PPOG 641

Research Paper: Current Events Assignment Instructions

Overview

This Module: Week you will choose any Middle East related research topic or question. Try to select a narrow rather than broad topic, say ‘terrorism in the Sinai’ rather than some generic paper on terrorism qua terrorism. You will not know all the answers related to the topic, but you should know what all the important questions and issues are if not the players involved. Good research papers seldom miss these critical aspects of an issue or topic. Be careful not to choose presidential policies (or presidents) or actions that have not had enough time to fully assess. This assignment may require students to make themselves aware of current issues in the region. The same could be said of US sponsored foreign policy initiatives generally. There are limitless possibilities here, so choose wisely.

Instructions

· Length: 5-7 double spaced pages not including additional pages for title and references. You may write more pages if necessary.

· Format: Turabian

· Citations: At least 7 sources must be used and may include the course text, Bible, and scholarly articles.

· Topic Selection

· The topic must be narrow rather than broad—avoid topics like ‘histories of this or that subject’, or ‘Iran-US relations’, ‘terrorism in the Middle East’, the ‘Iran nuclear deal’, or other such generic policy challenges. You may write on specific aspects of each of these so long as the problem is current.

· The topic must go beyond reporting facts to include analysis—it is not enough to rehearse descriptive accounts of a problem or provide a laundry list of them but must instead include analysis of its implications for US foreign policy.

· The topic may not include a paper already completed for another class.

· The topic should keep in mind the following research advice: You do not have to know all the answers to the questions you are asking in your paper, but you should know what or who all the important questions, issues, and players are.

· Write a research paper on any current USFP topic in the Middle East region. Remember—you do not have to know all the answers to the topic or question you ask, but you should know what all the important questions and issues are.

· What is the topic or issue that interests you?

· Why is it important to USFP?

· Assess the importance of the key topic/issue/question: Explain what all the key questions, issues, and key players are.

Note: Your assignment will be checked for originality via the Turnitin plagiarism tool.

Hi, I’m Sean acres, Dean of the helm School of Government. I’ve enjoyed so much having the opportunity to visit with you about US foreign policy toward the Middle East. Now as we go forward, it’s important to ask ourselves the difficult questions and to examine the future of US Middle East relations. The United States has historically held a certain vantage point of policy with the Middle East and a certain relationship with the countries of the Middle East. You see those in dynamic play in recent years. And it’s important to ask yourself why? Especially from a foundational standpoint, I would suggest to you that there are several layers in which you can view a question such as this one being the practical layer saying, how should we work with nations in the Middle East to accomplish a given set of results. The other though much more fundamental and it’s asking how a changing worldview in the United States and a chain and changing worldviews in the Middle Eastern countries is complicating and changing the relations between the two. And as a result, causing a need for change or causing change in the policies that exist between the United States and Middle Eastern countries. How particularly has a decline in the Judeo-Christian worldview in the United States affected the United States foreign policy toward the Middle East. How have competing Muslim world-views, Sunni and Shia worldviews affected the interplay of, of ideology and laws and transitions of power and Muslim nations in the Middle East. How have I, have the Jewish people in Israel gone through changes in worldview that have affected one way or another, policy toward the United States and policy toward their Arab neighbors. These are incredibly important questions that I would hold out to you are largely answered only in terms of the effects that that different parties would like to achieve, rather than in the fundamental questions of how they are being driven. What’s giving rise to them? How are they being driven by changes in the way that entire people’s think in the worldviews that they hold. Now this becomes incredibly important for us as the stakes are very high. The idea that there may at some point in the future be another nuclear power on the Middle Eastern Bloc named Iran. The idea that America status in the world continues to change in ways that are not related to the Middle East but directly affect its power and influence in the Middle East. The matters of economies in the Middle East. For example, the rise of such a vibrant economy in Israel. How has that affected foreign policy and the way that israel responds to its neighbors? All of these questions will continue to become important as we deal with both larger nations divesting themselves of their nuclear prowess, while smaller nations strive to develop nuclear capabilities. Oh, wow. We see very subtle and at times very overt shifting of allegiances and alliances and governmental structures in all the nations that not all, but in many, many of the nations that ring the Mediterranean Sea. This is an important time to be studying American foreign policy toward the State of Israel. I would encourage you to continue your studies even after this course ends. I think that you’ll find that even in domestic matters, we tend to discount how important these things are. For example, not many of us would think how a Middle Eastern conflict could affect the development of technology in the United States. But in fact, if you’ve got an Intel processor in your computer, or you use a cell phone or you like text messaging or a variety of other technological advancements of that nature. Those things came out of the State of Israel. How would conflict the wrong time have affected the development of those products? These are important issues that will be faced with for, for quite sometime in the future. And I encourage you to make US foreign policy toward israel, a staple of your studies.A

