The End of Appeasement
BOOT, MAX
The End of Appeasement Bush's opportunity to redeem America's past failures in the Middle East BY MAX BOOT Following Hans Blix's devastating report and President Bush's compelling State of the...
...Like most dictators, Nasser gave top priority to getting his hands on copious stockpiles of weapons...
...He was held in the Iranian capital for six months before being released...
...Deprived, against their will, of British protection, the sheikhs had to make common cause with their large, dangerous neighbors...
...Oil fields across the world had been developed at great risk and expense by Western oil companies...
...But "we could have changed history" by showing that Americans could not be attacked with impunity...
...None of this made an appreciable dent in Saddam's dictatorship...
...This was the second straight Arab-Israeli war that the United States had failed to prevent by not offering firm support to Israel beforehand...
...When a fanatical Islamic sect led by a self-proclaimed Mahdi (or messiah) took over the Sudan, and threatened to spread its extremist violence throughout the Islamic world, Gen...
...We believe that America is much weaker than Russia...
...The British pullout had left a power vacuum that the United States, embroiled in Vietnam and, before long, Watergate, was unable to fill...
...Israel agreed, but Egypt didn't, and on October 31, Anglo-French forces began bombing Egyptian military positions...
...This would have tilted the regional balance of power sharply against Israel, which possessed only 20 jet aircraft of its own...
...embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, 17 Americans among them, including both the CIA station chief and his deputy...
...But the hard-liners effectively foreclosed this possibility on November 4, 1979, when they invaded the U.S...
...Neither London nor Paris was willing to cede control of this vital waterway to a power-mad dictator who was increasingly allied with the Communist bloc...
...He was seen as the first Arab in hundreds of years to have defeated the forces of Christendom...
...to remove its troops, and Secretary General U Thant cravenly complied...
...Though this force was soon evacuated, the three countries decided to send a larger force back after the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps to help the Lebanese government restore some semblance of control over a country torn by civil war...
...The ayatollah was right...
...Their policy was centered on the Alpha Project, one of countless American attempts to broker peace between Israel and its enemies...
...The plan began to unfold on October 29, 1956, when Israeli forces moved into the Sinai desert, effortlessly overrunning Egyptian positions...
...They couch this fear in the language of "stability"—toppling Saddam, they counsel, would foster "instability" in the region...
...Except that Bush refused to follow the logic of military victory to its natural political outcome...
...But while this may have helped keep Lebanon out of Nasserite hands, it did not discourage Nasser from further adventurism...
...But although President Johnson declared Nasser's action illegal, he did not order the U.S...
...Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer, recounts in his gripping memoir, See No Evil, how in October 1984 he visited Baalbek and even saw the barracks where he suspected (rightly, as it turned out) that Buckley and five other Westerners were imprisoned...
...Again, this was presented by Riyadh as a great favor to Washington, but was actually in the Saudis' interest, since it was designed to court favor with Islamic extremists both at home and abroad...
...But by showing such restraint, Carter ensured that many more Americans would be kidnapped and killed in the future...
...The crisis was causing a run on sterling and a major depletion of Britain's scant oil reserves, which, if allowed to continue, would lead to an economic meltdown...
...In 1973 the Arab members of OPEC announced an embargo on oil shipments to the United States and the Netherlands to punish America for its support of Israel...
...Just as the United States had done a poor job of assuming Britain's imperial role in Egypt, so now it did an equally poor job in the Gulf...
...Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan calculated that Egypt would be ready to attack Israel by late spring 1956...
...Nasser The pattern of American weakness was set early on,I during the 1956 Suez Crisis, which serves as a kind of template for everything the United States has done wrong in the region for the past several decades...
...government response, which under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter primarily consisted of government-imposed rationing, price controls, and a "windfall profits" tax that interfered with the functioning of the market...
...Nixon saw them as "Twin Pillars" of stability in the region, but they were also twin pillars of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries...
...Some of the more prominent include: Truman's ultimatum that forced the Soviets to evacuate Iran in 1946 and his decision two years later to override all his foreign policy advisers by recognizing Israel...
...Bob Woodward's new book, Bush at War, reveals that during the Clinton administration, a group of Afghan agents hired by the CIA to shadow Osama bin Laden offered to kill the al Qaeda leader...
...This was a blatant violation of international law...
...Either way, the vacillating U.S...
