The War That Changed the Middle East in Every Way But One

By Richard H. Curtiss

The air war to eject Saddam Hussain's Iraqi occupiers from Kuwait lasted 43 days, the ground war only 100 hours, and less than nine months later the last of the 696 dynamited Kuwaiti oil wells left blazing or gushing by the withdrawing Iraqis had been capped. But before the last of the fires had been quenched, it was clear that some things more precious than oil to Arabs and Muslims had been consumed in the flames that engulfed Kuwait. The dream of Arab unity, cherished from Morocco to Oman, had vanished in the smoke pall, and the dream of Islamic harmony, cherished by Muslims from the Atlantic shores of Africa to the Pacific islands of Indonesia, had been extinguished as well.

The Middle East, its peoples, and all who look to them for employment, sustenance, or inspiration emerged from the Gulf War four years ago profoundly changed. If Iraq's stunning, overnight military occupation of one of the world's smallest but richest countries opened a chasm in the Muslim world, the swiftness with which the largest army in the Arab world was shattered and destroyed, and the immense loss of Muslim resources and manpower consumed first by the Iran-Iraq war and then by Iraq's misadventure in the Gulf left the entire Middle East in shock. The financial losses from the two wars are estimated at $600 billion, enough to have catapaulted the Islamic world into the forefront of world intellectual, scientific and social progress. Instead, the money, and the more than one million lives wasted in more than a decade of fighting from the fall of 1980 to the spring of 1991, are lost irretrievably, and Islam and all Muslims are diminished accordingly.

When Iraqi armored units rolled across the border into Iran in the fall of 1980, the taboo against one Muslim country attacking another was broken for the first time since the 1930s. The moment Iraqi paratroops dropped on the Kuwait airport and Iraqi tanks crashed through the Kuwait border on the night of Aug. 1 and 2, the taboo against one Arab country attacking another likewise was broken.

If the first event did not fracture the Muslim world, it was only because low-level fighting across the Iran-Iraq border had preceded the 1980 invasion over a long period. The event therefore could be regarded as as a continuation of cyclical Persian-Arab rivalry that traces its roots to the Arab conquest in the century following the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and which to this day is perpetuated in the Sunni-Shi'i Muslim schism.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, however, split the Arab world itself down the middle. Particularly outraged were Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries, who together had spent billions of dollars supporting such pan-Arab causes as the recovery of Israeli-occupied Palestinian lands, and Saddam's war against Iran. Feeling directly threatened, the Saudis made the hard decision to invite foreign military forces, whom they had spent generations ejecting from the Arabian peninsula, back to participate in the liberation of Kuwait.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait split the Arab world itself down the middle.

Perhaps even more stunning to the Gulf countries was the stand initially taken by some Arab governments in support of the Iraqis. This led to almost universal adoption of a conspiracy theory which held that the governments of Jordan, Yemen, Sudan, Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, and perhaps Algeria and Tunisia had been offered territorial incentives or armaments by Saddam Hussain to support, or at least not oppose, his strike into the Gulf. In some cases the divide cut right through a country. Saddam enjoyed much popular support in Morocco, even though the troops sent by King Hassan were among the first to arrive in Saudi Arabia to join the coalition gathering to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Most perplexed were the Palestinians. Some joined Yasser Arafat in supporting Saddam, who they believed would turn Kuwait and its revenues over to its large Palestinian population. Others, including Arafat's closest advisers, realized that unless they stood firmly on the side of the endangered Gulf states that had stood by them in the past, the large and prosperous Palestinian communities in the Gulf would be the war's ultimate losers.

The split even extended to the Arab-American community, with many whose main interest in the Middle East was in justice for the Palestinians following Arafat's lead, and others who recognized Saddam's action as naked aggression strongly supporting Saudi Arabia and the U.S.-led coalition. The result was a decline both in membership and in fund-raising by Arab-American and Muslim-American organizations from which none have recovered.

The swift victory of superior coalition military planning and technology, followed by the immediate withdrawal from the Arabian Peninsula of virtually all of the foreign forces that had arrived over the previous seven months, eased the political strain on Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies. But the two wars, the first supported financially by all of the Arab states of the Gulf, and the second involving payments by Saudi Arabia alone of some $55 billion to cover expenses of the foreign armies which had come to the rescue, left the Gulf countries apparently stripped of the proceeds from the years of the oil price boom.

The Legacy of the Oil Boom

In fact, the creation of vast, modern infrastructures in countries that 30 years earlier had virtually none, and the scientific and technical educations acquired by two generations of youths whose grandparents had been illiterate, were the real legacy of the oil boom. What the people of the Arab states of the Gulf saw, however, were treasuries seemingly emptied without popular consultation to fight two wars, the first to prop up Saddam Hussain against Iran's devastating counterattacks, and the second to force him out of Kuwait. One legacy of the Gulf war, therefore, is increasing demand for a consultative council (majlis ash-shura) if not full democracy in areas which, throughout three thousand years of recorded history, have seldom had any form of government other than clan- or tribe-based autocracy.

Far worse off, however, were the huge Palestinian, Yemeni and Sudanese communities which had become deeply entrenched throughout the Arabian peninsula, and whose remittances provided the main income for thousands of families not only in Yemen and Sudan but also in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. These Arab guest workers, some of whom had occupied high-level technical, educational and even political positions, and their families have largely vanished. Their places have been taken by workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Somalia and Eritrea.

