Decision at Sea

by Symonds, Craig L.

  It was an important question, and over the next fourteen months it prompted a reevaluation of American foreign and defense policy. At the heart of the debate was a consideration of the readiness or willingness of the United States to accept the role of international peacekeeper in the Persian Gulf—or anywhere else, for that matter. The United States had played the role of peacekeeper before (President Truman had referred to the Korean War as a “police action”). But to some, American interests in the Persian Gulf were not clear, and many feared that the country was trying on the uniform of global policeman. Moreover, these considerations took place at a time when the first rumblings of an earthquake in the global balance of power were becoming evident. Within half a dozen years the Soviet Union—America’s rival for forty years—would begin to fall apart, leaving the United States as the sole remaining superpower on earth. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the willingness of the United States to take on the responsibilities of what amounted to a maritime constabulary force marked a shift not only in U.S. policy but also in America’s role in the world. It was, as one American sailor in the Persian Gulf declared, “a whole new ball game.”8

  The Persian Gulf became the focus of this policy reassessment because of two issues that, though technically unrelated, became entangled nonetheless, and drew the United States into the region with all the centripetal force of a whirlpool. One was America’s Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, and the other was oil.

  The need for oil—the mother’s milk of modern industry—had led Japan to risk its empire in a war with the United States in 1941. In the United States, however, the availability of oil had never been a particular concern. Throughout the Second World War and into the early Cold War years, the United States had plenty of oil for its own use and even continued to export it abroad, selling it overseas as fast as it could be pumped out of the vast Spindletop oil fields in Texas. But in the winter of 1947–48 the expanding postwar economy—and the resulting spike in the domestic use of oil—led for the first time to shortages at home. The shortage was serious enough that for a while it seemed the United States might run out of heating oil just as winter set in. Newspapers recalled the coal strike of 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt had threatened to nationalize the mines to prevent families from freezing to death in their homes. In 1948 Truman was less draconian. He called for conservation, ordering the thermostats in government offices to be set back to sixty-eight degrees (as both Nixon and Carter would do during later energy scares), but he also released one million barrels of the U.S. Navy’s strategic oil reserves for domestic use. For the first time both the United States and the U.S. Navy confronted the reality of their dependence on oil.9

  That year also marked a turning point in the emerging relationship between the U.S. Navy and the countries bordering the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Even before the fuel crisis of 1948, the Navy had begun to buy oil from the Gulf region simply because it was cheaper there. Oil cost about $1.48 per barrel in the United States, but in the Persian Gulf it could be had for $1.05 a barrel from the Arab-American Oil Company (ARAMCO). The 1948 crisis increased U.S. Navy reliance on Persian Gulf oil, and Navy planners began to see the region as important to American interests. In consequence, they established Task Force 126 (U.S. Naval Forces, Persian Gulf), which initially consisted only of Navy oil tankers. Over time this force was augmented and renamed the Middle East Force, eventually becoming part of Central Command (CENTCOM) in 1983.10

  It was clear at once that operating in the Persian Gulf posed special problems for the U.S. Navy, both politically and operationally. Politically, the absence of American naval bases in the region required the United States to develop relationships with states that bordered the Gulf. Eventually the United States negotiated basing rights with the tiny sheikdom of Bahrain, taking over the former British base at Jufair, and tried repeatedly to gain similar rights in Saudi Arabia, though the Saudis proved to be reluctant partners at best.

