The United States’ International Policies Focused in Iran and Iraq
After World War II the United States promised to not return to its isolationist attitude, which allowed Hitler to gain so much power. They instead decided to take a very active role in the world’s politics. From Korea to Vietnam, the U.S. proved that it would go to extreme lengths to police the world. The past two decades have seen the U.S. deeply involved in the Middle East as they try to stabilize a region ravaged by ethnic battles and power struggles for the world’s oil supply. America has played integral roles in the skirmishes by either trying to organize a peace process or supporting one or both sides. These actions will have consequences. Just as the British world empire crumbled in the early 1900s, the U.S. has chosen a path of expansionism that if not altered will lead to the disintegration of its world dominance in political and economic power.
As we all know history has been known to repeat itself. Thus to justify my hypothesis, we must look at the last country to try to control the Middle East, specifically Great Britain. In 1917 the British began their occupation of Baghdad in order to protect the Arabs from the Turks from the Ottoman Empire. By 1920 the British had not fulfilled their promise to leave the area and the people of southern Iraq responded with military action. The British returned with their own aggression, but soon realized that they could not maintain control over the area. In 1921, a popular election was held and Prince Faisal of Hijaz won with 96% of the ballots. Unfortunately the new king of Iraq inherited a kingdom torn by civil war.
To understand this internal struggle, look at how the Kurds make up about 15% of the Iraqi population (http://i-cias.com/e.o/iraq_4.htm) and have long fought for their independence. Since World War I, the Kurdish minority has been used as a political ally, basically helping further another regime’s political or socioeconomic needs. The Kurds have long tried to claim Kurdistan as their origin, thus deserving their own state. They actually represent a majority in this region, which encompasses southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, western Iran and northeastern Syria. The Kurdish Democratic Party was organized with respect to the more than 26 million nationalistic Kurds. “Kurdish nationalism is both defined and resoundingly subjugated after the establishment of the Ba’th party in Iraq, and it is for this reason that the politics of the organization have become inextricably intertwined with Kurdish history in Iraq…This ideology called for Arab unity, stressing the Arabs’ need to overcome the artificial boundaries imposed in the Middle East by colonial powers, and by acting against these restraints…the Arab people would be able to assume their status as the executors of their own fate-no longer controlled by the absentee landlords of the West” (http://www.oppression.org/middleeast/kurdish_history.html). Tragically the Ba’thist doctrine legitimized Iraqi aggression against the Kurds in the north. By the end of 1969 Saddam Hussein had taken a greater role in Ba’thist politics and ruthlessly crushed a Kurdish insurrection and then signed a peace agreement with the KDP in 1970. This agreement did not bring much peace about considering Hussein and the KDP leader Barzani could not control their troops along the border, which led to many skirmishes. The real problem occurred when the United States pledged military and monetary support to Barzani, leading to an increase in Kurdish demands. The United States was against a united Arab world because it threatened its financial interests in the region.
The Ba’th was a nationalistic, populistic, socialistic, and revolutionary body based on the eradication of Western colonialism. Central to their ideology was their disregard for class divisions as well as divisions between religious groups. The original program put great emphasis on the freedom of speech and association. In 1955 the Iraq Ba’th branch began to cooperate with other nationalist groups and in 1968, with the help of military officers, they took full control of Iraq. This led to the beginning of a trend where the party and the state became one, including the government, with the military, with the police and the intelligence group.
Ever since Faisal requested help from the British to maintain control in the region and signed an alliance with the British in 1922, a world power has been present in the oil rich Gulf. As order slowly made it way through Faisal’s region, the new Iraqi parliament conceded to economical opportunities and gave international oil companies the ability to search for oil in Iraq. In the early 1920s the U.S. State Department tried to force Great Britain to allow U.S. companies a share of the Middle East oil. Standard Oil and Mobil eventually joined the British and French in sharing the oil interests when they signed the “Red Line Agreement,” a pledge to not develop Middle Eastern oil without the participation of the others. After the Second World War the immense oil reserves in Saudi Arabia became known and the U.S. firms Texaco and Standard Oil grabbed those concessions, completely cutting out the French and British.
