Further complicating the challenge of devising a strategy for World War IV was the fundamental incompatibility of two competing US interests in the region. The first was a steadily increasing dependence on oil from the Middle East. Dependence meant vulnerability, as the crippling oil shocks of the 1970s, administered by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), amply demonstrated. As late as World War II, the United States had been the world’s Saudi Arabia, producing enough oil to meet its own needs and those of its friends and allies. By the end of the twentieth century, with Americans consuming one out of every four barrels of oil produced worldwide, the remaining US reserves accounted for less than two percent of the world’s total. Projections showed the leverage of Persian Gulf producers mushrooming in the years to come, with oil exports from the region expected to account for between 54 and 67 percent of world totals by 2020.
The second US interest in the region, juxtaposed against Arab oil, was Israel. America’s commitment to the security of the Jewish state complicated US efforts to maintain cordial relations with oil-exporting states in the Persian Gulf. Before the Six-Day War (1967), the United States had tried to manage this problem by supporting Israel’s right to exist but resisting Israeli entreaties to forge a strategic partnership. After 1967, that changed dramatically. The United States became Israel’s preeminent international supporter and a generous supplier of economic and military assistance.
The Arab-Israeli conflict could not be separated from World War IV, but figuring out exactly where Israel fit in the larger struggle proved a perplexing problem for US policymakers. Was World War IV a war of blood-for-oil-for-freedom in which Israel figured, at best, as a distraction and, at worst, as an impediment? Or was it a war of blood-for-oil-for-freedom in which the United States and Israel stood shoulder to shoulder in a common enterprise? For the first twenty years of World War IV, the American response to these questions produced a muddle.
During his final year in office, then, Carter initiated America’s new world war. Through his typically hapless and ineffectual effort to rescue the Americans held hostage in Iran, he sprinkled the first few driblets of American military power onto the surface of the desert, where they vanished without a trace. The rescue effort, dubbed Desert One, remained thereafter the gold standard for how not to use force, but it by no means curbed America’s appetite for further armed intervention in the region. Ronald Reagan gave the spigot labeled “military power” a further twist—and in so doing, he opened the floodgates. Although Carter declared World War IV, the war was fully, if somewhat haphazardly, engaged only on Reagan’s watch.
Reagan himself professed to be oblivious to the war’s existence. After all, his immediate preoccupation was with World War III. For public consumption, the president was always careful to justify the US military buildup of the 1980s as a benign and defensive response to Cold War imperatives. All that the United States sought was to be at peace. “Our country has never started a war,” Reagan told the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 1983. “Our sole objective is deterrence, the strength and capability it takes to prevent war.” “We Americans don’t want war and we don’t start fights,” he insisted on another occasion. “We don’t maintain a strong military force to conquer or coerce others.”
This was, of course, at least 50 percent bunkum. During the Reagan era, with the first stirrings of revived American militancy, defense and deterrence seldom figured as the operative principles. In fact, the American military tradition has never viewed defense as anything other than a pause before seizing the initiative and taking the fight to the enemy.
Partisan critics saw Reagan’s muscle flexing as the actions of a reckless ideologue unnecessarily stoking old Cold War tensions. Viewing events in relation to Vietnam and the Cuban Missile Crisis, they forecast dreadful consequences. Reagan’s defenders, then and later, told a different story: having intuitively grasped that the Soviet system was in an advanced state of decay, Reagan proceeded with skill and dexterity to exploit the system’s economic, technological, and moral vulnerabilities; the ensuing collapse of the Soviet empire proved conclusively that Reagan had gotten things right. Today neither interpretation, Reagan as trigger-happy cold warrior or Reagan as master strategist, is especially persuasive. Assessing the military record of the Reagan years from a post-9/11 perspective yields a set of different and arguably more relevant insights.
Looking back, we can see that the entire Reagan era was situated on the seam between a world war that was winding down and another that had begun but was not yet fully comprehended. Although preoccupied with waging the Cold War, Reagan and his chief advisers, almost as an afterthought, launched four forays into the Islamic world, with mixed results: the insertion of US Marine “peacekeepers” into Lebanon, culminating in the Beirut bombing of October 1983; clashes with Libya, culminating in punitive US strikes against targets in Tripoli and Benghazi in April 1986; the so-called tanker war of 1984–88, culminating in the commitment of US forces to protect the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf; and American assistance throughout the 1980s to Afghan “freedom fighters,” culminating in the Soviet army’s ouster from Afghanistan. These actions greatly enhanced the ability of the United States to project military power into the region, but they also emboldened the enemy and contributed to the instability that drew Reagan’s successors more deeply into the region.
The nominal stimulus for action in each case varied. In Lebanon, the murkiest of the four, Reagan ordered marines ashore at the end of September 1982 “to establish an environment which will permit the Lebanese Armed Forces to carry out their responsibilities in the Beirut area.” This was a daunting proposition, given that Lebanon, divided by a civil war and variously occupied by the Syrian army, the Israeli Defense Forces, and (until its recent eviction) the Palestinian Liberation Organization, possessed neither an effective military nor an effective government and had little prospect of acquiring either. Vague expectations that a modest contingent of US peacekeepers camped in Beirut might help restore stability to Lebanon motivated Reagan to undertake this risky intervention, which ended disastrously when a suicide bomber drove into the marine compound, killing 241 Americans.
