Saddam Hussain: Unwitting Godfather of the Israeli-PLO Agreement

By Roger G. Harrison

As we bask in the afterglow of the Israeli/Palestinian agreement, it is perhaps well to remember the contribution of a world leader who was not present at the White House for the signing ceremony but who contributed as much to that outcome as any of those who were.

This unwitting contributor was Iraqi President Saddam Hussain. His invasion of Kuwait was the catalyst for an endgame which concluded on the White House lawn. It shook the parties to the Middle East conflict out of what had become an institutionalized confrontation, punctured pan-Arabist pretensions, buried the myth of Palestinian liberation by force, and focused moderate Arabs and Jews alike on the threat from the Islamist fringe. It was not so much the fighting which did all this as the ideological battle which preceded and surrounded it—a battle largely defined by Saddam. It was he who made the conflict a test of the old assumptions, and he who summoned all the most potent and reliable furies of Arab politics against the West, only to find they were not enough. In this battle of old politics with new, the new politics won—and changed the Middle East in ways only now becoming evident.

The ideological battle which would lead to this happy outcome was joined soon after the invasion as the two sides struggled to define for the world, and especially the Arab world, what precisely had occurred.

In the view of the administration of President George Bush, of course, the invasion was an unprovoked land grab by an expansionist state. An effort began almost immediately to rally the international community around this interpretation of events, which eventually became the basis for successive U. N. resolutions underpinning the Western counter-strokes. In those first hours, the administration was not yet certain what could be done about Saddam's invasion, but not because of any doubt about what had happened or why. Indeed, Washington was first nonplussed and then indignant to discover that this interpretation was not universally shared.

It was very much in Saddam's interest to define the events of Aug. 2, 1990 in a way which would rally the Arab street to his support. To accomplish this, he evoked the most powerful symbols of Arab politics—pan-Arabism, Islam and Palestinian liberation. In effect, he sought to cast himself as both Arab nationalist hero and Defender of the Faith. The evidence of this campaign was everywhere. Bat'hist Iraq had always been a thoroughly secular place, but now the Arabic characters for "God is Great" appeared on the Iraqi flag and a laughable attempt was made to prove that Saddam was a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. (Saddam began at this time to address King Hussein of Jordan, a legitimate descendent, as "cousin.")

Meanwhile, Iraqi propaganda hammered on the theme that Kuwait was a vestige of British imperialism ruled by secular voluptuaries who resolutely refused to share the proceeds of "Arab resources" with their less fortunate brothers. (This was not, as it turned out, a difficult case to make in most of the Arab world.) Finally, and most importantly, Saddam raised "linkage," the idea that his occupation of Kuwait would end only when Israel withdrew from the occupied territories. The invasion of Kuwait became, in Iraqi propaganda, a blow for Palestinian liberation. "Linkage" would soon become the key point in the public relations campaigns of both sides.

Fortunately for the West, Saddam's religious and liberationist credentials were not especially credible. Moreover, establishment leaders everywhere in the Islamic world recognized the subversive message in Saddam's propaganda, which challenged by implication their own legitimacy. But more to the point, the old slogans had lost their bite. With few exceptions, Arab leaders and publics heard the clarion call, but reacted as the cautious nationalists they had become. Where it counted most—in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and the Gulf states—Saddam's PR push failed. The street stayed quiet (encouraged in Syria by judicious use of Assad's iron fist).

Ironically, had this been the reaction everywhere in the Arab world, the peace process might never have been given the push it needed. But the old politics were not dead everywhere, and that forced both the U.S. and the PLO to react.

What both reacted to was the situation in Jordan and the occupied territories where Saddam's pitch was immediately and wildly successful. The Iraqi leader had masterfully distilled the essence of Palestinian and Jordanian frustration, which now exploded in an orgy of Saddam worship. Suddenly, children were on every Amman street corner peddling posters of Saddam, and cosmopolitan Ammanis were describing Saddam's person and purposes in terms many would later come to regret. There was widespread certainty of an Iraqi victory (an engineer confided that Saddam had filled his trenches with poisonous snakes who would make short work of our soldiers) and virtually unanimous condemnation of U. S. policy. The situation in the occupied territories was the same. A Western observer likened it, not inappropriately, to the mass hysteria in Germany during the 1930s.

Disaster vs. Irrelevance

That posed a problem for both Washington and the PLO. The PLO leaders had every reason to keep their distance from Saddam. Among other things, he was threatening states which were the major source of their funding. But the Palestinian street was vociferously behind the Iraqi president, and radical challengers initially cool to the invasion were soon leading the charge. PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and his colleagues now had to choose between risking disaster or accepting irrelevance. It was really no choice.

