17

Middle East Maelstroms

As everywhere else in Asia and Africa, the Cold War in the Middle East must be understood as part of a long-term struggle between colonialism and its opponents. What set it apart was the intensity of its conflicts, both domestic and international, and the significance these conflicts achieved at the global level. At times, such as around the 1967 and 1973 wars, it seemed as if the Cold War in the Middle East had hijacked the bipolar world for its purposes. And although not all clashes in the region were linked to the global ideological divide, many political leaders did their utmost to make it sound that way, both for purposes of domestic mobilization and in order to build alliances against their regional enemies. For Soviets and Americans, the Middle East was a maelstrom that threatened to pull them in toward its vortex, driven by forces they firmly believed they had an interest in, but still always found hard to gauge.

At the end of World War II, most of the Middle East had been controlled by foreign powers. British forces backed up French influence in Syria and Lebanon, as well as further west in the Maghreb. The British themselves occupied Palestine and dominated the governments in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and the Gulf states. Most of the Arabian peninsula was controlled by the conservative, religious Saudi monarchy in alliance with US oil companies. Iran was occupied by the Soviets in the north and the British in the south, ostensibly to keep its oil riches from falling into German hands. It was a colonial world through and through, where Arabs and Persians were always reminded of their status as dominated and controlled.

A decade or so later this political landscape was transformed. British and French domination was increasingly a thing of the past, and the 1956 Suez Crisis confirmed European frailties. So did France’s failing colonial war in Algeria. Arab nationalist revolutions were driving politics in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Palestine was divided between the new religiously defined state of Israel and territories occupied by Egypt and Jordan. In this rapidly changing Middle East successive US Administrations, and their European and Japanese allies, believed that it was critical to secure oil supplies and retain a Western strategic presence. The Soviets, meanwhile, hoped that radical nationalists would break away from capitalist control and form alliances with Moscow. Some CPSU theoreticians thought that shutting off cheap Middle Eastern oil could help produce the ultimate crisis of capitalism, while Red Army planners knew that in case of war NATO armies depended on imported oil. On both sides, it was a heady mix of dreams and apprehensions that linked the Middle East’s nightmarish politics with the Cold War conflict.

In addition to its oil supplies, there were two other main connectors between the Middle East and Cold War. One was the conflict within the region between secular and religious politics. In every country in the Middle East, secularists—mainly, but not always, socialists—confronted those who believed that government should be organized according to religious prescripts. In the Arab world, the nationalists who had the upper hand were socialist secularists who admitted some role for religion, but generally persecuted the Islamists, the minority who believed in religious rule. An exception was Saudi Arabia, but even there the conservative aristocrats in power were far too preoccupied securing their own income from the country’s oil wealth and exploiting their US alliance for domestic security purposes to risk any independent Islamist activity. In Iran, set apart from the Arab Middle East by language, culture, and confession, a young monarch intent on modernizing his country under US auspices ruthlessly persecuted those members of the Shia clergy who believed in religious rule. The Shah felt, with good reason in the 1950s and ’60s, that the majority of conservative mullahs would support him against his arch enemies, the Left and the Iranian Communist Party.

The other connector was the creation of a new Jewish state in the Middle East. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had supported the state of Israel at its inception. But they had done so for very different reasons. For the Americans, Israel was a refuge for Jews from the European Holocaust and, at least for some, the fulfillment of the biblical prophesy of the Jews’ return to their ancestral homeland. It was also the introduction of Western modernity into the Middle East and a potential ally for US foreign policy in the region. For the Soviets, Israel—at least at first—meant more trouble for the British and a victory for a kind of Left-wing Zionism with which even the deeply anti-Semitic Stalin thought he could work with over time. Israel might also be a solution to his own Jewish problem. Stalin had nothing against the thought of sending elderly, infirm, or politically undesirable Soviet Jews to Israel, just like he had moved whole peoples around inside the Soviet Union.

Both Americans and Soviets turned out to have been very mistaken in terms of the significance of the Jewish state for themselves and for the region. Israel’s defeat of the Arab countries in 1948 and the strength and cohesion of Israeli society made it into a force to be reckoned with on its own terms. Israel was beholden to US assistance but not dependent on it, at least not until the 1967 war. It confronted anti-Semitism in the Soviet bloc, simply because it existed there more than anywhere else. But the biggest mistake of the Superpowers in the Middle East was to misjudge the vigor and advance of Arab nationalism, fueled in part by the creation of a Jewish state on Arab territory. For many Arabs, the existence and success of Israel, paired with the number of Palestinian Arab refugees, served as constant reminders of the need to create a unified and powerful Arab nationalist movement that could redeem the Arab nation and speed it toward a modernity of its own.

ARAB NATIONALISM, LIKE other forms of European and Asian nationalisms, came out of the nineteenth century. It found its contemporary form in the years after World War I, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. When European countries refused to give Arab countries their independence, but instead proceeded with a full-scale recolonization of the Middle East, nationalist groups staged open revolts. In 1919 massive demonstrations in Egypt demanded full autonomy and the end of British control. In Iraq the population rebelled the following year. The British crushed the uprising with up to ten thousand Iraqis dead. The 1925 Syrian and Lebanese revolt against French rule cost at least six thousand lives. By the end of World War II, if not before, nationalism was in command of local politics all over the Arab world, and the colonial regimes were receding.

