The Arabs: A History

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 proved the watershed in the Lebanese conflict. At war once again, Iraq could no longer afford to arm its Lebanese clients. Moreover, Saddam Hussein’s attempt to link Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait to a general resolution of regional problems, including the Syrian “occupation” of Lebanon, was a transparent bid to divert international pressure onto Syria to withdraw from Lebanon. The Syrians were far too adept at regional politics to succumb to Saddam Hussein’s ploy. Hafiz al-Asad was using the Kuwait crisis to improve Syrian relations with Washington, and Washington fully supported the Taif Accord. Al-Asad thus decided to give his government’s full support to implementing the Taif framework and cast Iraq’s ally Michel Aoun as the main obstacle to peace. The Lebanese and Syrians conferred, and on October 11 President Hrawi formally requested Syrian military assistance, under the terms of the Taif Accord, to oust General Aoun. Two days later, Syrian aircraft began the bombardment of Aoun’s positions while Syrian and Lebanese Army tanks advanced into territory held by Aoun’s forces. Within three hours, General Aoun had capitulated and sought asylum in the French Embassy while his partisans continued the struggle. The fighting—often very intense—was over within eight hours. When the smoke cleared over the empty presidential palace in Baabda on October 13, the people of Lebanon enjoyed their first glimpse of a postwar world, if still under Syrian occupation. It was only after the defeat of Michel Aoun that the postwar reconstruction envisaged by the Taif Accord could begin in earnest. In November 1990 the government ordered all militias out of the capital, Beirut, and in December the army cleared the barricades separating Muslim West Beirut from Christian East Beirut, reuniting the city for the first time since 1984. On Christmas Eve 1990, Omar Karami, brother of the assassinated reformist premier Rashid Karami, a

Saddam Hussein’s invasion, and the American-led war to liberate Kuwait, had the unintended consequence of forcing America to address the long-simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The American government recognized that the Kuwait crisis had placed its Arab allies under tremendous pressure. However cynical, Saddam Hussein’s frequent references to liberating Palestine had earned him widespread popular support across the Arab world and exposed other Arab governments to public condemnation. Arab citizens believed their governments had lost the plot: they should be fighting Israel to liberate Palestine, not fighting Iraq on America’s behalf to liberate Kuwaiti wealth and oil. America too came under widespread condemnation in the Arab press and public opinion. For years the Americans had supported Israel while it flaunted U.N. resolutions calling for the restoration of occupied Arab lands. In 1990, Israel remained in occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and parts of southern Lebanon. Yet when Iraq invaded Kuwait, America invoked UN Security Council resolutions as though they were sacrosanct. Occupation was either right or wrong, and UN resolutions either were binding or they weren’t. The double standard in treatment of Iraq and Israel as occupiers was self-evident. President George H. W. Bush rejected Saddam Hussein’s attempts to link an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait to an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories. But he could not escape the logic of the Iraqi demand. No sooner had the Iraq conflict ended than the Bush administration a