...The "stability" of the region produced September 11...
...Numerous bills to allow OPEC to be sued have died in Congress, the most recent being legislation sponsored in 2001 by Rep...
...It turned out that his expectation of American acquiescence—based not only on his conversation with Glaspie but also on his reading of events of the previous three decades, going all the way back to Suez in 1956—was not justified...
...The Carter administration did little to help the shah, hoping thereby to woo support among the revolutionaries...
...This is not to suggest that the U.S...
...By the 1980s, the oil crisis had passed, having inflicted great damage on the economies of the West...
...The United States got involved in toppling Mossadegh by covert means only when efforts to work out a diplomatic solution had gotten nowhere, and it appeared that "Mossy's" chaotic rule might provide an opening for Tudeh, as the Iranian Communist party was known...
...In 1958, as part of this doctrine, he landed 15,000 Marines in Beirut to stabilize the Christian government against a Muslim uprising...
...And no longer considered acceptable in today's post-colonial world...
...On June 5, Israel launched a series of lightning strikes against its neighbors that delivered a resounding victory in just six days...
...Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 soldiers...
...the Saudis got a taste of what they could expect when, in the spring of 1973, terrorists attacked one of their refineries and pipelines...
...Carter's gambit paid off to the extent that all 52 hostages were released alive...
...Odd talk coming from a man whose survival—like that of the Saudi royal family—depended, in the final instance, on American military protection...
...Unfortunately this only increased the number of targets available for Iranian-backed Islamists who were openly waging war on the Great Satan...
...Ben Gilman...
...embassy in Tehran...
...Since Washington was not interested in helping its closest allies, they got together with Israel, and in the secret Protocol of Sevres, agreed on a joint operation to seize the canal and overthrow Nasser...
...Ike began by pushing a resolution through the United Nations demanding the British, Israeli, and French troops withdraw immediately...
...In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Palestine Liberation Organization—a secular organization but one that often cooperated with Islamist groups—used southern Lebanon as a base from which to attack Israel...
...But Washington nixed Prime Minister Clement Atlee's plans for military intervention to take back Anglo-Iranian's refineries...
...If not, the United States will have to take more vigorous steps to align our relationships with these countries with our interests and principles...
...All British oil company employees were summarily booted out of the country...
...Seventy-nine years earlier, when hordes of fanatical Boxers had invaded the Legation Quarter in Peking, America, Japan, and the leading nations of Europe had dispatched a large expeditionary force to march on the Chinese capital and liberate the besieged diplomats...
...Bush in 1993...
...Washington's ineffectual response in the face of this aggression boggles the mind...
...That we were a paper tiger—or, to use Osama bin Laden's metaphor, a "weak horse...
...OPEC, formed in 1960, had little success in controlling oil prices, because non-OPEC oil reserves, especially in the United States, had produced a lot of excess capacity...
...The U.S...
...Anwar Sadat, Nasser's successor, conceded as much by reaching a peace agreement with Israel...
...Indeed, the United States usually sought to make common cause with Arabs and Persians against the Soviet Union...
...Instead President Nixon outsourced the protection of the Gulf to America's great friends, the shah of Iran and the king of Saudi Arabia, who became two of the world's biggest buyers of U.S...
...President Reagan pressured Prime Minister Menachem Begin to rein in his troops and let Yasser Arafat and his followers leave Lebanon, preserving them to fight another day...
...But the outpourings of support quickly faded, to be replaced by the same sullen resentment, envy, and hatred that had once been directed against the British and the French...
...In all likelihood, Baghdad will be liberated by April...
...On May 16, 1967, Nasser asked the U.N...
...This may turn out to be one of those hinge moments in history—events like the storming of the Bastille or the fall of the Berlin Wall—after which everything is different...
...That same year Egypt and Syria combined to form the United Arab Republic, which received substantial military support from the USSR...
...As America slowly took over Britain's oversight role after 1945, Washington tried self-consciously to carve out a different style of leadership, one that was meant to distinguish the virtuous Americans from the grasping, greedy imperialists who had come before...
...The combined CIA-MI6 operation (code-named Ajax, and run by Kermit Roosevelt) wouldn't have worked had it not been for declining popular support for Mossadegh and a resurgence of backing for the shah, who, under Iran's constitution, was well within his rights to sack his prime minister...