Chapter 27

HARMONY AND HEGEMONY

THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS EXAMINED IN DETAIL THE diverse ways in which the United States has interacted with the Middle East since 1776. The purpose was to reveal the richness and substance of that history and to explore the foundations of America’s involvement in the region today. Another goal was to fill a gap in the literature on the relationship between the United States and the Middle East in the 150 years separating the Revolutionary War from the end of World War II.

This final section deals with the past six decades, from the advent of the Cold War to the war in Iraq, a time of intense American engagement in the Middle East. In contrast to the 1776–1945 period, about which relatively few works exist, the contemporary phase has yielded vast quantities of articles and books. Many fine studies have been conducted on American efforts to mediate an Arab-Israeli peace prior to the 1973 war, for example, or on the evolution of the U.S.-Saudi alliance in the 1950s and 1960s, and little can be added to them in terms of original research. On the other hand, analysis of the major events of the last thirty years is hampered by lack of internal government documents—the bedrock of serious research—which are still classified and closed to the public. Any attempt to reconstruct American involvement in the Middle East from 1948 to the present risks either repeating what has already been written or speculating on what is not yet adequately known.

In view of these pitfalls, this concluding section attempts to provide not an exhaustive study of this period but rather an overview of its crucial turning points and trends. The emphasis is on the continuity between the post–World War II phase of this history and earlier stages and on the persistent themes of power, faith, and fantasy. American policymakers, it will be shown, wrestled with many of the same challenges faced by their prewar predecessors and similarly strove to reconcile their strategic and ideological interests in the area. Mythic images of the Middle East, meanwhile, remained a mainstay of American popular culture.

By focusing on the consistency of America’s involvement with this crucial region and by placing its current involvement there within a historical context, the chapter aims to deepen the understanding of the nature of U.S.–Middle East relations. The objective is to enable Americans to read about the fighting in Iraq and hear the echoes of the Barbary Wars and Operation Torch or to follow presidential efforts to mediate between Palestinians and Israelis and see the shadows of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The same illusions that lured John Ledyard to explore the Middle East, they will learn, still entice Americans to attend movies with Middle Eastern motifs. After more than two hundred years, the interaction between the United States and the peoples and lands of the Middle East has remained remarkably vibrant, multifaceted, dynamic, and profound.

Cast between Communism and Nationalism

For a while, it seemed, Harry Truman managed to harmonize America’s newfound status as the preeminent power in the Middle East with its traditional role of liberator and peacemaker. Hoping to heal the wounds opened by the creation of the Jewish state, the president supported United Nations efforts to establish peace between Israel and the Arabs. The task fell to the UN special mediator on Palestine, Ralph Bunche, a former UCLA basketball star, accomplished editor, and one of the first African Americans to receive a Harvard Ph.D. “Have a look at these lovely plates!” the dapper but straight-talking Bunche told the Arab and Israeli delegates who dined with him on the island of Rhodes. “If you reach an agreement, each one of you will get one to bring home—if you don’t, I’ll break them over your heads!” By July 1949, Bunche had ironed out armistice agreements between Israel and the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria and established a precedent for more permanent treaties. His achievement earned him the Nobel Peace Prize and appeared to restore America’s reputation as a principled mediator.1

Truman also sought to balance Cold War concerns with the ascending tide of Middle Eastern nationalism. The first test of the president’s prowess came in Iran, where the prime minister, a seventy-year-old Swiss-educated lawyer named Mohammad Mossadegh, declared himself the champion of the people and the adversary of all forms of foreign domination. He worked to steer the country clear of Soviet influence but also maneuvered to ease the British out of Iran by nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC).

