[Peace-discuss] The Long War succeeds the Cold War

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...Already during World War II, the crucial strategic importance of the Middle 
East had been amply demonstrated in terms of its central geographic location on 
the southern flank of Europe and astride vital sea and air lanes, and the vast 
energy reserves it was known to contain ... since the Cold War ended, the 
significance of the Middle East to the United States has only seemed to increase 
with every passing year..."


	RASHID KHALIDI
	RETHINKING THE COLD WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST

"The period that is always most difficult of access is the one that is just 
within living memory. Not yet written down, its primary sources often still 
inaccessible, it is at the disposal of fallible memory and prejudice. No 
generation is ever fair to its parents." -ROSEMARY HILL

For nearly half a century, the Cold War rivalry between the United States and 
the Soviet Union created a glacial divide that loomed over international 
relations. Its icy tentacles extended across the globe, with often devastating 
effects. The Cold War provoked a high degree of polarization, as states and 
political parties aligned themselves with the two superpowers in virtually every 
region of the world, exacerbating and aggravating pre-existing local conflicts 
or producing new ones, and envenoming the political atmosphere in numerous 
countries. Once it became a full-blown ideological and great-power confrontation 
in the wake of World War II, the East-West division dominated deliberations at 
the newly established United Nations and became the main focal point of 
international affairs. Its chill was felt in the domestic politics not only of 
the United States and the Soviet Union but of countries the world over.

The Cold War did not begin immediately after World War II, although precisely 
when it did start is a subject of some dispute. Former British prime minister 
Winston Churchill's famous observation, in a speech at Westminster College in 
Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, that "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste 
in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent," is often 
seen as a decisive indication that the Cold War was already under way by that 
point, less than a year after the war's end. Historians, however, cite various 
key events from 1945 until 1947 as marking the end of the World War II alliance 
between the Western powers and the Soviet Union and the beginning of a cold war 
between them. It is clear, for example, that Churchill and some of President 
Harry S. Truman's advisors were much more hostile toward the Soviets than were 
others, or than President Franklin D. Roosevelt apparently had been. It is also 
clear that over time, political circumstances changed, as did the views of 
decision makers on the Anglo-American side. Although Soviet decision-making was 
more opaque, it appears as if similar differences regarding American intentions 
may have existed in the minds of Joseph Stalin and the small circle of advisors 
around him. Once the Cold War had started in earnest, however, it rapidly came 
to constitute the central axis of world affairs, and any such differences of 
opinion as may have existed on either side lost most of their importance.

We now know that this rivalry had been presaged by deep wartime suspicions and 
devious maneuvering among the Allies at the height of the colossal joint effort 
against Nazi Germany during World War II. In the case of those wary old 
adversaries Churchill and Stalin, antagonism to each other's system was of very 
long standing. Beyond the crucial questions of the postwar future of Germany, 
Central Europe, and the Balkans, the concerns of the Soviets and the Western 
powers extended into the Middle East and the adjacent regions south of the USSR, 
whence Britain had launched its repeated interventions to crush the Bolshevik 
regime during the four-year Russian Civil War after the 1917 revolution. It is 
unlikely that either Churchill or Stalin, both of whom were central figures in 
this earliest phase of the East-West rivalry, ever fully forgot the impact of 
that deadly struggle. In some measure, these intense early experiences can be 
said to have shaped each one's view of the other side. Indeed, Churchill's 
entire career shows that he was always profoundly anticommunist, while Stalin's 
long-standing obsession with Britain as an imperialist power, notably in the 
Middle East, at times seemed to override his strong concerns about the growing 
role there of the United States in the early phases of the Cold War. Meanwhile, 
to complete this triangular picture, American policymakers, less experienced in 
international affairs than their British counterparts, often tended to be 
influenced by the latter's deep concerns about the spread of communism in the 
Middle East (which they often conflated with nationalism and anticolonialism). 
At the same time, the United States was for many years frequently at odds with 
Britain in different parts of the region, until their simmering differences in 
approach exploded during the 1956 Suez War, when the United States openly 
opposed Britain and its French and Israeli allies. This sub rosa rivalry between 
the two Western powers is an underappreciated aspect of the early years of the 
post-World War II era.

The Cold War and the fears it engendered haunted several generations. It had 
this impact not only in the United States and the Soviet Union, and in Europe, 
which at the end of World War II lay battered by combat and virtually prostrate 
between the victorious armies of the two nascent superpowers. It also had a 
powerful effect in East and Southeast Asia, notably in Korea and Vietnam, where 
less than five years after the end of World War II the Cold War soon developed 
into ferocious hot wars. These were the only such wars directly involving the 
United States and its allies on the one hand and communist satellites and allies 
of the Soviet Union on the other. There were also less overt proxy 
confrontations between the superpowers in Central America and the Caribbean, 
Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, all of which were important arenas of 
superpower rivalry for decades. The first such non-European confrontations 
between the USSR and the United States and its allies (even before the wars in 
East and Southeast Asia) transpired in the Middle East. They were to have a 
special importance, as we shall see.