...As Daniel Yergin recounts in his invaluable history The Prize, this helped establish the principle that oil assets would not be privately held, a principle that other states enthusiastically applied in the years ahead...
...The inept Egyptian armed forces posed little obstacle...
...But the return of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to real power did not result in the privatization of the Iranian oil industry...
...Pro-Western rulers were deemed to be puppets ripe for elimination...
...The toppling of the Taliban was a good start, but only a start...
...Reagan's bombing of Libya in 1986 and protection of Gulf shipping from Iranian attacks in 1987-88...
...Having learned in 1979 that taking American hostages pays, the Iranians decided to turn this into a major business...
...It is no wonder that America today has so few real friends in the region...
...Note that the last time the United States played a pivotal role in a Mideast change of government (if one overlooks Bill Clinton's campaign against Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel's 1999 election) was in 1953, when the CIA, along with Britain's MI6, helped to depose Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh...
...Nixon and Kissinger's backing of Israel with emergency arms shipments during the 1973 Yom Kippur War...
...Horatio Herbert Kitchener snuffed out the movement in a hail of gunfire at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898...
...Saudi Arabia, with the largest oil reserves in the world, earned Washington's gratitude for moderating prices, much as a local Mafia boss might earn the gratitude of a bodega owner whose shop he refrained from destroying...
...Al Qaeda also claimed credit for working with local tribesmen to kill 18 American soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993, driving U.S...
...It was America's shining hour—a victory that might have erased years of failure in the Middle East...
...Painful as it was, the selective embargo did not work very well...
...piratical threat...
...When the pirates of the Barbary Coast (as Europeans called North Africa) could not be dealt with by the payment of ransom, the new American republic, and then the Europeans, took matters into their own hands...
...The cost of crossing the extremists was too great...
...With the complicity of Syria, the Iranians directed their Hezbollah proxies to kidnap and kill a steady stream of Westerners...
...economy went down, afflicted by a horrible combination of stagnation and inflation that came to be known as "stagflation...
...it turned into a major strategic problem, for it created the "oil weapon" that OPEC wielded with great gusto...
...It did not even dispatch Delta Force to Baalbek to free the captives and kill their kidnappers...
...Nasser responded by scuttling old ships filled with cement to block the canal...
...busboys, typists, and elevator operators, Lodge crowed, "have been offering their congratulations...
...And no wonder...
...Nothing now stood in the way of Egyptian troops, who massed near Israel's border...
...Arab nationalists were more successful in Iraq, where the Hashemite royal family was murdered in a 1958 coup d'etat...
...This produced an immediate shock in America, with lines snaking around the block at many gas stations— when gas was available at all...
...Since September 11, 2001, it has become obvious that significant sums in petrodollars have gone to fund virulently anti-Western madrassas around the world or have found their way into the pockets of outright terrorists like Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi...
...That is precisely what happened during the 1970s oil crisis, which made it profitable for Britain and Norway to extract high-cost oil from the North Sea...
...financial system without fear of having their assets frozen...
...In their pursuit of this chimerical goal, Eisenhower and Dulles decided that Israel would get no security assistance from the United States until a full settlement had been reached with the Arabs...
...But OPEC sheikhs, who rig the price of a commodity far more important than diamonds, are able to come to the United States whenever they desire access to physicians, chefs, or prostitutes superior to those available in the Arab world...
...OPEC held the Western economy hostage...
...More significantly, the Reagan administration did not punish Damascus or Tehran, which were bigger sponsors of anti-American terrorism than Tripoli...
...All these actions are very much to America's credit, and have done much to serve U.S...
...On April 18, 1983, a Shiite suicide bomber struck the U.S...
...Since Washington would not help, Israel turned to states that would—first France and then Britain...
...Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, refused...
...Among those seized and murdered were William Buckley, the new CIA station chief in Beirut, and Marine Colonel William Higgins, chief of a U.N...
...But there now arose a new and even more virulent threat to the United States in the form of Islamism, a violent creed that blended elements of fundamentalist Islam with a power-centered ideology inspired by fascism and communism...
...When people see a strong horse and a weak horse," the leader of al Qaeda has said, "by nature they will like the strong horse...
...This was not just a financial loss for the West...
...This would have been perfectly possible for Congress to do—if any administration had pushed for such legislation...