But Arab nationalism did not stop with demands for national independence. For many Arab nationalists, the monarchical regimes that gradually replaced direct colonial rule were almost as bad as the British and French. Nationalist leaders viewed these kings and sheikhs as outgrowths of the colonial presence, who were keen on striking compromises with the former colonial powers for their own personal gain. One by one Arab kings were overthrown by movements that criticized their “society of the half percent” and demanded rapid modernization alongside social equality. The young officers who removed Egypt’s King Farouk in 1952 stressed anti-imperialism, anti-feudalism, and abolition of monopolies as their policy. They also saw the Arab monarchies’ failure to win against Israel in 1948 as a sign of moral decay. “The Arab peoples entered Palestine with the same degree of enthusiasm,” wrote Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the 1952 Egyptian revolution. “They did so on the basis of… a common estimate shared by all as to the outer borders of their security. These peoples left Palestine with a common bitterness and disappointment; then, each in its own internal affairs encountered the same factors, the same ruling forces that had brought about their defeat, and forced them to bow their heads in humiliation and shame.”¹

Nasser’s speeches on Palestine made clear how far he and other nationalists had come in regarding all Arabs as one people. Even though the Arab world had been politically disunited since the thirteenth century, it was quite natural that revolutionaries who wanted rapid change hoped that Arab cultural unity could be translated into a common purpose, not least because it would give added significance to themselves and to their movements. “When the struggle was over in Palestine,” wrote Nasser, “the Arab circle in my eyes had become a single entity.… I have followed developments in the Arab countries, and I find they match, point for point. What happened in Cairo had its counterpart in Damascus the next day, and in Beirut, Amman, Baghdad and elsewhere.… It is a single region. The same circumstances, the same factors, even the same forces, united against all of it… the foremost of these forces was imperialism.”²

Born in 1918, Nasser was an army officer with strong Egyptian nationalist and Pan-Arab views. He saw the struggle for Egyptian independence as part of a wider Arab liberation struggle, which in turn linked to global anti-imperialist and Third World concerns. From the beginning of his political career, Nasser believed in a vague form of socialism, but it had to be a form of governance developed by Arabs themselves in accordance with the principles of Islam. Although Nasser admired the Soviet economic system, he was fearful of Communist political influence in Egypt, and on several occasions imprisoned Left-wing leaders when he thought they went too far in their criticism of the government. But his main domestic enemy was what he considered the religious Right. Nasser openly mocked the Muslim Brotherhood and banned all Islamist organizations after an infuriated member of the Brotherhood tried to assassinate him in 1954. For the Egyptian leader, Islam was first and foremost an inspiration for Arab liberation and regional unity. He abolished Sharia courts and made the religious authorities in Egypt—seen by many worldwide as the main Islamic theologians—issue a fatwa, which said that all Muslims, whether Sunni, Shia, or sectarian, belonged to the same Muslim community.

Nasser’s views on the Cold War were straightforward. He believed that the United States, Britain, and France would attempt to control the Arab world even after the end of colonialism. He saw the conservative Muslim monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, and the Gulf states as instruments in this political and economic oppression. Like the Indians and Indonesia under Sukarno, Nasser turned to the Soviet Union because he believed that Moscow could be an alternative supplier of economic and military aid and know-how. The Soviets, for Nasser, were a likely ally in the struggle for his political aims in the Arab world. His form of nonalignment was one in which he guarded his independence, united with other Third World countries, and worked ever-more closely with the Soviets in the pursuit of Nasser’s own aims. Domestically, his proof of his Cold War policies’ success was the Soviet financing of the Aswan Dam, the world’s largest dam project, which Nasser sought and received after he felt that the Americans would attach political strings to their aid. When the Eisenhower Administration furiously withdrew its offer of assistance, the Soviets designed and helped build the dam, which was completed in 1970.

Internationally, Nasser also benefitted from his increasing closeness with the Soviet Union. In the 1960s Egypt fought an outdrawn conflict with the Saudis in support of the revolution in Yemen. Nasser’s aim was to show the other regional powers that Egypt was in control of the fate of the Arab revolution all over the Middle East. The Soviets and other Communist countries gave substantial support to the more than seventy thousand Egyptian troops who served in Yemen. The Yemeni royalists were supported by Britain and the United States, as well as Jordan and Iran, in addition to the Saudis. Nasser’s intervention got entangled in Yemeni tribal relations and clan differences, and was at a logistical disadvantage due to Saudi proximity across Yemen’s northern border and British access from its colony in Aden. The Egyptian president fumed that even the shoes of the dead Egyptian soldiers “are more honorable than the crowns of King Saud and King Hussein.”³ But by the late 1960s Nasser’s effort in Yemen had fizzled out, with big losses and few achievements, even though the Egyptian presence left behind reservoirs of radicalism in the south of Arabia.

But other movements than Nasser’s also had their eyes on the cause of Pan-Arabism. The Arab Ba’ath [Renaissance] Party was founded in Damascus in 1940 by Michel Aflaq, a former Communist from a Christian Syrian family who believed in a regimented mass movement that would renew the Arab quest for political and cultural unity. Aflaq and his followers welcomed the revolution in Egypt but criticized Nasser for being self-serving and too centered on Egyptian interests. Instead, the Ba’ath leadership wanted to build Arab unity from below, with branches of the party in each country, all intent on taking power and unifying the Arab world around an authoritarian, nationalist, and socialist program. The Ba’ath leaders were the vanguard who would break with generations of backwardness, fragmentation, and European domination. They, Aflaq said, have “the will that the nation lacked, as a daring model and example of movement from passiveness and slumber to awakening and action.”⁴

As is often the case with parties that put unity above all other virtues, the Ba’ath experienced its fair share of infighting from the very beginning of the party’s existence. Some of its members supported the merger of Syria and Egypt into a United Arab Republic in 1958, in spite of the party’s criticism of Nasser. That union ended in acrimony three years later. In Iraq some members supported the 1958 revolution, which overthrew the monarchy, only to see the party crushed there a year later. But in spite of its disunity, the influence of the various branches of the Ba’ath Party increased in many Arab countries in the late 1950s and early 1960s. For many Arabs who wanted revolutionary change without embracing Communism, Ba’athist thinking served their purposes well.

