U.S. Policy in the Middle East A Brief History

The first time a Western power got soaked in the politics of oil in the Middle East was toward the end of 1914, when British soldiers landed at Basra, in southern Iraq, to protect oil supplies from neighboring Persia. At that time, the United States had little interest in Middle East oil or in any political designs on the region. Its overseas ambitions were focused south toward Latin America and the Caribbean, and west toward East Asia and the Pacific. When Britain offered to share the spoils of the defunct Ottoman Empire after World War I, President Woodrow Wilson declined. The United States creeping involvement in the Middle East began later, during the Truman administration, and continued through the 21st century. Truman Administration: 1945–1952 During World War II, American troops were stationed in Iran to help transfer military supplies to the Soviet Union and protect Iranian oil. British and Soviet troops were also stationed on Iranian soil. After the war, Russian leader Joseph Stalin withdrew his troops only after President Harry Truman protested their continued presence and threatened to boot them out. While opposing Soviet influence in Iran, Truman solidified America’s relationship with Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and brought Turkey into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), making it clear to the Soviet Union that the Middle East would be a Cold War hot zone. Truman accepted the 1947 United Nations partition plan of Palestine, granting 57 percent of the land to Israel and 43 percent to Palestine, and personally lobbied for its success. The plan lost support from U.N. member nations, especially as hostilities between Jews and Palestinians multiplied in 1948 and Arabs lost more land or fled. Truman recognized the State of Israel 11 minutes after its creation, on May 14, 1948. Eisenhower Administration: 1953–1960 Three major events defined Dwight Eisenhower’s Middle East policy. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the CIA to depose Mohammed Mossadegh, the popular, elected leader of the Iranian parliament and an ardent nationalist who opposed British and American influence in Iran. The coup severely tarnished America’s reputation among Iranians, who lost trust in American claims of protecting democracy. In 1956, when Israel, Britain, and France attacked Egypt after Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, a furious Eisenhower not only refused to join the hostilities, he ended the war. Two years later, as nationalist forces roiled the Middle East and threatened to topple Lebanon’s Christian-led government, Eisenhower ordered the first landing of U.S. troops in Beirut to protect the regime. The deployment, lasting just three months, ended a brief civil war in Lebanon. Kennedy Administration: 1961–1963 President John F. Kennedy, according to some historians, was not very involved in the Middle East. But as Warren Bass points out in â€Å"Support Any Friend: Kennedys Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance,† Kennedy tried to develop a special relationship with Israel while diffusing the effects of his predecessors’ Cold War policies toward Arab regimes. Kennedy increased economic aid for the region and worked to reduce the polarization between Soviet and American spheres. While the U.S. alliance with Israel was solidified during his tenure, Kennedy’s abbreviated administration, while briefly inspiring the Arab public, largely failed to mollify Arab leaders. Johnson Administration: 1963–1968 President Lyndon Johnson focused much of his energies on his Great Society programs at home and the Vietnam War abroad. The Middle East burst back onto the American foreign policy radar with the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel, after rising tension and threats from all sides, pre-empted what it characterized as an impending attack from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and Syria’s Golan Heights—and threatened to go further. The Soviet Union threatened an armed attack if it did. Johnson put the U.S. Navy’s Mediterranean Sixth Fleet on alert but also compelled Israel to agree to a cease-fire on June 10, 1967. Nixon-Ford Administrations: 1969–1976 Humiliated by the Six-Day War, Egypt,  Syria, and Jordan tried to regain lost territory by attacking Israel during the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur in 1973. Egypt regained some ground, but its Third Army was eventually surrounded by an Israeli army led by Ariel Sharon (who would later become prime minister). The Soviets proposed a ceasefire, failing which they threatened to act â€Å"unilaterally.† For the second time in six years, the United States faced its second major and potential nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union over the Middle East. After what journalist Elizabeth Drew described as â€Å"Strangelove Day,† when President Richard Nixons administration put American forces on the highest alert, the administration persuaded Israel to accept a cease-fire. Americans felt the effects of that war through the 1973 Arab oil embargo, during which oil prices rocketed upward, contributing to a recession a year later. In 1974 and 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated so-called disengagement agreements, first between Israel and Syria and then between Israel and Egypt, formally ending the hostilities begun in 1973 and returning some land Israel had seized from the two countries. These were not peace agreements, however, and they left the Palestinian situation unresolved. Meanwhile, a military strongman called Saddam Hussein was rising through the ranks in Iraq. Carter Administration: 1977–1981 Jimmy Carter’s presidency was marked by American Mid-East policy’s greatest victory and greatest loss since World War II. On the victorious side, Carter’s mediation led to the  1978 Camp David Accords  and the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, which included a huge increase in U.S. aid to Israel and Egypt. The treaty led Israel to return the  Sinai Peninsula  to Egypt. The accords took place, remarkably, months after Israel invaded Lebanon for the first time, ostensibly to repel chronic attacks from the  Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)  in south Lebanon. On the losing side, the  Iranian Islamic Revolution  culminated in 1978 with demonstrations against the regime of  Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The revolution led to the establishment of an  Islamic Republic, under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, on April 1, 1979. On November 4, 1979, Iranian students backed by the new regime took 63 Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran hostage. They held on to 52 of them for 444 days, releasing them the day  Ronald Reagan  was  inaugurated  as  president. The  hostage crisis, which included one failed military rescue attempt that cost the lives of eight American servicemen, undid  the Carter presidency  and set back American policy in the region for years: The rise of Shiite power in the Middle East had begun. Reagan Administration: 1981–1989 Whatever progress the Carter administration achieved on the Israeli-Palestinian