...Hezbollah attacked a Saudi National Guard facility in Riyadh in 1995, killing five Americans, and the Khobar Towers barracks in 1996, killing 19 Americans...
...The president rejected suggestions to invade Iran, or at the very least, bombard or capture its oil facilities and other important targets...
...This sent a loud and clear message to America's enemies: The Americans are weak...
...By jollying Nasser along, Washington had only encouraged his far-flung designs...
...This policy was not even very successful on its face: Repeated American deliveries of thousands of missiles induced Iran to release just three hostages...
...Why would anyone ride alongside a weak horse...
...peacekeeping force was inserted into the area...
...futility in the Middle East now presents us with this defining task...
...Within a month, Tehran had concluded a cease-fire with Iraq—an odd testament to the far-reaching results that even the inadvertent and misguided flexing of American muscle could achieve in the Middle East...
...The United States had contingency plans to provide loans and emergency oil supplies to Britain, but Eisenhower refused to activate them as long as British troops remained in Egypt...
...Faced with unremitting pressure from their most powerful benefactor, Britain, France, and Israel had no choice but to withdraw...
...government made no attempt to take back by force the oil fields confiscated by various Middle Eastern despots...
...Considering how many violently anti-American regimes have existed in the Middle East since World War II, America's failure to overthrow more of them is a testament to our passivity and forbearance...
...America is far too impotent to interfere in a military way here...
...By the mid-1970s, Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Venezuela had nationalized their oil industries, usually offering the previous owners a pittance in compensation...
...Doing so might have required legislation to lift the "sovereign immunity" provision that protects foreign governments, under most circumstances, from being sued in U.S...
...They had their own beef with Nasser, who on July 26, 1956, nationalized the Suez Canal Company...
...in retaliation, President Clinton unleashed America's full wrath . . . to flatten an empty intelligence headquarters...
...This is a major undertaking, and the necessity for it might have been averted by wiser action years ago, but the long record of U.S...
...The death toll mounted fast...
...arms...
...Saddam took this as a green light for his invasion of his tiny neighbor, which began a week later...
...The royal family decided to buy off the extremists, even if it meant offending Washington...
...Just as the OPEC potentates expected, the United States submitted supinely to economic blackmail...
...As oil prices went up, the U.S...
...ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge reported to Eisenhower that he was deluged with support from Third World countries—and not just from their diplomats...
...Nasser was sponsoring guerrilla raids into Israel, blockading the southern Israeli port of Eilat, and not allowing Israeli shipping access to the Suez Canal...
...One of the early hostages—David Dodge, acting president of the American University Beirut, who was abducted on July 19, 1982—was transported first to Damascus, and then, from there, to Tehran via Iran Air...
...President Bush, with a prompt from Margaret Thatcher, mobilized an impressive coalition to kick Iraq out of Kuwait...
...Here was the mighty American army sitting idle, while nearby rivers ran red with the blood of their allies...
...There have been occasional flashes of principle and infrequent displays of strength...
...Two ironies made this especially humiliating: The Gulf states were cutting off oil shipments to the U.S...
...On July 25, 1990, U.S...
...After the battleship NewJersey hurled a few Volkswagen-sized shells into the hills above Beirut, President Reagan announced that the remaining Marines would be "redeployed" to ships offshore...
...When Washington, not wanting to fuel a regional arms race, refused to provide them, he turned to the Soviet bloc...
...At the stroke of a pen, various dictators in effect stole these assets—and heard nary a peep of protest from Washington...
...interests in the region...
...There is no guarantee what will come out of post-invasion "instability," but if the United States remains a strong player in the region, it should be considerably better than the status quo antebellum...
...Ultimately, Algiers, Tripoli, Morocco, and Tunis were colonized, and thus ended their Contributing editor Max Boot i^ an Olin senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise ofAmerican Power...
...victory in Iraq will intimidate these regimes into better behavior...
...Looking at how America was chased out of Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia, bin Laden and his minions thought they saw an explanation for America's inaction: The United States was too weak and decadent to resist the jihadists...
...The Pax Britannica was defunct, the Pax Americana did not yet exist...
...embassies in Africa in 1998, and the USS C^le in 2000...
...Instead it provided the Iranian mullahs with arms in exchange for hostages, making a mockery of America's traditional policy of not dealing with terrorists...
...But by the early 1970s, fast economic growth in Japan, Western Europe, and the United States had strained oil stocks...
