The Arabs: A History

Liberation came at a high price. The Kuwaitis expressed profound joy at the restoration of their independence, but their country had been utterly destroyed by the Iraqi invasion and the war. Hundreds of oil wells burned out of control, infrastructure had been shattered, and much of the country had to be rebuilt from scratch. The population of Kuwait was deeply traumatized by occupation and war, with thousands killed, displaced, or missing. The wider Arab world also came out of the conflict divided and traumatized. Arab citizens strongly opposed their governments’ decision to side with the coalition and fight against a fellow Arab state. Those governments that joined the coalition ostracized those who did not. Jordan, Yemen, and the PLO were condemned for having been too supportive of Saddam Hussein?s regime. All three were heavily reliant on financial support from the Gulf, and they suffered economically for the stance they had taken. Many Arab analysts expressed deep mistrust for the United States and concerns for American intentions in the new unipolar world. America?s single-minded pursuit of a military solution, and perceived obstruction of efforts to secure a diplomatic resolution to the Gulf crisis, led many to believe that the United States used the war to establish its military presence in the Gulf and to dominate the region?s oil resources. The fact that thousands of American troops remained in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states years after the liberation of Kuwait only deepened these concerns. Withdrawal from Kuwait brought no respite to Iraq. The Bush administration, believing it had destroyed Saddam Hussein’s prestige along with his military, encouraged the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow their dictator in early February, 1991. American radio stations broadcast messages into Iraq promising U.S. support for popular uprisings. Their message fell on receptive ears in both the Kurdish districts of northern Iraq and the Shiite regions of the south that had suffered most from Saddam Hussein’s rule. Uprisings broke out in both regions in early March 1991. It was not the outcome the United States had hoped to achieve with its propaganda. The Americans wanted to see a military coup in Baghdad overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Kurdish and Shiite uprisings both threatened American interests. Turkey, which was an ally to the United States under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), had been combating a bitter separatist insurgency led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (known by the Kurdish acronym, the PKK) since 1984 and opposed any measure that might give rise to an Iraqi Kurdish state on Turkey’s eastern frontier. The Americans for their part feared that a successful Shiite revolt would only strengthen the regional influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Americans offered no support to either the Shiites or Kurds, despite having encouraged the Iraqis to rise up. Instead, the Bush administration turned a blind eye while Saddam Hussein reassembled the remnants of his forces to suppress the rebellions with ruthless brutality. Tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites are believed to have been killed in the suppression of their revolt, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled Iraqi retaliation to take refuge in Turkey and Iran. Faced with a massive humanitarian catastrophe of its own making, the United States responded by imposing a no-fly zone over northern Iraq. U.S. and British aircraft patrolled the region north of the 36th Parallel to protect the Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s forces. Ironically, the no-fly zone created precisely the sort of autonomous Kurdish enclave that Turkey had most opposed. Elections to a regional assembly independent of Saddam Hussein?s state were held in May 1992, setting in motion the creation of what would become the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. Having failed to unseat Hussein by military means or domestic uprising, the Bush administration returned to the United Nations to secure a resolution stripping Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, establishing Iraq’s responsibility to pay wartime reparations, and reinforcing economic sanctions imposed by earlier resolutions. Saddam Hussein recognized that these measures were designed to provoke his overthrow, and he responded with defiance. He commissioned a mosaic portrait of George H. W. Bush in the entrance of the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad so that all its customers would tread on the face of his adversary. In November 1992, Hussein celebrated Bush’s defeat in the presidential elections. Bush had fallen; Saddam was still in power. The Americans could claim an outright military victory in the Gulf War, but only a partial political victory. The survival of Saddam Hussein meant Iraq remained a source of instability in a region of heightened volatility. And, much against the wishes of the Bush administration, Saddam set the agenda for regional politics after the Desert Storm Gulf War. By drawing parallels between Iraq’s position in Kuwait to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, the Iraqi leader forced the international community to address some of the outstanding conflicts in the Middle East.

By the end of the 1980s, the prospects for peace in Lebanon had never seemed more remote. Ninety percent of the country was under foreign occupation, with Israel in control of the so-called South Lebanon Security Zone, and Syrian troops everywhere else. Foreign funds flooded the country, arming a host of rival militias whose power struggles laid waste to towns and cities in all parts of Lebanon. A whole generation had grown up in the shadow of war, denied an education or the prospect of a earning an honest living. The once-prosperous model democracy of the Middle East had disintegrated into a failed state over which Syria exercised a tenuous control. The breakdown of the Lebanese state under the duress of communal fighting had put into question the very bases of Lebanon’s sectarian system of politics as set out in the 1943 National Pact. Many veteran politicians held Lebanon’s volatile mix of religion and politics responsible for the civil war and were determined to impose a root and branch reform as part of any peace settlement. Rashid Karami, a Su