The Gulf Conflict and International Relations

Ken Matthews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9781138161559
• eBook ISBN: 9781134904570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a comprehensive analysis and review of the major events and the leading actors of the Gulf War. Copies of key documents and essential factual information build up a picture of the realities of war in the Middle East but the material is set in a strong theoretical framework. This allows the author to see the conflict within the context of the international system and to relate it to the changes of the post-cold-war world.

Matthews looks at the shifts in international order which dictated the nature of the international response to the war, but also at the new conditions created by the war itself. What scope is there for Arab socialism after the fall of European socialism? Has the conflict made Israel stronger or weaker? Can the UN be entrusted with the post of global peace-keeper?

Chapter 1
The Middle East in historical context

THE ‘MIDDLE EAST’ DEFINED

The Middle East is a construction of the European mind. In intellectual and cultural terms, as has already been observed in the idea of Orientalism’, the Middle East is a product of the European imperial and bourgeois imagination. What might be termed the ‘politics of exotica’ describes the whole ethos of nineteenth-century European exploration, not only of the Middle East but of much of the globe. The era of exploration was financed very often by European governments for political/ imperial reasons, but the incentive for the individual explorers and travellers themselves was a fascination with the ‘exotic’, with alien peoples and their cultures, customs and languages.¹ Thus the foundations of the European conception of the Middle East is based upon the accounts of these European travellers— in many ways these accounts ‘defined’ the Middle East in cultural terms.

But of course the very term ‘Middle East’ is essentially a geographical term and only has meaning when it is used in a relativistic way. The reference point of that relativity is Europe. It refers to a region which is east of Europe but not so far east as India or China. It is perhaps alone of the ‘regions’ of the world (themselves fabrications) in being referred to almost exclusively in terms of geography rather than a specific and unique designation. There is the ‘Far East’, but that can be broken down into South-East Asia, the East Indies, the Indian subcontinent, Indo-China— all of which terms include reference to a named continent or named region. The Middle East is merely that region which is in the European mind mid-way between Europe and India or Europe and China.

The Middle East is also defined politically in European terms. The ‘importance’ of the Middle East globally has been gauged in terms of European interests. It occupied a geostrategic position vital to European imperial power. Territorially it straddled the land access to Britain’s Indian empire. Its strategic importance to Europe was considerably enhanced, of course, with the building by the Frenchman, de Lesseps, of the Suez Canal in 1869, which gave vital sea access to India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and later, even in the post-colonial period, represented Europe’s ‘lifeline’ in terms of international trade and post-colonial defence commitments. In the Suez crisis of 1956 the Canal fulfilled Ernest Renan’s prediction to de Lesseps in 1885 when he said, ‘You have marked out a great battlefield for the future’. This geostrategic signficance of the Middle East was enhanced in the post-1945 growth of the Cold War, in which, in addition to its importance in relation to the ‘Far East’, the region became a theatre of superpower rivalry and always a dangerous theatre for potential superpower military conflict.

The importance of the Middle East to European interests has also been defined in economic terms. The region was the site of the discovery of the world’s largest reserves of oil, which of course became one of the major sources of the European and American ‘second industrial revolution’—that is, the revolution in the late nineteenth century based upon organic chemistry (the chemistry of carbon compounds), as well as the source of power for the revolution in transport produced by the internal combustion engine and of the development of the automobile—the symbol of so many key facets of contemporary ‘western civilisation’, both functional (freedom, enterprise and individual autonomy) and dysfunctional (congestion, concrete landscape, air pollution and environmental damage).

Even the major problem of the Middle East in the post-Second World War era, the Arab—Israeli conflict, is the consequence of a ‘displacement’ of a European problem. The Israeli state, formed in 1948, is a Euro-American construction which was given its vital impetus by the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War fashioning a climate of opinion which made it impossible for the victorious powers to resist the Jewish claims for a homeland in Palestine. From the Arab point of view the Jewish homeland was imposed upon the region as a solution to an essentially European problem and a salving of the European conscience. Clearly there is not the space here for an extensive analysis of the Arab-Israeli dispute or of the validity of the respective territorial claims. The fact of the matter is that the establishment of the Jewish state (with or without justification) by dictat, has been the major source of instability in the region since 1948.

