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The United States and the Middle East
The first time a Western power got soaked in the politics of oil in the Middle East was toward the end of 1914, when
British soldiers landed at Basra, in southern Iraq, to protect oil supplies from neighboring Persia. At the time the United
States had little interest in Middle East oil or in imperial designs on the region. Its overseas ambitions were focused
south toward Latin America and the Caribbean (remember the Maine?), and west toward east Asia and the Pacific.
The Balfour Declaration, Great Britain and France redesign boundaries in the Middle East, not taking into account
history, religion, culture, customs, alliances, opposition, etc. The goal was to make it easier to control and spread
influence. When Britain offered to share the spoils of the defunct Ottoman Empire after World War I in the Middle East,
President Woodrow Wilson declined. It was only a temporary reprieve from creeping involvement that began during the
Truman Administration. It’s not been a happy history. But it’s necessary to understand that past, even if only in its
general outlines, to better make sense of the present -- especially regarding current Arab attitudes toward the West.
Truman Administration, 1945-1952.
American troops were stationed in Iran during World War II to help transfer military supplies to the Soviet Union and
protect Iranian oil. British and Soviet troops were also on Iranian soil. After the war, Stalin withdrew his troops only
when Harry Truman protested their continued presence through the United Nations, and possibly threatened to use
force to boot them out.
American duplicity in the Middle East was born: While opposing Soviet influence in Iran, Truman solidified America’s
relationship with Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, in power since 1941, and brought Turkey into the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), making it clear to the Soviet Union that the Middle East would be a cold war hot zone.
Truman accepted the 1947 United Nations partition plan of Palestine, granting 57 percent of the land to Israel and 43
percent to Palestine, and personally lobbied for its success. The plan lost support from U.N. member nations, especially
as hostilities between Jews and Palestinians multiplied in 1948, and Arabs lost more land or fled. Truman recognized the
State of Israel 11 minutes after its creation, on May 14, 1948.
Eisenhower Administration, 1953-1960
Three major events marked Dwight Eisenhower’s Middle East policy. In 1953, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to depose
Mohammed Mossadegh, the popular, elected leader of the Iranian parliament and an ardent nationalist who opposed
British and American influence in Iran. The coup severely tarnished America’s reputation among Iranians, who lost trust
in American claims of protecting democracy.
In 1956, when Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, a furious Eisenhower
not only refused to join the hostilities; he ended the war.
Two years later, as nationalist forces roiled the Middle East and threatened to topple Lebanon’s Christian-led
government, Eisenhower ordered the first landing of U.S. troops in Beirut to protect the regime. The deployment, lasting
just three months, ended a brief civil war in Lebanon.
Kennedy Administrations, 1961-1963
John Kennedy was supposedly uninvolved in the Middle East. But as Warren Bass argued in “Support Any Friend:
Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance,” John Kennedy tried to develop a special relationship
with Israel while diffusing the effects of his predecessors’ cold war policies regarding Arab regimes.
Kennedy increased economic aid toward the region and worked to reduce its polarization between Soviet and American
spheres. While the friendship with Israel was solidified during his tenure, Kennedy’s abbreviated administration, while
briefly inspiring the Arab public, largely failed to mollify Arab leaders.
The Johnson Administration, 1963-1968
Lyndon Johnson was absorbed by his Great Society programs at home and the Vietnam War abroad. The Middle East
burst back onto the American foreign-policy radar with the Six Day War of 1967, when Israel, after rising tension and
threats from all sides, preempted what it characterized as an impending attack from Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights. Israel threatened
to go further. The Soviet Union threatened armed attack if it did. Johnson put the U.S. Navy’s Mediterranean Sixth Fleet
on alert, but also compelled Israel to agree to a cease-fire on June 10, 1967.
Nixon-Ford Administrations, 1969-1976
Humiliated by the Six Day War, Egypt, Syria and Jordan tried to regain lost territory when they attacked Israel during the
Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur in 1973. Egypt regained some ground but its Third Army was then surrounded by an
Israeli army led by Ariel Sharon (who would later become prime minister).
The Soviets proposed a cease-fire, failing which they threatened to act “unilaterally.” For the second time in six years,
the United States faced its second major and potentially nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union over the Middle
East.
After what journalist Elizabeth Drew described as “Strangelove Day,” when the Nixon administration put American
forces on the highest alert, the administration persuaded Israel to accept a cease-fire. Americans felt the effects of that
war through the 1973 Arab oil embargo, rocketing oil prices upward and contributing to a recession a year later.
In 1974 and 1975 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated so-called disengagement agreements, first between
Israel and Syria, then between Israel and Egypt, formally ending the hostilities begun in 1973 and returning some land
Israel had seized from the two countries. Those were not peace agreements, however, and they left the Palestinian
situation untouched. Meanwhile, a military strongman called Saddam Hussein was rising through the ranks in Iraq.
Carter Administration, 1977-1981
Jimmy Carter’s presidency was marked by American Mid-East policy’s greatest victory and greatest loss since World War
II. On the victorious side, Carter’s mediation led to the 1978 Camp David Accord and the 1979 peace treaty between
Egypt and Israel, which included a huge increase in U.S. aid to Israel and Egypt. The treaty led Israel to return the Sinai
Peninsula to Egypt. The accord took place, remarkably, months after Israel invaded Lebanon for the first time, ostensibly
to repel chronic attacks from the Palestine Liberation Organization in south Lebanon.
On the losing side, the Iranian Revolution culminated in 1978 with demonstrations against the regime of Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and culminating with the establishment of an Islamic Republic, with Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, on April 1, 1979.
On Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian students backed by the new regime took 63 Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran hostage.
They’d hold on to 52 of them for 444 days, releasing them the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president. The
hostage crisis, which included one failed military rescue attempt that cost the lives of eight American servicemen, undid
the Carter presidency and set back American policy in the region for years: The rise of Shiite power in the Middle East
had begun.
To top things off for Carter, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, eliciting little response from the
president other than an American boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
Reagan Administration, 1981-1989
Whatever progress the Carter administration achieved on the Israeli-Palestinian front stalled over the next decade. As
the Lebanese civil war raged, Israel invaded Lebanon for the second time, in June 1982, advancing as far as Beirut, the
Lebanese capital city, before Reagan, who had condoned the invasion, intervene to demand a cease-fire.
American, Italian and French troops landed in Beirut that summer to mediate the exit of 6,000 PLO militants. The troops
then withdrew, only to precipitately return following the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemeyel and
the retaliatory massacre, by Israeli-backed Christian militias, of up to 3,000 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra
and Shatila, south of Beirut.
In April 1983, a truck bomb demolished the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. On Oct. 23, 1983, simultaneous
bombings killed 241 American soldiers and 57 French paratroopers in their Beirut barracks. American forces withdrew
shortly after. The Reagan administration the faced several crises as the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite organization that
became known as Hezbollah took several Americans hostage in Lebanon.
The 1986 Iran-Contra affair revealed that the Reagan Administration had secretly negotiated arms-for-hostages deals
with Iran, discrediting Reagan’s claim that he would not negotiate with terrorists. It would be December 1991 before the
last hostage, former Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson, would be released.
Throughout the 1980s, the Reagan Administration supported Israel’s expansion of Jewish settlements in occupied
territories. The administration also supported Saddam Hussein in the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which ended in 1988. The
administration provided logistical and intelligence support, believing, wrongly, that Saddam could destabilize the Iranian
regime and defeat the Islamic Revolution.
George H.W. Bush Administration, 1989-1993.
After benefiting from a decade of support from the United States and receiving conflicting signals immediately before
the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein invaded the small country to his southeast on Aug. 2, 1990. President Bush
launched Operation Desert Shield, immediately deploying U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to defend against a possible
invasion by Iraq.
Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm when Bush shifted strategy – from defending Saudi Arabia to repelling
Iraq from Kuwait, ostensibly because Hussein might, Bush claimed, be developing nuclear weapons. A coalition of 30
nations joined American forces in a military operation that numbered more than half a million troops. An additional 18
countries supplied economic and humanitarian aid.
After a 38-day air campaign and a 100-hour ground war, Kuwait was liberated. Bush stopped the assault short of an
invasion of Iraq, fearing what Dick Cheney, his defense secretary, would call a “quagmire.” Bush established instead “nofly zones” in the south and north of the country, but those didn’t keep Hussein from massacring Shiites following an
attempted revolt in the south -- which Bush had encouraged -- and Kurds in the north.
In Israel and the Palestinian territories, Bush was largely ineffective and uninvolved as the first Palestinian intifada, or
uprising, roiled on for four years. In the last year of his presidency, Bush launched a military operation in Somalia in
conjunction with a humanitarian operation by the United Nations.
Operation Restore Hope, involving 25,000 U.S. troops, was designed to help stem the spread of famine caused by the
Somali civil war. The operation had limited success. A 1993 attempt to catch Mohamed Farah Aidid, leader of a brutal
Somali militia, ended in disaster, with 18 American soldiers and up to 1,500 Somali militias and civilians killed. Aidid
wasn’t caught. Among the architects of the attacks on Americans in Somalia: a Saudi exile then living in the Sudan,
largely unknown in the United States: Osama bin Laden.
Clinton Administration, 1993-2001.
Besides mediating the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, Bill Clinton’s involvement in the Middle East was
bracketed by the short-lived success of the Oslo Accords in August 1993 and the collapse of the Camp David summit in
December 2000.
The accords ended the first intifada and established Palestinians’ right to self-determination in Gaza and the West Bank
and established the Palestinian Authority. The accords also called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
But Oslo left unsettled such fundamental questions as the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, the fate of
East Jerusalem, which is claimed by Palestinians, and continuing expansion of Israeli settlements in the territories.
Those issues, still unresolved by 2000, led Clinton to convene a summit with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli
leader Ehud Barak at Camp David in December 2000, the waning days of his presidency. The summit failed. The second
intifada exploded.
Throughout the Clinton administration, terrorist attacks orchestrated by the increasingly public bin Laden punctured the
1990s’ post-cold war air of quietude, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the bombing of the USS Cole, a
Navy destroyer, in Yemen in 2000.
George W. Bush Administration, 2001-.
After deriding operations involving the U.S. military in what he called “nation-building,” President Bush turned, after the
terrorist attacks of 9/11, into the most ambitious nation-builder since the days of Secretary of State George Marshall
and the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. Bush’s efforts, focused on the Middle East, have
not been as successful.
Bush had the world’s backing when he led an attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 to topple the Taliban regime there,
which had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda. Bush’s expansion of the “war on terror” to Iraq in March 2003, however, had
less backing. Bush saw the toppling of Saddam Hussein as the first step in a domino-like birth of democracy in the
Middle East.
But while Bush talked democracy regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, he continued to support repressive, undemocratic
regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and North Africa. The credibility of his democracy campaign was short-lived. By
2006, with Iraq plunging into civil war, Hamas winning elections in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah winning immense
popularity following its summer war with Israel, Bush’s democracy campaign was dead.