CHAPTER 14
After nearly a half-century of superpower rivalry, the Cold War came to an abrupt end in 1989. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of greater openness (glasnost) and internal reform (perestroika) wrought permanent change to the political culture of the Soviet Union during the mid-1980s. By the time the Berlin Wall was formally breached in November 1989, the Iron Curtain separating Eastern and Western Europe already lay in tatters. Starting with the defeat of the Communist Party in the Polish elections in June 1989, the governments of the Soviet bloc fell one by one: in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria. The once all-powerful dictator of East Germany, Erich Honecker, tendered his resignation that autumn, and Nicolae Ceausescu, who had ruled Romania with an iron fist for over twenty-two years, was summarily executed by revolutionaries on Christmas Day 1989.
The international system was transformed as the balance-of-power politics of the two superpowers gave way to a unipolar age of American dominance. Gorbachev and U.S. president George H. W. Bush captured the sense of hope engendered by the end of the Soviet-American antagonism, promising a “new world order.” For the Arab world, one of the central theatres of the Cold War, the new era of American ascendancy held great uncertainties. Once again, Arab leaders were forced to come to terms with new rules in the international arena.
The conservative Arab monarchies were disconcerted by the specter of popular movements overturning long-standing governments, but they did not mourn the collapse of communism: Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states had placed their trust in the West, and, fortunately for them, the West had emerged victorious from the Cold War.
Not so the left-leaning Arab republics like Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Algeria, which had more in common with the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe: single-party states, they were all headed by long-term dictators with large armies and centrally planned economies. The video images of Ceausescu’s corpse broadcast around the world provoked deep disquiet in some Arab capitals. If it could happen in Romania, what was to prevent similar events in Baghdad or Damascus?
Clearly, the Soviet Union could no longer be counted on to stand up for its Arab allies. For the past four decades, Arab republics had turned to the Soviet Union for military hardware, development assistance, and diplomatic support to counterbalance the forces of Western domination. Those days were finished. In autumn 1989 Syria’s president, Hafiz al-Asad, pressed Gorbachev for more advanced weapons to help Syria achieve strategic parity with Israel. The Soviet president rebuffed him, saying: “Your problems are not going to be solved through any such strategic points—and anyway, we’re no longer in that game.” Al-Asad returned to Damascus devastated.
The factions of the PLO were also worried. George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, criticized Gorbachev’s policies on a visit to Moscow in October 1989. “If you go on like this you are going to hurt us all,” he warned. Veteran analyst Mohamed Heikal witnessed the confusion among the Arab leadership. “Everyone sensed that a shift from one phase of international relations to another was taking place, but they still clung to the old familiar rules. On all sides there was a failure to anticipate the new ones correctly.”1
The old Arab conflicts of the Cold War-era burst to the fore in the new unipolar age of American dominance. Iraq, weakened economically by its eight-year war with Iran (1980–1988), still had sufficient military resources to assert its bid for regional ascendance. The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait proved the first crisis of the post–Cold War world. The invasion of one Arab state by another polarized the entire Arab world, with some countries opposing foreign intervention and others participating in an American-led coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi rule. The Kuwait crisis also divided citizens from their governments, as Iraqi president Saddam Hussein emerged as a popular hero across the Arab world for standing up to America and for his cynical promises to liberate Palestine from Israeli rule.
It was not enough to drive Iraq from Kuwait to restore order in the Arab region. Saddam Hussein had linked Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait to Syria’s position in Lebanon and Israel’s longstanding occupation of Palestinian territory. In the aftermath of the war to liberate Kuwait, the Arab world was forced to address the Lebanese Civil War, then in its fifteenth year. The United States for its part convened in Madrid the first meeting of Arabs and Israelis to address their differences since the 1973 Geneva Peace Conference. It was unclear to contemporary observers if Iraq’s invasion and subsequent expulsion from Kuwait was the harbinger of a new age of conflict resolution, or just an escalation in a long history of regional disputes.
One of the first Arab leaders to recognize the realities of the post–Cold War world was the president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. As early as March 1990, Hussein had warned his fellow Arab leaders that “for the next five years there would be only one true superpower”—the United States.2
In many ways, Iraq was better positioned than the other Arab republics to make the transition from the old rivalries of the Cold War to the new realities of American predominance. Although Iraq had enjoyed particularly close relations with the Soviet Union, confirmed in their 1972 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, the eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) had led to a thaw in U.S.-Iraqi relations. American hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran drove the Reagan administration to support Iraq in order to prevent an outright Iranian victory. Even after the war ended in stalemate, Washington had continued its rapprochement with Baghdad.
The new American president, George H. W. Bush, had every intention of building better relations with Iraq when he came to office in January 1989. In October of that year the Bush administration issued a national security directive that set out U.S. policies toward the Persian Gulf that put a high premium on closer ties to Iraq. “Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East,” it read. “The United States should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior and to increase our influence with Iraq.” The directive also encouraged an opening of the Iraqi market to American companies. “We should pursue, and seek to facilitate, opportunities for U.S. firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy.” This extended to “non-lethal forms of military assistance” to enhance American influence over the Iraqi defense establishment.3 Saddam Hussein could be forgiven for believing he had guided his country well through the turmoil of the end of the Cold War.
Yet Saddam Hussein still faced daunting challenges ruling his country—challenges stemming from disastrous decisions taken since he came to power in 1978. The Iraqi president’s unprovoked and ultimately fruitless war with Iran had taken a terrible toll on the country—and his own support base among the Iraqi populace. Half a million Iraqi men died in the course of the eight-year conflict, provoking domestic opposition to Hussein’s rule. As the war dragged on, the opposition to Saddam Hussein grew violent. In 1982 Hussein survived an assassination attempt in the village of Dujail to the north of Baghdad. The Iraqi president responded with overwhelming violence, ordering his security forces to kill nearly 150 villagers in retaliation.
In northern Iraq, Kurdish factions took advantage of the war with Iran to make a bid for autonomy. The Iraqi government responded with an extermination campaign dubbed al-Anfal, or “the spoils.” Between 1986 and 1989, thousands of Iraqi Kurds were forcibly resettled, 2,000 villages were destroyed, and an estimated 100,000 men, women, and children were killed in Anfal operations. In one of the most notorious incidents, the Iraqi government used nerve gas against the village of Halabja in March 1988, killing 5,000 Kurdish civilians.4
Along with the Kurds, the Sunni and Shiite communities of Iraq also faced intense repression—arbitrary arrest, widespread torture, and summary executions—to stifle dissent. Only confirmed members of the ruling Ba’th Party were to enjoy confidence and advancement within Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Once celebrated for its secular values, high literacy rates, and gender equality, by 1989 Iraq had degenerated into a republic of fear.5
Besides a restive populace, the most immediate challenge facing Saddam Hussein at the end of the Iran-Iraq War was the reconstruction of his country’s shattered economy. Iraq’s wealth derived from its massive petroleum resources. For eight years, the country’s vital lifeline of oil had been cut by attacks on pipelines and port facilities, and a ruthless tanker war that took the Iran-Iraq conflict to the Gulf’s international shipping lanes. Deprived of oil revenues, Iraq had been forced to borrow billions of dollars from its Arab Gulf neighbors to sustain its war effort. By the war’s end in 1988, Iraq owed some $40 billion to the other Gulf states, and debt repayment consumed over 50 percent of Iraq’s oil income in 1990.6
Compounding Iraq’s difficulties was the steady decline in the price of oil. To pay off his country’s debts Saddam Hussein needed oil prices to remain in the range of $25 a barrel (at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, prices had reached as high as $35 a barrel). He watched in despair as the international price slumped to $14 by July 1990. The Gulf, at peace once again, was now able to export all the oil the world needed. To make matters worse, some Gulf states were producing well beyond their OPEC quotas. Kuwait was one of the worst offenders. Kuwait had its own reasons for breaking ranks with OPEC over production quotas. Earlier in the 1980s, the Kuwaiti government had diversified its economy by investing heavily in Western refineries and opening thousands of gasoline stations across Europe under the new brand name “Q-8,” a homonym for “Kuwait.” Kuwait’s crude oil exports increasingly went to its own facilities in the West. The more crude oil the Kuwaitis sold to their Western refineries, the higher their profits in Europe.7These refining and marketing outlets generated higher profit margins than the export of crude and insulated Kuwait from variations in the price of crude oil. Kuwait was more interested in generating maximum output than seeking the highest price per barrel by hewing to OPEC’s guidelines.
Iraq, in contrast, had no such external outlets, and its revenues were inextricably linked to the price of crude oil. Every drop of one dollar in the price of a barrel of oil represented a net loss of $1 billion to Iraq’s annual revenues. In OPEC meetings, Iraq and Kuwait found themselves on the opposite side of the table, with Iraq pressing to reduce output and drive up the price of oil while Kuwait called for greater output. The Kuwaitis paid little attention to Iraqi concerns. In June 1989 Kuwait simply refused to be bound by the quota it was assigned by the other OPEC members. Having supported Iraq’s war effort against Iran with loans totaling $14 billion, the Kuwaitis felt justified in putting their own economic interests first now that the war was over.
Saddam Hussein began to pin the blame for Iraq’s economic woes on Kuwait, and he responded by applying pressure and threats to the small Gulf shaykhdom. He called on Kuwait not only to forgive Iraq’s $14 billion debt but to make a further loan of $10 billion for Iraq’s reconstruction. He accused Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil from their shared Rumaila oil field. He also claimed that Kuwait had seized Iraqi territory during the Iran-Iraq War, and he demanded the “return” of the strategic islands of Warba and Bubiyan at the head of the Gulf both for military facilities and to provide Iraq with a deep-water port.
Hussein’s assertions, though unfounded, reopened Iraq’s long-standing challenge to Kuwait’s frontiers and independence. Iraq had already claimed Kuwait as part of its territory twice in the twentieth century—in 1937, and upon Kuwaiti independence in 1961. Yet Iraq’s Arab neighbors took these new claims and threats to be no more than empty rhetoric.
The Arab states were mistaken: in July 1990, Hussein backed up his words with actions when he deployed large numbers of troops and tanks to Iraq’s border with Kuwait. The other Arab states were forced into action, now aware that a serious crisis was brewing.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia responded to the growing crisis by trying to broker a diplomatic solution. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and President Mubarak of Egypt arranged a meeting between the Kuwaitis and Iraqis in the Saudi Red Sea port of Jidda, scheduled for August 1. Saddam Hussein promised the Arab leaders before the meeting that all differences between Iraq and its neighbors would be settled in a “brotherly manner.”
Saddam Hussein had already made up his mind to invade Kuwait. Before sending his vice president to meet with the Kuwaiti crown prince in Jidda, Hussein requested a meeting on July 25 with the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, to sound out Washington’s position on the crisis. Glaspie assured the Iraqi president that the United States had “no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”8 It appears that Hussein interpreted Ambassador Glaspie’s remarks to mean the United States would not intervene in an inter-Arab conflict, and shortly after the meeting, he changed the scope of his invasion plans. Initially he had envisaged a limited incursion into Kuwait to seize the two islands and the Rumaila oil field. Now he called for a total occupation of the country. In a meeting with the governing Revolutionary Command Council, Hussein argued that if he were to leave the ruling al-Sabah family in charge of part of Kuwait, they would mobilize international—particularly American—pressure to force Iraq to withdraw. A quick and decisive invasion that toppled the al-Sabah before they had a chance to call for American intervention would give Iraq the best chance for success. Moreover, were Iraq to absorb its oil-rich neighbor entirely, it could solve all its economic problems at once.
When Saddam Hussein sent his Vice President to meet with the Kuwaiti Crown in Jidda on August 1, he was using diplomacy to achieve total surprise for his military plans. The meeting between Ezzat Ibrahim and Shaykh Saad al-Sabah was conducted amiably, without any hit of threats. The two men parted on good terms and agreed to hold their next meeting in Baghdad. By the time they left Jidda at midnight, Iraqi troops were already moving across the border into Kuwait.
In the early morning hours of August 2, tens of thousands of Iraqi troops crossed into Kuwait in a dash to occupy the oil-rich state. The shocked residents of Kuwait were the first to find out. Jehan Rajab, a school administrator in Kuwait City, recalled: “At 6:00 A.M. on 2 August I got out of bed as usual, opened the window and looked outside. To my consternation I heard the sharp staccato sounds of gunfire, not a shot or two but sustained firing, which was being answered back. The sounds resonated off the walls of the mosque beside us and it immediately and horrifyingly became obvious what was happening. Kuwait was being invaded by Iraq.”9
Telephones began to ring across the Arab capitals. King Fahd was awakened with the news at 5:00 A.M. Having just seen off the Iraqi and Kuwaiti negotiators in Jidda the night before, the Saudi king could scarcely believe that Iraqi troops had invaded Kuwait. He immediately tried to contact Saddam Hussein but could not reach him. His next call was to King Hussein of Jordan, who was known to be closest to the Iraqi leader.