  Operationally, there were two problems. The first was the weather. When the United States sent its first task force into the Gulf in the summer of 1948, the officers and crew were entirely unprepared for the relentless heat. With daytime temperatures topping 120 degrees, it was too hot to eat in the galley, and the sailors took their trays topside to sit at tables on the fantail, where at least there was a little breeze; it was impossible to shower, as the water in the pipes was literally scalding; and even sleeping was difficult because the nighttime temperature in the berthing spaces sometimes topped 115 degrees.11

  The other operational problem was the peculiar geography of the Persian Gulf. It is so narrow, and large parts of it, especially on the eastern side, are so shallow, that it funnels all deep-draft ship traffic into a fairly narrow channel. Indeed, the geography of the Gulf region compelled the Navy’s “blue water” fleet to adjust to the requirements and limitations of littoral warfare. The Gulf was (and is) a particularly unsatisfactory place for aircraft carriers to operate. In order to provide air cover for U.S. Navy surface units operating in the Gulf, therefore, American carriers stationed themselves south of the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf of Oman—a location sailors immediately dubbed “Camel Station.”*

  Besides oil, the other factor in the American strategic equation in the early Cold War era was the constant, even obsessive, American concern about the Soviet Union. The overarching U.S. policy of containment, which required the United States to confront Soviet ambitions everywhere in the world, certainly included the Middle East, especially since that region’s volatile politics and proven oil reserves made it both vulnerable and desirable. After World War II, the United States sought to bolster the stability of the Gulf region by cultivating close relations with Saudi Arabia and by backing Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, in what amounted to a coup to overthrow Iran’s nationalist (and virulently anti-British) prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh.12 In the early 1970s, in the wake of the American withdrawal from Vietnam and the British retreat from maintaining a military presence “east of Suez,” President Richard Nixon sought to formalize U.S. relationships with both Saudi Arabia and Iran, which he referred to as “the twin pillars” of stability in the Gulf region.

  While American interest in the Persian Gulf was firmly grounded in the rivalry of the Cold War, other issues were percolating beneath the surface. Arabs had long resented America’s strong support for Israel, and during the 1970s anger at what some Arabs saw as American cultural imperialism contributed to a revival of Islamic fundamentalism. Unrest was particularly great in Iran because, even though he often proved resistant to American advice, the shah was nevertheless perceived as an American puppet. In addition, he squandered about a third of his country’s entire budget buying modern weaponry that was well beyond any realistic assessment of Iran’s defense needs. In early 1979 the country exploded in anger, and the shah and his wife were forced to flee. The government collapsed, and what eventually filled the vacuum was a regime grounded in Islamic religious law and dominated by the Shiite ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. For the United States, the decisive event in this crisis was the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran by student supporters of the new regime. For more than a year, some fifty-two Americans, including eight Marines, were held as hostages in Tehran. Televised images of blindfolded American hostages and their gleeful, unrepentant captors infuriated the American public.*

  President Jimmy Carter used a State of the Union address to warn the Soviet Union (which sent troops into Afghanistan that same year) not to try to take advantage of the chaos in Iran. “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region,” he warned, “will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States.” This statement, quickly labeled the Carter Doctrine, marked a revival of American commitment to international involvement that had waned significantly in the wake of the nation’s unhappy experience in Vietnam. More significantly, it was a policy that, under Carter’s successors, would go a long way toward establishing the United S
tates as a kind of regional policeman.13

  For Iraq, the 1979 revolution in Iran was both bad news and good news. Iraq was a secular state with a Shiite Muslim majority, but its government was dominated by Sunni Muslims. The elevation of a Shiite ayatollah in Tehran was therefore of considerable concern, especially if it encouraged Iraqi Shiites to look to Tehran rather than to Baghdad for leadership and inspiration. On the other hand, the revolution had separated Iran from its rich and powerful American patron and dramatically weakened its military forces, which were in a shambles after being purged of those who were not loyal to the new regime. In such circumstances, the new president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, believed he saw an opportunity.