Around this time, the oil producing countries in the Middle East joined together to form the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in an attempt to improve their financial position. U.S. companies did not fight the price increases because higher oil prices would be beneficial, increasing the value of their investments in the developed nations and furthermore, the higher prices would just be passed on to consumers. The Nixon administration agreed with this raise in oil prices because it would primarily affect Japan and Europe, thus strengthening America’s economic competitive advantage. At the end of 1973 the Arabs cut their oil production and imposed an embargo against the U.S. because of their pro-Israel stance. The American public faced a rationing of gas and a crisis-like atmosphere, but the truth of the matter was that the international oil companies spread out their production cutbacks, minimizing their losses and the U.S. ended up suffering less than any other country.
After the end of the embargo, U.S. allies tried to makes deals for purchasing oil with OPEC nations, taking the international oil companies out of the market. The U.S. opposed these efforts because it better served their policy and their large oil companies. “If all Gulf oil were cut off, the elimination of recreational driving (which in the U.S. accounts for 10% of total oil consumption) would reduce Western petroleum needs to a level easily replaceable from non-Gulf sources. Even in wartime, [CIA analyst Edward] Atkeson concluded, Gulf oil is not essential to Western needs” (Atkeson 54).
The only U.S. policy that does not change in the Gulf throughout history is its support for the most conservative local forces in order to keep radical and popular movements from coming to power, no matter how much intervention or human loss is necessary. The U.S. originally supported Iraq until their loose cannon named Saddam Hussein turned radical. The history of military coups in Iraq repeats itself with the rise to power of Saddam Hussein.
In 1969 Saddam Hussein was formally elected Deputy Secretary General of the Ba’th party, despite his presence behind bars. Three years later he led the process of nationalizing the oil resources in Iraq that had previously been in the control of Western companies. In 1975 he signed the Algiers Accord with Iran, which regulated the disputed border.
The U.S. at this point changed its foreign policy regarding the Middle East because of the rise of Islam and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Preceding the Iran-Iraq War, Hussein protested the Islamic propaganda that was being transmitted from Iran to Iraq, which the Iraqi government leaders assumed would lead to a revolt from the Iraqi Shi’is in the south. In 1979 Hussein took the presidency after learning that the former prime minister had begun negotiations on a unity between Syria and Iraq.
The U.S., fearing this spread of Islamic governments, pulled its aid to the Kurds, and began supporting the Iraqis as they embarked on their war with Iran beginning in 1980. Believing that they would be weak after the Iranian Revolution. Hussein terminated the 1975 border agreement with Iran and then used poison gas to attack the Kurdish villages and supported programs to assassinate Kurdish leaders (http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/world/A0859147.html).
The Iran-Iraq War carried many facets of war including religious schisms, border disputes, and political differences. Saddam Hussein was known to have a personal hatred for Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, which gave him incentive to push for the centuries old hostilities between Arabs and Persians to gather supporters. Above all, Iraq launched the war in an effort to consolidate its rising power in the Arab world and to replace Iran as the dominant Persian Gulf state. Phebe Marr, a noted analyst of Iraqi affairs, stated "the war was more immediately the result of poor political judgment and miscalculation on the part of Saddam Hussein," and "the decision to invade, taken at a moment of Iranian weakness, was Saddam's” (http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/iran-iraq.htm). As the Iraqis prepared for war, they saw an Iranian army lacking solid leadership (a result of the revolution which killed most of their high ranking officers), and they also saw an army that lacked the critical parts to maintain their American-made equipment. Hussein believed that they would never receive these spare parts because of the United State’s fear of an Islamic government. This war became a prediction for the following invasion of Kuwait as seen in the entire rearrangement of the government’s infrastructure to the needs of the military.
The United States announced its neutrality between Iraq and Iran in 1980, yet was anything but neutral as it saw positive opportunities open up if the war dragged on. Baghdad needed arms and money, which moderated their policies and led them to repair the ties between Cairo and other Gulf states. Iran, whose weapons had all been U.S. supplied, would desperately need U.S. equipment and spare parts. The Carter administration also thought that the constraints of war might provide enough incentive for both nations to restore relations with the United States as they search for strategic and influential allies.