An hour later, aides woke the Egyptian president, Husni Mubarak, to report that Iraqi troops had occupied the amir’s palace and key ministries in the Kuwaiti capital. The Arab leaders had to wait until mid-morning for the first explanation from Baghdad: “This is just part of Iraq returning to Iraq,” Saddam’s political envoy explained to the incredulous Arab heads of state.10
The international community now faced the first crisis of the post–Cold War era. News of the invasion reached the White House at 9:00 P.M. on August 1; the Bush administration issued a robust condemnation of the Iraqi invasion that same night. The next morning it referred the matter to the UN Security Council, which swiftly passed Resolution 660, calling for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces.
Undaunted, Iraqi forces sped into the capital, Kuwait City, in a bid to seize Kuwait’s amir, Shaykh Jabar al-Ahmad al-Sabah, and his family. Had they successfully captured the ruling family, the Iraqis would have enjoyed far more control over the country, holding the amir and his family hostage to secure their objectives. However, the amir had been warned that the Iraqis were on the move and left with his family to take refuge in neighboring Saudi Arabia.
The Kuwaiti crown prince, Shaykh Saad, returned from his Jidda meeting with the Iraqi vice president to learn that the invasion was already underway. He immediately called the U.S. ambassador in Kuwait and officially requested American military support to repel the Iraqi invasion, before joining the rest of the royal family in exile in Saudi Arabia. By these two simple acts—the request for American assistance, and taking exile—al-Sabah managed to foil Saddam’s invasion just as it was starting. Yet the Kuwaiti people would face seven months of horror before the ordeal of occupation would end.
Given the authoritarianism and political double-talk of the Ba’thist regime, the first days of the occupation seemed to emanate straight from the pages of George Orwell’s 1984. The Iraqis preposterously claimed to have entered Kuwait on the invitation of a popular revolution to overthrow the ruling al-Sabah family. “God helped the free people from the pure ranks in Kuwait,” a communiqué issued by the Iraqi government explained. “They have swept away the old order and brought about a new order and have asked for the brotherly help of the great Iraqi people.”11 The Iraqi regime then installed what it called the Provisional Free Kuwait Government.
With no obvious Kuwaiti revolutionaries to support Iraq’s claims, however, Saddam Hussein’s government quickly abandoned the pretense of liberation and announced the annexation of Kuwait. On August 8 it was declared the nineteenth province of Iraq. The Iraqis went to work erasing Kuwait from the maps, and even redesignated the capital Kuwait City by a name of their own coining—Kazimah.
By October, new decrees were issued that required all Kuwaitis to change their identity papers, as well as the license plates on their cars, to standard Iraqi issue. The Iraqis tried to force compliance by denying services to Kuwaitis without Iraqi papers. Ration cards for basic foods like milk, sugar, rice, flour, and cooking oil were only issued to people with Iraqi papers. People had to present Iraqi identification to get medical service. Gas stations would only serve cars with Iraqi license plates. Yet the majority of Kuwaitis resisted these pressures and refused to take Iraqi citizenship, preferring to trade for essentials on the black market.12
The invasion of Kuwait was accompanied by the wholesale looting of shops, offices, and residences by Iraqi forces, much of it for reshipment to Baghdad. Watching the truckloads of stolen goods depart for Baghdad, one Kuwaiti official questioned an Iraqi officer:
“If you are saying that this is part of Iraq, why are you taking everything away?” “Because no province can be better than the capital,” the officer replied.13
The brutality of the occupation grew more intense with each passing day. Toward the end of August, Saddam Hussein appointed his notorious cousin Ali Hasan al-Majid, grimly nicknamed “Chemical Ali” for his use of gas warfare against the Kurds in the Anfal campaign, as military governor of Kuwait. “After the arrival in Kuwait of Ali Hassan Al Majeed,” Kuwait resident Jehan Rajab noted in her journal, “the reign of terror intensified, as did the rumours of possible chemical attacks.” Those who could, fled. “Escape was on everyone’s mind,” reflected Kuwaiti banker Mohammed al-Yahya. He described cars from Kuwait four abreast at the Saudi border, backed up for 30 kilometers (about 19 miles). Al-Yahya, however, chose to remain in Kuwait.14
As the full repression of Iraq’s political system took root in Kuwait, its people rose up in nonviolent resistance. “Within the first week of the invasion,” Jehan Rajab wrote, “Kuwaiti women decided to demonstrate on the streets against what had happened.” The first demonstration was held on August 6, just four days after the invasion. “There was a feeling of tension and expectancy: it was almost as if the crowd subconsciously realized that even peaceful demonstrations would not be countenanced by the Iraqis.” As many as 300 people took part in the march, carrying banners, posters of the exiled amir and crown prince, and Kuwaiti flags.
The protesters combined chants in honor of Kuwait and the amir with condemnations of Saddam Hussein: “Death to Saddam” and, incongruously, “Saddam is a Zionist.” The first two demonstrations met with no Iraqi reaction, but by the third consecutive day of protests, the swelling mass came face to face with armed Iraqi soldiers who fired straight into the crowd. “Pandemonium broke out,” Rajab recorded. “Car engines roared as they tried to back wildly down the road, people screamed and the shooting continued.” Dead and wounded demonstrators littered the ground outside the police station in downtown Kuwait City. “That was the last of such marches in our district, and probably the last anywhere, for the Iraqis shot to kill or maim. Kuwaitis were beginning to understand just how ruthless the invaders were.”15
Yet nonviolent resistance activities continued throughout the Iraqi occupation. The resistance movement changed tactics to avoid the risk of Iraqi gunfire. On September 2, the Kuwaitis marked the end of the first month of the occupation with a show of defiance. The plan spread by word of mouth for all residents of Kuwait City to climb to their roofs at midnight and cry out “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.” At the appointed hour, thousands joined in a chorus of protest against the occupation. For Jehan Rajab, it was a shout of “defiance and fury at what had taken place—at the invasion, the brutality that had followed, the killings, and the torture centres that had been set up in various places around Kuwait.” Iraqi soldiers fired warning shots to the rooftops to silence to protest, but for one hour the people of Kuwait successfully defied the occupation. “Some say Kuwait was born anew that night,” the banker al-Yahya claimed.16
Many Kuwaitis mounted armed resistance against the Iraqis as well, led by former police and soldiers who were trained in the use of firearms. They ambushed Iraqi troops and ammunition stores. The road that ran past Jehan Rajab’s school was a main thoroughfare for Iraqi military vehicles and became the focus of many resistance attacks. In late August, Rajab was shocked by an enormous explosion from the main road, followed by a random volley of rocket fire. She soon realized that the resistance had struck Iraqi ammunition trucks and detonated the ordinance they were carrying. She only dared to leave her apartment when the explosions died down. She found fire engines dousing the flaming wreckage of the Iraqi army trucks. “There was little left to be seen other than scattered and blackened skeletal remains,” she noted in her journal. “Anything human must have been blasted into infinity.”
The attacks placed the residents of her neighborhood at grave risk, both from the fallout of the attacks and from the retaliation of the Iraqis. “After this particular incident,” she noted, “in which a few houses had been hit and, worse, the Iraqis had threatened to kill everyone in the area if anything like it happened again, the Resistance tried to protect ordinary civilians by keeping its explosions further away from residential districts.”17
The residents of Kuwait took Iraqi threats very seriously. The stench of death hung heavy over the occupied country. Death had literally come to the doorsteps of many Kuwaitis: one of the Iraqis’ tactics was to return a detainee to his home and gun him down before his family. To compound the horror, the authorities threatened to kill all members of the household if the body was moved. The dead were often left for two or three days in the heat of summer to serve as a grisly warning to others who dared to resist.
Yet in spite of Iraqi efforts to intimidate the Kuwaitis into submission, resistance continued unabated throughout the seven months of occupation. Jehan Rajab’s claims of “continued resistance during the long months” of the occupation are corroborated by Iraqi intelligence documents, seized after the liberation of Kuwait, that tracked resistance activities through the seven months of the occupation.18
In the early days of the occupation, there was no reason to believe that Iraq would confine its ambitions to Kuwait. None of the Arab Gulf countries had sufficient military strength to repel an Iraqi invasion, and following the fall of Kuwait, both the Americans and the Saudis were concerned that Saddam Hussein might attempt to occupy nearby Saudi oil fields.
The Bush administration believed a large American presence to be the only deterrent against Saddam Hussein’s ambitions. It wanted base rights for U.S. troops in the event of military action to displace the Iraqis; however, the administration would need a formal request from the Saudi government for military support before any troops could be dispatched. King Fahd demurred, fearing a negative domestic public reaction. As the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia has always been particularly uncomfortable with a non-Muslim presence on its soil. Furthermore, never having been subject to foreign imperial control, the Saudis guard their independence from the West jealously.
The prospect of American troops flooding into Saudi Arabia rallied the country’s Islamists to action. Saudi veterans of the Afghan conflict, flushed with their successes against the Soviets, were adamantly opposed to an American intervention in Kuwait. Osama bin Ladin had returned from the Afghan jihad and had been placed under house arrest by the Saudi government for his outspoken speeches, which were enjoying wide circulation by cassette recording.
When Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait, Bin Ladin wrote to the Saudi minister of interior, Prince Nawwaf bin Abdul Aziz, to suggest mobilizing the mujahidin network that he believed had been so effective in driving the Soviets from Afghanistan. “He claimed he could muster an army of 100,000 men,” recalled Abdul Bari Atwan, one of the few journalists to interview Bin Ladin in his hideout in the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan. “This letter was ignored.”
On balance, the Saudis believed the Iraqis to pose the greater threat to their country’s stability, and opted for American protection in spite of domestic Saudi opposition. Bin Ladin denounced the move as a betrayal of Islam. “Bin Laden told me that the Saudi government’s decision to invite U.S. troops to defend the kingdom and liberate Kuwait was the biggest shock of his entire life,” Atwan recorded.
He could not believe that the House of Al Saud could welcome the deployment of “infidel” forces on Arabian Peninsula soil, within the proximity of the Holy Places [i.e., Mecca and Medina], for the first time since the inception of Islam. Bin Ladin also feared that by welcoming U.S. troops onto Arab land the Saudi government would be subjecting the country to foreign occupation—in an exact replay of the course of events in Afghanistan, when the Communist government in Kabul invited Russian troops into the country. Just as bin Laden had taken up arms to fight the Soviet troops in Afghanistan, he now decided to take up arms to confront U.S. troops on the Arabian Peninsula.19
His passport confiscated by the Saudi authorities, Bin Ladin had to exploit his family’s close ties with the Saudi monarchy to secure travel documents and go into permanent exile. In 1996 he declared jihad against the United States and declared the Saudi monarchy “outside the religious community” for “acts against Islam.”20 Yet his alienation from the United States and the Saudi monarchy, his former allies in the Afghan jihad, dated to the events of August 1990.
The Kuwait crisis opened a new chapter of Soviet-American cooperation in international diplomacy. For the first time in its history, the Security Council was able to take decisive action without being undermined by Cold War politics. Over the four months following the swift passage of Resolution 660 on August 2, the Security Council passed a total of twelve resolutions as the crisis deepened without the risk of a veto. On August 6 it imposed trade and economic sanctions on Iraq and froze all Iraqi assets abroad (Res. 661); the UN tightened the sanction regime again on September 25 (Res. 670). On August 9 the Security Council declared the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait “null and void” (Res. 662). A number of resolutions condemned Iraqi violations of diplomatic immunity in Kuwait and upheld the rights of third-state nationals to leave Iraq and Kuwait. When on November 29 the Soviets joined with the Americans in passing Resolution 678, authorizing member states “to use all necessary means” against Iraq unless it withdrew fully from Kuwait by January 15, 1991, the Cold War in the Middle East came to a formal end.
What most surprised Arab statesmen—and the Iraqis in particular—was the Soviet position. “Many in the Arab world assumed that even if Moscow refused to help Iraq after the invasion it would at least remain neutral, and they were surprised when the Soviet Union helped the Americans to pass resolution after resolution through the UN Security Council,” Egyptian analyst Mohamed Heikal recalled. What the Arab world had not reckoned on was the weakened state of the Soviet Union and its concern to preserve good relations with Washington. Given America’s geostrategic interests in the Gulf, the Soviets knew they could either support the U.S. or confront it, but they could not deter it from action. With nothing to be gained from confrontation, the Soviets opted for cooperation with the United States and left their former Arab ally totally exposed.
The Arab world was slow to recognize the reorientation of Moscow’s policies in the post–Cold War age. As Iraq turned a deaf ear to the UN, and as the United States began to mobilize a war coalition, the Arab world still expected the Soviet Union to prevent the United States from taking military action against its ally Iraq. Instead, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze worked closely with U.S. secretary of state James Baker in drafting the very resolution that authorized military action. “To the amazement of Arab delegations,” Heikal claimed, “it became clear that Moscow would give Washington a license to act.”21
Whereas the Americans and the Soviets enjoyed a moment of unprecedented cooperation over the Kuwait crisis, the Arab world had never been so fragmented. The invasion of one Arab state by another, and the threat of outside intervention, provoked deep divisions among Arab leaders.