The Cold War has now been over for nearly two decades. For students of college 
age today, it is beyond their experience and their memory. If they know anything 
at all about it, this period is at best a matter of dim, distant history to 
them. And yet if time seems to fly for those of us who grew up during the Cold 
War and do remember it, changes in the way people see history progress very 
slowly. This may be especially true of recent history, about which many of those 
who have lived through the events in question may have deeply felt views, views 
that they are reluctant to modify. Thus, a serious rethinking of this crucial 
and well-defined period of modern world history, free of the Cold War 
shibboleths and the intense partisanship that distorted so much earlier 
scholarship, only began slowly. A reluctance to readdress the period has 
especially afflicted the "winning side," where certain aspects of the orthodox, 
long-accepted interpretation of the conflict have yet to be challenged. Indeed, 
the continuing identification of many older Cold War historians with the 
received truths on "their side" of the now vanished iron curtain has been a 
hindrance to the writing of balanced, objective history of the Cold War.

Although much good historical work has been done in recent years, particularly 
on the origins of the Cold War, there is still significant room for further 
reconsideration of the broad story of this rivalry's origins, development, and 
course, and of its effects, especially as considerable new archival 
documentation on the Soviet side and from other sources has become available 
since the collapse of the Soviet Union. A new look at the Cold War is 
particularly timely now that even after the demise of communism and the rise of 
capitalism in Russia, and the end of the ideological struggle that supposedly 
undergirded the Cold War, Western relations with Russia in East and central 
Europe, in the Caucasus, and in the Middle East are once again characterized by 
considerable friction. This is a perfect example of how one's vantage point in 
time makes possible a completely different view of history. After the West's 
warm embrace of the first two post-Soviet rulers of Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev 
and Boris Yeltsin, and after the triumphalist proclamations of the "End of 
History," who could have foreseen the emergence of grave differences only a 
decade later between the United States and Europe, on the one hand, and Russia, 
on the other, over Iran, energy supplies, the expansion of NATO to countries 
like Georgia and Ukraine, and missile defenses? All of this should perhaps make 
us rethink at least some of the conventional views of the causes and motivations 
of the Cold War. Perhaps ideology was not quite as important as some on both 
sides made it out to be, and perhaps traditional great-power conflicts of 
interest over strategic issues and resources, the likes of which continually 
plagued Russian-Western relations before the Bolshevik Revolution, deserve more 
attention.

Beyond the need for further rethinking of Cold War history in general, 
relatively little new research has been done about the central role of this 
great international rivalry in a number of regional conflicts. This follows on a 
period, from the late 1950s through the early 1990s, when much scholarship in a 
variety of fields, much of it policy driven and some of it of uneven quality, 
was devoted to exploring the impact of the Cold War on these regions. The 
inquiry into regional impacts of the superpower rivalry was a branch of an 
entire field, Sovietology, which grew up in the shadow of the Cold War and has 
now virtually disappeared. There has been a similar drop in recent decades in 
the number of such works in various Cold War-related fields. Ironically, this 
has come just as some distance in time has developed between us and the most 
dramatic events of the Cold War, and when new archival and other primary sources 
have been made available, at least in theory making the writing of the history 
of this period easier. The relative paucity of new scholarly work on this vital 
era is as true of the Middle East as it is of most of the regions that were 
deeply marked by the impact of the Cold War rivalry from the 1940s until the 1990s.

These regions, whether Africa, Latin America, South and East Asia, or the Middle 
East, have been marked further since then by what might be called the ghosts of 
the Cold War. The most striking example is the blowback of United States' 
involvement in the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation of that country, but 
there are many others. Understanding these powerful and lingering aftereffects 
of the Cold War requires going back in time and reassessing that conflict, 
especially its less-studied final phases. I will seek to explore further on in 
this book the lingering impact of these Cold War ghosts in the Middle East long 
after the Soviet Union itself had disappeared and the Cold War was forgotten.