The revolution in Iraq in 1958 was a watershed in the Cold War in the Middle East. The military regime that took power allied itself with the miniscule Iraqi Communist Party, in part because the new president, Abd al-Karim Qasim, distrusted the Ba’ath. Qasim also wanted an alliance with the Soviets to protect his regime against Western intervention, like the one in Iran five years earlier. The revolution was bloody. The king and fourteen members of his family were gunned down at the palace. The British embassy was sacked. US leaders, understandably, were horrified. Within weeks, Iraq had gone from being a US ally central to its security architecture to joining with its opponents, Nasser and the Soviets. “We either act now or get out of the Middle East,” President Eisenhower told his advisers. “To lose this area by inaction would be far worse than the loss in China, because of the strategic position and resources of the Middle East.”⁵ Always watchful for falling dominoes, Eisenhower wanted to confront what he saw as a direct Soviet challenge to US power in the Middle East. “Our military advisers,” Secretary of State Dulles told Congress, “believe we now hold a considerable superiority which the USSR would not want to challenge.… So, it is a probability that if we act decisively and promptly, they may figure that Nasser has gone too fast. They may withdraw before their prestige is engaged and general war risked.”⁶

The immediate US response showed clearly the limitations of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Acting on a request from Lebanon’s president Chamoun, Eisenhower sent eight thousand US marines to land in Beirut. The president referred to Communist subversion of Lebanon and the need to “preserve its territorial integrity and political independence.”⁷ But in reality the landing was an almost desperate attempt to demonstrate US power and purpose in the Middle East. The aim was to frighten the Soviets from too deep an involvement with Middle Eastern revolutions and to warn the new Iraqi leaders away from taking possession of Kuwait, an oil-rich sheikdom that most Iraqis regarded as part of their national territory. More than half of Britain’s oil imports came from Kuwait, and its loss would mean that western Europe and Japan would be in dire straits in terms of energy supplies.

In Moscow, Khrushchev observed the revolutions in the Middle East with satisfaction and not a little glee. “Can we imagine a Baghdad Pact without Baghdad? This consideration alone is enough to give Dulles a nervous breakdown,” the Soviet leader grinned to his comrades in Moscow.⁸But Khrushchev was not about to give the new Iraqi leaders, or their Egyptian backers, any hard guarantees against US interventions. He told Nasser, who flew to Moscow for an urgent meeting in the wake of the US troop landings in Lebanon, that he would not provide sophisticated weapons systems for Arab use. “If the need arises,” the Soviet leader argued, “then it would be better to launch [these weapons] from our territory.… [And] you can be assured that if aggressors start a war against your country, then we will help you by means of these rockets.”⁹ Khrushchev found the Middle East to be a hopeful but confusing region, where Soviet power could do little but prod the new regimes in the direction of social reform, socialist planning, and ever-closer military, political, and economic relations with the Soviet Union.

Soviet room for action in the Middle East was caught between its experts’ Marxist analysis of class-struggle and the political and strategic aims of its leaders. Both the Arab and the Persian Middle East were seen as too backward for genuine socialist revolutions. Their immediate future would be nationalist revolutions against Western imperialist domination carried out by the local bourgeoisie and its allies. The Soviet Union should be a backer of such revolutions, although it had to realize their character, which was defined by the narrow local self-interest of their protagonists. But while Middle Eastern bourgeois nationalists could not have the same global class perspective as Soviet or eastern European Communists, they could still be part of an international front against the West. Soviet purposes in the Middle East did not need true socialist revolutions. They only needed movements and regimes that rebelled against Western control of their resources, and that sought Soviet support in doing so.

Soviet and American views of Israel also attempted to fit complex local realities into shallow Cold War frameworks. At least up to the Suez Crisis, the Soviets retained some hope that the Zionist state could be amenable to Moscow’s positions in international affairs, thereby making it possible for them to broker a settlement between it and its Arab neighbors. This view was not as far-fetched as it sounds today. Bolshevism and Zionism had grown up politically side by side in Russia and eastern Europe, as socialist rivals and sometimes as enemies. “The struggle between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews,” Churchill had proclaimed back in 1920, “is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.”¹⁰ But up to 1948 British imperial policies, not the Arabs or the Soviets, had been Zionism’s deadliest enemy. The willingness of an Israeli Labor government under Ben-Gurion to align itself totally with the British and French at Suez therefore came as a bit of a shock to Moscow.