Egypt, recently rehabilitated after a decade’s isolation for its peace treaty with Israel, took the lead in organizing an Arab response to the Kuwait crisis. President Mubarak convened a snap Arab summit, the first to be held in Cairo since the Camp David Accords, on August 10. The Iraqis and Kuwaitis faced each other for the first time since the invasion. It was a tense moment. The amir of Kuwait gave a conciliatory speech, trying to mollify the Iraqis and to advance a diplomatic resolution to the crisis. He hoped to return to where negotiations had left off in the August 1 meeting in Jidda. The Iraqis, however, took an intransigent line. When the amir finished his speech and sat down, the Iraqi delegate Taha Yassin Ramadan protested: “I don’t know on what basis the sheikh is addressing us. Kuwait does not exist any more.”22 The amir stormed out of the hall in protest.
For some Arab leaders, the threat of American intervention was more serious yet than the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. President Chadli Benjedid of Algeria admonished the assembly: “We have fought all our lives to get rid of imperialism and imperialist forces, but now we see that our endeavours are wasted and the Arab nation . . . is inviting foreigners to intervene.”23 The leaders of Libya, Sudan, Jordan, Yemen, and the PLO all shared Benjedid’s concerns, and they pressed for concerted Arab action to resolve the crisis. They hoped to negotiate an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait on terms that both sides could accept without further armed conflict or foreign intervention.
When it came to the vote on the final resolution of the Cairo summit, the divisions within the Arab world were most apparent. The resolution condemned the invasion, disavowed Iraq’s annexation, and called for an immediate withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait. It also endorsed Saudi Arabia’s request for Arab military support against Iraq’s threats to its territory. Mubarak curtailed the debate on the resolution after just two hours and put the text to a vote that split the Arab world into two deeply divided camps, with ten in favor and nine opposed to the final resolution. “It had taken just under two hours to create the deepest divisions the Arab world had ever seen,” Mohamed Heikal wrote. “The last slender chance for an Arab solution had been lost.”24
The American government believed nothing short of a credible threat could force the Iraqis to withdraw from Kuwait. They had no confidence in Arab diplomacy and instead began to recruit Arab allies for military action. The first American forces had already landed in Saudi Arabia on August 8, where they were joined by Egyptian and Moroccan units. The Syrians, long-time enemies of Iraq and interested in rapprochement with the United States since the Soviets had withdrawn their support, were leaning toward joining the coalition and confirmed their participation on September 12. The other Gulf states—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman—also sided with the Saudis and offered troops and facilities to the American-led coalition.
Having split the Arab states into irreconcilable camps by his actions, Saddam Hussein next played to Arab public opinion to turn citizens against their governments in Arab states. He presented himself as a man of action who stood up to the Americans and the Israelis. He condemned the United States of double standards, of enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions on behalf of oil-rich Kuwait while turning a blind eye to Israel’s repeated violations of UN resolutions calling for withdrawal from occupied Arab lands. By his actions, Saddam Hussein put added pressure on Arab regimes by making them out to be lackeys of the Western powers who sacrificed Arab interests to preserve good relations with the United States. Hussein openly accused his fellow Arab leaders of playing by America’s rules in the new post–Cold War age. And the Arab masses rallied to the one leader who refused to bow to American pressure. Violent demonstrations broke out in Morocco, Egypt, and Syria in protest of their leaders’ decision to join the coalition. Massive rallies were held in Jordan and the Palestinian territories in support of the Iraqis—much to the chagrin of the exiled Kuwaitis, who for years had provided generous support to both the Hashemite monarchy and the PLO.
King Hussein of Jordan and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, who had once enjoyed cordial relations with the Iraqi regime, now found themselves caught between Arab public opinion in support of Saddam Hussein and the international community’s demand that they side with the U.S.-led coalition against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Arafat openly threw in his lot with Saddam Hussein, whereas Jordan’s monarch limited himself to refusing to condemn the Iraqis as he pursued an increasingly unlikely “Arab solution” to the Kuwait crisis. For failing to condemn the Iraqis, King Hussein was accused by both the Bush administration and the Arab Gulf leaders of supporting the invasion of Kuwait. In the aftermath of the crisis, Jordan faced isolation from both the Arab Gulf states and the West. However, King Hussein retained the support of the Jordanian people, averting a crisis that could well have cost him his crown.
Ultimately, Saddam Hussein became a prisoner of his popularity with the Arab street. Once he had claimed the moral high ground on issues like the Israeli occupation of Palestine or withstanding American pressure, he left himself no room for compromise. Nor did arguments that generated Arab public support carry much weight with the American government. The Bush administration refused to broaden the discussion from the immediate context of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. And Saddam Hussein could not afford to withdraw without some face-saving concession on the Palestine-Israel track that the Americans were unwilling to concede. Unwilling to play by America’s rules, Saddam Hussein grew increasingly fatalistic about the prospect of war.
By the time the January 15, 1991, deadline set by UN Security Council Resolution 678 had passed, the United States had mobilized a massive international coalition to force Iraq out of Kuwait. American forces accounted for over two-thirds the total, with 650,000 soldiers. The Arab world contributed nearly 185,000 soldiers, with 100,000 Saudi troops reinforced by units from Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain. Britain and France headed the European contribution to the coalition, though Italy and eight other European states also contributed. In all, some thirty-four countries from six continents combined to make a world war against Iraq.
The world held its breath as January 15 passed without incident. The next day, the United States launched Operation Desert Storm with a massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad and of Iraqi army positions in both Kuwait and Iraq. Saddam Hussein remained defiant, threatening his adversaries with the “mother of all battles.” The greatest uncertainty facing the coalition was if Iraq might use chemical or biological weapons, as it had done against the Kurds in the Anfal campaign. U.S. commanders hoped to beat Iraq from the air without exposing their infantry to the risk of gas warfare.
The Iraqis responded to the air war by firing long-range Scud missiles at Israel and against American positions in Saudi Arabia. Without warning, eight Scuds struck Haifa and Tel Aviv in the early morning hours of January 18, inflicting material damage but no fatalities. As sirens blared, Israeli radio stations advised citizens to don gas masks and take shelter in sealed rooms for fear that the Iraqis might deploy chemical warheads on the Scuds.
Yitzhak Shamir’s government met in emergency session to decide how to retaliate, but the Bush administration managed to persuade the Israelis to stay out of the war. Saddam Hussein clearly hoped to transform the war for Kuwait into a broader Arab-Israeli conflict that would confound the American-led coalition. Mohamed Heikal recounted how Iraq’s missile strikes against Israel confused the loyalties of Arab soldiers in the coalition. When a group of Egyptian and Syrian soldiers encamped in Saudi Arabia heard that Iraq had fired Scud missiles at Israel, they celebrated with shouts of Allahu Akbar—“only to remember an instant later that they were supposed to be against Iraq. Too late—seven Egyptians and several Syrians were disciplined.”25
In all, some forty-two missiles were fired at Israel, some falling short and striking Jordan and the West Bank, others intercepted by Patriot missiles. The Scuds provoked more fear than casualties. Many Palestinians in the Occupied Territories cheered Saddam Hussein’s strikes against Israel. Frustrated by the stalemate of the Intifada and Israeli iron-fist policies to break the popular uprising, and now confined to home by a strict twenty-four-hour curfew, the Palestinians were glad to see the Israelis under attack for a change. When journalists filmed Palestinians dancing on their rooftops, cheering on the Scuds, Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh explained their reaction to a British newspaper: “If Palestinians are happy when they see a missile going from east to west, it is because, figuratively speaking, they have seen missiles going from west to east for the last 40 years.” Nusseibeh was to pay for his missile-spotting comments; a few days later he was arrested on the spurious grounds of helping the Iraqis guide their Scuds against Israeli targets, for which he was given three months in Ramle Prison.26
The Iraqis fired forty-six Scuds against Saudi Arabia. Most were intercepted by Patriot missiles, though one Scud struck a warehouse in Dhahran used as a barracks for American soldiers, killing 28 and injuring over 100, the highest number of casualties sustained by American forces in any single incident in the war.
Analysis of missile wreckage reassured American commanders that the Iraqis were not using biological or chemical agents. The failure to deploy unconventional weapons emboldened coalition forces to take their war from the air to the ground, and on February 22, President George H. W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein a final ultimatum to withdraw from Kuwait by noon the following day or face a ground war.
By February, Iraq and its army had suffered more than five weeks of unprecedented aerial bombardment, which dwarfed the impact of its crude Scuds on Israel and Saudi Arabia. Coalition aircraft sustained a rate of up to 1,000 sorties a day, deploying laser-guided precision weapons with high explosives and cruise missiles against Iraqi targets. Baghdad and the cities of southern Iraq endured extensive bombing raids that destroyed power stations, communications, roads and bridges, factories, and residential quarters.
Though there are no official statistics for civilian deaths in the Desert Storm Gulf War—estimates range from 5,000 to 200,000—there is no doubt that thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and wounded by the intense bombardment. In the worst single incident of the war, the U.S. Air Force dropped two 2,000-pound “smart bombs” on an air-raid shelter in the Amiriya district of Baghdad, killing over 400 civilians, most of them women and children taking refuge from the intense bombardment of the city. The Iraqi army too had suffered heavy casualties from the sustained bombardment, and morale was low by the third week of February.
Facing imminent eviction from Kuwait, the Iraqi government responded with acts of environmental warfare intended to punish Kuwait and the neighboring Gulf states. Already in late January, Iraqi forces deliberately pumped four million barrels of oil into the waters of the Persian Gulf, creating the world’s greatest oil slick, a lethal mass 35 miles long and 15 miles wide (56 kilometers long by 24 kilometers wide). Given the fragility of the Gulf as an ecosystem, and coming after years of damage inflicted by the Iran-Iraq War, the oil slick was an environmental catastrophe of unprecedented scale.
On the eve of the ground war, the Iraqis detonated charges in 700 Kuwaiti oil wells, creating an inferno. Jehan Rajab witnessed the explosions from the roof of her home in Kuwait. “We can hear for ourselves that the Iraqis have been setting off more of the dynamite placed around the well heads,” she recorded in her journal. “The sky is a throbbing, burning red. Some of the flames rise and fall steadily, others shoot straight into the air to a great height and, I imagine, let out a mighty roar of theatrical proportions. Yet others are almost palpably alive: they spurt out in a swollen ball that pulsates steadily with evil intensity.” The next morning, the blue skies of Kuwait had been blotted out by the smoke of 700 burning oil wells. “The entire sky this morning was black. It blotted out the sun.”27
The Iraqis’ environmental war added urgency to the ground campaign, which began in the early morning hours of Sunday, February 24, 1991. The ground war proved brief and brutally decisive. Coalition forces swept into Kuwait and forced a complete Iraqi withdrawal within 100 hours. The intense fighting was terrifying for the inhabitants of Kuwait and the Iraqi invaders alike. Jehan Rajab described massive explosions and heavy fires across Kuwait City, against the background noise of blazing oil wells and hundreds of aircraft crowding the skies. “What an unbelievable night!” she wrote on February 26, two days into the ground assault. “The barrage lit up the lower sky with a blinding white light and blood red flashes.”
The panicked Iraqi forces began a disorganized retreat. Soldiers sought rides on trucks and jeeps heading north to the Iraqi border, and commandeered whatever vehicles were still in running order (the Kuwaitis had sabotaged their own cars to deter theft). Many of those who found a ride out of Kuwait perished at Mutla Ridge, an exposed stretch of Highway 80 running from Kuwait north to the Iraqi border. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers in army trucks, buses, and stolen civilian vehicles caused a massive traffic jam on Highway 80. Coalition aircraft bombed the front and rear of the retreating column, trapping thousands of vehicles in between. Some 2,000 vehicles were destroyed in the ensuing carnage. It is not known how many Iraqis managed to flee their vehicles and how many were killed. Yet the images of the “Highway of Death” exposed the American-led coalition to accusations of using disproportionate force, even of war crimes. Concerned lest such atrocities jeopardize the international support they had built for their campaign, the Bush administration pressed for a complete cease-fire on February 28, bringing the Gulf War to an end.
Liberation came at a high price. The Kuwaitis expressed profound joy at the restoration of their independence, but their country had been utterly destroyed by the Iraqi invasion and the war. Hundreds of oil wells burned out of control, infrastructure had been shattered, and much of the country had to be rebuilt from scratch. The population of Kuwait was deeply traumatized by occupation and war, with thousands killed, displaced, or missing.
