US Foreign Policy and the Persian Gulf

Safeguarding American Interests through Selective Multilateralism

Robert J. Pauly, Jr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351876315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Robert J. Pauly, Jr examines the history of US foreign policy toward the Greater Middle East in general and focuses specifically on the fundamental economic, military and political causes of the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf crisis. He investigates to what extent these causes were internal and external in origin, looks at the principal actors in the crisis, and determines whether and how these actors have continued to drive unfolding events in the Persian Gulf ever since. The volume explores in detail the role of American leaders since 1989, including how far the US should collaborate with Europe to pursue both American and collective Western economic, military and political interests in the Gulf. It also considers the prospects for the future of American-led nation-building operations in Iraq and the outlook for the eventual liberal democratization of the Greater Middle East.

Chapter 1

Introduction

US Foreign Policy and the Persian Gulf: Breaking with the Past

In June 2004, President George W. Bush used his commencement address to the graduating class of the US Air Force Academy to articulate a long-term strategy designed to reduce the threats posed to American interests by transnational terrorist organizations and their sponsors. In that speech, which was delivered approximately three months prior to the third anniversary of Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., on 11 September 2001, Bush made three fundamental points. First, the US-led pursuit of the democratization of the Greater Middle East is—and will remain—central to the effective prosecution of the war against terrorism. Second, the conduct of nation-building operations in Iraq since the liquidation of former President Saddam Hussein’s regime in April 2003 represents the first step in the wider economic and political transformation of the broader Arab and Islamic worlds. Third, the maintenance of a sustained American commitment to the above objectives is indispensable to providing for the security of the United States at home and safeguarding its interests abroad.¹

Most significantly, in linking the democratization of Iraq—and, eventually, the Greater Middle East as well—to the war on terror, Bush stressed that “[f]ighting terror is not just a matter of killing or capturing terrorists. To stop the flow of recruits into terrorist movements, young people in the region must see a real and hopeful alternative—a society that rewards their talent and turns their energies to a constructive purpose.” Consequently, he continued, the “vision of freedom has great advantages. Terrorists incite young men and women to strap bombs on their bodies and dedicate their deaths to the deaths of others. Free societies inspire young men and women to work, and achieve, and dedicate their lives to the life of their country. And in the long run, I have great faith that the appeal of freedom and life is stronger than the lure of hatred and death.”²

In casting Saddam’s removal from power through the conduct of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March and April 2003 and ongoing efforts to develop representative political and free market economic institutions in the new Iraq as key parts of the war on terrorism, Bush drew parallels to past American conflicts with opponents of freedom across the globe. In particular, he emphasized that “it resembles the great clashes of the last century—between those who put their trust in tyrants and those who put their trust in liberty. Our goal, the goal of this generation is the same: we will secure our nation and defend the peace through the forward march of freedom.”³ Furthermore, he noted that the extension of the pursuit of freedom beyond Iraq represents an innovative new approach toward the region, one that reverses Washington’s long-time support for authoritarian leaders in the Arab world. In conclusion, he explained that

[For] decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability, and much oppression. So I have changed this policy. In the short term, we will work with every government in the Middle East dedicated to destroying the terrorist networks. In the longer term, we will expect a higher standard of reform and democracy from our friends in the region. Democracy and reform will make those nations stronger and more stable, and make the world more secure by undermining terrorism as its source. Democratic institutions in the Middle East will not grow overnight; in America, they grew over generations. Yet the nations of the Middle East will find, as we have found, the only path to true progress is the path of freedom and justice and democracy.⁴

Bush’s remarks at the Air Force Academy reiterated a theme upon which the president and his advisors consistently placed an emphasis during the diplomatic prologue to, and prosecution of, the Second Iraq War, and the subsequent implementation of US-led nation-building operations in Iraq: the long-term pursuit of economic and political reform processes across the Greater Middle East.⁵ In an address at the American Enterprise Institute just under a month prior to the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, for example, Bush stressed that

The nation of Iraq—with its proud heritage, abundant resources, and skilled and educated people—is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom. The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life. And there are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the Middle East. Arab intellectuals have called on Arab governments to address the “freedom gap” so their peoples can fully share in the progress of our times. Leaders in the region speak of a new Arab charter that champions internal reform, greater [political] participation, economic openness, and free trade. And from Morocco to Bahrain and beyond, nations are taking genuine steps toward [political] reform. A new regime in Iraq [will] serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.⁶

Notwithstanding the extent to which the Bush administration’s objectives are realistic—a question open to debate and unlikely to be answered convincingly for years, if not decades, to come—its approach to the Persian Gulf is indeed a revolutionary one. It was developed in large part as a result of the events of 9/11, which prompted the administration to develop a preemptive National Security Strategy designed to eliminate future threats to US interests posed by terrorist organizations and their state sponsors (most notably Al Qaeda and Iraq) before such dangers become imminent and thus unavoidable.