Thus it can be seen that the Middle East in the contemporary international system in a sense is seen in terms of European (in its widest sense) interests, conflict and aspirations. It is not seen in terms of the nature, development and aspirations of the peoples of the Middle East themselves. European relations with Middle Eastern states have not been for their own sake but have usually been developed by reference to relations between the European states themselves and even by reference to the constellation of political forces within their own domestic constituencies. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Middle East was merely the object of intra-European imperial rivalry; in the postwar world the significance of the area has been defined in terms of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Even within this context American policy towards the region has been determined almost as much by reference to the strength of the Jewish lobby in the American electorate as to its ideological and strategic competition with the Soviet Union. So the Middle East has largely been a theatre for the playing out of interests and conflicts of external powers. The states and peoples of the area have been seen as objects of the diplomacy and conflict between external states rather than participants in the international system.

Having said all this is not to make any value judgement about that state of affairs or to say that it could have been or should have been any different. International politics are complex and all interstate relationships are reducible to issues of perceived self-interest. We are not really concerned with whether this state of affairs is a good or a bad thing. What we have to do is to note the facts of these relationships and then consider how they help us better to understand contemporary events—in this case the crisis and war in the Gulf of 1990–1.

THE STRUCTURAL COMPLEXITIES OF THE MIDDLE EAST

It is ironic perhaps that the overriding declared aspiration of the peoples of the Middle East is unity—yet its overwhelming characteristics are division, tension and schism. It is only possible in this context to give an indication of this complexity by drawing attention to the intricate network of ‘cross-cutting cleavages’ operating across the region.

The Islamic diaspora

Though Islam is the overwhelmingly dominant religion in the Middle East, it is not confined to that region. Historically Islam spread wide and deep into Asia and Africa. In Asia it spread into the very heart of the continent as well as to its peripheries. Islam is the dominant religion of the central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), Malaysia and Indonesia, and of a large minority of the population in India. The whole of North and Saharan Africa is predominantly Islamic, with large minority Islamic populations in some West African and East African states. The only Islamic presence of any significance in the Americas is in the formerly British, French and Dutch Guianas (now Guyana, French Guiana and Surinam), where indented Indian labourers were imported from the Indian subcontinent during the early part of this century. However, the existence of Islamic societies outside of the Middle East means that states in the region may feel particular attachments to some of these non-Arab, non-Middle Eastern countries and in turn these countries often have particular views on, and interests in, Middle Eastern problems such as Palestine. Hence the particular significance of the stance taken on the Gulf crisis by such states as Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia. For example, the mujahedin, the Islamic anti-government guerrillas in Afghanistan, sent a detachment of fighters to join the UN Coalition forces, but the Afghan government did not.

An added dimension of the expansion of Islam is the movement of Muslim peoples that has taken place from the Muslim world to the European countries. This has occurred as a result essentially of the economic migration of peoples from the former colonial territories, especially of Britain and France, and from those Muslim countries closest to Europe. Hence the United Kingdom has been the destination of Muslims from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, and France has been the recipient of peoples from its former North African colonial territories, especially Algeria and Morocco. Germany on the other hand has been the main destination of Muslim migrants from Turkey (see Appendix 1). The point to be made here is that increasingly these Muslim minorities in European states may feel themselves to have particular interests, expressed in terms of religious or cultural values, which may be at variance with those of their countries of residence or adoption, particularly in circumstances of foreign policy or military conflict with Muslim countries. In Britain the effects on the Muslim community of the fatwa issued by the Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini, condemning to death the British writer Salman Rushdie, is a case in point—as of course was the Gulf War, where many Muslims in Europe felt conflicting loyalties. This is part of the general problem of conflict between the demands for loyalty by the state and demands for loyalty by global proselytising political or religious ideologies and is bound to be a continuing global phenomenon with increasing movement of peoples across national and cultural boundaries