The wider Arab world also came out of the conflict divided and traumatized. Arab citizens strongly opposed their governments’ decision to side with the coalition and fight against a fellow Arab state. Those governments that joined the coalition ostracized those who did not. Jordan, Yemen, and the PLO were condemned for having been too supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime. All three were heavily reliant on financial support from the Gulf, and they suffered economically for the stance they had taken. Many Arab analysts expressed deep mistrust for the United States and concerns for American intentions in the new unipolar world. America’s single-minded pursuit of a military solution, and perceived obstruction of efforts to secure a diplomatic resolution to the Gulf crisis, led many to believe that the United States used the war to establish its military presence in the Gulf and to dominate the region’s oil resources. The fact that thousands of American troops remained in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states years after the liberation of Kuwait only deepened these concerns.
Withdrawal from Kuwait brought no respite to Iraq. The Bush administration, believing it had destroyed Saddam Hussein’s prestige along with his military, encouraged the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow their dictator in early February, 1991. American radio stations broadcast messages into Iraq promising U.S. support for popular uprisings. Their message fell on receptive ears in both the Kurdish districts of northern Iraq and the Shiite regions of the south that had suffered most from Saddam Hussein’s rule. Uprisings broke out in both regions in early March 1991.
It was not the outcome the United States had hoped to achieve with its propaganda. The Americans wanted to see a military coup in Baghdad overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Kurdish and Shiite uprisings both threatened American interests. Turkey, which was an ally to the United States under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), had been combating a bitter separatist insurgency led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (known by the Kurdish acronym, the PKK) since 1984 and opposed any measure that might give rise to an Iraqi Kurdish state on Turkey’s eastern frontier. The Americans for their part feared that a successful Shiite revolt would only strengthen the regional influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Americans offered no support to either the Shiites or Kurds, despite having encouraged the Iraqis to rise up. Instead, the Bush administration turned a blind eye while Saddam Hussein reassembled the remnants of his forces to suppress the rebellions with ruthless brutality. Tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites are believed to have been killed in the suppression of their revolt, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled Iraqi retaliation to take refuge in Turkey and Iran.
Faced with a massive humanitarian catastrophe of its own making, the United States responded by imposing a no-fly zone over northern Iraq. U.S. and British aircraft patrolled the region north of the 36th Parallel to protect the Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s forces. Ironically, the no-fly zone created precisely the sort of autonomous Kurdish enclave that Turkey had most opposed. Elections to a regional assembly independent of Saddam Hussein’s state were held in May 1992, setting in motion the creation of what would become the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq.
Having failed to unseat Hussein by military means or domestic uprising, the Bush administration returned to the United Nations to secure a resolution stripping Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, establishing Iraq’s responsibility to pay wartime reparations, and reinforcing economic sanctions imposed by earlier resolutions. Saddam Hussein recognized that these measures were designed to provoke his overthrow, and he responded with defiance. He commissioned a mosaic portrait of George H. W. Bush in the entrance of the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad so that all its customers would tread on the face of his adversary. In November 1992, Hussein celebrated Bush’s defeat in the presidential elections. Bush had fallen; Saddam was still in power.
The Americans could claim an outright military victory in the Gulf War, but only a partial political victory. The survival of Saddam Hussein meant Iraq remained a source of instability in a region of heightened volatility. And, much against the wishes of the Bush administration, Saddam set the agenda for regional politics after the Desert Storm Gulf War. By drawing parallels between Iraq’s position in Kuwait to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, the Iraqi leader forced the international community to address some of the outstanding conflicts in the Middle East.
By the end of the 1980s, the prospects for peace in Lebanon had never seemed more remote. Ninety percent of the country was under foreign occupation, with Israel in control of the so-called South Lebanon Security Zone, and Syrian troops everywhere else. Foreign funds flooded the country, arming a host of rival militias whose power struggles laid waste to towns and cities in all parts of Lebanon. A whole generation had grown up in the shadow of war, denied an education or the prospect of a earning an honest living. The once-prosperous model democracy of the Middle East had disintegrated into a failed state over which Syria exercised a tenuous control.
The breakdown of the Lebanese state under the duress of communal fighting had put into question the very bases of Lebanon’s sectarian system of politics as set out in the 1943 National Pact. Many veteran politicians held Lebanon’s volatile mix of religion and politics responsible for the civil war and were determined to impose a root and branch reform as part of any peace settlement. Rashid Karami, a Sunni Muslim who served ten times as prime minister, had long called for a major reform of the Lebanese government to establish political equality between Muslims and Christians. Karami, who again held the premiership between 1984 and 1987, believed that all Lebanese citizens, regardless of their faith, should have an equal right to run for any office. Other reformist members of the cabinet shared Karami’s views. Nabih Berri, head of the Shiite Amal Party and minister of justice, dismissed the National Pact as “a sterile system incapable of revision or improvement” and called for a new political system.28
Amin Gemayel, whose six-year term as president represented the nadir of Lebanese politics (1982–1988), became the focus of the reformers’ attacks. The Druze transport minister, Walid Jumblatt, suggested Gemayel should be driven from office at gunpoint. Many ministers refused to attend the cabinet sessions that he chaired. Karami joined the boycott, and the cabinet ceased to meet, bringing the government to a complete standstill.
Karami escalated the confrontation with Gemayel in May 1987, when the premier tendered his resignation. Many observers believed Karami had resigned to make a bid for the presidency in the upcoming1988 elections. The Sunni politician had tried once before, in 1970, and had been barred from running for a post that was reserved for Maronite Christians. Karami was a respected public figure with powerful supporters in the reformist camp. Perhaps, given the breakdown in Lebanese politics, he might have stood a better chance in 1988 than he had in 1970. However, he never got the chance to declare his candidacy. Four weeks after resigning as prime minister, Rashid Karami was assassinated by a bomb planted in his helicopter. Though Karami’s assassins were never found, the message behind his killing was widely understood: the National Pact was not open for negotiation.
The isolated President Gemayel could not find a credible Sunni politician who was willing to serve as prime minister following Karami’s assassination. He designated the Sunni minister of education in Karami’s defunct cabinet, Selim al-Hoss, as acting premier. From June 1987 until the end of Gemayel’s term on September 22, 1988, Lebanon went without a functioning government. The challenge facing Lebanon in 1988 was to agree on a new president when the warring political elites could not agree on anything.
Only one candidate stood for the presidency in 1988: former president Suleiman Franjieh. The public had no confidence in the seventy-eight-year-old warlord who had proved ineffectual in preventing civil war in his previous term of office (1970–1976). No one believed he would be any more effective at achieving national reconciliation twelve years later.
The lack of presidential candidates proved a moot point, for by election day there were not even enough electors present to select a new president. In Lebanon, the president is elected by the parliament, and as no parliamentary elections had been held since the outbreak of civil war, the aging survivors of the 1972 parliament were summoned on August 18 to fulfill their constitutional duty for the third time. Many of the seventy-six surviving deputies had fled their war-torn country for a safer life abroad, and on election day only thirty-eight managed to take their seats. The parliament inquorate, Lebanon went without a president for the first time in the country’s history.
According to the Lebanese constitution, in the absence of an elected president, the prime minister and his cabinet are empowered to exercise executive authority until a new president is installed. As President Gemayel’s term came to an end, this constitutional provision posed grave dangers to the Maronite guardians of the political status quo. As Lebanon had never gone without a president, no Sunni had ever exercised executive authority. Conservative Maronites feared that if al-Hoss were to assume such power, inevitably he would seek to reform the political system and dispense with the National Pact in the interest of (Muslim) majority rule. And that would mean the end of Lebanon as a Christian state in the Middle East.
As the end of Gemayel’s term approached, at midnight on September 22, the Maronite commander in chief of Lebanon’s army, General Michel Aoun, took matters in his own hands. A native of the mixed Christian-Shiite village of Haret Hreik in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the fifty-three-year-old general demanded that Gemayel dismiss the caretaker al-Hoss government before it achieved executive powers by default. “Mr. President,” General Aoun warned him, “it is your constitutional right either to form a new government or not. Should you choose to do the latter [i.e., not form a government], we will consider you a traitor from midnight.”29
In trying to prevent one crisis Aoun’s coup was creating another. As a Maronite Christian, he was ineligible for the premiership, which under the terms of the National Pact was reserved for Sunni Muslims. The man who claimed to be upholding the National Pact was actually undermining the foundations of Lebanon’s sectarian system. Yet at the eleventh hour—at a quarter to midnight, to be precise—Amin Gemayel succumbed to Aoun’s pressures and signed his last two executive orders. The first dismissed the caretaker cabinet of Selim al-Hoss, and the second appointed General Michel Aoun as head of an interim government. Al-Hoss and his supporters rejected Gemayel’s last-minute decrees and claimed the right to rule Lebanon.
Overnight, Lebanon went from being a country with no government to a country with two governments, with mutually incompatible agendas: al-Hoss sought to replace Lebanon’s confessional system with an open democracy that would favor the country’s Muslim majority, under Syrian trusteeship; Aoun hoped to reestablish the Lebanese state on the basis of the National Pact, preserving its Christian dominance, with total independence from Syria.
The rival governments split Lebanon into Christian and Muslim statelets. Few Christians were willing to serve in the al-Hoss cabinet, and no Muslims would participate in the Aoun government. Al-Hoss ruled over the Sunni and Shiite heartlands, and Aoun over the Christian districts of Lebanon. There was an element of farce in the rivalry, as both leaders appointed their own heads of the military, security apparatus, and civil service. Only the Lebanese Central Bank withstood the pressures of duplication, though it found itself financing the expenditures of both governments.
The real danger came from outside patrons. Al-Hoss’s cabinet was openly supportive of Syria’s role in Lebanon and enjoyed the full backing of Damascus. Aoun condemned the Syrian presence in Lebanon as a threat to the sovereignty and independence of the country, and he gained Iraq’s full support. Baghdad was intent on settling scores with Damascus for having broken Arab ranks to side with Iran in the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War. Lebanon’s many feuds provided the Iraqi government with ample opportunity to punish Syria. With massive stores of weapons and ammunition, the Iraqi government was able to provide military assistance to Aoun in his opposition to Syria’s presence in Lebanon, especially after the Iran-Iraq War came to an end in August 1988.
So emboldened, Aoun declared a war of liberation against Syria on March 14, 1989. Syria’s army responded by imposing a total blockade over the Christian regions under Aoun’s rule. The two sides began to exchange lethal volleys of heavy artillery, causing massive destruction to Muslim and Christian districts of Lebanon and displacing tens of thousands of civilians in what proved the heaviest bombardment since the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut.
Two months of horrific fighting and heavy civilian casualties galvanized the Arab states into action. In May 1989, an Arab summit was convened in Casablanca, Morocco, to address the new crisis in Lebanon. The conference gave a mandate to three Arab heads of state, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, King Hassan II of Morocco, and President Chadli Benjedid of Algeria, to negotiate an end to the violence and set in process the restoration of stable government in Lebanon.
The three rulers, dubbed “the troika,” ordered Syria to respect a cease-fire and demanded that Iraq stop arms shipments to Aoun and the Lebanese Forces militia. The troika’s efforts met with little success at first. The Syrians ignored the troika’s demands and stepped up their bombardment of the Christian enclave, and Iraq continued to supply its allies through ports under the control of Syria’s Maronite opponents.
After six months of fighting, the troika finally persuaded all sides to observe a cease-fire in September 1989. The Arab leaders invited Lebanon’s parliamentarians to a meeting in the Saudi city of Taif to initiate a process of national reconciliation on neutral ground. The Lebanese deputies, all survivors of the election of 1972, ventured from their places of exile in France, Switzerland, and Iraq, or from their safe houses in Lebanon, to assemble in Taif to decide the future of their country. Sixty-two deputies attended the meeting—half of them Christians, the rest Muslims—providing the necessary quorum to make decisions on behalf of the Lebanese state. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, convened the opening meeting on October 1, 1989, warning that “failure was forbidden.”
Success took longer than expected. What had been planned as a three-day conference turned into a twenty-three-day marathon that produced nothing less than the blueprint for Lebanon’s Second Republic. The terms of Lebanon’s political reconstruction, enshrined in the Taif Accord, preserved many of the elements of the confessional system set out in the National Pact but modified the structure to reflect the demographic realities of modern Lebanon. Thus, seats in parliament were still distributed among the different religious communities, but the distribution had been changed from a 6:5 ratio that favored the Christian communities to an equal division of seats between Muslims and Christians. The number of seats in parliament was increased from 99 to 108 so that the expansion of Muslim representatives could be achieved without any decrease in Christian seats.
The reformers failed in their primary objective of opening political office to all citizens without distinction by religion. It soon became apparent that such an assault on the confessional order would not gain consensus. The compromise solution was to preserve the distribution of offices as set out in the National Pact but to redistribute the powers of those offices. The president would remain a Maronite Christian, but the office was reduced to the more ceremonial role of “head of state and symbol of unity.” The prime minister and the cabinet, known as the Council of Ministers, were the main beneficiaries of the redistribution of power. Executive authority would now lie with the Sunni premier, who would chair the cabinet meetings and was charged with implementation of policy. Moreover, although the president still named the prime minister, only the parliament had the power to dismiss the premier. The speaker of the parliament, the highest post allowed for a Shiite Muslim, was also given important new powers by the Taif reforms, including a “kingmaker” role in advising the president on the appointment of the prime minister. With these changes, the Maronites could claim to have preserved their key offices, while Muslims could claim to hold more powers than the Christians. As a reform measure, the Taif Accord provided a compromise that all parties could accept, even if it left all dissatisfied.