front stalled over the next decade. As  the Lebanese civil war  raged, Israel invaded Lebanon for the second time, in June 1982. They advanced as far as Beirut, the Lebanese capital city, before Reagan, who had condoned the invasion, intervened to demand a cease-fire. American, Italian, and French troops landed in Beirut that summer to mediate the exit of 6,000 PLO militants. The troops then withdrew, only to return following the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir  Gemayel  and the retaliatory massacre, by Israeli-backed Christian militias, of up to 3,000 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, south of Beirut. On April 18, 1983, a truck bomb demolished the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. On October 23, 1983, bombings killed 241 American soldiers and 57 French paratroopers in their Beirut barracks. American forces withdrew shortly after. The Reagan administration then faced several crises as the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite organization that became known as Hezbollah took several Americans hostage in Lebanon. The 1986  Iran-Contra Affair  revealed that President Ronald Reagans administration had secretly negotiated arms-for-hostages deals with Iran, discrediting Reagan’s claim that he would not negotiate with terrorists. It was not until December 1991 that the last hostage, former Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson, was released. Throughout the 1980s, the Reagan administration supported Israel’s expansion of Jewish settlements in occupied territories. The administration also supported Saddam Hussein in the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War. The administration provided logistical and intelligence support, believing wrongly that Saddam could destabilize the Iranian regime and defeat the Islamic Revolution. George H.W. Bush Administration: 1989–1993 After benefiting from a decade of support from the United States and receiving conflicting signals immediately before the invasion of Kuwait,  Saddam Hussein  invaded the small country to his southeast on August 2, 1990.  President George H.W. Bush  launched Operation Desert Shield, immediately deploying U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to defend against a possible invasion by Iraq. Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm when Bush shifted strategy—from defending Saudi Arabia to repelling Iraq from Kuwait, ostensibly because Saddam might, Bush claimed, be developing nuclear weapons. A coalition of 30 nations joined American forces in a military operation that numbered more than half a million troops. An additional 18 countries supplied economic and humanitarian aid. After a 38-day air campaign and a 100-hour ground war, Kuwait was liberated. Bush stopped the assault short of an invasion of Iraq, fearing what Dick Cheney, his defense secretary, would call a â€Å"quagmire.† Bush established instead no-fly zones in the south and north of the country, but these did not keep Saddam from massacring Shiites following an attempted revolt in the south—which Bush had encouraged. In Israel and the Palestinian territories, Bush was largely ineffective and uninvolved as the first Palestinian intifada roiled on for four years. In the last year of his presidency, Bush launched a military operation in Somalia in conjunction with a humanitarian operation by the  United Nations. Operation Restore Hope, involving 25,000 U.S. troops, was designed to help stem the spread of famine caused by the Somali civil war. The operation had limited success. A 1993 attempt to catch Mohamed Farah Aidid, the leader of a brutal Somali militia, ended in disaster, with 18 American soldiers and up to 1,500 Somali militia soldiers and civilians killed. Aidid was not captured. Among the architects of the attacks on Americans in Somalia was a Saudi exile then living in Sudan and largely unknown in the United States: Osama bin Laden. Clinton Administration: 1993–2001 Besides mediating the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, President Bill Clinton’s involvement in the  Middle East was bracketed by the short-lived success of the Oslo Accords in August 1993 and the collapse of the Camp David summit in December 2000. The accords ended the first intifada, established Palestinians’ right to self-determination in Gaza and the West Bank, and established the Palestinian Authority. The accords also called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. But Oslo did not address such fundamental issues as the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, the fate of East Jerusalem, or what to do about continuing expansion of Israeli settlements in the territories. Those issues, still unresolved in 2000, led Clinton to convene a summit with Palestinian leader  Yasser Arafat  and Israeli leader Ehud Barak at Camp David in December of that year. The summit failed, and the second intifada exploded. George W. Bush Administration: 2001–2008 After deriding operations involving the U.S. military in what he called â€Å"nation-building,† President George W. Bush  turned, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, into the most ambitious nation-builder since the days of Secretary of State  George Marshall, who helped rebuild Europe after World War II. But Bush’s efforts focused on the Middle East, were not very successful. Bush had the world’s backing when he led an attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 to topple the Taliban regime, which had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Bush’s expansion of the â€Å"war on terror† to Iraq in March 2003, however, had far less international support. Bush saw the toppling of Saddam Hussein as the first step in a domino-like birth of democracy in the Middle East. But while Bush talked democracy in regards to Iraq and Afghanistan, he continued to support repressive, undemocratic regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and several countries in North Africa. The credibility of his democracy campaign was short-lived. By 2006, with Iraq plunging into civil war, Hamas winning elections in the Gaza Strip, and Hezbollah winning immense popularity following its summer war with Israel, Bush’s democracy campaign was dead. The U.S. military surged troops into Iraq in 2007, but by then the majority of the American people and many government  officials were widely skeptical of the motivations for the invasion. In an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2008—toward the end of his presidency—Bush touched upon what he hoped his Middle East legacy would be, saying: I think history will say George Bush clearly saw the threats that keep the Middle East in turmoil and was willing to do something about it, was willing to lead and had this great faith in the capacity of democracies and great faith in the capacity of people to decide the fate of their countries and that the democracy movement gained impetus and gained movement in the Middle East. Sources Bass, Warren. Support Any Friend: Kennedys Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance. Oxford University Press, 2004, Oxford, New York.Baker, Peter. President George W. Bushs final days, The New York Times magazine, August 31, 2008.