Shifting Sands

The United States in the Middle East

Joel S. Migdal

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231536349
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Joel S. Migdal revisits the approach U.S. officials have adopted toward the Middle East since World War II, which paid scant attention to tectonic shifts in the region. After the war, the United States did not restrict its strategic model to the Middle East. Beginning with Harry S. Truman, American presidents applied a uniform strategy rooted in the country's Cold War experience in Europe to regions across the globe, designed to project America into nearly every corner of the world while limiting costs and overreach.

The approach was simple: find a local power that could play Great Britain's role in Europe after the war, sharing the burden of exercising power, and establish a security alliance along the lines of NATO. Yet regional changes following the creation of Israel, the Free Officers Coup in Egypt, the rise of Arab nationalism from 1948 to 1952, and, later, the Iranian Revolution and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979 complicated this project. Migdal shows how insufficient attention to these key transformations led to a series of missteps and misconceptions in the twentieth century. With the Arab uprisings of 2009 through 2011 prompting another major shift, Migdal sees an opportunity for the United States to deploy a new, more workable strategy, and he concludes with a plan for gaining a stable foothold in the region.

PART I

Introduction

1

The Middle East in the Eye of the Global Storm

Three Mideast Transformations

During the final months of the Second World War, the United States made its first bid to be a permanent player in the Middle East. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took a much publicized detour to the region in February 1945 on his way home from the famous Yalta Conference, only two months before his death. The immediate purpose of his trip was to meet with the king of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, on the Great Bitter Lake along the Suez Canal in Egypt. FDR’s circuitous (and risky) sailing route back to Washington, even when he was exhausted and already gravely ill, spoke to the importance his administration put on U.S. relations with not only Saudi Arabia but the entire Middle East as the war sputtered to an end.

Following on his declaration in 1943 that the defense of Saudi Arabia was vital to American security, Roosevelt took the first step, in his post-Yalta trip, in making the United States an ongoing actor in the region. He also instituted what would become a longstanding foreign-policy approach in the area, one grounded in leader-to-leader—president-to-autocrat—relations. From that moment of Roosevelt’s journey until this day, the Middle East has remained a focal point of American foreign concerns. For better or worse, every president since FDR has contributed to the abiding presence by the United States in this strategically crucial but troubled part of the world.

FIGURE 1.1 Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia at the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt, February 14, 1945.

Source: Courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

The same key regional factors that drew Roosevelt and his successor, Harry S. Truman, into the region’s web in the first place have persisted over two-thirds of a century: access to oil, the Arab-Jewish conflict, the geographic centrality of the area, its key shipping lanes, the desire to block other powers from establishing a power base in the region, the threats the area held to global peace and stability, wars, more wars, violence, and more violence. Despite these seemingly unchanging issues and what appear to be timeless regional animosities, the Middle East actually has been a rapidly changing, fast-moving region (Korany 2010, 282). Leading powers, dominant ideologies, the basis of hostilities, the fault lines of conflict, and ongoing coalitions—what I call the dynamics of the region—have all shifted dramatically. The modern Middle East that FDR found had been fashioned in the latter stages of the First World War and its aftermath, and it has been substantially revamped several times since then.

In fact, almost like clockwork, a fundamental transformation of Mideast regional dynamics has occurred every three decades since 1918, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and new indigenous states and European imperial rule came to dominate the region. By the time Truman followed up on Roosevelt’s trip and made the bid for the United States to become a permanent player in the Middle East, in 1947–1948, the region was already on the cusp of another thoroughgoing change. The creation of Israel in 1948 and the breakthrough of Arab nationalism in the 1952 Egyptian Free Officers Revolution, along with the coming of the Cold War to the area, all worked to change the regional dynamics for a generation. Later, the United States would witness two additional fundamental transformations, one beginning in 1979, with the Iranian Revolution and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and another in 2009–2011, with the outbreak of major protests in Iran and those of the Arab Spring.