Aoun’s supporters failed in their bid to force Syria from Lebanon through the Taif Accords. The troika found Hafiz al-Asad unwilling to compromise on Syria’s position in Lebanon, and recognized that an accord would be meaningless without Syria’s support. The Taif Accord gave formal thanks to the Syrian army for past services rendered, legal recognition to Syrian troops currently stationed in Lebanon, and left it to the Lebanese and Syrian governments to agree among themselves when to terminate the Syrian military presence in Lebanon at some unspecified point in the future. The Taif Accord also called on the governments of Lebanon and Syria to formalize their “privileged relationships in all fields” through bilateral treaties. In short, the accord gave legal sanction to Syria’s position in Lebanon and bound the two countries closer together. The Lebanese politicians assembled in Saudi Arabia recognized the realities of their position and accepted a compromise solution in the hope of achieving better in the future. The final draft of the accord was approved by the Lebanese deputies in Taif without opposition.
The announcement of the Taif Accord set off the final round of fighting in war-torn Lebanon. From his battered enclave in the Christian highlands, General Aoun persisted in his claim to be the sole legitimate government of Lebanon. He rejected the accord outright for the legal cover it gave to Syria’s presence in Lebanon. He issued a presidential decree dissolving the Lebanese parliament in a bid to prevent the implementation of the Taif Accord, but to no avail. Aoun was now isolated at home and abroad as both the Lebanese and the international community put their support behind the framework for national reconciliation in Lebanon.
In a bid to forestall Aoun’s challenge, the deputies hastened back to Beirut to ratify the Taif Accord. On November 5 the Lebanese parliament formally approved the accord and proceeded to elect the sixty-four-year-old deputy from Zghorta, René Moawad, as president of the republic. Scion of a respected Maronite family from the north, Moawad was a consensus candidate who enjoyed the support of both Lebanese nationalists and the Syrians. Yet Moawad had dangerous enemies. On his seventeenth day in office, the new president of Lebanon was assassinated by a powerful roadside bomb detonated as he returned home from Lebanese Independence Day celebrations. Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Michel Aoun were all accused of the murder, but those responsible for Moawad’s assassination have never been brought to justice.
Moawad’s brutal murder risked provoking the collapse of the Taif process—as his assassins no doubt intended. The Lebanese parliament reconvened within forty-eight hours to elect a replacement before Moawad’s death could set back the reconstruction process agreed to in Taif. The Syrian authorities were even quicker than the Lebanese parliamentarians in finding a replacement for Moawad. Radio Damascus announced Elias Hrawi as the new president before the Lebanese deputies had put his nomination to the vote.30By this deliberate gaffe, the Asad regime made clear to all that ultimate authority over Lebanon in the Taif era remained with Syria.
One of President Hrawi’s first acts would be to take on Michel Aoun, now widely recognized as a renegade and an impediment to Lebanon’s political reconciliation. The day after his election, Hrawi dismissed Aoun as commander of the army and ordered him to withdraw from the presidential palace in Baabda within forty-eight hours. Ignoring Hrawi’s command, Aoun turned to his Iraqi patrons for resupply, securing arms, ammunition, and antiaircraft defenses through his own port near Beirut to reinforce his position against outside attack. The human shield surrounding Aoun—thousands of his civilian supporters camped out around the presidential palace in Baabda in a festival atmosphere—proved the greatest deterrent to Hrawi in facing down Aoun’s defiance.
The Lebanese president did not have to take any action. Rivalries between Aoun and the Maronite Lebanese Forces militia turned into open conflict when the Lebanese Forces commander Samir Geagea declared his support for the Taif Accord in December 1989. Geagea, like Aoun, was supplied by the Iraqis. In January 1990, the rival factions went to war in fighting more intense than at any time since the outbreak of the civil war. Iraqi rockets, tanks, and heavy artillery were deployed with utter disregard for the safety of noncombatants in heavily populated neighborhoods, inflicting heavy civilian casualties. The fighting continued for five months before a tenuous cease-fire between the rival Christian factions was mediated by the Vatican, in May 1990.
Though he faced isolation and growing opposition, Michel Aoun took some satisfaction in knowing that his battle with the Lebanese Forces had, for the moment at least, derailed the Taif Accord.
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 proved the watershed in the Lebanese conflict. At war once again, Iraq could no longer afford to arm its Lebanese clients. Moreover, Saddam Hussein’s attempt to link Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait to a general resolution of regional problems, including the Syrian “occupation” of Lebanon, was a transparent bid to divert international pressure onto Syria to withdraw from Lebanon.
The Syrians were far too adept at regional politics to succumb to Saddam Hussein’s ploy. Hafiz al-Asad was using the Kuwait crisis to improve Syrian relations with Washington, and Washington fully supported the Taif Accord. Al-Asad thus decided to give his government’s full support to implementing the Taif framework and cast Iraq’s ally Michel Aoun as the main obstacle to peace. The Lebanese and Syrians conferred, and on October 11 President Hrawi formally requested Syrian military assistance, under the terms of the Taif Accord, to oust General Aoun. Two days later, Syrian aircraft began the bombardment of Aoun’s positions while Syrian and Lebanese Army tanks advanced into territory held by Aoun’s forces. Within three hours, General Aoun had capitulated and sought asylum in the French Embassy while his partisans continued the struggle. The fighting—often very intense—was over within eight hours. When the smoke cleared over the empty presidential palace in Baabda on October 13, the people of Lebanon enjoyed their first glimpse of a postwar world, if still under Syrian occupation.
It was only after the defeat of Michel Aoun that the postwar reconstruction envisaged by the Taif Accord could begin in earnest. In November 1990 the government ordered all militias out of the capital, Beirut, and in December the army cleared the barricades separating Muslim West Beirut from Christian East Beirut, reuniting the city for the first time since 1984.
On Christmas Eve 1990, Omar Karami, brother of the assassinated reformist premier Rashid Karami, announced a new government of national unity. With thirty ministers, the cabinet was the largest in Lebanon’s history, and it integrated the leaders of nearly all the country’s main militias. The advantages of forming a government from the very warlords responsible for the worst atrocities of the conflict soon became apparent when the government decreed the disarmament of the militias—again, in accordance with the Taif Accord. The militias were given to the end of April 1991 to disband and surrender their weapons; in return, the government promised to integrate those militiamen who wished to serve in Lebanon’s army. However much the militia leaders might have objected, they did not oppose the government or resign from the cabinet.31
Only one militia was allowed to continue military operations: Hizbullah, which enjoyed Iranian and Syrian support, retained its weapons so that it could continue its resistance to the Israeli occupation in the south of Lebanon. The Shiite militia agreed to confine its operations to the territory Israel claimed as part of its South Lebanon “security zone,” which at any rate lay beyond the writ of the Lebanese government. Hizbullah would continue its jihad against the Israeli occupier, with growing sophistication and lethal effect.
The fighting finally at an end, Lebanon faced the nearly insurmountable task of reconstruction after fifteen years of civil war. Between 1975 and 1990 an estimated 100,000–200,000 people died, many more were wounded and disabled, and hundreds of thousands were driven to exile. No city had been spared, as whole quarters were reduced to silent streets of shattered buildings. Squatters—refugees from later battles—had taken over habitable buildings abandoned in earlier battles. Utilities had completely broken down in many parts of the country. Private generators provided electricity, running water was sporadic and unhealthy, and raw sewage flowed through the streets, encouraging luxuriant plant growth among the ruins of the war.
The social fabric of Lebanon was no less damaged. Memories of atrocities and of injustices that would never be redressed divided Lebanon’s many communities long after peace had been declared. A combination of reconciliation, amnesia, and a fierce drive to get on with life enabled the Lebanese to act like a nation again. Some have argued that the Lebanese have emerged stronger in their commitment to their nation as a consequence.32 Yet Lebanon remains a volatile country in which the threat of renewed conflict is never far from consciousness.
Saddam Hussein’s invasion, and the American-led war to liberate Kuwait, had the unintended consequence of forcing America to address the long-simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The American government recognized that the Kuwait crisis had placed its Arab allies under tremendous pressure. However cynical, Saddam Hussein’s frequent references to liberating Palestine had earned him widespread popular support across the Arab world and exposed other Arab governments to public condemnation. Arab citizens believed their governments had lost the plot: they should be fighting Israel to liberate Palestine, not fighting Iraq on America’s behalf to liberate Kuwaiti wealth and oil.
America too came under widespread condemnation in the Arab press and public opinion. For years the Americans had supported Israel while it flaunted U.N. resolutions calling for the restoration of occupied Arab lands. In 1990, Israel remained in occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and parts of southern Lebanon. Yet when Iraq invaded Kuwait, America invoked UN Security Council resolutions as though they were sacrosanct. Occupation was either right or wrong, and UN resolutions either were binding or they weren’t. The double standard in treatment of Iraq and Israel as occupiers was self-evident.
President George H. W. Bush rejected Saddam Hussein’s attempts to link an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait to an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories. But he could not escape the logic of the Iraqi demand. No sooner had the Iraq conflict ended than the Bush administration announced a new Arab-Israeli peace initiative, in March 1991. It was a transparent bid to regain the initiative and demonstrate that, in the New World Order, America could use its power as effectively in peace as in war.
Palestinians greeted the news of the American initiative to restart the peace process with some relief. Their support for Saddam Hussein and his occupation of Kuwait had cost the Palestinians dearly. The international community shunned the PLO, and the Arab Gulf states cut all funding to the Palestinians. Though the Bush administration made clear they had no intention of rewarding the PLO for its stance in the recent conflict, the new peace initiative could only serve to break the Palestinians out of their isolation.
Palestinian activist Sari Nusseibeh celebrated the Bush initiative in his cell in Ramle Prison. Nusseibeh was coming to the end of his three-month sentence, ostensibly for guiding Iraqi Scuds against Israeli targets, when Bush made his announcement in March 1991. The American initiative came as a total surprise to Nusseibeh. “Out of the blue George Bush, Sr., made a stunning policy statement: ‘A comprehensive peace must be grounded in resolution 242 and 338 and the principle of territory for peace.’” Bush went on to link Israeli security to Palestinian rights. And his secretary of state, James Baker, declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank the greatest obstacle to peace. “I was dancing in my tiny cage after hearing this,” Nusseibeh recalled in his memoirs.33
Some Palestinians were more skeptical of American intentions. Hanan Ashrawi, one of Nusseibeh’s colleagues at Bir Zeit University and a leading Palestinian political activist, dissected the language of Bush’s statement. “The claim was that [Bush] would ‘invest the credibility that the United States had gained in the war in order to bring peace to the region.’ We read that as claiming the spoils of war.” Ashrawi saw the whole peace initiative as an American effort to subordinate the Middle East to its rules. “The claim was that a ‘New World Order’ was emerging with the end of the Cold War and that we were part of it. We read that as a reorganization of our world according to the American blueprint. The claim was that a window of opportunity was opening up for a Middle East reconciliation. We read that as a peephole, a long tunnel, or a trap.”34
The first thing the Americans made clear to the Palestinians was that they would not allow the PLO to play any role in the negotiations. The Israeli government categorically refused to attend any meeting with the PLO, and the Americans were intent on sidelining Yasser Arafat in retribution for his support of Saddam Hussein.
U.S. secretary of state James Baker went to Jerusalem in March 1991 to invite Palestinian leaders from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to take part in a peace conference and negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The Palestinians saw the Baker initiative as a blatant attempt to create an alternate Palestinian leadership. They wanted no part in undermining the PLO’s internationally recognized position as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The “insider” political activists wrote to Tunis for official approval from Arafat before agreeing to meet with Baker on March 13.
Eleven Palestinians attended the first meeting, chaired by the Jerusalemite Faisal al-Husseini. The son of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, whose death in the 1948 battle of al-Qastal marked the defeat of Palestinian resistance to Zionism, Faisal al-Husseini was the scion of one of Jerusalem’s oldest and most respected families. He was also a loyal Fatah member with close ties to Yasser Arafat.
“We are here at the behest of the PLO, our sole legitimate leadership,” al-Husseini began.
“Whom you choose as your leadership is your own business,” Baker responded. “I am looking for Palestinians from the Occupied Territories who are not PLO members and who are willing to enter into direct bilateral two-phased negotiations on the basis of UNSC resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of land for peace, and who are willing to live in peace with Israel. Are there any in this room?” Baker looked the eleven Palestinians in the face, but they were not to be rushed.
“We must remind you, Mr. Secretary, that we are a people with dignity and pride. We are not defeated, and this is not Safwan Tent,” said Saeb Erakat, referring to the tent set up by the Americans to negotiate the terms of Iraq’s surrender at the end of the Gulf War. The burly Erakat was an English-trained professor of political science at al-Najah University in Nablus.
