The Origins of the US War on Terror

Lebanon, Libya and American Intervention in the Middle East

Mattia Toaldo

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138851382
• eBook ISBN: 9781136166808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The war on terror did not start after 9/11, rather its origins must be traced back much further to the Reagan administration and the 1980s. Utilizing recently declassified archival resources, Toaldo offers an in-depth analysis of how ideas and threat perceptions were shaped both by traditional US policy in the Middle East during the Cold War and by the cooperation with the Israeli right. The book examines two case studies of American intervention in the region and of its reactions to terrorism: Lebanon between 1982 and 1984 and Libya from 1981 to 1986. The first encounter with Hizbullah and the 'pre-emptive strike' against Qadhafi are analyzed in light of the recently released sources.

Tracing foreign policy thinking developed by Reagan officials and Israeli intellectuals and leaders, the work demonstrates the significant impact this thinking had on US foreign policy after 9-11: ideas such as pre-emptive strikes, regime change and state-sponsorship were elaborated in the Reagan years and would later influence Bush's Global War on Terror. The book will be of great interest to scholars of US Foreign Policy, Middle East studies and American history.

1 Crucial relations

Two important revolutions occurred between 1979 and 1980. The first radical change started with the election of conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom which anticipated the ‘Reagan revolution’ in the United States. The victory of the former governor of California brought to power a leader concerned with what he perceived as a Soviet offensive in the Third World and in the Middle East. Moreover, Reagan’s elite and social coalition was the result of a rising tide in American politics which had started as a reaction to the domestic liberal reforms of the 1960s and had been reinvigorated by the aversion to what was perceived as American decline in foreign affairs. The second revolution had reached a climax with the beginning of the new Islamic century in 1979 and the revolution in Iran. After the overthrow of the pro-Western Shah, an Islamic republic was established with a distinctly ‘anti-imperialist’ foreign policy that would appeal to many Muslims beyond Iranian borders.

Still in 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had reinforced US perception of a Soviet offensive in the extra-European world and encouraged a strategic shift from Europe towards the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle East. Reagan’s particular version of American conservatism, the growing influence in the Arab world of Political Islam, the renewed Cold War and the growing US military involvement in the greater Middle East would all play a decisive role in the shaping of the policy of the Reagan administration in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, different and more longstanding factors have to be described in order to analyse the events that are the subject of this book. As a matter of fact, US policy in Libya and Lebanon in the 1980s was the result of a complex interaction between several ‘crucial relations’.

First of all, the Reagan administration showed a considerable degree of continuity with the main features of the relationship that the US had pursued with the Middle East since the end of the Second World War. Cold War considerations and hierarchy of priorities had always been high when Washington dealt with governments and actors from this part of the world. Moreover, the Reagan administration would also witness the coexistence of policy-makers more concerned with the global dimension of local events – and therefore, with its implications for the Cold War – and ‘regionalists’ more focused on Middle Eastern politics. The balance between these two trends, however, would be tipped in favour of the former during the Reagan years.

The second ‘crucial relation’ which needs to be investigated is that between the United States and Lebanon. The US intervention in 1982, indeed, was not the first one in the country. Not only had Eisenhower deployed American troops to Beirut in 1958, other presidents and secretaries of state had played a crucial role in the development of local events. Simultaneously, American global concern with fighting the Cold War was manipulated by local actors to achieve their goals.

Third, the ‘crucial relation’ between the US and Libya must be analysed not only to understand the nature of Qadhafi’s regime but also because this Northern African country was an example of a wider political strategy, that of ‘modernization’, which had been implemented since the 1960s in two other countries that would later turn troublesome for the US: Iran and Iraq.

Finally, that with Israel is a ‘special relationship’ which cannot be overlooked when analysing events in the Middle East. Its existence, though, should not be given for granted and its ‘specialness’ is a rather recent phenomenon which owes a lot to the Reagan years and to the events in Lebanon. Moreover, the common US–Israeli elaboration about the fight against terrorism during 1984 would be crucial to the preparation of the 1986 strike against Libya.