  Since its creation as a British mandate after World War I, Iraq’s most significant geographical deficiency was that except for a tiny toehold on the northern end of the Persian Gulf, it was virtually landlocked. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers merged to flow into the Gulf in what was called the Shatt al-Arab (the Arab River), but Iraq had sovereignty over only the western bank of that river, for the Iran-Iraq boundary ran down the center of the ship channel. For years Iraq had made no secret of its ambition to obtain a real coastline, and with the collapse of the shah and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein believed that his moment had come. In September 1980, with America in the throes of anti-Iranian hysteria due to the ongoing hostage crisis, he launched a ground invasion of Iran.14

  Instead of the easy victory that almost everyone expected, the Iraqi army ran into fanatical resistance. The war lasted through the fall and winter, and then into the hot Gulf summer. And still it continued: into a second year, then a third, and a fourth. By the mid-1980s it had become one of the bloodiest wars of the twentieth century, with hundreds of thousands killed and no end in sight. Desperate to achieve a breakthrough, both sides adopted irregular tactics. The clerics who ruled Iran urged their poorly supplied soldiers to carry out human-wave attacks that, however costly, nevertheless won them some tactical victories. For his part, in addition to ordering Scud missile attacks on Tehran, Saddam Hussein authorized the use of poison gas on the battlefield as well as at home, where his regime was threatened by a Kurdish uprising.

  Iraq began the naval war in the Persian Gulf barely two weeks into the fighting when, on October 7, 1980, it declared the waters off Iran a “prohibited war zone” and announced that any vessel inside that zone was subject to destruction—not just Iranian vessels but those of any nationality that visited an Iranian port. This was similar to Imperial Germany’s declaration of a “war zone” around the British Isles in 1914, but while Germany had relied on submarines to enforce its declaration, Iraq relied on the airplane. As the war began to turn against Iraq, Iraqi air attacks on Gulf shipping escalated and focused particularly on tankers in order to deprive Iran of the money it needed to continue the war. The goal was to frighten neutral shipping away from Iranian ports, and during 1982, Iraqi Mirage fighters conducted twenty-one attacks on tankers, most of them neutrals, in the Persian Gulf.15

  Iran countered with the declaration that it would “not allow any merchant ship to carry cargo to Iraqi ports.” There was an obvious threat in the announcement that “the Iranian government will not take responsibility for those vessels which do not pay consideration to this notice.”16 But despite that threat, the Iranians made no effort to interfere with maritime traffic in the Gulf during the first three years of the war. In part this was because it had its hands full fending off the Iraqi army and in part because it would have been a waste of resources since Iraq exported most of its oil overland by pipeline and was therefore less dependent on tanker traffic.

  But in 1984, a year during which Iraqi planes made fifty-three attacks on neutral tankers in the Gulf, Iran at last retaliated. It had become clear that in addition to using the oil pipeline into Syria and Turkey, Iraq also relied on the tankers of both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to export its oil. More importantly, both of those countries acted as conduits to supply Iraq with war materials from abroad. The Saudis accepted shipments of tanks, artillery, and other war materials at its Red Sea port of Jidda, then shipped the material by truck through Kuwait to Iraq. If not quite Iraqi allies, neither country was genuinely “neutral.” That year, therefore, Iran began attacking the tankers of Saudi Arabia and especially Kuwait using small high-speed attack boats armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, a particularly low-tech threat in an increasingly high-tech war.17

  This conflict had little direct connection to the Cold War, which was still America’s dominant concern, but historically the United States had always been a champion of freedom of the seas. Consequently, at the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, President Carter had declared, “Freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf is of primary importance to the whole international community. It is imperative that there be no infringement of that freedom of passage of ships to and from the Persian Gulf region.” Similarly, Carter’s secretary of state, Edmund Muskie, declared to the United Nations that “the freedom of navigation to and from the Persian Gulf . . . must not be infringed upon in any way.” But despite these statements, the United States directed its principal efforts at halting Iranian seaborne attacks and ignored Iraq’s airstrikes on Iranian shipping.18