Knowing what was going on in Israel, the country’s alliances should not have come as a surprise. For Israel’s Labor government, confronting the country’s Arab neighbors was a question of survival. And to uphold this confrontation, Western support was necessary. “When we are isolated,” explained Ben-Gurion, “the Arabs think that we can be destroyed and the Soviets exploit this card. If a great power stood behind us, and the Arabs knew that we are a fact that cannot be altered, Russia will cease her hostility towards us, because this hostility would no longer buy the heart of the Arabs.”¹¹ The Israeli leaders’ suspicions were confirmed through Soviet agreements with Egypt in the wake of the 1956 war. The Zionists felt that they had to move closer to the Americans. Soviet anti-Semitism, which Khrushchev never confronted openly, also helped convince Ben-Gurion and other Jewish leaders that the Communist state could never become a friend of Israel.

For Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Soviet alliance brought its frustrations. He had hoped to use Soviet military and economic aid to position Egypt as the primary power within the region.¹² Instead, the economy took a downward turn in the 1960s, mainly caused by low productivity, corruption, high military expenditure, and excessive free distribution of goods and services. Meanwhile, the long war in Yemen impressed nobody; the United Arab Republic was dissolved by the Syrians in 1961; and Qasim was overthrown and murdered in Iraq in 1963. In both Syria and Iraq the Ba’ath Party was in ascendance, in spite of both Egyptian and Soviet disapproval. By the mid-1960s, Ba’ath governments were in place in both Damascus and Baghdad, even though they saw eye to eye on few things, except persecuting Communists, Islamic leaders, and ethnic minorities.

The Cold War in the 1960s gave Nasser a chance to reset his international stature. While continuing to work closely with the Soviets, the Egyptian leader intensified his engagement with and on behalf of revolutionary movements in the Third World. Such positions, Nasser felt, enabled him to break out of a local framework that he often found irksome. Especially after the fall of Ben Bella in Algeria in 1965, Cairo became the meeting point of African revolutionaries from Angola to Morocco. The Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) was headquartered in Cairo, and even though Soviet influence in the association increased in the late 1960s, Nasser always made sure that he could put his personal imprimatur on its usually nebulous proceedings.¹³

Nasser’s Third World engagements and his need to be seen as the principal champion of all Arabs, especially after the Yemeni debacle, led him to focus more than he had in the past on the plight of the Palestinians. Since 1948, more than a million stateless Palestinians had lived as refugees all over the Arab world. Their existence was precarious. Most Arab regimes refused them the right of citizenship and they were often exploited in terms of work and living conditions. But by the mid-1960s Palestinian organizations had become more visible, and one of them, Fatah, led by a former student at Cairo University, Yasir Arafat, had begun small-scale armed attacks against Israel. “We will not put down our arms as long as Palestine is not liberated and until Palestine occupies the status it deserves in the heart of the Arab nation,” Arafat declared.¹⁴

The origins of the 1967 Middle East war are to be found in the intersection between the Arab rediscovery of the Palestinian cause and the intensifying Cold War in the region. Playing Arab leaders against each other in their search for support, in 1966 Fatah had relocated from Egypt to Syria, where a radical faction of the Ba’ath Party was now in command. In spite of the difficult relationship between them and the Ba’ath Party in the past, the Soviets also threw their weight behind the new regime in Damascus, hoping it would mean a Ba’athist realignment with Moscow. If that were to be the case, the balance in the Middle Eastern Cold War would tip decisively toward the Soviets, Brezhnev believed. Soviet arms deliveries to both Syria and Egypt intensified, as did Arab rhetoric against Jewish occupation of Palestine.

In April 1967 Israel responded to Fatah incursions from Syria and Jordan by strafing the forces of the two countries with aircraft and tanks. Israeli jet fighters overflew Damascus. The Soviets believed the Israelis were preparing a full-scale attack on Syria, and warned their local allies. Fearful of being seen as less anti-Israel than the Ba’athists and alarmed by the information from Moscow, Nasser moved his troops toward the Israeli border and blockaded its sea access from the Gulf of Aqaba. The Soviets and the Syrians hoped that Egyptian pressure on Israel would temper Israeli bellicosity elsewhere.

Instead, fear of a concerted Arab action made Israel decide to strike first. On 5 June 1967, in a surprise attack, its air force destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground. Its armies then conquered the Sinai peninsula, threatening Cairo, and responded to shelling from the Jordanian side by conquering East Jerusalem and the West Bank of the river Jordan. In the north Israeli troops routed the Syrians, taking possession of the Golan Heights. In less than a week of fighting, Israel’s Arab neighbors had suffered a total military defeat. In the Sinai Desert, row after row of burned-out T-34 tanks, supplied by the Soviets to the Egyptian army, bore witness to the scale of the Arab humiliation and its Cold War significance.

The United States had stayed out of the war as best it could. But even if the only US casualties were the crew on a Navy spy ship accidentally (it was claimed) sunk by the Israelis, US public opinion was firmly on the side of Israel. Though the Jewish state was undoubtedly the aggressor, the scale of its victory against much larger forces made it a David fighting Goliath. Americans also liked that the Israelis did what the United States itself seemed incapable of doing in Indochina: giving a licking to the Soviet Union and its allies. The humiliation of aggressively anti-American Arab regimes also suited Washington. “We’re going to start sorting these people out a bit,” President Johnson’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy told his White House colleagues.¹⁵