Loss of the worker remittances has exacerbated existing instability in Sudan, which has been convulsed by civil war; in Yemen, which has suffered a brief civil war between the victorious northern government and the formerly independent south; and in Lebanon, which is slowly recovering from its own 15-year ordeal by war. Most profoundly affected, however, were Jordan and the Palestinians. The initial effect on Jordan was a construction boom, as tens of thousands of Palestinians holding Jordanian nationality returned from the Gulf and invested what savings they had in homes and businesses in Amman. But an alarmed King Hussein knew that it was a boom based largely upon consumption, not investment in income-producing industry.

Other Palestinians, forced to return to beleaguered Gaza and the West Bank, found it difficult to use their savings either for housing or businesses because of Israeli military occupation rules designed to make life so oppressive that people would leave, not return. Most significant, however, was the Saudi cutoff of funds for Palestinian institutions in any way associated with Yasser Arafat, who the Saudis felt had repaid their years of support with betrayal.

Sensing after ending the Iraqi military occupation of Kuwait that the situation also was ripe for ending the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, U.S. President George Bush initiated direct Arab-Israeli talks, despite the reluctance of hard-line Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel to become involved in any negotiation which might force Israel to cede land for peace. However, after Bush linked U.S. loan guarantees to a halt in Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, Shamir's government fell. It was replaced by the Labor party government of Yitzhak Rabin, who promised Bush, in return for the loan guarantees, to freeze all Israeli government support for Jewish settlements.

Within five months, however, the Bush administration itself had been defeated at the polls, and the Rabin government had launched a series of secret negotiations with Israel's Arab neighbors, or intermediaries for them, while orchestrating media reports that a settlement on this or that front was imminent. The target was Syria, whose military forces, after the destruction of Iraq's army, were the only serious remaining threat to Israel. The goal was an agreement with Syria that would pave the way to an agreement with Jordan, which increasingly needed the U.S. foreign aid that would be part of any peace treaty. The Palestinians would thereby be left without allies among the Arab states bordering Israel, and could be dealt with as the Israelis saw fit.

The surprise was that Yasser Arafat, desperate for funds to meet his obligations to his armed forces scattered over half a dozen Arab countries, his bureaucrats in Tunis, the widows and orphans of PLO dead, and the network of hospitals and social institutions established by the PLO, took the bait before Syria. In return for promises of U.S. and European aid, Arafat signed a virtually blank peace of paper. It permitted the return of Palestinian forces to Gaza and tiny Jericho, promised the release of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, and set out a timetable for further Israeli withdrawals to be followed by Palestinian elections. It made no concessions, however, on the key Palestinian requirements for an eventual sovereign state, removal of the Jewish settlers to whom the Israeli government had given title to 65 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, and sharing Jerusalem with Israel. Nor did it deal with Palestinian refugees in Israel proper, inside the Green Line. Arafat gambled that "legitimizing" with Israel his role as leader of the Palestinians would set in motion a momentum toward real Israeli concessions for peace that no one could resist. Rabin gambled that he could extract enough concessions from the Palestinians that the Israeli public would accept the resulting peace agreement and re-elect him.

Peace with the Palestinians would provide Syria and Jordan with the political cover to reach deals of their own with Israel. That, in turn, would pave the way to acceptance by the rest of the Arabs and real Israeli economic integration into the Middle East.

Such a scenario would have seemed impossible before the decade of warfare in the Gulf, which diverted some of the hostility of the Arabian Peninsula states away from Israel and toward Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Yemen, Sudan and Arafat. However, finding the Arabs even more divided that he had realized, and finding Clinton willing to overlook blatant Israeli cheating on the pledge to freeze settlements, Rabin now is reneging.

A Lost Opportunity?

In fact, by avoiding the inevitable clash with Zionist settlers, and underestimating Palestinian resilience, he may already have let the opportunity for peace slip away. Instead of continuing to exploit post-Gulf war Arab disunity to establish Israel as a country at peace with its neighbors for the first time in its history, Rabin may instead force the Arabs to forget the trauma of 1990 and 1991, and close ranks to avenge the Israeli betrayal of 1995. If Israel loses the opportunity for peace at this moment of maxium Arab weakness, such an opportunity is unlikely to arise again as the Arab world rebounds.

That is because Arab demoralization in the wake of the Gulf war also has accelerated an anti-Western (and virulently anti-Israeli) pan-Islamic resurgence that dwarfs and transcends the pan-Arab fascination for "Arab socialism" that once captured the allegiance of the masses.

The present Iran-inspired Islamic "fundamentalism" is a basically negative force, dedicated to rooting out secularism and Western influences rather than strengthening Islamic society by adapting it to the modern world. It eventually may run its course in any part of the Middle East in which it takes root just as unsuccessfully as it has in Iran.

But, so long as it threatens every Middle Eastern government, none will be in a position to make peace with Israel—which by design has turned itself into the symbol, if not the actual cutting edge, of a return of Western colonialism. By the time the "purifying" Islamists have become discredited like the "scientific socialists" before them, the disparity will be even greater between present-day Israel's 4-1/2 million Jews, and its current 200 million Arab neighbors. The imbalance also can only grow between the world's present 13 million Jews and its 1.1 billion Muslims. If another opportunity ever arises for Israel to reach a modus vivendi with its regional neighbors, it will be on their terms, not its own

Then Israelis will realize, too late, that for a brief time only the Gulf war has changed everything in the Middle East but one thing. That is the truism, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose—the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.