Mossadegh was a forerunner of the nonaligned movement, composed mostly of developing countries that declared their neutrality in the Cold War, affiliated with neither the Soviet Union nor the West. Such a position could well have antagonized the United States, but Mossadegh, to the contrary, became something of an American hero. Iran, in the eyes of many Americans, was still the enchanted land of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. They continued to flock to Middle Eastern fantasy films such as The Son of Ali Baba (1952) and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1953) and to the 1953 Broadway sensation Kismet, in which a love-struck caliph croons to a lissome Iraqi slave, “Take my hand, I’m a stranger in paradise.” They remained mesmerized by the myth of the liberty-loving Middle Easterner, which Mossadegh seemed to embody. The American press consequently compared him to Paine and Jefferson, and Time magazine named him its 1951 Man of the Year. Truman invited the prime minister to the White House and, much to Britain’s annoyance, supported his claims to Iranian oil.

Another example of Truman‘s ability to juggle America’s strategic and ideological interests occurred in Egypt. There, too, the nationalist movement mobilized to expel the British, disband parliament, and overthrow the monarchy of King Farouk. In scenes evocative of the ‘Urabi revolt seventy years earlier, rioters rampaged through the streets of Cairo and Alexandria in January 1952, torching foreign-owned buildings. Among the classic structures destroyed was the Shepheard’s Hotel, which had once hosted Mark Twain. Such chaos, Truman feared, was liable to be exploited by the Soviets in order to penetrate Egypt politically. He consequently assigned Kermit Roosevelt and other CIA agents to identify an Egyptian nationalist figure, “a Moslem Billy Graham,” who could restore order in the country and enroll it in a NATO-like Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO). Their search took them to a cell of self-described Free Officers who were plotting to stage a coup and to their thirty-four-year-old leader, Lieutenant Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser.2

Articulate and strikingly handsome, Nasser looked like a modern incarnation of ‘Urabi, as well as a hero culled from the pages of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. He was also the product of the nationalist ideas introduced to Egypt by American veterans of the Civil War and by Arab graduates of the Syrian Protestant College. Nasser indeed seemed to be the leader whom the CIA, for the first time in its Middle East operations, sought to install, and the agency assured him and his co-conspirators of America’s sub rosa support. Emboldened by this backing, the officers seized government buildings on July 23, 1952, dissolved the parliament, and deposited Farouk on a yacht bound for Europe. The British responded with horror to these events, but the United States promptly recognized the new regime and initiated a dialogue with Nasser.

By the last year of his presidency, Truman had succeeded in mediating between Arabs and Israelis, in supporting nationalists, and in blocking Soviet aggression. A pax Americana in the Middle East suddenly appeared within grasp. But that proximity proved to be a mirage. The Arab states declared that the armistice was little more than a provisional truce and that a state of war continued to exist between them and Israel. Egypt blockaded Israel-bound cargoes from traversing the Suez Canal or from passing through the Straits of Tiran, at the entrance to the Red Sea, to Israel’s southern port of Eilat. In violation of the armistice, the Jordanians banned Israelis from entering the Old City in East Jerusalem, home to the holiest of Jewish shrines, the Western Wall. Israel, for its part, refused to repatriate the Palestinian refugees without a peace agreement and retaliated for Palestinian infiltration across its border with large-scale raids into Arab territory.

Burned-out vehicles and the bullet-ridden dead once again littered the landscape sacred to millions. Scenes elsewhere in the Middle East, though, were scarcely less appalling. Much of the region from Morocco to Iraq was agitated by nationalist demonstrations and sporadic guerrilla attacks against the French and British authorities. The tumult coincided with renewed Soviet provocations against Iraq and Iran and by the Kremlin’s decision to embrace the Middle Eastern nationalists whom it had formerly shunned as “bourgeois lackeys” as its natural allies in the Cold War. A convergence of communism and radical nationalism imperiled the Middle Eastern oil on which the West depended for its well-being and even its survival.

The inability of the Western allies to stabilize, much less redress, the multiple conflicts rocking the Middle East was apparent as early as 1950, when Britain, France, and the United States issued the Tripartite Declaration. The document implicitly admitted the powers’ growing frustration with Arab-Israeli peace efforts and called on both disputants to exercise restraint. Rather than shoot at one another, the powers urged all states in the Middle East to aim their guns at their common Soviet foe by cooperating on regional defense.