For the new Soviet leadership the Arab defeat was a massive setback. The lead-up to the war had shown Moscow’s diplomacy to be fumbling and uncertain. While advising Egypt and Syria to tone down their rhetoric so as to avoid war, the Soviets’ warning about an impending Israeli attack had helped make that attack a reality. But first and foremost it was the scale of the Arab losses that shocked Moscow. “The data at our disposal,” an exasperated Leonid Brezhnev explained to his Warsaw Pact colleagues on 20 June, “shows clearly that due to this generous aid rendered by the USSR and other countries, Arab countries were indisputably superior to Israel in weapons and military personnel prior to the outbreak of hostilities.” The Arab leaders had failed because of lack of coordination among themselves and with the Soviet Union. Only a Soviet ultimatum, sent to the Americans, brought the Israeli offensive to an end. But the Soviets, Brezhnev said, would continue to support the “progressive” Arab states, since Moscow was convinced that the United States had encouraged and facilitated the Israeli attack.¹⁶

Nasser offered to resign but stayed on after massive demonstrations in Cairo and other cities demanded that he remain. The defeat may have dented the president’s popularity but had not destroyed it. Together with the Syrians, and with Soviet support, the Egyptians kept their confrontational stance toward Israel. The “War of Attrition,” as Nasser called it, consisted of small-scale attacks on Israeli forces, while avoiding an all-out war. In each case the Israelis struck back with what the new Labor prime minister, Golda Meir, straightforwardly called an asymmetrical response: to do more damage to the Arabs than what they could do to Israel. Meir refused to withdraw her troops from the occupied territories. “There is no substitute for our consolidation along the cease-fire lines in view of the fact that the Arabs still refuse to make peace,” she claimed.¹⁷

The 1967 war added to the Palestinian tragedy. New refugees, this time from the West Bank and Gaza, settled in the surrounding Arab states. In Jordan and Lebanon they became a key part of the population, and their Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) a key part of the political landscape. The PLO was a loose confederation of Fatah and other groups, with Yasir Arafat as the leader. They continued to carry out small-scale attacks against Israel. But the PLO became increasingly fractious. One group, the Patriotic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a self-declared Marxist-Leninist party that claimed Che Guevara among its heroes, hijacked a US plane in 1969 and forced it to land in Damascus, where the group was headquartered. A year later the PFLP pulled off a much larger operation: it hijacked four Western planes and flew three of them to Jordan, where they blew them up.

Even though all the hostages were released, the terror operation provided Jordan’s King Hussein with the excuse he had been waiting for to tame the Palestinian presence in his country. Accusing the PLO and other Palestinian groups of behaving as a state within the state, the king sent his forces to drive them out of Jordan. To the surprise of most observers, the Jordanians succeeded, in spite of Syrian threats to intervene. “Black September,” as the Palestinians called it, was a landmark in the Middle Eastern Cold War. Arab unity had been broken. The PLO leadership, even though it had been opposed to terror against foreign targets, was tainted by its conflict with other Arabs and its links with international terrorist organizations. The Soviet Union, which had cautiously begun to build links with the PLO, was again humiliated in the Middle East, this time by a “plucky little king” whom they considered a relic of the past in the region.

The Soviets responded to Black September by intensifying their buildup of the Egyptian and Syrian forces. Internally, Brezhnev explained his policies by stressing that the Soviet Union wanted a political compromise in the Middle East, and that a diplomatic solution could only be possible when Israel and its US backers realized that there was a true balance of power in the region. The increasing Soviet involvement was not contrary to détente, he explained. “Our party has always… proven that the policy of peaceful co-existence is not in opposition to, but rather strengthens the process of global revolution,” Brezhnev told his colleagues.¹⁸ By 1970 the Soviets had resupplied the Egyptian army and air force, and provided much more advanced missiles than the Egyptians had had before. Red Army personnel manned Egyptian positions along the Suez Canal. “At Nikolayev,” one of them recounted later, “they dressed us in civvies, issued us smart foreign-tailored suits (from Socialist-bloc countries). The enlisted men got berets and the officers, hats. We turned in all our personal effects and military documents and boarded the cruise liner Admiral Nakhimov as tourists. My surveillance station was masked as an ambulance.”¹⁹

With Soviet S-125 anti-aircraft missiles in place and Soviet pilots flying missions over Egypt the balance in the Middle East did begin to shift. There is no doubt that the cease-fire that Israel agreed to in August 1970, which allowed the S-125 missiles to remain on the canal banks, was a product of the new Soviet intervention. About twenty thousand Soviet advisers served in Egypt between 1967 and 1971, most of them in military positions. Negotiations began on a defense treaty that would make Egypt the closest thing to a Soviet ally outside of the Warsaw Pact. The Nixon Administration stepped up its military support for Israel, while trying to get Soviet support for a peace deal. A “settlement which is painful to both sides and Soviets sell to UAR [Egypt] would be in our interest,” Henry Kissinger explained to the NSC. “From point of view of our overall relationship, we want a settlement that is unpalatable to UAR and Soviets have paid the price of selling it.”²⁰

The sudden death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in October 1970 dramatically changed politics in Egypt. His successor, Anwar Sadat, was caught in an ironic situation. On the one hand, he wanted to put pressure on the Soviets to further increase their military support for his regime. On the other, he believed the Egyptians at some point would have to talk with Washington to get an overall peace agreement for the Middle East. After signing the new defense treaty with the Soviets in 1971, a year later he protested against Soviet reluctance to supply advanced longer-range missiles to Egypt by capriciously expelling some (but not all) Soviet military advisers. He also opened secret channels of communication with the Americans. President Nixon, impatient with Israeli reluctance to negotiate with the Arabs, suspended US military aid to put pressure on Golda Meir. For Nixon it was much more important to get the Soviets out of Egypt, and eventually out of the Middle East, than to make Israel invulnerable to an attack.