In the case of Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s declared intention of denying the US Sixth Fleet access to the Gulf of Sidra, off Libya’s coast, had led to preliminary skirmishing in 1981 and again in March 1986. But it was Qaddafi’s support for terrorism and, especially, alleged Libyan involvement in the bombing of a Berlin disco frequented by GIs that prompted Reagan to order retaliation.
In the tanker war, Reagan was reacting to attacks perpetrated by both Iran and Iraq against neutral shipping in the Persian Gulf. Since 1980, the two nations had been locked in an inconclusive conflict. As that struggle spilled over into the adjacent waters of the gulf, it reduced the availability of oil for export, drove up insurance rates, and crippled merchant shipping. An Iraqi missile attack on the USS Stark on May 17, 1987, brought things to a head. Iraq claimed that the incident, which killed thirty-seven sailors, had been an accident, and offered compensation. The Reagan administration used the Stark episode to blame Iran for the escalating violence. In short order, Kuwaiti supertankers were flying the Stars and Stripes, and US forces were conducting a brisk campaign to sweep Iranian air and naval units out of the gulf.
In the case of Afghanistan, Reagan built on a program already in existence but hidden from public view. In July 1979, the Carter administration had agreed to provide covert assistance to Afghans resisting the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, the aim was to induce a Soviet military response, thereby “drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.” When the Soviets did invade, in December 1979, they became bogged down in a guerrilla war against the US-backed mujahideen. Reagan inherited this project, initially sustained it, and then, in 1985, greatly stepped up the level of US support for the Afghan resistance.
At first glance, these four episodes
seem to be all over the map, literally and in terms of purpose, means, and outcome. Contemporaneous assessments tended to treat each in isolation from the others and to focus on near-term outcomes. “After the attack on Tripoli,” Reagan bragged, “we didn’t hear much more from Qaddafi’s terrorists.” Nonsense, replied critics, pointing to the suspected Libyan involvement (since confirmed) in the bombing of Pan American Flight 103 in December 1988 and in the midair destruction of a French DC-10 nine months later. When a ceasefire in 1988 ended the fighting between Iran and Iraq, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger assessed US involvement in the tanker war as a major achievement. “We had now clearly won,” he wrote in 1990. With several hundred thousand US troops deploying to the Persian Gulf that very same year to prepare for large-scale war, Weinberger’s claims of victory seemed, at best, premature.
To be sure, Reagan himself labored to weave together a comprehensive rationale for the various military actions he ordered, but the result amounted to an exercise in mythmaking. To listen to him, all these disparate threats—Soviet leaders pursuing global revolution, fundamentalists bent on propagating Islamic theocracies, Arab fascists such as Libya’s Qaddafi and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, fanatical terrorists such as Abu Nidal—morphed into a single conspiracy. To give way to one element of that conspiracy was to give way to all, so the essential thing was to hold firm everywhere for peace.
Further muddying the waters were administration initiatives seemingly predicated on an assumption that no such overarching conspiracy against peace actually existed, or at least that selective US collaboration with evildoers was permissible. The Reagan administration’s notorious “tilt” toward Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, offering intelligence and commercial credits to the region’s foremost troublemaker—perhaps the final US effort to enlist a proxy to secure its Persian Gulf interests—provides one example. Such opportunism made a mockery of Reagan’s windy pronouncements regarding America’s role as peacemaker and fed suspicions that the president’s rhetoric was actually intended to divert attention from his administration’s apparent strategic disarray.
Considered from a post-9/11 vantage point, however, Reagan-era uses of force in Lebanon, Libya, Afghanistan, and the tanker war do cohere, at least in a loose sort of way. First, and most notably, all four initiatives occurred in the Greater Middle East, hitherto not the site of frequent US military activity. Second, none of the four episodes can be fully understood except in relation to America’s growing dependence on imported oil. Although energy considerations did not drive US actions in every instance, they always loomed in the background. Lebanon, for example, was not itself an oil exporter, but its woes mattered to the United States because instability there threatened to undermine the precarious stability of the region as a whole.
The four episodes constituting Reagan’s Islamic quartet were alike in one other way. Although each yielded a near-term outcome that the administration touted as conclusive, the actual results turned out to be anything but. Rather, each of the four pointed toward ever-deepening American military engagement.
The true significance of Reagan’s several interventions in the Islamic world lies not in the events themselves but in the response they evoked from the US national security apparatus. A consensus emerged that, in the list of pressing US geopolitical concerns, the challenges posed by the politically volatile, energy-rich world of Islam were eclipsing all others, including the size of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and the putative ambitions of the Soviet politburo. Given the imperative of meeting popular expectations for ever-greater abundance (which meant importing ever-larger quantities of oil)—Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency having demonstrated the political consequences of suggesting a different course—the necessary response was to put the United States in a position to determine the fate of the Middle East. That meant forces, bases, and infrastructure. Only by enjoying unquestioned primacy in the region could the government of the United States guarantee American prosperity—and thus American freedom.