...He wanted to force the British and French "to work out their own oil problem—to boil in their own oil, so to speak...
...If you look back, it started in 1979...
...Why would I accept to be a toy...
...In 1962 he dispatched 50,000 troops to Yemen, where they became embroiled in a civil war against the Saudi-backed monarchy...
...and our brothers who fought in Somalia told us they were astonished to observe how weak, impotent and cowardly the American soldier is...
...Had we opened fire on them maybe we would only have lasted an hour," he told the New York Times in 2002...
...Desert Storm turned into one of the most one-sided wars in history...
...A broad generalization may stretch the truth but not break it: America was strong in resisting Soviet designs on the region but weak in the face of Arab nationalism and Islamic extremism...
...The Saudis and the rest weren't just out to make a buck...
...Even U.N...
...As part of this "tanker war," the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian passenger airliner on July 3, 1988...
...These distant masters did not always rule wisely or well, but they generally prevented the region from menacing the security of the outside world...
...The escalation occurred first in Saudi Arabia and Egypt...
...It did not require Hercule Poirot to see Iranian fingerprints all over these operations...
...In the face of this attack, the Reagan administration revealed itself to be no more muscular than its Democratic predecessor had been...
...Now there was little give in the market, leaving the oil-producing states maximum leverage to raise prices...
...The Levant soon became a major focus of their operations...
...There was little Washington could or would do to force the Soviet Union to disgorge Hungary, but America had plenty of leverage with its allies, and didn't hesitate to use it...
...A few years later Nasser turned his attention back to the "Zionist entity...
...Before long America was embroiled in its next Middle East crisis— this one centered on the oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf...
...The Mullahs By the late 1970s, Nasserite pan-Arabism was a spent force...
...Prime Minister David Ben Gurion asked Washington to guarantee Israel's security and supply it with weapons to counter the growing Egyptian threat...
...Beyond Iraq loom other challenges—especially Syria and Iran, which have been waging undeclared war on the United States for 20 years, but also Saudi Arabia, which has abetted this war even as it has benefited from American protection...
...Eisenhower's dispatch of Marines to support the Lebanese government in 1958...
...military supplies...
...But Nasser spurned the West by taking a prominent role at the Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations and by extending diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China...
...Unfortunately, America continued catering to Saddam Hussein even after the Iran-Iraq War was over...
...Those helicopters helped Saddam slaughter Shiites and Kurds who had risen up against his rule—at American instigation—in great numbers...
...The Sheikhs Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced in 1968 that Britain was withdrawing from its military commitments "east of Suez...
...The small Gulf states—Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and what would become the United Arab Emirates—were on their own...
...Saddam America was an equal opportunity appeaser...
...Only after nearly five months of "America held hostage" did Carter attempt a rescue mission, and the pathetic Eagle Claw expedition had to be aborted on April 25, 1980, after two aircraft collided at a rendezvous point code-named Desert One...
...Bush's resounding victory in the Persian Gulf War of 1991...
...On October 23 of that year, another Shiite suicide bomber hit the U.S...
...President Eisenhower thought he could lure Nasser to the Western camp by offering him support, such as loans to build the Aswan Dam, which would supply most of his country's electricity...
...It is possible that a U.S...
...Saddam plotted to kill George H.W...
...They figured—rightly, as it turned out— that the United States would do little to undermine their governments because it feared that the alternative, whether Nasserite or fundamentalist, would be worse...
...courts...
...American prestige instantly plummeted from the heights it had attained just a few weeks before...
...The canal, which was owned (and had been built) by an Anglo-French consortium, was the transit point for two-thirds of Europe's oil supplies...
...They were supposed to land in Israel under cover of darkness...
...Five days later, Nasser announced that he was closing the Straits of Tiran, thus keeping Israeli shipping out of the Gulf of Aqaba, its only outlet to the Red Sea...
...The shah did sign a contract with a multinational consortium of oil companies (including Anglo-Iranian) to manage Iran's production, but his government retained ownership...
...The End of Appeasement Bush's opportunity to redeem America's past failures in the Middle East BY MAX BOOT Following Hans Blix's devastating report and President Bush's compelling State of the Union address, Saddam Hussein looks more and more like a dead man walking...
...record in the Mideast during the past 50 years has been exclusively weak and pusillanimous...