The ultimate irony of Sadat’s first years in power is that he wanted peace with Israel based on the pre-1967 borders, but saw no other way to achieve his objective than through forcing a military solution. Convinced that the Arab armies now were up to the task of if not defeating, then causing serious damage to the Israelis, he began preparing an attack. With the Soviet position much reduced and the Americans still on the sidelines, there was little that could hold Sadat back. On 6 October 1973, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, the Egyptian and Syrian armies attacked across the cease-fire lines. The Israeli army was pushed back both in the Sinai and on the Golan Heights, with substantial losses. It was clear that Israel had problems assembling enough men and materiel to fight effectively on both fronts. By 9 October Meir ordered the Israeli nuclear forces, which the country had developed secretly in the late 1960s, to be readied. Her move was both an attempt to force the Americans to provide military assistance and an ultimate guarantee against a full-scale Arab invasion. At Kissinger’s insistence, US military resupplies started that day. The Soviets had already begun resupplying their Arab allies.

The surprising Israeli setbacks in the first phase of the October War meant that the conflict quickly took on a Cold War dimension. “The Arabs may even be smelling a victory, not a stalemate,” Kissinger said. “That means the Soviet Union has won. For us to have gone in to have saved the Arabs’ ass would have been perfect.”²¹ But, as things were, the Americans even refused to join the Soviets in a UN Security Council call for an immediate cease-fire. Washington wanted status quo restored because even a small loss of occupied territory for Israeli would have meant a victory for the Soviet Union.

With US resupplies underway, Israel could go on the offensive. On 11 October its forces crossed the former cease-fire line on the Golan Heights and headed toward Damascus. On 15 October the Israelis crossed the Suez Canal and began pushing toward Ismailia and Cairo. The Soviets bristled at what they saw as US-Israeli collusion to secure even further territorial gains for the Jewish state or, possibly, overthrow the regimes in Syria and Egypt. When the Americans finally agreed to a UN cease-fire resolution, which was accepted by all parties, the Israelis continued their advance in some sectors. This brought their troops to within forty kilometers of Damascus and one hundred kilometers of Cairo. The Egyptian Third Army, thirty-five thousand men, was surrounded. Brezhnev sent Nixon a message. In it he threatened a direct Red Army intervention if the Israeli offensives did not end. US intelligence reported that they believed Soviet troops were being readied to be sent to the Middle East.

On the evening of 25 October, Nixon responded by putting US forces worldwide on alert. Strategic Air Command, Continental Air Defense Command, European Command, and the Sixth Fleet all went to DEFCON 3, the highest level of combat readiness since the Cuban missile crisis. With Nixon already beleaguered by the Watergate scandal, Kissinger believed that “the overall strategy of the Soviets now appears to be one of throwing détente on the table since we have no functional President, in their eyes, and, consequently, we must prevent them from getting away with this.”²²While Nixon signaled to the Soviets that Red Army troops in the Middle East would mean war with the United States, Kissinger put maximum pressure on the Israelis to cease their violations of the truce.

In Moscow, the Politburo was shocked when they picked up the US nuclear alert. The discussion that followed made it clear that the Soviet leaders had not reached any decision on sending troops to the Middle East; theirs had been merely threats and contingency planning. “It is not reasonable to become engaged in a war with the United States because of Egypt and Syria,” Kosygin said.²³ Brezhnev summed up by saying that the Soviet warnings had, after all, had the intended effect: the Americans were reining in the Israelis. But the Soviet Union was quick to accept a US-sponsored resolution that gave the UN the responsibility of separating the fighting armies. In a rambling press conference in Washington, Nixon credited his détente policy with resolving the crisis. It was, he said, because he and Brezhnev “have had this personal contact, that notes exchanged in that way result in a settlement rather than a confrontation.”²⁴ But neither side was in doubt that the 1973 war had exposed some of the limitations of détente.

The despair within Arab states over the outcome of the October War was palatable. Libya had announced an embargo on oil exports to the United States and others who were backing Israel. To Kissinger’s horror all other Arab oil producers followed suit, including stalwart US allies such as Saudi Arabia. The embargo led to a massive increase in the price of oil, which in itself contributed to the West’s economic woes during the mid-1970s. In spite of US pressure, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was keen to regulate production to keep prices high even after the embargo ended. Oil, which in spite of increases in demand had been cheap and abundant ever since the 1940s, now doubled in price. OPEC’s price policies encouraged those in the Third World who sought a new international economic order based on higher prices for raw materials. It also made the installation of a real US hegemony in the Middle East a more pressing concern for Washington.

Kissinger had realized that the United States needed to be seen as contributing to some form of peace deal in the Middle East if the Soviet Union were to be pushed back. And putting pressure on the Israelis to withdraw from at least some of the occupied territories was essential for any negotiations to work, the secretary of state thought. The 1973 war could help convince Golda Meir that her country needed a deal. The Israelis, Kissinger said, “have lost their invincibility and the Arabs have lost their sense of inferiority.”²⁵ But Meir’s government refused to play ball, except on military disengagement agreements, which Kissinger skillfully negotiated. Even with Sadat’s Egypt increasingly turning away from the Soviet Union, in spite of the support it had given during the war, the Americans got little help from the Israelis to completely turn the tables on Moscow.