Since the last years of the Carter administration, the US government had re-emphasized the Cold War dimension in its understanding of the events in the Middle East. This emphasis, if one looks at history, was not completely misplaced. The Middle East had actually been an important scenario for many events of the Cold War since its early phases. The dispute over Iran and Azerbaijan in 1946 was one of the first clashes in the 50-year-long competition between the two superpowers; the Suez crisis in 1956 was one of the events that expanded this competition from Europe to the Third World; four US presidential doctrines (Truman’s, Eisenhower’s, Nixon’s and Carter’s) originated from Middle Eastern conflicts. Six times the American nuclear alert was activated due to problems in the Middle East: the Suez crisis in 1956, Lebanon and also Jordan in 1958, Turkey in 1963, Jordan in 1970 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Seeing events in the region through the prism of the Cold War, therefore, was not without justification if one worked for the American government although this was not the only available conceptual framework: regional dynamics were also important. The balance between regional and global causes has always been a crucial cleavage in the academic literature as well as within the US foreign policy elite which dealt with the Middle East. In the introduction to their The Cold War and the Middle East, Yezid Sayigh and Avi Shlaim draw a distinction between two competing approaches to the study of the Middle East: the ‘systemic’ which assigns a decisive role to external powers and especially to superpowers; the ‘regionalist’ which points out how ‘local states have much more leverage in dealing with outside powers than is generally recognized’.¹

This division actually resembles one of the main cleavages inside the US foreign policy elite which dealt with the Middle East. As Steven Spiegel explained, throughout the Cold War two conflicting views have clashed. On one side, those more concerned with regional issues (such as the pro-Israelis or the pro-Arabs), on the other one those ‘who see the Middle East as part of a larger, more global conflict’.² Former member of the Political Affairs Directorate at the NSC Raymond Tanter has defined the former as regionalists and the latter as globalists and this distinction proved very useful in the analysis of the events that are the subject of this book.³

Seen from another perspective, the issue is the balance between the role of the superpowers and that of regional actors: how much the former could influence the latter and how much the latter could manipulate the former. Avi Shlaim in his War and Peace in the Middle East argues that even though the involvement of great powers is not a unique feature of this region, the ‘pervasiveness and profound impact of this involvement’ are specific to the Middle East. In support of his view he cites Carl Brown’s International Politics and the Middle East.⁴ However, even though Shlaim assigns a major role to the superpowers, he does not see it as decisive and supports rather the opinion of Malcolm Yapp that ‘the dominant feature was the manipulation of the international powers by regional powers’.⁵ Shlaim’s own view is that ‘regional powers have enjoyed more leverage in dealing with outside powers than is generally recognized’.⁶

In fact, events described in this book tend to confirm these interpretations of the role of the Cold War in the shaping of US policy, during the Reagan administration too. The Middle East was increasingly important in the eyes of US policy-makers precisely because of its Cold War implications and this determined a more ‘globalist’ trend in the foreign policy elite of the United States. Simultaneously, the bipolar confrontation was used by local actors to manipulate the superpowers. Thus, the more an administration tended to be ‘globalist’ the more opportunities it gave to regional actors for ‘manipulation’.

All of these factors were present in a particular form under the Reagan administration. The events of 1979 had been read, as we have seen, as a further confirmation of Cold War threats in the region and this did not help, as will be clear in Lebanon, to understand developments such as the rise of the Party of God that had little to do with Communism and the Soviet Union. The balance between ‘globalists’ and ‘regionalists’ was tipped in favour of the former, particularly because of Reagan’s personal inclinations. Manipulation by local actors, especially with regards to the war in Lebanon, was more effective when based on the Cold War paradigm.

Manipulations, however, worked in two directions, especially in the period from the mid- 1950s to the early 1970s. Fawaz Gerges in his comprehensive account of the events of the Cold War in the Middle East from 1955 to 1967 wrote that ‘the intrusion of the Cold War into regional politics exacerbated regional conflicts and made their resolution more difficult’.⁷ The case of the ‘false intelligence report’ passed by the Soviets to the Egyptians in May 1967 provides a good example of ‘exacerbation’ by the superpowers. The report contained news of a supposed Israeli military build-up on the Syrian front and started a chain reaction: it provoked the Egyptian mobilization which in turn was one of the causes of the Israeli pre- emptive strike which materially started the war. According to Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez this was part of a pattern of behaviour by Moscow aimed at provoking an Arab–Israeli war.⁸ The Six Days War was just an example of the combination between the super-power chess game and regional dynamics, a constant feature of US policy during the Cold War which needs to be analysed with some details.

US policy in the Middle East during the Cold War

Several factors of continuity can be spotted when analysing American policy in the Middle East during the Cold War. To start with, the priorities of US policy were similar from one administration to the other. As Steven Spiegel wrote,

American leaders have consistently sought to prevent Soviet expansion, limit Arab radicalism, promote Arab-moderates and pro-American governments throughout the area, and preserve oil supplies. (…) no administration since 1948 has wavered from a fundamental commitment to the security and survival of the State of Israel.