No single reason explains the odd fact that the Middle East has had a major upheaval about every thirty years. Each regional transformation had its own conditions and causes. Still, the pattern is not entirely coincidental. In each case, a new set of ideas, institutions, and leaders came on the scene with energy and excitement. But after a generation those ideas, institutions, and leaders had exhausted themselves. The ideas no longer spoke to the challenges that common people faced. The institutions were marked by cronyism and tired approaches to the problems of their countries and the region. The young leaders grew old in office, and the region had precious few states with effective modes of political succession: sons of rulers replaced their fathers and tended to stick with the same shopworn ideas and cronies. Ideas, institutions, and leaders that had arrived in a burst of innovation eventually strangled any new efforts at innovation. Even as Mideast societies changed rapidly, their politics remained stagnant, unable to cope with unfolding social change.

Each of these transformations, in 1918, 1948–1952, 1979, and 2009–2011, reordered the entire political and social dynamics of the area. The last three also complicated policy making for the United States, in its attempts to use its heft to influence those dynamics. This book follows the transformations in regional dynamics and traces the twisting path that Washington took as it insinuated itself as a day-in, day-out power in the Middle East.

The 1948–1952 Transformation: The Creation of Israel, the Free Officers Coup in Egypt, and Arab Nationalism

The Middle East that Roosevelt encountered was one that had been configured in great part by Great Britain and, secondarily, France. After nearly half a millennium of ups and downs, the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled the region—sometimes actually, sometimes nominally—collapsed entirely in 1918. In its place an array of territories appeared whose borders were carved out by the British and French as well as by local wars and political machinations. By the time of Roosevelt’s trip, some of these territories housed real states exercising a credible degree of sovereign power; others contained states in name only, with imperial European powers hovering over them or with local tribal or other forces doing most of the actual governing; and still others were mandates ruled like colonies by the French and British.

When Roosevelt visited the region, though, the characteristics and dynamics of the post–World War I Middle East were already under great stress. The battering that the British and French took in World War II, the spread of anticolonial and nationalist thinking among the peoples of the region, the crystallization of conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, and the burgeoning power of the Soviet Union to the north all pointed to the coming of a major transformation of the modern Middle East only thirty years after its birth.

Two local events set off the rush of regional changes. The first was the creation of Israel in 1948 and the first Arab-Israeli War. In that war, Arab armies unsuccessfully attempted to reverse the establishment of the Jewish state. Many of the familiar issues marking the region for the rest of the century and beyond were generated in the crucible of 1948. The global centrality of Israel, the Palestinian refugee crisis, the participation of Arab states and societies in the struggle against Israel, and the seeds of a Palestinian resistance movement all came out of the struggles of that year.

But a second event only four years later had just as important a role in establishing a new set of dynamics for the region. On July 23, 1952, a small group of junior army officers in Egypt calling themselves the Free Officers overthrew the Egyptian monarchy. A confluence of forces in the Middle East led up to the coup d’état, including the continuing heavy hand of European colonialism and imperialism despite the debilitation of the European powers by World War II; the shameful defeat of the Arab armies in the 1948 war with Israel; the growth of a powerful Arab nationalist ideology, especially in the 1940s, dedicated to the creation of a single, unified Arab state; and the corruption of the then ruling monarchies and their collaboration with foreign powers, particularly Great Britain.

The Free Officers coup and ensuing revolution jolted the entire Middle East like an electric charge. By 1958, three Arab nationalist regimes, led by Egypt and including Iraq and Syria, had set the tone for the entire region. For all Mideast players, including the United States, it was the Arab nationalists who lay at the heart of the region’s dynamics. Those local dynamics took place in the context of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, which was itself taking shape just as the effects of the Free Officers coup rumbled through the Middle East. U.S. administrations from that of Truman on tried to shoehorn events in the area into the Cold War frame, but the region stubbornly had its own set of institutional configurations, lines of conflict, and axes of cooperation. The local dynamics were doubtless deeply influenced by the global U.S.-Soviet faceoff, but what actually occurred in the region stubbornly cleaved to locally generated factors.