“The Middle East,” Kissinger explained to President Gerald Ford right after he had taken office in August 1974, “is the worst problem we face. The oil situation is the worst we face.… But we can’t afford another embargo. If we are faced with that, we may have to take some oil fields.”²⁶When Meir’s Labor successor, Yitzhak Rabin, refused to agree to an interim accord with the Egyptians in March 1975, as proposed by Washington, President Ford lost patience. He wrote to Rabin “to convey my deep disappointment over the position taken by Israel during the course of the negotiations.… The failure to achieve an agreement is bound to have far-reaching effects in the area and on our relations. I have directed an immediate reassessment of U.S.… relations with Israel, with a view to assuring that the overall interests of America in the Middle East and globally will be protected. You will be informed of our decisions.”²⁷

But the US president was increasingly under pressure at home from those who believed that the global détente policy had given too much to the Soviets. With Kissinger protesting furiously that his Middle East policy rather aimed at taking something away from the Soviet Union, seventy-six senators from both parties wrote to President Ford attempting to undermine his new stance. “We believe,” they said, “that a strong Israel constitutes a most reliable barrier to domination of the area by outside parties. Given the recent heavy flow of Soviet weaponry to Arab states, it is imperative that we not permit the military balance to shift against Israel. We believe that preserving the peace requires that Israel obtain a level of military and economic support adequate to deter a renewal of war by Israel’s neighbors.”²⁸

For an unelected president hoping to win the presidency in 1976, this pressure was too much to bear. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and some Jewish organizations in the United States were able to link their fear of the United States not being supportive enough of Israel with the rising criticism of détente. Groups on the Right, often called neoconservatives because of their eclectic background in libertarian thinking, human rights promotion, and foreign policy militancy, took up these allegations. In their eyes, Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger were bartering away support for the only true friend the United States had in the Middle East, just like they had bartered away support for oppressed people in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Standing tall against the Soviet Union meant standing with Israel. President Ford’s own rhetoric became remarkably more pro-Israel as the presidential campaign got underway.

The development in American politics was in a way a parallel to what was happening in Israel itself. The Cold War came to overwhelm the democratic promise of Israel. From a republic fighting for the right to self-determination, Israel after 1967 became an occupying power whose politics moved significantly to the Right. Rabin’s Labor Party lost the 1977 elections to a conservative coalition, the Likud. It was the first time since the founding of Israel that Labor was out of government. The new prime minister, Menachem Begin, had been the leader of Irgun, one of the terrorist organizations fighting for Israel’s independence before 1948, and had been marginalized in Israeli politics ever since because of his extreme views. The Likud’s election manifesto had made clear that “the right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is eternal, and is an integral part of its right to security and peace. Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] shall therefore not be relinquished to foreign rule; between the sea and the Jordan, there will be Jewish sovereignty alone.”²⁹ As he took office, Begin had made up his mind that he wanted peace with Israel’s neighbors, but not at the expense of the new conquests in the east.

The Palestinian organizations, meanwhile, made any form of negotiations harder to achieve. This was in part because of Arafat’s despair over lack of support from Arab states. But it was also because he feared that any settlement that would be made with the Israelis would happen at great cost to the Palestinians. His people’s only hope, Arafat thought, was that the Cold War would prevent Arab countries from seeking separate deals with their enemies. Palestinian terrorism was most of all intent on making it more difficult to ignore their cause. In 1972 a terrorist group attacked Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, killing twelve people, and there were a series of hijackings of international flights. Not all of these were carried out by the PLO, but Arafat refused to condemn any form of Palestinian violence. In the short term, this strategy without a doubt gave prominence to the Palestinian cause and dominated the news media, but in the longer term it proved catastrophic, as its recklessness and nihilism alienated many states and individuals who might otherwise have sympathized with the Palestinians’ plight.

With Sadat’s Egypt attempting to get US support for a peace with Israel, other Arab countries moved closer to the Soviet Union.³⁰ Two different factions of the Ba’ath Party were in power in Syria and Iraq. Syria’s leader Hafez al-Assad despised his Iraqi colleagues, and they hated him back in equal measure. Saddam Hussein, who became the key leader in Iraq in the mid-1970s, believed that the Syrians were out to kill him and force a unification of the two countries under Assad’s leadership. Both countries, however, turned to the Soviets and eastern Europeans to help them out, both in terms of security and economic development. For the Soviets, close links with these two regimes served to mitigate—perhaps essentially in their own minds—the disaster of Sadat’s defection to the US side. Soviet experts were of course aware of the self-serving fickleness of both Ba’ath regimes. They knew how the Syrians and the Iraqis persecuted Communists, about high-level corruption, and about the nepotism of the leaders. But the International Department of the Soviet Communist Party, in particular, argued that the Ba’athists were bourgeois nationalists who had broken with imperialism, and therefore worthy of Soviet support.

By the late 1970s extensive Soviet-led support programs were in place for both countries. To a higher degree than before, the Soviets delegated some of the assistance for Syria and Iraq to the eastern European states, especially to East Germany and Bulgaria. Of the three thousand Soviet bloc advisers in Syria in 1979, seven hundred were from the GDR.³¹ Although the Soviets’ inability to get the Iraqis and the Syrians to cooperate sometimes drove them to distraction—Assad, especially, had a tendency to get on Brezhnev’s nerves—they patiently continued to supply aid to both countries. Younger leaders gave some hope for the future. Saddam Hussein was, according to the Hungarian Communists, a “progressive, nationalist patriot” from whom much could be expected.³² By 1980 Syria and Iraq were among the biggest recipients of Soviet backing globally, although the amounts paled in comparison with US assistance to Israel and Egypt.