  In January 1981 Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter in the White House, and in a deliberate slap at the departing president, Iran released the American hostages the same day.* Like his predecessors, Reagan focused most of his foreign policy attention on the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, which the new president called an “evil empire.” Indeed, efforts by the Reagan administration to strengthen the U.S. military—including a plan to increase the U.S. Navy to six hundred ships—were directed exclusively at the Soviets. Reagan’s secretary of defense, Casper Weinberger, was especially focused on the Soviet issue; one administration insider noted that Weinberger’s “whole world was Moscow.” Despite such single-minded focus, other issues intruded. In 1982 the United States sent eight hundred Marines into Lebanon as part of a peacekeeping force, and in October of the following year 241 of them died when a terrorist drove a truck bomb into their barracks. In 1986, the United States executed an air raid against Libya in retaliation for a series of terrorist acts against Americans and others. That same year the number of attacks on tankers in the Gulf jumped to 111, and Reagan sounded very much like his predecessor in announcing that “the United States has a vital interest in maintaining freedom of navigation in the gulf and stability in the region generally.”19

  In the midst of this sudden acceleration in the number of attacks, Kuwait sought protection for its tanker fleet by appealing first to the Gulf Cooperation Council and soon thereafter to the United States. At first the Reagan administration resisted entanglement in a lengthy and bloody war in the Persian Gulf, especially after the loss of the Marines in Lebanon. The United States was naturally and genuinely concerned by the menace to trade, but accepting responsibility for the security of the Gulf seemed to many to be a slippery slope and a distraction from the country’s focus on countering Soviet ambitions. Then the State Department learned that Kuwait had also appealed to the Soviet Union for help and that the Soviets were giving it serious consideration. In fact, the Soviets had already chartered three Kuwaiti tankers and re-flagged them as Soviet vessels. To the Reagan administration, the only scenario worse than putting U.S. forces in the middle of a shooting war halfway around the world was one that allowed the Soviet Union to become the patron of the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf. “Once we knew that the Kuwaitis were negotiating with the Soviets,” an American official admitted, “it sped up the process tremendously and we said ‘Let’s do it all!’” As a result, the United States advised the Kuwaiti government in March 1987 that it would accept responsibility for escorting Kuwaiti tankers in and out of the Persian Gulf.20

  To justify an American escort, the first step was to reflag the Kuwaiti tankers as American vessels. Only after the Reagan administration had committed itsel
f did someone think to ask the Coast Guard about the legal ramifications of such a move. As the Coast Guard representative began to explain the rules at a meeting in the White House, Weinberger became visibly agitated, finally bursting out: “Are you telling me we can’t do this?” It could, in fact, be done, but it would require a lot of work. The ships would have to be refitted to meet U.S. standards, American skippers had to be found, and it all had to be accepted by the Kuwaitis. “We had to scurry around and get the Kuwaitis to agree,” recalled Admiral William J. Crowe Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “and they were very reluctant. . . . They were grumbling all the way.”21

  Nor was that the only complication. Revelations that the Reagan administration had been engaged in secretly (and illegally) selling arms to Iran in order to obtain funds that it funneled into Central America to support a revolution there not only triggered a political firestorm in the United States but dramatically weakened the administration’s Gulf policy as well, since it was at least possible to argue that some of the weapons Iran was using to attack neutral shipping had been provided by the United States. Indeed, the United States continued to deliver missiles clandestinely to Iran as late as October 1986.

  Then on May 17, 1987, an Iraqi fighter jet put two Exocet missiles into the USS Stark, and an angry Congress voted to put the escort mission on hold. The nation found itself entangled in a policy web so complex that even experts had difficulty sorting it out. As policy makers wrestled with the alternatives, there seemed to be three options: (1) the United States could back away from its emerging role as the cop on the beat and pull its naval assets out of the Gulf, conceding the field to the Soviets; (2) it could invite other nations to join it in establishing a multinational maritime force to protect trade; or (3) it could aggressively reinforce its own position in the Gulf and attempt to do the job alone. The Reagan administration considered the first option completely unacceptable. The United States might have opted for a multinational approach if it had been able to convince other nations to participate, but America’s NATO partners did not see Gulf security as a NATO issue despite the fact that in 1986 Western European countries obtained 46 percent of their oil from the Gulf. In the end, therefore, the United States settled on option three.22