What were these regional dynamics that marked the postcolonial, post-1952 Middle East? Four bitter struggles marked this period and shaped both the international and state-society relations in the region:

1. The ongoing battle between the new postcolonial nationalist Arab republics, with Egypt at the head, and Arab states clinging to older forms of governance, particularly monarchical rule

2. The triangular and often hostile relations among the principal new Arab nationalist republics, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq (and whomever they could line up on their sides)

3. The conflict between Israel and the Arab states, led, again, mostly by Egypt

4. Lines of division generated by the global bipolar division between the United States and the Soviet Union, especially as they acted through regional client states

If there was one country that as a single lever moved the entire area, it was Egypt. Under the leadership of the charismatic Gamal Abdul Nasser, it was the font of the ideology of Arab nationalism that deeply touched people’s hearts, from the Persian Gulf all the way to the far reaches of northwestern Africa. The new Egypt drew key allies, even to the point of political unification with them. And it stood on one side of practically every war and serious conflict in the area. Egypt was a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement globally and was at the heart of U.S.-Soviet competition in the region, sometimes drawing close to one, other times to the other. For nearly thirty years after 1952, the ideas coming out of Egypt—secular republican rule, independent postcolonial states, Arab unity, socialism, and more—shaped the character and the conflicts of the Middle East.

Both the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the 1952 Egyptian Revolution occurred as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union took shape. Truman and his successors, along with the various leaders of the Soviet Union, interpreted the swirl of Mideast ideas, alliances, and fault lines primarily through the lens of the Cold War, which dominated their thinking. And while the distribution of power in the region certainly intersected time and again with the larger global power struggle, it was far from simply derivative of the Soviet-U.S. conflict.

The 1979 Transformation: The Iranian Revolution, Political Islam, and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty

Several factors contributed to the close of this Egypt-dominated era. Not least among them were the lingering effects of the humiliating defeat suffered by the Arab states, most notably Egypt, in the June 1967 war with Israel. But, similar to the first transformation of 1948–1952, it was just a couple of immediate occurrences that touched off a period of fundamental change and reconfigured the area’s regional dynamics.

Within five days, two critical events took place in 1979. On March 26, Israel and Egypt formally signed a peace treaty, a phenomenon that was unthinkable only six years before, when the two, along with Syria, fought a ferocious war—the third Israeli-Egyptian War in six years. That treaty unofficially marked Egypt’s abandonment of Nasser’s Arab nationalist dream. It put an end to ideas of Arab political unity. The treaty also opened the door for a new, much more active diplomatic and political role for Israel in the entire Middle East, although it would take more than a decade for that to become obvious. Finally, the treaty was a godsend to Washington, which underwrote it. It enabled subsequent U.S. administrations to ally both with Israel and the most powerful Arab state simultaneously, crowning America’s rise as the single most important outside power in the region.

The second, even more momentous event occurred in Iran. After months of growing popular unrest, including massive demonstrations that carried through 1978 and into 1979, Iran’s autocratic monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, fled his country—to Egypt, ironically. The ousting of the shah led to the collapse of the regime, indeed, of the Iranian state itself. Islamic religious forces, led by the most notable figure in the Shiite sect and, perhaps, in all of Islam, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, guided the population through a national referendum that created the Islamic Republic of Iran on April 1, 1979.

Iran’s revolution was a portent of major change for the entire Middle East. It provided an alternative model to the secular republics that had arisen in and dominated the region over the previous three decades. Iran demonstrated that a revived Islam could serve as the basis for rule in modern, republican Mideast states. This model, political Islam, called for a rededication and purification of personal religious practice, a change in the construction of public space, and the establishment of a state governed by Islamic law. Ayatollah Khomeini’s theological justification of an Islamic republic was grounded in Shiite doctrine, but political Islam became a goal for Sunni Muslims as well, and its ideology displaced Arab nationalism in its ability to move Muslims deeply throughout the region.