“It’s not my fault you backed the losing side,” Baker retorted. “You should tell your leadership not to back the wrong horse; that was absolutely stupid. There’s a big price to be paid.”
“I’ve agreed to come to this meeting to talk about one thing only,” said Haidar Abdel Shafi. A physician and president of the Gaza Medical Association, Abdel Shafi was the senior statesman in the Occupied Territories and had served as speaker of the Palestinian parliament while Gaza was under Egyptian rule, from 1948 to 1967. “Israeli settlement activities in the Occupied Territories must stop. There will be no peace process while the settlements continue. You can count on hearing this from me all the time.”
“Begin negotiations, and the settlements will stop,” Baker responded.
“They must stop before, or we can’t enter the process,” the Palestinian activists replied in chorus.
Secretary Baker recognized that the conversation was turning to negotiation, and that he had found a credible group to represent Palestine at the peace conference. “Now you’re talking business,” he said with some satisfaction.35
That first exchange initiated six months of negotiations between the Americans and the Palestinians that ultimately framed the agenda for the peace conference held in Madrid in October 1992. The Americans moved between the Israelis and Palestinians, trying to bridge nearly irreconcilable positions to ensure a successful conference.
The Israeli government proved a far greater impediment to American peace plans than the Palestinians. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir headed a right-wing Likud coalition that was committed to retaining all of the Occupied Territories, especially East Jerusalem. With the end of the Cold War, Soviet Jews enjoyed the liberty to emigrate to Israel, and the Israeli government was determined to reserve its options on all the land under its control to accommodate the new wave of immigrants. Israel was stepping up its settlement activity both to extend its claim to West Bank territory and to provide new housing for Russian immigrants.
For the Palestinian negotiators, East Jerusalem and the settlements were red line issues: If the Israelis retained all of Jerusalem and allowed continued construction on occupied land in the West Bank, there would be nothing left to discuss. The Palestinians saw the two issues as inextricably linked. “It couldn’t have been an accident that the Israelis wanted to bracket out the settlements and East Jerusalem,” Sari Nusseibeh reflected. “Of the two, the issue of East Jerusalem bothered me most. The fight over Jerusalem was existential, not because it is a magical city but because it was, and is, the center of our culture, national identity, and memory—things the Israelis had to extirpate if they were to have their way throughout what they called Judea and Samaria [i.e., the West Bank]. As long as we held on to Jerusalem,” Nusseibeh concluded, “I was certain we could resist them everywhere else.”36
The Bush administration showed sympathy for the Palestinian position, and was clearly irritated by the intransigence of Shamir and his Likud government in the lead-up to the Madrid Conference. Nevertheless, in many ways, the United States continued to privilege Israeli demands over Palestinian arguments. The Israelis insisted on the total exclusion of the PLO from the process, that the Palestinians only be allowed to attend the conference as junior partners in a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, and that no resident of East Jerusalem be accredited to the negotiations. This meant that some of the most influential Palestinians, like Faisal al-Husseini, Hanan Ashrawi, and Sari Nusseibeh, were barred from an official role in the Madrid negotiations. Instead, on Arafat’s suggestion, Husseini and Ashrawi accompanied the official Palestinian delegation, headed by Dr Abdul Shafi, as an unofficial “Guidance Committee.”
In spite of the restrictions, the Palestinian delegation that accompanied the Jordanians to Madrid were the most eloquent and persuasive spokespeople ever to represent their national aspirations on the international stage. Hanan Ashrawi was designated the official spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation. Ashrawi had studied at the American University of Beirut and took her doctorate in English literature from the University of Virginia before returning to teach at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. A brilliant woman of great eloquence from a Christian family, Ashrawi was the antithesis of the stereotype of a terrorist that many in the West associated with the Palestinian cause.
Once in Madrid, Ashrawi devoted herself to wooing the media, so as to swing coverage in the Palestinians’ favor. Strategically, she knew how important it was for the Palestinian delegation to win over the international press to compensate for their weak position at the negotiating table. Ashrawi showed great ingenuity at putting the Palestinians’ message across in Madrid. When denied access to the official press center, Ashrawi created chaos by convening impromptu press conferences in public spaces that attracted more journalists than any other delegation at Madrid. When Spanish security measure proved too stringent, she took over a municipal park where camera crews could set up beyond the restrictions of the security forces. In one day alone she gave twenty-seven extensive interviews to international television networks. The Israeli delegation’s spokesman, Benjamin Netanyahu, struggled to keep up with the charismatic Palestinian woman who consistently stole the show.
Ashrawi’s most enduring contribution to the Madrid conference was the speech she drafted for Haidar Abdul Shafi to deliver on behalf of the Palestinian delegation on October 31, 1991. With his grave demeanor and deep, rich voice, Abdul Shafi matched in dignity what Ashrawi’s text conveyed in eloquence. He began with greetings to the assembled dignitaries before launching into the heart of his text, fixing the global audience with his penetrating gaze. “We meet in Madrid, a city with the rich texture of history, to weave together the fabric which joins our past with the future,” he intoned before the assembled Israelis, Arabs, and members of the international community. “Once again, Christian, Moslem, and Jew face the challenge of heralding a new era enshrined in global values of democracy, human rights, freedom, justice, and security. From Madrid we launch this quest for peace, a quest to place the sanctity of human life at the center of our world and to redirect our energies and resources from the pursuit of mutual destruction to the pursuit of joint prosperity, progress, and happiness.”37 Abdul Shafi took care to speak on behalf of all Palestinians, in exile as well as under occupation. “We are here together seeking a just and lasting peace whose cornerstone is freedom for Palestine, justice for the Palestinians, and an end to the occupation of all Palestinian and Arab lands. Only then can we really enjoy together the fruits of peace: prosperity, security and human dignity and freedom.” It was a brilliant debut performance for the Palestinian delegation, making their first appearance on the stage of world diplomacy.
Abdul Shafi’s speech provoked divided reactions from Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The Islamist Hamas movement, unreconciled to a two-state solution, had announced its opposition to participation in the conference from the outset. Secular Palestinians were fearful that their delegation might come under such pressure from the United States and Israel as to make concessions inconsistent with Palestinian national aspirations. After four years of the Intifada, all Palestinians wanted to see some concrete results for their years of struggle and sacrifice.
As the Palestinians had most to gain from Madrid, their speech was the most forward-looking. The other delegations paid lip service to the historic nature of the conference but otherwise used the occasion to review past grievances. The Lebanese focused on the ongoing Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, the Israeli premier catalogued Arab efforts to destroy the Jewish state, and the Syrian foreign minister provided a list of “inhuman Israeli practices” to make clear his distaste at having to meet with the Israelis at all.
After three days together, the delegates took off their gloves and openly brawled in their closing speeches. Prime Minister Shamir set a vituperative tone; he lambasted the Syrians, offering to “recite a litany of facts that demonstrate the extent to which Syria merits the dubious honor of being one of the most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world.” He patronized the Palestinians, claiming Abdul Shafi “made a valiant effort at recounting the sufferings of his people,” though he accused the Palestinian of “twisting history and perversion of fact.” At his speech’s conclusion, Shamir stormed out of the conference hall with his delegation, ostensibly to observe the Jewish Sabbath.
Abdul Shafi responded angrily, addressing his words to the empty seats vacated by the Israeli delegation. “The Palestinians are a people with legitimate national rights. We are not ‘the inhabitants of territories’ or an accident of history or an obstacle to Israel’s expansionist plans, or an abstract demographic problem. You may wish to close your eyes to this fact, Mr. Shamir, but we are here in the sight of the world, before your very eyes, and we shall not be denied.”
The exchange of insults reached its climax when the outraged Syrian foreign minister pulled out a British “Wanted” poster for Yitzhak Shamir dating back to his days in the Stern Gang fighting the British mandate in Palestine. “Let me show you an old picture of Shamir, when he was 32 years old,” Farouk al-Shara‘a said, brandishing the poster and pausing to note Shamir’s diminutive stature—“165 cm,” he sneered. Warming to his theme, Shara’a continued: “This picture was distributed because he was wanted. He himself confessed he was a terrorist. He confessed he . . . participated in murdering U.N. mediator Count Bernadotte in 1948, as far as I remember. He kills peace mediators and talks about Syria, Lebanon, terrorism.”38
Shara’a’s tirade was an unedifying spectacle that bode ill for the prospect of Arab-Israeli peace. On that sour note, the Madrid conference came to an end. Yet with the conclusion of the formal conference, a new phase of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations opened under American auspices: bilateral negotiations to resolve the differences between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and multilateral talks involving over forty states and international organizations to address issues of global concern such as water, the environment, arms control, refugees, and economic development. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the Madrid process initiated the most extensive peace negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors in over forty years of conflict.
The bilateral negotiations were intended to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict by returning occupied land in exchange for peace, in line with UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. But the divergent ways in which the Arabs and Israelis interpreted these resolutions bedeviled negotiations from the outset. The Arab states seized on the principle of the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” set out in the preamble of the resolution to argue for a full Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territory occupied in the June 1967 War as a prerequisite for peace. The Israelis, in contrast, claimed that the resolution only required “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied” in the 1967 War—not all territories, just “territories”—and insisted they had already fulfilled their commitments to Resolution 242 by withdrawing from the Sinai Peninsula following the peace treaty with Egypt. The Israelis argued that the Arab parties had to sue for peace for its own sake and negotiate a mutually acceptable territorial solution without preconditions. No progress was achieved in talks between Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
Talks between Israel and the Palestinians had a different focus. The two sides agreed to negotiate the terms of a five-year interim period of Palestinian self-rule, after which they would enter into final negotiations to conclude the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But once the negotiations began, the Shamir government did everything in its power to prevent meaningful progress with the Palestinians, and it stepped up settlement activity to deepen Israel’s hold over the West Bank. In an interview after his electoral defeat in 1992, Shamir confirmed his government had obstructed negotiations to prevent Palestinian statehood and retain the West Bank for Israeli settlements. “I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years, and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria.”39
Shamir’s stonewalling came to an end when his government was defeated at the polls. The Israeli elections of 1992 brought Yitzhak Rabin to power at the head of a left-leaning Labor coalition. Rabin’s reputation as the man who had authorized physical violence against Intifada demonstrators gave the Palestinian negotiators little grounds for confidence that “Rabin the bone-breaker” could “become Rabin the peacemaker.”40
In his first months in office, Rabin delivered more continuity than change in the deadlocked bilateral negotiations. In December 1992, Hamas activists kidnapped and murdered an Israeli border guard. Rabin retaliated by ordering the roundup and deportation to Lebanon of 416 suspects without charge or trial. All Arab delegations suspended negotiations in protest. If anything, Rabin appeared to be even more of a hard-liner than Shamir.
Bill Clinton’s surprise defeat of George H. W. Bush in the American presidential elections in 1992 raised concerns among the Arab negotiation teams. During the presidential campaign, Clinton had made clear his unconditional support for Israel. The Arab delegations did not believe the change in presidents bode well for them. Although negotiations did resume in April 1993, the Clinton administration took a hands-off approach to the negotiations, and in the absence of strong American leadership the framework launched by the Madrid conference reached a dead end.
The breakthrough in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations came from a change in Israeli policy. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his deputy, Yossi Beilin, were convinced that a settlement with the Palestinians was in Israel’s national interest. They also recognized that a settlement could only be reached through direct negotiations with the PLO. Yet since 1986, Israelis had been forbidden by law to meet with members of the PLO. By 1992, the number of Israeli journalists and politicians who had violated the ban had grown to such an extent as to make the law irrelevant. Yet the Israeli government could not knowingly break Israeli law. Rabin was not enthusiastic about dealing with the PLO, but he agreed to overturn the law banning contact between Israeli citizens and the PLO in December 1992.
The following month, Yossi Beilin gave the green light for two Israeli academics, Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak, to meet in secret with the PLO treasurer, Ahmad Qurie, in Oslo, Norway. It was the beginning of an intense and fruitful negotiation conducted through fourteen meetings under the auspices of the Norwegian foreign ministry.