It is important to revisit this period, in the Middle East in particular, for 
several other reasons. Immediately subsequent to the rapid disappearance of its 
Soviet rival, in 1990-91, the United States engaged in an extraordinarily 
confident assertion of its suddenly unrivaled power in the Middle East via its 
leadership of a grand coalition against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the Gulf 
War of 1991, and in convening the 1991 Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid, 
which led to the 1993 Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn. Both were 
unprecedented initiatives in various ways. Although nominally a collective 
effort, the 1991 Gulf War was the first American land war in Asia since Vietnam. 
Meanwhile, Madrid witnessed the first multilateral peace conference in history 
bringing together all the parties to the conflict, Arab and Israeli, and all 
relevant international actors. Moreover, it constituted the first and only 
serious and sustained American (or international) effort in over half a century 
at a comprehensive resolution of the Palestine conflict.

In light of these apparently radical departures in American policy immediately 
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would be useful to revise our 
understanding of the Cold War as simply a prolegomenon to the current era of 
unfettered American dominance over the region. Such a revision would help us 
answer a number of questions: Was the United States previously as constrained by 
the presence of its Soviet rival as sometimes seemed to be the case, and as 
these two novel departures immediately after the demise of the USSR seemed to 
indicate? Alternatively, was America in fact more dominant in the Middle East 
throughout the Cold War era than may have appeared at the time?

These are important questions, since for the United States the Cold War was at 
least the ostensible reason for an enormously expanded American post-World War 
II global presence. Similarly, the perceived Soviet threat was the pretext for 
the establishment of U.S. military bases spanning the globe, and for the 
development of a vastly enhanced American international intelligence, economic, 
and diplomatic profile compared with the relatively modest world role of the 
United States before December 7, 1941. Before that date, the United States was a 
Western Hemisphere and Pacific power with a major fleet and great economic 
might, but with limited military and air capacities and narrowly defined 
international interests. It thereafter became the dominant world power, the sole 
possessor of atomic weapons, with fleets and air forces that dwarfed those of 
all other powers, and an unrivaled global economic, diplomatic, and intelligence 
presence. The post-World War II expansion of American power around the globe 
contrasted strikingly with the isolationist aftermath of World War I and the 
rapid decline of American involvement in European and Middle Eastern issues in 
1919-20. The post-1945 expansion was in large measure predicated, at least as it 
was presented to the American public, on the newfound "need" to confront the 
Soviet Union (although it is striking to note that certain important aspects of 
this expansion, especially in the military sphere, well antedated the Cold War). 
What drove this expanded vision of the role of the United States in the world in 
the waning years of Roosevelt's presidency was a sense that the global presence 
of American power was necessary to prevent yet another world war, and that 
America's previous refusal to play such a global role was a major reason for the 
disasters of 1914 and 1939. Such a view might not have convinced an American 
public skeptical of shouldering expansive international burdens, whence the 
utility of the easy-to-understand "Soviet menace" to Truman and those around him 
in justifying the efforts involved.

In many regions, this expansion of America's global reach meant that the wartime 
arrival of U.S. troops — in the case of the Middle East this occurred in North 
Africa and Iran in 1942 — was not followed after the end of the war by their 
disappearance back over the horizon, as had happened in Europe immediately after 
World War I. These initial wartime deployments of American forces, and the later 
establishment and postwar maintenance of major U.S. air bases at Dhahran in 
Saudi Arabia, at Wheelus Field near Tripoli in Libya, in Morocco, and in Turkey 
marked the beginning of a continuous U.S. military presence in different locales 
in this region, a presence that is ongoing to this day. It was the beginning as 
well of what has become a well-established role for the United States as a major 
Middle Eastern power. Indeed, I would argue strongly that these early wartime 
and postwar moves constituted the beginning of an American role as the major 
Middle Eastern power, a reality that was masked for a time by the power and 
proximity to the region of the USSR.

Although overshadowed at times by other Cold War arenas, the Middle East was not 
just a secondary region where the United States and the USSR contended. Already 
during World War II, the crucial strategic importance of the Middle East had 
been amply demonstrated in terms of its central geographic location on the 
southern flank of Europe and astride vital sea and air lanes, and the vast 
energy reserves it was known to contain. The region's importance in terms of 
strategy and oil was further established during the Cold War, perhaps to a 
greater extent than some observers realize, as later chapters of this book will 
show. And since the Cold War ended, the significance of the Middle East to the 
United States has only seemed to increase with every passing year. Evidence for 
this assertion can be found in a series of major recent American initiatives in 
the region, including those already mentioned such as the defeat of Iraq in the 
1991 Gulf War and the 1991-93 Madrid-Oslo Middle East peace process. Further 
evidence is the Iraq sanctions regime from 1991 until 2003, which involved 
constant bombing and overflights of Iraq, followed by the invasion of that 
country in 2003 and its subsequent occupation, which in 2009 will enter its 
seventh year, the largest, longest-lasting, and most costly such American 
overseas military effort since Vietnam.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from SOWING CRISIS by RASHID KHALIDI Copyright © 2009