When war broke out, the Soviet Union pulled its arm shipments from Iraq, while they were on the offensive. In March of 1981 the U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig told the Senate that he saw a possibility to improve ties with Baghdad and noted that the Iraqis were concerned by with the behavior of the Soviet Imperialism in the Middle East. Shortly after March an assistant secretary of state was sent to Baghdad for talks and the U.S. approved the sale of five Boeing jetliners to Iraq. They were also removed from the U.S. list of terrorist supporting countries (albeit the sheltering of known international terrorists) and received a $400 million credit guarantee for U.S. exports.
While the U.S. restored and improved relations with Iraq, they also used it to create more ties in the region. In 1980 the president proclaimed the “Carter Doctrine” which stated that the U.S. would use military force to prevent an outside power (mainly the Soviet Union) from conquering the Persian Gulf region. After announcing this doctrine, the U.S. found itself in a precarious position. “One sensitive issue is whether the United States should plan to protect the oil fields against internal or regional threats. Any explicit commitment of this sort is more likely to upset and anger the oil suppliers than to reassure them” (Brown 157). The oil suppliers did not like the thought of being dependent on the U.S. for protection against their people or the belief that the U.S. would confiscate the oil fields if they started another embargo.
To alleviate some of the anti-U.S. sentiment in the region, the U.S. began supporting both sides during the war. Israel continuously supplied large quantities of U.S. origin weapons to Iran. When the Iranians began dominating the battlefield and the U.S. relations with Iraq improved, the U.S. tried to stop the weapons sales to Iran, but this only made the transfers more valuable, leading to the embarrassing Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration claimed that all the weapons were defensive in nature, but an advancing soldier can carry an anti-tank missile making it offensive.
The U.S. continued to prolong the war, supporting both sides by giving both of them information, technology, and weapons. The CIA exaggerated Soviet troop movement on the northern Iranian border in order to incite hostility inside Iran towards Moscow and the local Communists. The intelligence given by the U.S. clearly gave the Iranians an edge in battle as witnessed in the Iranian victory in the Fao Peninsula in 1986. Yet the CIA also established a direct Washington to Baghdad link, providing the Iraqis faster intelligence from U.S. satellites. This help coupled with U.S. encouragement convinced Iraqi officials to continue the war with Iran. Once this information leaked from Iran, the U.S. found itself having alienated the Iranians and the rest of the Arab world who felt that the U.S. valued Iranian friendship over theirs. In response to this the U.S. tilted heavily towards Iraq.
Iraq emerged from this war as a superpower in the Persian Gulf. It transformed its position to one of domination apparent in its repel of Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist crusade. Many nations outside of the conflict played crucial roles, such as France who became the major source of Iraq's high-tech weaponry, in order to protect its financial stake in that country. The Soviet Union became was Iraq's largest weapon's supplier, while vying for influence in both Baghdad and Tehran. Israel too provided arms to Iran, hoping to prolong the war, weakening their neighboring countries. At least ten nations sold arms to both of the warring sides. The list of countries engaging in this behavior includes the United States. The U.S. objective was not only to make profits from the arms trade, but also to control to the greatest extent possible the region's oil resources. Before turning to U.S. policy during the Iran-Iraq war, it will be useful to recall some of the history of the U.S. and oil.
First, much of the world’s oil reserves are located in the Persian Gulf, yet less than 4% of that oil goes to the United States. But the key factor here was that the U.S. allies could not operate without the oil from the Gulf. Japan and Western Europe’s vulnerability became a liability for the security of the U.S. America supported Iraq only to the point to unsure the eventual defeat of the Islamic Iranians. Washington provided intelligence to both sides, provided military arms to one, funded paramilitary exile groups, sought military bases, and even sent in the U.S. Navy, while Iraqi and Iranian people died. The administration wanted to maintain its status quo in a strategically and economically volatile yet valuable region.
In 1989 Bush signed the National Security Decision Directive 25 which was a secret order that in effect said, the United States believes that they can do business with Saddam and that they will pursue this policy of carrots and sticks that will assist Saddam in certain ways if his behavior conforms to our aspirations for the Middle East and Iraq in particular. The U.S. extended agricultural credits worth a billion dollars to help Saddam stabilize his regime and to provide necessities for Iraqis. There were eight hundred export licenses granted to Iraq, which allowed them to import certain sophisticated technical items, which in fact in some cases could be used for military purposes. This was not unbridled trade in any sense. It was a recognition that Saddam was using some of this stuff for immoral purposes.