Khomeini was not interested in revolutionary change in Iran alone; he was a true regional revisionist, just as Nasser had been a generation earlier. His aim was to export the Islamic revolution to other Muslim states, particularly in the Middle East. Slowed at first by a long, bloody war with Iraq, which lasted from 1980 until 1988, Iran emerged as the new lever for regional dynamics, replacing Egypt. Its increasing influence in the region coincided with the growing interest and power in the region by the Middle East’s two other non-Arab powers, Turkey and Israel.

The region changed from one dominated by Arab states and ideas to one in which non-Arab states played the central roles and in which violent nonstate actors also became major players. Long-subservient Shiites now surged in power with the help of Iranian successes, material aid, and meddling. And various forms of political Islamic ideology became the dominant set of ideas in the region. And all this occurred as the global Cold War, which framed so much of what had occurred in the region until the early 1980s, diminished in importance and then disappeared altogether with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the end of the Cold War, the regional dynamics changed markedly; they were now characterized by four different, sometimes overlapping fault lines:

1. The emergence of an Iran-led coalition—in part defined by anti-Americanism—that stretched westward across the entire expanse of the Middle East, from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, and its perceived threat to a heterogeneous group of other states and actors

2. Political Islam’s push against existing regimes of nearly all stripes

3. Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and, secondarily, with Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon

4. American imperial presence in the region, exercised principally in Iraq, and the deep opposition it engendered

If the fulcrum of regional dynamics for most of the period up to 1980 was Egypt and Arab nationalism, it subsequently became Iran and political Islam. And as the global context and the region changed, so did the role of and the challenges for the United States. After multiple successes in the 1970s, capped by the Egypt-Israel peace agreement, in the 1990s and 2000s Washington faced the growing animosity and power of Iran, along with the challenges posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. From the high perch it had achieved in the region in the 1970s, it descended into unending, draining wars after September 11, 2001.

The 2009–2011 Transformation: The Green Movement and the Arab Spring

The popular demonstrations that convulsed the Middle East during the last weeks of 2010 and through 2011—the Arab Spring—destabilized and upended what had seemed to be immovable dictatorships. The grassroots uprisings that shook the region actually did not begin in spring 2011 or even in the Arab world. They appeared first in a remarkable three months of street protests that shook Iran in 2009, sometimes called the Green Movement or the Persian Awakening. The demonstrations came after a national vote on June 12, 2009, that appeared to have been rigged by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was running for reelection. Ahmadinejad’s security forces, including the Basij, a feared paramilitary force, brutally repressed protestors, killing dozens and arresting thousands of others.

The uprising and its eventual suppression riveted Middle East populations. The bloody events were often captured on cell-phone videos and were viewed by millions on YouTube; the Iranian regime had banned professional journalists. The pictures of Iranian authorities brutalizing their own population deeply affected people across the region. They undermined much of the popular support Iran had garnered in the region since its revolution, when it had stood up to the United States and offered a viable alternative to American-conceived democracy. And they served as an inspiration for the Arab populations that undertook social protests against their own governments a year and a half later.

The initial uprisings in the Arab world, beginning in Tunisia in December 2010 and then, during eighteen extraordinary days, in Egypt in January–February 2010, ousted both presidents, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak. Those dictators and other autocrats in the region had been in power for remarkably long periods—Ben Ali for twenty-three years, Mubarak for thirty, and some others going on half a century! They had survived for a variety of reasons, including their adroit manipulation of security forces, their ability to nip dissent in the bud, and their unrelenting suffocation of institutional innovation, which might create nodes of autonomous power, anywhere and everywhere in their societies.

Many lasted so long, too, because of their enduring, deep relations with the United States. Five American presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, had cultivated relations with the likes of Tunisia’s Ben Ali. But their most intense and intimate ties were with two Egyptian presidents, first, Anwar Sadat in the 1970s, until his ass...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. The Cold War and Its Aftermath
• Part III. A Transformed Region: The Rise and Fall of the Arab Middle East
• Part IV. The United States and the New Middle East in the Twenty-First Century
• Part V. Conclusion: Looking Back and Looking Forward
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index