...Presumably the campaign in Afghanistan disabused al Qaeda of some of these illusions—^but not all...
...When a pro-Nazi regime took power in Baghdad in 1941, the British intervened to topple the offending dictator, Rashid Ali...
...Jimmy Carter contented himself with imposing ineffectual diplomatic and economic sanctions...
...When a group of Egyptian army officers led by an early-day Nasser named Arabi Pasha tried to seize power in 1882, the British occupied the country, and wound up administering it from behind the scenes for decades to come...
...A few days later, on November 5, they occupied Port Said, which controlled the Mediterranean entrance to the canal, with little resistance...
...The result is that De Beers executives are afraid to visit the United States for fear of being arrested or served with legal papers...
...The agency refused to authorize the mission, because it would have violated the executive ban on assassinations...
...Oil is a fungible commodity, and America and the Netherlands were able to buy most of what they needed from other sources...
...We no longer fear the so-called Great Powers," bin Laden proclaimed in a 2000 recruitment video for al Qaeda...
...The Reagan administration did briefly bomb Libya in 1986, in response to an attack on a Berlin disco, but these pinprick airstrikes only enraged Muammar Qaddafi, whose agents, in retaliation, destroyed Pan Am flight 103 in 1988, killing 270 people...
...It was an accident, but conspiracy-minded Iranians thought it a deliberate expression of a new get-tough approach by that cowboy Ronald Reagan...
...Years later, one of the embassy guards, former Marine Sgt...
...he ended the ground war after just 100 hours, while the Republican Guard remained intact and Saddam remained in power...
...Daniel Pipes estimates that even before the costliest terrorist strike in history occurred on September 11, 2001, Islamist violence directed at Americans had killed 800 people—"more than killed by any other enemy since the Vietnam War...
...In the immediate run-up to the crisis, the United States tried unsuccessfully to court Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had emerged as the leader of the group of Egyptian army officers that overthrew King Farouk in 1952...
...British prime minister Anthony Eden complained in his memoirs, with considerable justice, "In recent years the United States has sometimes failed to put its weight behind its friends, in the hope of being popular with their foes...
...America wanted to show that it sympathized with the Arabs, Persians, and Muslims, had no designs on their lands or oil wealth, and would not even choose sides in their struggle to eradicate the nascent state of Israel...
...they were also out, like Nasser before them, to assert Arab and Islamic power at the expense of the West...
...While trying to buy off Iran, it was also backing Iran's mortal enemy, Iraq, during their war in the 1980s...
...It is perhaps no coincidence that within two years of the final British pullout in 1971, these Gulf states were presenting a major challenge to the West...
...Instead the embassy surrender showed that Americans were easy targets...
...To supervise the evacuation of 8,000 Fatah fighters, the United States, along with France and Italy, landed a small peacekeeping force in Beirut...
...It is not entirely America's fault, but our mismanagement and misconceptions have allowed a backward, once insignificant region to become arguably the main threat to the security of the United States and the entire West...
...This is actually the best reason to liberate Iraq...
...This may seem an odd statement to make, since America is often accused of being a bully, in the Mideast as elsewhere...
...In centuries past, the wild and unruly passions of the Islamic world were kept within tight confines by firm, often ruthless imperial authority, mainly Ottoman, but, starting in the late 19th century, increasingly British and French...
...When Britain balked, Eisenhower tightened the economic screws...
...For the United States, this represents perhaps the last, best chance to do what it has singularly failed to do since World War II—to provide the Middle East with effective imperial oversight...
...America's nightmares in Vietnam and Lebanon will pale by comparison with the forthcoming victory in al-Hijaz...
...And successive American administrations—obsessed, understandably, with the Soviet threat—did little to stop them...
...Rather pitifully, Washington pleaded with its friends in the region to exert their influence to bring down prices, but the Twin Pillars, the Saudi king and the shah, usually turned a deaf ear to American entreaties...
...But the oil cartel, led by the shah, was more successful in its attempts to ratchet up prices by ratcheting down production: Prices spiked from $3 a barrel in 1970 to a whopping $30 a barrel in 1980...
...They also feel free to keep vast amounts of money in the U.S...
...Unfortunately America's record of failure is more glaring, starting with the Suez Crisis, continuing in the runup to the Six Day War, the oil crisis of the 1970s, the Iranian revolution, subsequent terrorist attacks against the United States by radical Islamists, and the failure to depose Saddam Hussein...