Around this time, the U.S. found itself in a radically changing political world as the Berlin Wall fell, the Warsaw Pact collapsed, and the Soviet Union collapsed. April Glaspie our Ambassador to Iraq basically told Saddam that the U.S. was concerned about his bellicose attitude and the various statements that he had issued regarding his intentions toward Kuwait and his disgruntlement with the way he was being treated by the Arab world in general. She had a meeting with Saddam on July 25, 1990 in which she basically said, the United States has no direct vested interest in Arab disputes including the border dispute that Saddam had with the Kuwaitis. In retrospect this was a clear mistake. Taken within the context of the time one must first acknowledge that she more or less executed orders that came to her from the State Department. Secondly, again, this was a continuation of a long policy of tough love with Saddam. Warning him that they were watching him and yet telling him that they would continue to be his friend as long as he remained within certain parameters. The United States would periodically wag their finger under his nose, but at the same time said, we will continue to make it worth your while if you will simply conform to certain standards of behavior. Saddam took this as a green light where he could safely run without consequence.
On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded and then later annexed the small neighboring country of Kuwait. He first claimed that Kuwait belonged to Iraq, second that it was in response to Kuwait’s overproduction of oil, and third that Kuwait had illegally pumped oil from Iraq’s Rumaila oil field. The UN Security Council called for Iraq to withdraw and subsequently embargoed most trade with Iraq. On August 7, U.S. troops moved into Saudi Arabia to protect Saudi oil reserves and the UN set January 15, 1991, as the deadline for a peaceful withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait. When Saddam Hussein refused to comply, Operation Desert Storm was launched on Jan. 18, 1991, under the leadership of U.S. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. The U.S.-led coalition began a massive air war to destroy Iraq's forces and military and civil infrastructure. Iraq called for terrorist attacks against the coalition and launched Scud missiles at Israel (in an unsuccessful attempt to widen the war and break up the coalition) and at Saudi Arabia. The main coalition forces invaded Kuwait and southern Iraq on February 24 and, over the next four days, encircled and defeated the Iraqis, liberating Kuwait. When U.S. President George Bush declared a cease-fire on February 28, most of the Iraqi forces in Kuwait had either surrendered or fled.
At the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the Iraqis again crushed a Kurdish uprising, forcing more than one million Kurds to flee to neighboring Iran and Turkey. They did not return until 1992 under UN protection. In 1993 the United States, France, and Britain launched several air and cruise missile strikes against Iraq in response to provocations, including an alleged Iraqi plan to assassinate former President Bush. An Iraqi troop buildup near Kuwait in 1994 led the United States to send forces to Kuwait and nearby areas. Continued resistance to weapons inspections led to a U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf. U.S. and British bombing raids against Iraq began again in November 1998, and continued into 1999.
As we can see, the United States has created political and economic strife in this region, not to mention years of war. Saddam has brilliantly played the U.S. to gain the power he has always wished for in the Gulf region. He used the American fear of Islamic-governed states to receive millions of dollars worth of weapons, technology and resources from the U.S. to build his army. Now the U.S. has no more carrots to give Saddam to temporarily appease him. He has taken the technology and poison gas that we gave him back during the Iran-Iraq War and continues to use it and now threatens the lives of Americans with that same gas. The Bush administration greatly fears the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s hands because they know the technology the U.S. has supplied him. The Bush administration must carefully deal with the situation at hand and not repeat the mistakes of past administrations. Colin Powell continues to use his respect to gather the support of the U.N. Security Council and use them to deal with Iraq. I believe that we should listen to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because he has been through the Persian Gulf, has learned from the mistakes of the United States and will use his knowledge to prevent another debacle from beginning.
Bibliography
Atkeson, Maj. Gen. Edward B., “The Persian Gulf: Still a Vital Interest?” Armed Forces
Journal International, Vol. 124, No. 9, April 1987
Brown, Harold, “Thinking About National Security”, Boulder: Westview, 1983, p. 157
Stocking, George W., “Middle East Oil: A Study in Political and Economic Controversy”,
Nashville: Vanderbilt U.P., 1970 p. 103-106
Stork, Joe, “Middle East Oil and the Energy Crisis”, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975
http://i-cias.com/e.o/iraq_4.htm
http://www.oppression.org/middleeast/kurdish_history.html
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/world/A0859147.html
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/iran-iraq.htm