Islamic schism

The major religious schism in the Islamic world is that between the Shi’a and Sunni sects. Though a complex body of doctrinal differences has developed between the two groups, the origins of the split lie in political rivalries surrounding the legitimacy of the succession to the Prophet.² The Shi’a constitute about 20 per cent of the total world Muslim population and about 40 per cent of that in the Middle East.³ The majority of these are in Iran. The rivalry of the two sects is significant given that it may give rise to conflicting loyalties since the schism transcends political boundaries. The majority of Shi’as are in Iran, yet the Shi’a holy city is Karbala in Iraq (the Sunni holy city is Mecca in Saudi Arabia). The Shi’a sect tends to be rather more extreme and revolutionary in its doctrine and thus the Iranians are suspected of subverting the majority Shi’a of southern Iraq and fomenting unrest against the Sunni dominated government in Baghdad. The government of Afaz Assad in Syria is Alawite, a Shi’a sub-sect, ruling over a predominantly Sunni population which thus partly explains Syria’s pro-Iranian stance in the Iran-Iraq war even despite the fact that it ostensibly subscribes to the same political ideology as the Iraqi leadership—that of Ba’athism.

Ethnicity

It is also important to recognise that the Middle East contains non-Arabs as well as Arabs and that these play an important role in Middle Eastern politics. Of course, the major non-Arab, non-Islamic state is Israel, and the large underlying question that has lain behind Middle Eastern politics for the whole of the post-war period is whether it is possible in the long term for a non-Arab, non-Islamic state to co-exist with Arab, Islamic states in the very centre of the region. It is difficult to set aside the issue of territory since it is at the heart of the problem; but the question does arise as to whether even from a cultural/religious viewpoint it is possible for the two cultural systems to co-exist. That will be the future test of the ‘Israeli experiment’ even when and if a modus vivendi is achieved on the question of a Palestinian territory.

The major non-Arab Islamic states in the region are Iran and Turkey. Iran has occupied an ambivalent position in Middle Eastern politics partly because of its geography, partly because of its history, both pre-modern and contemporary, and partly because of its role in Islamic politics. Iran has a language, culture and history distinct and separate from that of the Arab nations, and both sides are keen to emphasise that distinction. Geographically it occupies an area of transition between the Middle Eastern world and the Asian world. It has a key and legitimate role to play in the security structure of the Gulf region which puts it in contention with the other Gulf states, notably Iraq and Saudi Arabia. For a long period during the 1960s and 1970s under the leadership of the Shah Muhammed Reza Pahlavi, Iran acted as a western, particularly American, ‘agent of influence and interests’ in the region. Indeed at one time Iran was seen, at least by its own advocates, as the model for secularising, modernising and westernisng Islamic states.

The third element of ambivalence of Iran’s role in the Middle East is of course the fact that it is the centre for the Shi’a sect in the Islamic world and as such perhaps acts as a potential focus of loyalty for Shi’a minorities in many of the Arab countries of the region. After the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 Iran became the source and driving force of the Islamic fundamentalist revival—a development that posed a potential threat to established governments in the Middle East, especially those which have secularist aspirations for their countries. So Iran has moved from being a target (and perhaps source) of hostility for the Arabs because of its American ‘client’ status in the 1960s and 1970s to one of hostility because of its revolutionary fundamentalist ideology in the 1980s and 1990s.

Turkey is the other non-Arab Islamic state in the Middle East. Modern-day Turkey is the successor to the imperial Ottoman system which at its height included what is now Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldavia, the Black Sea territories of the former Soviet Union, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the eastern shores of the Red Sea, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. Turkey was, after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, the first of the Islamic states to secularise, under the leadership of Kemal Mustapha Attaturk, who aspired to modernise his country on the pattern of the European states. Indeed Turkey has now perhaps become the model more acceptable than Iran for those secular forces in the other Middle Eastern states who would like to bring about such a revolution in their own societies.