With Arafat in the van, the PLO leadership put aside its doubts and scrambled to get in front of the pro-Saddam parade. The result was political isolation and bankruptcy. By mid-1991, the PLO was at its lowest ebb since the flight from Lebanon.

What to do? Renewed violence would only strengthen Arafat's radical opponents. But if peace were on the agenda, Arafat would be the indispensable player. No one else could give the negotiators the credibility they needed. No one else could sign an agreement and make it stick.

Later, experts would wonder at the tenacity of the Palestinians in sticking to the negotiations through a spate of settlement building, deportations and economic retaliation. But stick they did, largely because, in the aftermath of Saddam's war peace was Arafat's last card.

The United States, too, was forced to react to Saddam's propaganda campaign. "Linkage," in particular, was finding considerable resonance. The administration responded by assuring Arab leaders, both publicly and privately, that the U.S. would return with new vigor to the Arab/Israeli peace process once Kuwait was liberated.

Many Arabs greeted this pledge with skepticism, to put it mildly. But from President Bush's viewpoint there were good reasons for redeeming it. Radical fundamentalism had not been crushed along with Iraq; quite the opposite. There were echoes in the region of 1967, when a previous military humiliation had led to an upsurge in radicalism. And while the old politics had not produced all Saddam had hoped for, he had shown that they were still a potent force, and would continue to be as long as the Palestinian issue remained unresolved. That, in the end, was the most dangerous threat to U.S. interests.

In short, the invasion of Kuwait—and the ideological dicta with which Saddam surrounded it—forced two of the three major players to confront the underlying issues of Middle East peace much more directly than they had before. The PLO approached the issue from a position of weakness and the U.S. from one of strength. Both, however, decided their interests were served by negotiations. The Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir, needing U.S. aid to absorb Soviet Jews, decided to play along. The other Arabs joined too, some demonstrating more reluctance than they felt.

Thus began the Madrid process. The victory of a Labor government in Israel (itself arguably a product of the U.S. push for a settlement) provided a key impetus. Now the Arabs had an interlocutor genuinely interested in a settlement.

The election of President Bill Clinton helped too. Although the Clinton administration made its pledge to be a "full partner" in the negotiations, this phrase (like "new world order") seemed a speechwriter's conceit rather than a plan of action. The underlying message—reinforced by President Clinton's almost complete detachment—was less U.S. involvement. It turned out to be the right message.

This was the situation in July 1993. Saddam's gambit in Kuwait had forced the issue. As a result, the U.S. had created a context for peace talks which moderate Palestinians and the PLO enthusiastically embraced. The momentum swept through Israeli politics and helped produce a government genuinely interested in peace.

Then the two sides suddenly were left to their own devices. Arafat could see peace slipping away, and with it his hope of retaining his leadership. Rabin could feel his campaign pledge to bring peace becoming a political liability.

So Rabin and Arafat moved toward direct contacts. It helped that the emergence of the Islamist Hamas movement, largely funded by the Iranian government, had pushed Arafat to the Palestinian center. It helped that Likud's new leader, Benyamin Netanyahu, could offer nothing more than a slightly slicker take on the old Shamir prescriptions of deportations, assassinations and house demolitions. It helped that President Hafez Al-Assad of Syria needed better ties with the West. And it helped that the two principals had unimpeachable credentials as hard-liners.

Most of all, however, it helped that the new realities of the region had been made so indelibly clear to all of the players. Here is where Saddam Hussain takes a last bow. He played his role by casting the ideological issues in sharp relief and forcing the parties to confront them. The result was the opposite of Saddam's intentions.

Most Arabs refused to rally to the cause. Asked to choose between pan-Arabist anti-Zionism and the realities of stability and investment and access to markets, they abandoned the old ideological cause for the new pragmatic one. Those who did respond to Saddam's siren song found themselves isolated, both politically and financially. In short, the ground had shifted, and the Gulf war served both to illustrate this fact and to shift it further.

It would be too much too claim a complete victory. Ruthless authoritarianism and violence are not dead in the Middle East, as Saddam's own survival attests. Still, the changes in the Arab world which Saddam's war helped reveal are very promising, a fact underlined now by the relative calm with which the Arabs have greeted the Israeli/ Palestinian agreement. Indeed, that agreement, which is hard to imagine in the absence of the catharsis provided by Saddam's war, has put a further seal on his personal defeat, and the defeat of the politics on which he relied.