The Norwegians were impartial brokers who provided the neutral terrain and discretion to allow the Palestinians and Israelis to work out their differences with minimal interference. The Norwegian facilitator, Terje Roed Larsen, set out his country’s role as the Palestinians and Israelis began the first round of secret diplomacy. “If you want to live together, you have to solve your own problems,” Larsen insisted. “It is your problem. We are here to give you the assistance you might need, the place, the practicalities, and so on. We can be facilitators . . . but nothing more. I will wait outside and will not interfere unless you come to blows. Then I will interfere.” Larsen’s humor helped break the ice between the two delegations. “This made us all laugh,” PLO official Ahmed Qurie recalled, “as it was meant to.”41
Qurie, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Ala, had never met an Israeli prior to his first encounter with Professor Yair Hirschfeld, and he brought to the table all of the dread and mistrust accumulated over years of mutual hostility between Palestinians and Israelis. Yet in the isolation of the Norwegian winter, the five men—three Palestinians and two Israelis—began to break down barriers. “The atmosphere in the house became more relaxed, and though we still felt on our side some mistrust of the Israelis, we nonetheless began somewhat to warm to them.” In their first meeting, the delegates set a pattern they were to follow through future rounds. Putting recriminations over the past behind them, Abu Ala recalled, “we focused our attention on the present and the future, trying to gauge the extent to which we had common ground, to identify such points of agreement as we might reach, and to estimate the distance which separated us on the various issues.”42
Behind closed doors, in total secrecy, Palestinians and Israelis discussed their differences and secured their governments’ backing for a framework to resolve them—in eight brief months. They experienced breakdowns, and the Norwegians occasionally had to play a more active role. Foreign Minister Johan Joergen Holst even engaged in a bit of discrete telephone diplomacy between Tunis and Tel Aviv to help overcome deadlocks. Yet by August 1993, the two sides had concluded an agreement they were willing to take public.
When Israel and the PLO announced their agreement on Palestinian interim self-rule in Gaza and Jericho, they caught the world by surprise—and faced predictable criticism. The Clinton administration was nonplussed to see the Norwegians succeed where the Americans had failed in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. In Israel, the opposition Likud Party accused the Rabin government of betrayal and promised to annul the accord when it returned to power. The Arab world criticized the PLO for breaking Arab ranks to conclude a secret deal with the Israelis, and Palestinian dissident groups condemned their leadership for extending recognition to Israel.
Oslo was a desperate gamble for Yasser Arafat, but the PLO chairman was running out of options. The Palestinian movement faced imminent financial and institutional collapse in 1993. The oil states of the Gulf had severed all financial support to the PLO in retribution for Arafat’s support of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf crisis. By December 1991 the PLO’s budget had been halved. Thousands of fighters and employees were made redundant or went months without pay; by March 1993, up to one-third of all PLO personnel received no pay at all. The financial crisis led to charges of corruption and maladministration that split PLO ranks.43 The PLO as a government in exile would not long survive the pressures. A peace deal with Israel stood the chance of opening new sources of financial support and would give the PLO a toehold in Palestine on which it could realize the elusive goal of a two-state solution.
The Oslo Accords offered the Palestinians little more than a toe-hold. The deal provided for a provisional Palestinian authority over the Gaza Strip and an enclave surrounding the West Bank town of Jericho. For many Palestinians these seemed small territorial gains for such important Palestinian concessions to Israel. Arafat confided his strategy to Hanan Ashrawi shortly before the Oslo Accords were announced: “I will get full withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho as the first step of disengagement, and there I will exercise sovereignty. I want Jericho because it will get me to Jerusalem and link up Gaza with the West Bank.” Ashrawi looked unconvinced. “Trust me, we will soon have our own telephone country code, stamps, and television station. This will be the beginning of the Palestinian state.”44
The “Gaza-Jericho First” plan became a reality with the signing of the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993. Before a global television audience, Yitzhak Rabin overcame his reluctance and shook Yasser Arafat’s hand, sealing the deal. “All Arab television stations carried the ceremony live,” Abu Ala recalled. “Many people around the Arab world could scarcely believe what was happening.”45
The PLO and Israel had agreed to what was effectively a partition plan for Palestine. The document called for the withdrawal of Israeli military administration from Jericho and the Gaza Strip and its replacement with a Palestinian civil administration for a five-year interim period. It also provided for the creation of an elected council so that the people of Palestine would be governed “according to democratic principles.” The Palestinian Authority would gain control over education and culture, health, social welfare, taxation, and tourism. Palestinian police would provide security for the areas under Palestinian control.
The agreement deferred discussion of the most controversial issues. The future of Jerusalem, the rights of refugees, the status of settlements, borders, and security arrangements were all to be addressed in final status negotiations set to begin three years into the interim period. The Palestinians expected more from the permanent settlement than the Israelis were likely to concede: an independent Palestinian state in the whole of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Israelis anticipated a disengagement from unessential Arab territory leading to a demilitarized Palestinian entity. Leaving such fundamental disagreement to future negotiations, the Israeli Knesset ratified the Declaration of Principles with a comfortable majority, and the eighty-member Palestinian Central Council gave its overwhelming approval (sixty-three in favor, eight opposed, with nine abstentions) on October 11.
By May 1994 the technical details surrounding the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the establishment of Palestinian rule in Gaza and Jericho had been ironed out. Yasser Arafat made his triumphant return to Gaza to oversee the running of the Palestinian Authority on July 1. In September, Arafat and Rabin returned to Washington to sign the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, known as Oslo II. Middle Eastern politics had entered the Oslo Era.
The Oslo Accords gained Israel unprecedented acceptance in the Arab world. Once the Palestinians had struck a unilateral deal with the Israelis, the other Arab countries felt free to pursue their own interests toward the Jewish state without risking accusations of betraying the Palestinian cause. For the most part, the Arab world had grown weary of the Arab-Israel conflict and was pragmatic in its views of Israel. The Jordanians were the first to respond to the new realities.
Once the Oslo Accords had been announced, the Jordanians did not hesitate. King Hussein saw peace with Israel as the best way for Jordan to break from the isolation it had suffered since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. King Hussein also believed that Jordan would be rewarded for making peace by substantial U.S. aid and international investment into his country. The day after the White House signing of the Declaration of Principles, representatives of Israel and Jordan met in the offices of the U.S. State Department to sign an agenda for peace that the two sides had worked out over the course of bilateral negotiations in Madrid.
On July 25, 1994, King Hussein and Prime Minister Rabin were invited back to Washington to sign a preliminary peace agreement, ending the belligerency between the two states, agreeing to settle all territorial issues in accordance with UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and recognizing a special role for the Hashemite monarchy in the Muslim holy places of Jerusalem. The final Jordan-Israel peace treaty was signed on the border between the two countries in the Araba Desert on October 26, 1994. Jordan became the second Arab state after Egypt to exchange ambassadors and normalize relations with the Jewish state.
The deals with the PLO and Jordan paved the way for other Arab governments to establish ties with Israel. In October 1994, Morocco and Israel agreed to open liaison offices in each other’s capital, and Tunisia followed suit in January 1996. Both countries have significant Jewish minority communities with long-standing ties to Israel. Mauritania, a member state of the Arab League in northwest Africa, established formal relations with Israel and exchanged ambassadors in November 1999. Two of the Arab Gulf states established trade offices with Israel—the Sultanate of Oman, in January 1996; and Qatar in April of the same year. Confounding those who had long argued that the Arab world could never live in peace with the Jewish state, the Oslo Era demonstrated widespread Arab acceptance of Israel from North Africa through the Gulf.
Yet the Oslo process continued to face strong opposition in some quarters—nowhere more intensely than in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Extremists from both Israel and the Palestinian territories resorted to violence in a bid to derail the peace agreements. Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for a number of lethal attacks on Israelis in the immediate aftermath of the signing of the Declaration of Principles in September 1993. Israeli extremists stepped up their own attacks on Palestinians as well. In February 1994 Baruch Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron dressed in his Israeli army reserves uniform and opened fire on the worshipers gathered for dawn prayers, killing 29 and wounding 150 before being overwhelmed and killed by survivors of the attack. Goldstein was a medical doctor and resident of Kiryat Arba, a militant settlement neighboring Hebron that posthumously honored Goldstein for his act of mass murder with a graveside plaque reading: “To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah and the nation of Israel.”
The gulf between Palestinian and Israeli extremists was growing wider. Outrage over the Hebron massacre led to an escalation of Palestinian attacks and an increase in suicide bombings designed to inflict maximum casualties. In April 1994, suicide bombings on buses in Afula and Hadera claimed thirteen lives, and twenty-two people were killed by a suicide attack on a bus in Tel Aviv in October 1994. The Israelis responded by assassinating Islamist leaders. Israeli agents killed Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shiqaqi in Malta in October 1995 and used a booby-trapped mobile phone to kill Hamas leader Yahya ’Ayyash in January 1996. Israelis and Palestinians found themselves locked in a cycle of violence and retaliation that gravely undermined confidence in the Oslo process.
One murder presaged the end of the Oslo process. On November 4, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin addressed a mass peace rally in downtown Tel Aviv. The Israeli premier was visibly moved by the sea of faces 150,000-strong, united by their common belief in Palestinian-Israeli peace. “This rally must send a message to the Israeli public, to the Jews of the world, to the multitudes in the Arab lands and in the world at large, that the nation of Israel wants peace, support[s] peace,” Rabin intoned, “and for this I thank you.”46 Rabin then led the crowd in a peace song before taking his leave.
One man came to the rally to put an end to the peace process. As Rabin was escorted from the podium back to his car, an Israeli law student named Yigal Amir broke through a gap in the prime minister’s security cordon and shot him dead. In his trial, Amir openly confessed to the assassination, explaining that he had killed Rabin to put a stop to the peace process. Convinced of the Jewish people’s divine right to the whole of the Land of Israel, Amir believed it his duty as a religious Jew to prevent any exchange of land for peace. In an instant, a process that had withstood many acts of violence between Palestinians and Israelis fell to a single act of violence between Israelis.
Rabin was the indispensable man for the Oslo process. His immediate successor as prime minister was his old rival Shimon Peres. Though an architect of Oslo, Peres did not enjoy the same degree of public confidence as Rabin. The Israeli voters did not place the trust in Peres that an enduring land-for-peace settlement required.
Deemed weak on security, Peres tried to confound his critics by launching a military campaign against Hizbullah in retaliation for its attacks on Israeli positions in South Lebanon and missile attacks on northern Israel. The April 1996 initiative, Operation Grapes of Wrath, confirmed voters’ doubts about Peres’s judgment on security issues. The massive incursion into Lebanon displaced 400,000 Lebanese civilians and provoked widespread international condemnation when the Israeli air force bombed a UN base in the southern Lebanese village of Qana, killing 102 refugees who were seeking shelter from the assault. The operation was brought to an ignominious end by American mediation, with no visible benefit to Israel’s security. Peres was punished by voters in the May 1996 election, when Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu won the premiership by the slenderest of margins.
Netanyahu’s election set Israel on a collision course with its Oslo commitments. Netanyahu and his party had consistently opposed the principle of exchanging land for peace. Although he did succumb to American pressure to conclude a redeployment scheme from the West Bank town of Hebron, Netanyahu’s minor land for peace deal left Israel in full control of more than 71 percent of the West Bank, and in control of security over 23 percent of the other territories. This was a far cry from the 90 percent transfer the Palestinians expected from the Oslo II agreement.
In his battle for Jerusalem, Netanyahu used the settlement movement to create unalterable facts on the ground. He commissioned 6,500 housing units on Jabal Abu Ghunaym to create a new settlement called Har Homa, which would complete the encirclement of Arab East Jerusalem with Israeli settlements. By encircling Jerusalem with Jewish settlements, Netanyahu intended to preempt any pressure to surrender the Arab parts of the city occupied in June 1967 to the Palestinian Authority. Har Homa was the latest of an escalating settlement policy that, more than any other factor, led to the collapse in Palestinian confidence in the Oslo process.
After three years in office, Netanyahu lost the confidence of his own party and, dogged by corruption scandals, was forced to call for new elections in May 1999. He was defeated, and the Labor Party returned to power under another retired general, Ehud Barak. One of Barak’s campaign promises had been to end Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon and withdraw all Israeli troops within one year if elected. The occupation of South Lebanon had grown increasingly unpopular in Israel, as persistent attacks by Hizbullah inflicted regular casualties on Israeli forces.
Having won a landslide victory over Netanyahu, Barak made the Lebanon withdrawal one of his first priorities. However, efforts to effect a smooth transfer of power from the departing Israeli forces to their local proxies of the South Lebanon army collapsed as the collaborators surrendered to Hizbullah units. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal degenerated into an unseemly retreat under fire, leaving Hizbullah to claim victory in its eighteen-year campaign to drive the Israelis from Lebanon. Israel’s top brass chafed, eagerly awaiting the next opportunity to settle the score with the Shiite militia.
The opportunity for future conflict was preserved in a territorial anomaly. Israel withdrew from all of Lebanon except the disputed “Shiba’ Farms” enclave, a strip of land 22 square kilometers (8 square miles) in area along Lebanon’s frontier with the occupied Golan Heights. Israel claims to this day that it is occupied Syrian territory, whereas Syria and Lebanon insist it is Lebanese territory. Hizbullah takes Shiba’ Farms as a pretext for continuing its armed resistance against Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory.
Once out of Lebanon, Prime Minister Barak resumed negotiations with the PLO. In view of Israel’s actions under Netanyahu, there was little trust or goodwill between the two sides. Yasser Arafat accused the Israelis of failing to meet their treaty obligations under the Oslo Accords and pressed Barak to respect unfulfilled commitments under the interim agreements. Barak, in comparison, wanted to proceed directly to discuss a permanent settlement. The Israeli premier believed that negotiations with the Palestinians had been undermined through endless disputes over interim details, and he wanted to take advantage of the closing months of the Clinton presidency to secure a permanent settlement.