Finally, unilateralism was a fundamental part of US policy in the region, based on the belief that ‘America’s allies had made errors that the United States would not repeat’.⁹ Avi Shlaim, too, outlined the same main areas of interests: containment of the Soviet Union; control over the oil sources of the Persian Gulf; limiting Arab radicalism; and safeguarding Israel.¹⁰

The fact that the Soviet threat ranked first in US hierarchy of priorities did not imply that a coherent and successful strategy was always devised. The US had initially tried, and failed, to replicate in the Middle East the regional security system that it had created in Europe. This failure was due in part to the Arab– Israeli conflict and had left the US without a coherent strategy for the region. The problem was that, while in Europe there was a coincidence between regional and global factors (the Soviet Union was both a local and a global actor here), this was less true in the Middle East where some of the crises were born before the Cold War and have outlived it. William Quandt was therefore right to conclude that while the ‘Soviet angle was never far from the minds of policymakers’, it ‘did little to help clarify choices’.¹¹

As a matter of fact, shortly after entering office the Reagan administration framed a regional security framework called Strategic Consensus which called for a common cause against the Soviets by both pro-Western Arab regimes and Israel. This strategy, however, did not deal with the issue that had always divided these allies, namely the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Nevertheless, throughout the Cold War, the absence of a coherent strategy to contain the Soviet threat in the Middle East did little to diminish the importance of this region for US global calculations. Military bases in Arab states, for instance, would enable the Western allies to conduct aerial offensives in the Russian heartland, concentrate troops for ground intervention and position intelligence forces close to the enemy’s frontier. As Peter Hahn wrote,

‘If a hostile Power secured control of this area,’ US and British officials agreed in 1947, ‘not only would we lose very important resources and facilities but it would acquire a position of such dominating strategic and economic power that it would be fatal to our security.’¹²

The proximity of this region to the Soviet Union had indeed been again evident after the events of 1979. In the global chess game, the fate of Afghanistan and Iran would determine whether the West would be on the Soviet’s doorstep or whether the USSR would have access to the vital Persian Gulf. Indeed, according to Seyom Brown, the doctrine taught by American geopolitical thinkers at West Point (where Alexander Haig, Reagan’s first secretary of state, studied) warned

Against allowing a would-be Eurasian ‘heartland’ hegemon to establish a position of dominance on the Near Eastern ‘rimland’ for this would allow the Eurasian imperialist to interdict the oceanic powers’ lines of global navigation for essential commerce and military operations. A heartland power that also controlled the rimland could rule the world.¹³

Ironically, the Middle East concerned the US because of the possibility of Soviet inroads while being, at the same time, one of the few areas of the world in which there was seldom a serious domestic communist threat. This detail was not entirely clear to the officials of the Reagan administration who dealt with Qadhafi’s Libya and considered it as part of the Soviet bloc. Qadhafi’s revolution was, yes, ‘anti-imperialist’ but ideologically speaking it had little to do with communism which he actually despised as much as he did capitalism. The fact that Qadhafi regularly bought Soviet weapons did not imply that he coordinated his foreign policy with the Kremlin.

Libya was not an isolated case. As a matter of fact, throughout the Cold War, the Soviets failed to stir up a single communist revolution in any of the Arab countries. As Fired Halliday pointed out, in the Arab countries of the Middle East the USSR could not count on strong and influential Communist parties and had to rely on radical nationalist regimes found in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya and Algeria. ‘They may, on occasion, proclaim “socialist” goals and aspirations but, apart from the PDRY [People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen], Soviet influence has been superfcial, and has been easily controlled and repudiated when the states wished.’ Often, these regimes took initiatives which, against Soviet will, stirred up a major American involvement. Their reliability was, according to Halliday, poor:

The PDRY has been too marginal, and factionally divided, to count. The others – Syria, Egypt and Libya – have been difficult clients at best, prone to adventurist initiatives on the one hand and fickle rapprochements with the West on the other.¹⁴

Moreover, where tiny Communist Parties existed such as in Syria or Iraq, the Soviets sacrificed them in order to have good relationships with the radical nationalist regime...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Revolutions
• 1. Crucial relations
• 2. Lebanon, attack and withdrawal
• 3. Defining the flight against terrorism
• 4. Libya: Pre-emptive strikes and regime change
• Conclusions: Between the Cold War and the Global War on Terror
• Notes
• References
• Index