...The trend had begun in Mexico in the 1930s and spread to the Middle East in 1951, when Prime Minister Mossadegh crafted, and the shah signed, a law nationalizing Iran's oil industry...
...To assuage Israel's security concerns, a U.N...
...peacekeeping force...
...Navy to run the blockade and preserve the freedom of the seas—as Eisenhower had pledged ten years before that America would do if the straits were ever closed...
...Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, hoped to maintain a public stance of neutrality by hiding these arms shipments from the Arab states...
...Already the danger loomed...
...But then they did not especially fear the wrath of the Americans...
...His radio station, the Voice of the Arabs, blared out a daily stream of vituperation against the West and its friends in the region, while Nasser's agents tried to subvert these "lackeys of imperialism...
...Unfortunately America showed something else—that we were weak, and could be attacked, economically and physically and rhetorically, with impunity...
...In the spring of 1957, Nasserite army officers tried, and failed, to overthrow King Hussein of Jordan...
...This, it was feared, would lead to the hostages' being killed...
...Saudi Arabia embargoed oil shipments to France and Britain, and acts of sabotage shut down Kuwait's supply system...
...But none did...
...But the Saudi pressure on fellow OPEC states not to raise prices too high, while presented to credulous Washington policymakers as a great favor to America, was in reality self-serving: Riyadh was afraid that if it priced its oil out of the market the result would be a slackening of demand and the development of alternative energy sources...
...This failure suggested to conspiracy-minded Middle Easterners either that the United States secretly wanted to maintain Saddam in power for some nefarious purpose, or that it feared the Iraqi dictator...
...At first this cynical gambit—precisely what the United States often accuses its European allies of doing— seemed to pay dividends...
...Realizing that the embargo was failing, OPEC abandoned it in 1974...
...in response, the United States and Britain bombed Iraq for all of four days...
...France and Britain issued an ultimatum calling on both sides to stop fighting and pull back 10 miles from the canal...
...If the occupation goes well (admittedly a big if), it may mark the moment when the powerful antibiotic known as democracy was introduced into the diseased environment of the Middle East, and began to transform the region for the better...
...This may have been a sound short-term strategy—it did contribute to the defeat of the Evil Empire—^but its unintended long-term consequence has been to leave behind a poisonous legacy of anti-Americanism, despotism, and corruption that poses a stark challenge to the 21st-century world...
...Many of the kidnap victims were held at the Sheik Abdallah Barracks in the Lebanese town of Baalbek, which had been taken over as a base of operations by uniformed members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pasdaran...
...Britain, France, and America were perceived to be on the run...
...America's "friends" in the region fear that American troops will march on Baghdad and install a democratic government, something that would undermine their own grip on power...
...government hatched a plot to overthrow Saddam in 1995, only to pull out at the last minute, and leave its Kurdish friends to either cut deals with the dictator, flee, or be killed...
...instead they descended in the middle of the day on October 14, their insignia clear for all to see...
...policy on Iraq signaled a fatal lack of seriousness on America's part...
...The OPEC countries were ready to seize the moment, having already nationalized their oil industries...
...and the embargo had to be carried out by American companies, which still ran many oil fields under contract to the exporting states...
...In 1979 Islamist radicals briefly seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and in 1981 they assassinated Anwar Sadat...
...Our youth should be confident that America cannot do a damn thing," he told his followers three days after the embassy takeover...
...Continuing a campaign that began in 1979, Islamist operatives bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, two U.S...
...Successive administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, treated them not as an ongoing war but as a matter for the criminal justice system...
...Eisenhower sensed, too late, the Nasserite danger, and proclaimed the Eisenhower Doctrine to help friendly Middle Eastern regimes...
...Rodney Sickmann, regretted that he'd been ordered not to fire so much as a tear gas canister at the embassy invaders...
...There are reasons for our power which will make us stronger, so why would we be content to be someone else's catspaw...
...Johnson counseled Levi Eshkol not to take matters into his own hands, either, but the Israeli prime minister decided he had no choice...
...The catalyst for its rise was the 1979 Iranian revolution which overthrew America's great friend, the shah...
...In the cease-fire that followed, General Norman Schwarzkopf unwisely allowed Saddam's forces to fly helicopters over the parts of Iraq they still controlled...