Ultimately, that strategy breaks with past US policymaking in the Persian Gulf, an undertaking that itself dates to the 1830s.⁷ A brief review of American engagement in the Gulf is all that is required to demonstrate that point. That review is broken down temporally in three contexts—the pre-Cold War, Cold War and post-Cold War eras, each of which is touched on below.

Pre-Cold War Years

Prior to the outbreak of the Cold War, US interests in the Persian Gulf were primarily, albeit not exclusively, economic in orientation. Initially, American engagement in the region was limited to the cultivation of a new market for US goods. The development and deepening of commercial relationships with actors such as the Persian Empire and Oman coincided with the progression of the American Industrial Revolution over the latter half of the twentieth century. Linkages between private interests in the United States and the states of the Gulf (most notably Saudi Arabia) grew stronger with the discovery and exploitation of petroleum deposits across the region during World War I and the interwar years.⁸

Increasing American reliance on the Persian Gulf for oil, in turn, led to a growing impetus for the expression of US diplomatic influence therein. Ultimately, the diminution of the British presence in the Middle East as the United Kingdom focused on domestic rather than colonial interests in the aftermath of World War left Washington to play the West’s lead role in the Gulf—politically and, if necessary, militarily. As historian Michael Palmer asserts:

Americans naively expected to supplant the British commercially without having to accept old-world-style political or military responsibilities. … The evolution of American involvement in the Gulf paralleled the British pattern—a long period of solely commercial, followed by the more rapid development of strategic and geoeconomic interests. By the 1940s, Americans had replaced the British as the most important economic power in the Persian Gulf. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, with that newfound commercial dominance came considerable diplomatic and military involvement.⁹

Cold War Years

During the Cold War, the “diplomatic and military involvement” to which Palmer refers was conditioned primarily by US efforts to minimize, if not eliminate, Soviet involvement in the region. However, the ethnic, political and religious complexity of the Middle East also demanded the pragmatic cultivation of often-transitory collaboration with given states at a particular historical juncture.

The nature of the relationships between Washington and Iran on one hand, and Iraq on the other, is a case in point. The United States maintained a close relationship with Iran until the government of Shah Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by supporters of fundamentalist Islamic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. In the 1980s, by contrast, the United States backed Saddam’s regime in its war against Iran. It supplied the Iraqis with armaments—as did the rival Soviets—and failed to discourage Baghdad’s development, and use, of chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Above all, those policies enhanced Iraq’s capacity to threaten regional stability, which it did, to Washington’s detriment, during the 1990s and 2000s. As historian Charles Tripp notes,

By the mid-1980s, not only had Iraq re-established full diplomatic relations with the United States, but it was also benefiting from the material support of a range of Western states, most notably the United States itself, France and Great Britain. Some of this assistance came in the form of financial credits, some in consumer goods and some in military supplies directly useful to Iraq’s war effort. Iraq found itself in the happy position of being courted by both superpowers and their allies, successfully enlisting its support for their war effort in the waters of the Gulf and on the land front.¹⁰

Post-Cold War Years

More than any state in the Persian Gulf, Iraq has been central to American policymaking in the region throughout the post-Cold War era to date. The defining event in the Gulf during President George H.W. Bush’s tenure in the White House, for instance, was the American-led prosecution of Operation Desert Storm, which unfolded between January and February 1991 on the heels of the conclusion of the Cold War via the collapse of Communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989–90 and the reunification of Germany in October 1990.¹¹ Bush responded to the act of provocation that triggered the conflict—Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990—with a mixture of prudence and resolve.

From the outset, he was determined not to allow Saddam’s aggression to stand. However, Bush also recognized the need to avoid unilateral American action in a region generally averse to Western culture and influence. In order to achieve that end, he set about the construction of a broad coalition of Western, Asian and Middle Eastern states that would act only under the auspices of the United Nations (UN) and thus mitigate, if not avoid completely, the perception that the United States was acting solely in its own interest. Capitalizing on the personal and professional relationships Bush and Cabinet members such as Secretary of State James Baker, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft had cultivated with world leaders in the past, the administration mobilized international support against Iraq more rapidly than would likely have been the case had a set of individuals lacking their collective experience been in office at the time.

Throughout the 1990–91 Persian Gulf crisis, the administration focused on the use of personal diplomacy—whether over the telephone or through frequent airplane shuttles from Washington to European and Middle Eastern state capitals—in order to maintain cohesion within the coalition by ensuring that each of its members’ needs were met sufficiently. Baker’s September 1990 trip to procure financial contributions from coalition partners both to offset the costs of the military buildup and offer aid to states making significant sacrifices ...