Bill Clinton invited Barak and Arafat to a summit meeting at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland. The three leaders met for two weeks in July 2000, and though bold new ideas were put on the table, the summit ended without any substantive progress toward a settlement. A second summit was held in the Egyptian resort of Taba in January 2001. There, the Israelis offered the most generous terms yet tabled; even so, the Taba proposals still left too much of the proposed Palestinian state under Israeli control to serve as a permanent settlement. The failure of the Camp David and Taba summits led to bitter recriminations and finger pointing, as both the American and the Israeli teams wrongly placed the blame for failure on Arafat and the Palestinian delegation. The trust and goodwill necessary for Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking had evaporated.
The Oslo framework had been flawed, but it brought Israel and the Arab world closer to peace than at any point since the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. The gains of Oslo were very significant. Israel and the PLO had overcome decades of mutual hostility to exchange recognition and enter into meaningful negotiations toward a two-state solution. The Palestinian leadership left exile in Tunisia to begin building its own state in the Palestinian territories. Israel broke its isolation within the Middle East, establishing formal ties with a number of Arab countries for the first time, and overcoming an Arab League economic boycott that had been in place since 1948. These were important foundations upon which to build an enduring peace.
Unfortunately, the process was inextricably linked to building confidence between the two sides and to generating sufficient economic prosperity that Palestinians and Israelis would be willing to make the difficult compromises necessary for a permanent settlement. Whereas the Oslo years were a period of economic growth for Israel, the Palestinian economy suffered recession and stagnation. The World Bank recorded a significant decline in living standards over the Oslo years and estimated that one in four residents of the West Bank and Gaza had been reduced to poverty by 2000. Unemployment rates reached 22 percent.47 The decline in living standards between 1993 and 2000 produced widespread disillusion with the Oslo process.
Israel’s decision to expand the settlements was also a key factor in dooming the Oslo accords. As far as the Palestinians were concerned, settlements were illegal in international law and their continued expansion contravened the terms of the Oslo II Accords.48Yet the Oslo years witnessed the greatest expansion of Israeli settlements since 1967. The number of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem rose from 247,000 in 1993 to 375,000 in 2000—a 52 percent increase.49 Settlements were built in areas Israel wanted to retain either because of their proximity to urban centers within Israel or to crucial aquifers, providing control over scarce water resources in the West Bank. Palestinians accused the Israelis of forsaking land-for-peace for a land grab, while the guarantor of the process, the United States, turned a blind eye.
The Palestinians expected nothing less of the Oslo process than an independent state on all of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinians knew their position was supported by international law and believed it was reinforced by the demographic reality that the territories were almost exclusively inhabited by Palestinians. The PLO had come to recognize the state of Israel in the 78 percent of Palestine conquered in 1948, and the Palestinians held to their rights over the remaining 22 percent of the land. With so little space on which to build a viable Palestinian state, there was no room for further concessions.
The expansion of settlements contributed significantly to public anger at a process Palestinians believed failed to deliver statehood, security of property, or prosperity. That anger boiled over in a series of violent demonstrations that broke out in September 2000 and developed into a new popular uprising. Whereas the First Intifada (1987–1993) had been marked by civil disobedience and nonviolence, the second uprising was very violent indeed.
The outbreak of the Second Intifada followed a visit by Ariel Sharon, who had risen to lead the right-wing Likud Party, to East Jerusalem on September 28, 2000. At the Camp David summit, Prime Minister Ehud Barak had raised the possibility of relinquishing East Jerusalem to Palestinian control and for Jerusalem to serve as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. The proposal was enormously controversial in Israel, prompting some of the members of Barak’s coalition to withdraw from the government in protest, which in turn required a new election.
For Sharon, Jerusalem was a vote winner. He chose to visit the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem to reinforce his party’s claim to preserve Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel and to launch his campaign to unseat Barak as prime minister. The Temple Mount, known in Arabic as the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary), was the site of Judaism’s Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, and, since the seventh century, home to the Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site after Mecca and Medina. Because of its significance to both Judaism and Islam, the Temple Mount is politically charged territory.
Sharon arrived in Arab East Jerusalem on September 28, 2000, with an escort of 1,500 armed police and toured the Haram al-Sharif. In his comments to the press pack that followed the Likud leader, Sharon asserted his commitment to preserve Israeli rule over all of Jerusalem. A group of Palestinian dignitaries, on hand to protest Sharon’s presence, were dispersed by Sharon’s security detachment. Television cameras captured Israeli police rough-handling the Aqsa Mosque’s highest-ranking Muslim cleric. “As chance would have it, his turban, a symbol of his exalted spiritual status, got knocked off his head and tumbled into the dust,” Sari Nusseibeh recalled. “Viewers saw the highest Muslim cleric of this highly charged Muslim site standing bareheaded.” This insult to a respected Muslim official in Islam’s third holiest site was enough to provoke a massive turnout the next day for Friday prayers in the Haram. “Armed and nervous [Israeli] border police marched into the Old City by the hundreds, while hundreds of thousands of Muslims poured through the gates from neighborhoods and villages.”
Prayers were conducted without an incident, but as the angry crowd withdrew from the mosque a violent demonstration erupted. Teenagers threw stones from the Haram complex onto Israeli soldiers posted to the Western Wall below. The Israeli border police stormed the Haram complex while soldiers opened fire on the protesters. Within minutes, eight rioters were shot dead and dozens fell wounded. “The ‘Al-Aqsa intifada’ had begun,” Sari Nusseibeh recorded. 50
The deterioration in public order played to Sharon’s advantage, given his reputation for being tough on security, and he swept to power in February 2001. Israel’s bellicose new prime minister was more interested in land than peace, and his election only exacerbated volatility between Israelis and Palestinians. At the start of a new millennium, the Middle East was further from peace than ever.
As the twentieth century came to a close, the Arab world witnessed a number of important transitions. Three leaders who had been pillars of Arab politics for decades died and were succeeded by their sons. The Middle East had been static under a group of long-term rulers. The successions brought a new generation to power, raising hopes for reforms and change. Yet the fact that both monarchies and republics tended to single-family rule weighed against substantial changes.
On February 7, 1999, King Hussein of Jordan died after a prolonged battle with cancer. With nearly forty-seven years on the throne, he was the longest-serving Arab ruler of his generation. Celebrated at home and abroad as a peacemaker, Hussein caused turmoil in his family and country with a last-minute change in his choice of successor. Hussein’s brother Hassan had served as crown prince since 1965. With no warning, Hussein relieved Hassan of his duties and named his eldest son, Abdullah, as his heir and successor less than two weeks before his death. Not only was Abdullah relatively young—he had just turned thirty-seven—but he had spent his entire career in the military, with little preparation to rule. Worse yet was King Hussein’s handling of the change in succession. The dying monarch published a long and angry letter to Prince Hassan in the Jordanian press that was nothing less than a character assassination of his younger brother. Many close to the king explained the letter as a cruel but necessary measure to ensure that Hassan could never mount a challenge to the change in succession. The Jordanians experienced two seismic shocks of the change in succession and the death of their long-ruling monarch within two weeks. Many feared for the future of their precarious country, left in young and inexperienced hands.
Five months later, on July 23, 1999, King Hassan II of Morocco died, ending thirty-eight years on the throne. He was succeeded by his son, Mohammed VI, who was only thirty-six and, like King Abdullah II of Jordan, represented a new generation of Arab leaders. He had trained in politics and law and had spent time in Brussels to familiarize himself with the institutions of the European Union, and his father had been expanding his official duties in the years before his succession. Even so, he remained an unknown quantity to most people at home and abroad, and all were left to wonder how the new king would strike the balance between continuation of his father’s policies and making his own mark on the kingdom.
Dynastic succession was not confined to the Arab monarchies. On June 10, 2000, Syria’s President Hafiz al-Asad died after nearly thirty years in power. The elder Asad had been grooming his son Basil to succeed him until Basil’s untimely death in a car accident in 1994. The grieving president summoned his younger son, Bashar, interrupting Bashar’s medical studies in ophthalmology in London, to prepare him for the succession. Bashar al-Asad entered the military academy in Syria and saw his official duties expanded in the last six years of his father’s life. Bashar assumed office at age thirty-four on the promise of reform. Though many in Syria expected the new president to face serious challenges from within the political establishment, and from the many enemies his father had created in three decades of authoritarian rule, the succession from the strong man of Damascus to his novice son passed without incident.
Other aging leaders around the Arab world were grooming their sons for succession. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein had originally promoted his son Uday as heir apparent. Uday headed a television station and a newspaper in Iraq. Notorious for his homicidal cruelty, Uday Hussein was critically wounded in an assassination attempt in 1996 that left a bullet lodged in his spine. As the limits of Uday’s recovery became apparent, Saddam Hussein began to promote his second son, Qusay, for the leadership role. The leader of Libya, Muammar al-Qadhafi, was rumored to be preparing his sons to inherit power. And in Egypt, Husni Mubarak was promoting his son Gamal and refusing to name a vice president, leading many to assume Gamal would in time assume the presidency.
The most significant succession of 2000, however, took place in the United States. Pundits in the Arab world made jokes at America’s expense as the U.S. Supreme Court awarded an Electoral College victory to George W. Bush, son of former president George H. W. Bush. The fact that the popular vote had slightly favored Bush’s Democratic opponent Al Gore—and that the outcome hinged on faulty ballots and contested recounts in the state of Florida, where Bush’s brother was governor—suggested the Americans were no less dynastic than the Arabs.
In fact, most Arab observers celebrated the victory of George W. Bush in 2000. They saw the Bush family as Texas oil men with good ties to the Arab world. The fact that Al Gore had chosen Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as his vice presidential running mate, the first Jewish candidate on a major U.S. political party presidential ticket, led many in the Arab world to assume that the Democrats would be yet more pro-Israel than the Republicans. And they placed their trust in Bush.
The new President Bush took little interest in the Middle East. He was not a foreign affairs president, and his priorities lay elsewhere. One week before his inauguration, Bush had a meeting with the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet. As part of his intelligence briefing, Tenet presented the president-elect with the three top threats facing the United States: weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Osama bin Ladin, and the emergence of China as a military and economic power.51
Though a number of Arab states were believed to have dangerous weapons programs, including Libya and Syria, the international community was most concerned with Iraq’s WMD. The government of Iraq had been under sustained pressure by the United Nations and the international community to surrender its weapons of mass destruction since the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 687 in April 1991. The resolution called for the destruction of all chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, as well as all ballistic missiles capable of reaching beyond 150 kilometers (93 miles). Saddam Hussein, suspecting the Americans of using the weapons inspection regime as a means to subvert his government, obstructed the work of UN weapons inspectors, who withdrew from Iraq in 1998.
The Clinton administration was determined to topple the government of Saddam Hussein. They upheld stringent trade sanctions on Iraq that had been in place since the invasion of Kuwait, and had caused a humanitarian crisis without weakening Hussein’s grip on government. They maintained strict control over Iraqi airspace by regular British and American air patrols over northern and southern Iraq. In 1998, the Clinton administration introduced legislation—the Iraq Liberation Act—that committed U.S. government funds to support regime change in Iraq. And in December, 1998, after UN weapons inspectors had left Iraq, President Clinton authorized a four-day bombing campaign to “degrade” Iraq’s capacity to produce and use weapons of mass destruction.
George W. Bush preserved Clinton’s policies to contain Iraq and the WMD threat it was believed to pose to the United States.
The American intelligence community was far more concerned about the deepening conflict with Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qaida network than any threat from Iraq. Bin Ladin had invested a great deal of time and energy in al-Qaida’s stated goals of driving the United States out of Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world more broadly. In August 1998 the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were targeted by simultaneous suicide bombings that left over 220 dead and hundreds more wounded—nearly all of them local citizens (only twelve of the fatalities were American citizens). For his role in the embassy bombings, Bin Ladin was placed on the FBI list of ten most wanted criminals. In October 2000, a suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden left seventeen American sailors dead and thirty-nine wounded.
Al-Qaida’s ability to strike at vulnerable points in America’s armor had raised real concerns in White House circles. CIA Director Tenet warned Bush in January 2001 that Bin Ladin and his network posed a “tremendous threat” to the U.S. that was “immediate.” However, unlike Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bin Ladin was a mobile and elusive threat. It was not clear what policy measures the president might authorize to address the Bin Ladin threat.
Bush entered the Oval Office convinced that the threat of Iraqi WMD had been contained, and seems not to have been particularly concerned by the terror threat posed by Bin Ladin and his network. In his first nine months in office Bush made China his top priority.
Extraordinary events on September 11, 2001, would change Bush’s priorities, opening a period of the greatest American engagement with the Middle East in its modern history. It would also prove the moment of greatest tension in modern Arab history.