If Syria and Iraq were troubled alliances for the Soviets, a revolution in the south of Arabia for a while, at least, seemed to set hearts fluttering in Moscow. In 1967 Britain beat another hasty retreat, this time from its colony in Aden, on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula. The National Liberation Front, which took over power, declared their country to be a people’s republic, and sought close relations with the Soviets and their allies. The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), as the country became know, was different from the other “progressive” Arab regimes in Communist eyes. The heads of the PDRY “are guided in their activity mainly by Marxist-Leninist theory, rather than by nationalist and religious views,” declared the Hungarian leaders, who engaged in a big assistance program for South Yemen.³³ For the Soviets, access to the important port of Aden for naval purposes was also a substantial advantage, just like its naval base in Tartus on the Syrian coast.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union were looking for their own kind of regimes in the Middle East and finding very few of them. The Americans were finding democracy in Israel and the Soviets Marxism-Leninism in South Yemen, but that helped them little as long as both were small states actively engaged in antagonizing their neighbors. From an overall strategic point of view, neither Superpower could hope to achieve much, except in a negative sense. By the 1970s, both the Soviets and the Americans needed, for their own reasons, to forestall another Middle East war. Each hoped, gradually, to force the other power out of the region, which would give them advantages in the global Cold War (though not very many in the Middle East, as long as no fundamental political and economic changes took place there). For both Superpowers, the Middle East was a zone of confusion and fluidity, where lasting advantages seemed very hard to achieve.

The lack of much economic progress, except in Israel and, through extreme oil revenues, in some of the Gulf states, was more significant for the future of the region than the shifting Cold War allegiances of Middle Eastern states. Much as in other Third World countries, the secular nationalist regimes in the Middle East failed to deliver the kind of improvements in their daily lives that most people were looking for. Instead they got increasingly high-handed and undemocratic governments, in alliances with foreign powers to whom the lives of their peoples seemed to count for little. Not surprisingly, some younger people began looking for other forms of authority and purpose to dedicate themselves to. Especially after the 1973 war, a sense of hopelessness and humiliation drove thousands to attend Islamic schools and mosques where preachers blamed the failures of Arab regimes on their detachment from God.

Contemporary political interpretations of Islam were of course nothing new among Muslims in the Middle East or elsewhere. But up to the mid-1970s such groups—the so-called Islamists—were small and persecuted minorities. Even in Saudi Arabia, where the king claimed to base his whole political system on Islam, only government-approved Islamists were allowed. Egypt, Syria, and Iraq had all banned the Muslim Brotherhood, and those who believed in a political role for Muslim leaders disappeared into the regimes’ prisons, or worse. Gradually Islamists turned toward underground organization and terrorism. In Syria the Ba’athists allegedly used chemical weapons among other armaments to put down an Islamist rebellion in the west in 1982. At least ten thousand people were killed.

But the pressure various Islamist organizations were put under by Middle Eastern governments only seemed to strengthen them. Their faith, and the belief that God was the ultimate authority of all things political, made persecution easier to bear. Some groups, such as the Brotherhood in Egypt, also began to extend their popularity through assistance programs in poor neighborhoods. When those using such services were arrested by the regime, they admitted that they would rather support Muslims who did something for the poor than a regime that talked loudly but did very little. The regimes were also vulnerable to criticism of corruption, subservience to foreign powers, and their now famous inability to destroy Israel.

Some key Islamist leaders made the Cold War the foremost sign of the depravation of Middle Eastern regimes. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who had traveled in the United States (where the way of life repelled him) and who wrote extensively, mostly from prison, claimed that only Islam had the answer to the world’s ills.

Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice, not [only] because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head… but because humanity is devoid of vital values.… Democracy in the West has become infertile to such an extent that it is borrowing from the systems of the Eastern bloc, especially in the economic system, under the name of socialism. It is the same with the Eastern bloc.… Marxism in the beginning attracted not only a large number of people from the East but also from the West, as it was a way of life based on a creed.… This theory conflicts with man’s nature and its needs. This ideology prospers only in a degenerate society or in a society which has become cowed as a result of some form of prolonged dictatorship. But now, even under these circumstances, its materialistic economic system is failing.³⁴

Qutb was hanged in an Egyptian prison in 1966. But his ideas spread further in the 1970s, as the secular states in the Middle East came under pressure from within because of their poor economic performance. The United States did not view the Islamists as a main threat. On the contrary, the Islamists might be useful because they opposed Left-wing nationalist regimes that the Americans themselves despised and wanted to see removed. Their social conservatism and anti-Communism also fitted American purposes. The arch-enemies of the Islamists were the Communist parties, especially in Iraq and Iran. For the Soviets, the Islamists were reactionary relics of the past. They would have no role in progressive societies moving—under Soviet guidance—toward socialism.

By the late 1970s the Cold War in the Middle East had fashioned a region with hard, almost intractable problems. The area was divided into US and Soviet allies, much as were Europe and eastern Asia. Both powers supported regimes that did not serve their own populations well. Neither power had a real interest in solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, except to the degree that negotiations helped their own position versus the other Superpower. The United States refused to speak with the Palestinian leaders, whom they considered terrorists. The Soviets claimed to support the Palestinian cause, but only to the extent that they could control the Palestinian organizations. The American obsession with securing Middle Eastern oil supplies made dictatorships such as Iran and Saudi Arabia natural US allies. It was an explosive mix, which made sure that the region would stay highly volatile up toward the end of the Cold War and beyond.