From the outset, dominance was the aim and the driving force behind US actions in World War IV—not preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, not stemming the spread of terror, certainly not liberating oppressed peoples or advancing the cause of women’s rights. The prize was mastery over a region that leading members of the American foreign-policy elite, of whatever political persuasion, had concluded was critically important to the well-being of the United States. The problem, at its very core, demanded a military solution.
In March 1984, Donald Rumsfeld, out of power but serving as a Reagan administration troubleshooter, told Secretary of State George Shultz that Lebanon was a mere “sideshow.” The main show was the Persian Gulf; instability there “could make Lebanon look like a taffy pull.” According to Shultz’s memoir, Turmoil and Triumph (1993), Rumsfeld worried that “we are neither organized nor ready to face a crisis there.” In fact, the effort to reorganize was already under way. And here is where Reagan made his most lasting contribution to the struggle to which Jimmy Carter had committed the United States.
Seven specific initiatives figured prominently in the Reagan administration’s comprehensive effort to ramp up America’s ability to wage World War IV:
• The upgrading in 1983 of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, the Persian Gulf intervention force created by Carter after the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, to the status of a full-fledged regional headquarters, US Central Command.
• The accelerated conversion of Diego Garcia, a tiny British-owned island in the Indian Ocean, from a minor US communications facility into a major US forward support base.
• The establishment of large stocks of supplies and equipment, preloaded on ships and positioned to facilitate the rapid movement of US combat forces to the Persian Gulf.
• The construction or expansion of air bases, ports, and other fixed locations required to receive and sustain large-scale US expeditionary forces in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kenya, Somalia, and other compliant states.
• The negotiation of overflight rights and agreements to permit US military access to airports and other facilities in Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere in the region to support the large-scale introduction of US troops.
• The refinement of war plans and the development of exercise programs to acclimate US forces to the unfamiliar and demanding desert environment.
• The redoubling of efforts to cultivate client states through arms sales and training programs, the latter administered either by the US military or by American-controlled private contractors employing large numbers of former US military personnel.
By the time Ronald Reagan retired from office, the skids had been greased. The national security bureaucracy was well on its way to embracing a highly militarized conception of how to deal with the challenges posed by the Middle East. Giving Reagan his due requires an appreciation of the extent to which he advanced the reordering of US national security priorities that Jimmy Carter had barely begun. Reagan’s seemingly slapdash Islamic pudding turned out to have a theme after all.
Those who adjudge the present World War IV to be necessary and winnable will see in Reagan’s record much to commend, and may well accord him a share of the credit even for Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. It was Reagan who restored the sinews of American military might after Vietnam, refashioned American attitudes about military power, and began reorienting the Pentagon toward the Islamic world, thereby making possible the far-flung campaigns to overthrow the Taliban and remove Saddam Hussein. George W. Bush pulled the trigger, but Ronald Reagan had cocked the weapon.
Those who view World War IV as either sinister in its motivation or misguided in its conception will include Reagan in their bill of indictment. From their perspective, it was he who seduced his fellow citizens with promises of material abundance without limit. It was Reagan who made the fusion of military strength with American exceptionalism the centerpiece of his efforts to revive national self-confidence. It was
Reagan’s enthusiastic support of Afghan “freedom fighters”—an eminently defensible position in the context of World War III—that produced not freedom but a Central Asian power vacuum, Afghanistan becoming a cesspool of Islamic radicalism and a safe haven for America’s chief adversary in World War IV. Finally, it was Reagan’s inconclusive forays in and around the Persian Gulf that paved the way for still-larger, if equally inconclusive, interventions to come.
Throughout the first phase of World War IV, from 1980 to 1990, the United States viewed Iran as its main problem and even toyed with the idea that Iraq might be part of a solution. Washington saw Saddam Hussein as someone with whom it might make common cause against the mullahs in Tehran. During the second phase of World War IV, extending through the 1990s, Iraq supplanted Iran as the main US adversary, and policymakers came to see the Iraqi dictator as their chief nemesis.
Various and sundry exertions ensued, but as the US military profile in the region became ever more prominent, the difficulties with which the United States felt obliged to contend also multiplied. Indeed, instead of eliminating Saddam, the growing reliance on military power served only to rouse greater antagonism toward the United States. Actions taken to enhance Persian Gulf stability—more or less synonymous with guaranteeing the safety and survival of the Saudi royal family—instead produced instability.
Phase two of the war began in August 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s army overran Kuwait. From the US perspective, Saddam’s aim was clear. He sought to achieve regional hegemony and to control, either directly or indirectly, the preponderant part of the Persian Gulf’s oil wealth. Were Saddam to achieve those objectives, there was every likelihood that in due course he would turn on Israel.
Twilight of the American Century Page 35