...But Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had no fear of an American army marching on Tehran...
...Following the 1956 war, the United States had forced Israel to disgorge its territorial gains in the Sinai...
...This inaction in the face of Saddam's provocations would be repeated time and again in the 1990s...
...His allies in Damascus sabotaged the oil pipeline linking Iraq to the Mediterranean, thus interrupting a major source of Europe's oil supplies...
...The Israel Defense Forces estimated that Czech weapons would begin flowing to Egypt by November 1955, and that it would take six to eight months for the Egyptians to assimilate the inflow...
...As soon as eighty [sic] American troops were killed, they fled in the dark as fast as they could, after making a great noise about the new international order...
...If they could have interfered, they would have retained the shah...
...This was a justifiable realpolitik policy designed to forestall Iranian domination of the Persian Gulf, and included a limited war to protect Kuwaiti tankers from Iranian attacks in 1987-88...
...The U.S...
...At this point, the United States, as so often in the past, intervened to prevent Israel from winning a complete victory against its sworn enemies...
...Washington did not even try to prosecute OPEC for blatant violations of antitrust law, as it has done with other overseas cartels such as De Beers...
...it's just escalated," Sickmann says...
...But there was no question that the primary culprits were to be found around a meeting table in Vienna...
...But the ruse fell apart when foul weather delayed some giant C-5A transport planes laden with U.S...
...Kill a few of them, and you can chase them out of your country...
...forces out of Somalia...
...Yet, as Pipes notes, "these murders hardly registered...
...In 1955 the Kremlin agreed, through its Czech puppets, to supply Nasser with an awesome array of weaponry including 200 jet airplanes and 100 tanks...
...Strong medicine, that...
...Navy, which protected them...
...This decision, which occurred amid turmoil and violence (a previous, anti-nationalization prime minister had been assassinated by Islamic terrorists), caused great consternation in London, since a British company (Anglo-Iranian, forerunner of British Petroleum) held the Iranian oil concession...
...Generations of Washington policymakers have fooled themselves into thinking that Saudi oil revenues could be directed for friendly purposes...
...None of this was a secret at the time...
...A bigger test now awaits us in Iraq...
...The image of American impotence was reinforced by the continuing hostage crisis in Lebanon...
...This places OPEC's activities—^previous-ly seen merely as greed run amok—in a rather more sinister light...
...Ambassador April Glaspie had an infamous meeting with Saddam in which she informed the Iraqi dictator that the United States had "no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait...
...But the shah and the Saudis were more eager to appease nationalist and Islamic radicals who called for a united Arab front against the "Zionist oppressors" and "Western imperialists...
...The United States likewise did little to forestall Egypt's next attempt to wipe Israel off the map, which occurred during the Yom Kippur holiday in 1973...
...Al Qaeda This impression was reinforced in the 1990s by America's failure to take stern steps against the terrorists who waged war against it...
...Israel responded by invading Lebanon in 1982, putting the PLO fighters on the run and trapping them in Beirut...
...But at least the Nixon administration, to its great credit, rushed emergency deliveries of arms to Israel when it appeared that the Jewish state stood on the brink of annihilation...
...The immediate impact of the Suez Crisis was to give a major impetus to Nasser in his grandiose plans to unite the entire Arab world under his tyrannical rule...
...This illusion was easy to sustain in the 1980s when the Saudis, for their own theological purposes, bankrolled anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan...
...These economic woes were exacerbated by the ham-handed U.S...
...A looming oil shortage could have been averted with continued military action by Israel, France, and Britain to open the canal and overthrow Nasser...
...There are some people who thought—and perhaps some who still think—that I am a toy in the Americans' hands," the shah said in 1975...
...Such a settlement is still elusive almost 50 years later, but in the meantime Israel faced a pressing danger...
...Yet the record shows precious little bullying— indeed not enough...
...weapons inspectors in 1998...
...Saddam stopped cooperating with U.N...
...But the allies could not cope with the overwhelming pressure brought by President Eisenhower, who didn't want to "get the Arabs sore at all of us" and who was eager to paint the United States as opposed to imperialism, whether conducted by the Soviet Union in Hungary or by France and Britain in Egypt...
...and, most recently, George H.W...
...Such unwarranted restraint demoralized America's friends in the region and emboldened our enemies...
Vol. 8 • February 2003 • No. 21