Turkey also occupies a position which may be regarded as ‘pivotal’ or ‘ambivalent’, depending on which perspective is used. As an Islamic state Turkey looks to the Middle East, and having borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran she clearly has important interests in the region not only politically but also economically, in particular relating to resources (water and oil). But also as a secular, ‘westernised’ state Turkey looks west to Europe, indeed with ambitions to become a member of the European Community. That claim to be European is based not only upon the secular nature of her society but also on the important role Turkey has played in the Cold War as an important member of NATO, effectively constituting the southern flank of NATO’s military strategy against the Soviet Union. However, in the post-Soviet world Turkey now finds the tension caused by the contrary pulls of ‘west’ and ‘east’ enhanced. The ambivalence of her position on the cultural transition between Europe and Asia and her pivotal geostrategic position are both reinforced by the rebirth of the Central Asian republics. The changed political geography of the region means that Turkey has to exert its own influence in the area and further its own interests in the face of competition from other interested parties such as Iran. Added to this is the potential to be drawn into the Balkan conflicts in order to protect Muslims against Serbian aggrandisement, possibly even at the expense of her relations with Western Europe. Turkey’s foreign—policy environment has become immensely more complicated in the wake of the fall of Soviet communism.

The largest group of non-Arab, non-state Islamic people in the region is the Kurds, who occupy a large area which consists of adjacent areas of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. A source of dissent under both Ottoman and British/French occupation of these areas, the Kurds have long claimed autonomous status and aspired to have their own state. Their attempt to declare their own state in 1945 prompted joint action by these states to put down the move. Autonomy has been opposed systematically by whoever has exercised authority over them; they have been repressed by all four governments because to concede their right to secede would entail losing large areas of territory and the resources contained in it— notably oil. Hence the clamour for a Kurdish autonomous zone even confined within Iraq after the Gulf War has not met with great enthusiasm from Turkey and the other states with a ‘Kurdish problem’. The most recent and brutal acts of repression have been conducted by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime in Iraq. Largely Sunni Muslims, the Kurds have not been integrated within the Sunni communities of any of these states; on the whole they tend towards secularism.

Fundamentalism versus secularism

Another major fault line running through the whole of the Middle East is that between those forces that want to retain and emphasise orthodox Islam as the major and unchallenged social and political authority in society and those that want a measure of secularism in which there is a separation of religious authority and political authority, with the former being subordinate to the latter. Many Middle Eastern states have achieved a measure of secularisation, either in fact or in effect, but both within and between states the issue of secularism continues to be a controversial one. The revival of orthodoxy received a large measure of reinforcement with the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, which has become the focus not only of Shi’a fundamentalism but of a more general return to Islamic orthodoxy and a rejection of secular and western aspirations. This has exacerbated conflicts within many Middle Eastern states between governments who very often recognise the importance of secularisation as a necessary concomitant of economic modernisation and their populations which are vulnerable to the anti-secular, anti-western rhetoric of the fundamentalists both within and outside of their societies. Egypt is the most successful example of a Middle Eastern state which has been able both to foster Arab nationalism and to establish a ‘modernising secularist Islam’.⁴

The secularism to which Islamic orthodoxy and fun...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• INTRODUCTION: THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
• CHAPTER 1: THE MIDDLE EAST IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• CHAPTER 2: CRISIS: THE PROVOCATION AND THE PROTAGONISTS
• CHAPTER 3: THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE GULF CONFLICT
• CHAPTER 4: THE DIPLOMACY OF CRISIS
• CHAPTER 5: THE GULF CONFLICT AND INTERNATIONAL LAW
• CHAPTER 6: THE LAWS OF WAR AND THE GULF CONFLICT
• CHAPTER 7: MORALITY AND THE GULF CONFLICT
• CHAPTER 8: THE ECONOMIC DIMENSION OF THE GULF CONFLICT
• CHAPTER 9: WAR, STRATEGY AND THE GULF CONFLICT
• CHAPTER 10: THE AFTERMATH
• APPENDICES
• NOTES