The Tripartite Declaration marked another attempt to reconcile the incompatible components in America’s Middle East policy. The Truman administration naïvely believed that the United States could befriend both Israel and the Arab world, and that it could support demands for Middle Eastern independence while expecting Britain and France to defend the region from communism. Those assumptions were baseless, however, and by 1952, with the rise of Arab-Israeli tensions and the resurgence of nationalist revolts, the United States again faced agonizing choices. Either it could continue supporting Israel and further inflame Arab anger or back away from the Jewish state and garner Arab goodwill. America could either stand beside Britain and France in protecting the Middle East from Soviet aggression or abandon them in favor of native nationalists, some of whom were already in contact with the Kremlin.

Truman would not have to make those decisions. In January 1953, the Democratic White House passed into the hands of the Republicans under the square-jawed former general and World War II icon, Dwight David Eisenhower. “We who are free must proclaim anew our faith,” Eisenhower, a Kansan, drawled in his first inaugural address. Appearing no fewer than fourteen times in the text, the word “faith,” for the new president, meant confidence in America’s ability to protect freedom worldwide while respecting “the special heritage of each nation.” The United States had at last achieved the supremacy necessary to disseminate its values around the globe, but so, too, had the Soviet Union. And the “special heritage” of those nations still languishing under imperial rule contained at least as much hostility toward the West as it did fear of Soviet aggression. “Faith,” Eisenhower proclaimed, “defines our full view of life,” but that weltanschauung still overlooked the contradiction between nurturing nationalism and combating communism in an increasingly labyrinthine Middle East.

Dull, Duller, Dulles

Never adept at foreign policy, Eisenhower ceded responsibility for the Middle East—indeed for much of the world—to his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. Prim and stodgy, his gaze frigid behind steel-rimmed glasses and his smile precluded by a pipe, Dulles was notorious for his lack of pathos. Winston Churchill, who again served as British prime minister in the early 1950s, epitomized him in three words: “Dull, Duller, Dulles.” A Princeton graduate and a pious Presbyterian, the secretary was Wilsonian in his anticolonialism but Jacksonian in his determination to safeguard America’s interests abroad. He regarded communism as a global evil and viewed nonaligned countries such as India and Indonesia as abettors of that evil. Radical nationalists were also considered dangerous by Dulles. “Whether it is in Indo-China or Siam or Morocco or Egypt or Arabia or Iran…the forces of unrest are captured by the Soviet Communists,” he told the Senate. Together with his brother, Allen, formerly of the State Department and now head of the CIA, Dulles vowed to rid the Middle East of those who furnished entrées for the Russians.

The first target of this campaign was Mohammad Mossadegh. Shedding his avuncular image, the prime minister emerged in 1953 as Iran’s strongman. He severed relations with Britain, seized control of the army, and forged alliances with the communist Tudeh Party. The ineffectual but pro-Western shah, Mohammad Reza, was forced to flee the country. These events, in Dulles’s mind, augured the imminent fall of the entire Persian Gulf to a nationalist-communist coalition and the loss of irreplaceable Middle Eastern oil. Determined to prevent this catastrophe, Dulles collaborated with the British in plotting Mossadegh’s ouster. The operation, code-named Ajax, was carried out by the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt with the assistance of Loy Henderson, now serving as America’s ambassador to Teheran, and General Norman H. Schwarzkopf, all of whom had supported Iranian nationalism in the past. The conspirators inserted virulent attacks on Mossadegh in the Iranian press and incited antigovernment riots in the streets. Civil war threatened to bifurcate Iran when, on August 19, 1953, Ajax finally succeeded. The shah regained his throne and eliminated hundreds of Mossadegh supporters. The deposed prime minister was placed under house arrest, where he remained until his death, in 1967.3

The Iranian coup served as a precedent for the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954. And yet, in countries in which the danger of communist takeover was not perceived as acute, the United States continued to foster nationalist movements, even at the expense of its European allies. Such was the case in North Africa. “We cannot give the French the support they desire for their North African policies without incurring the enmity of the native populations,” the State Department averred in 1955. “The French are operating a police state in North Africa,” raged the Republican senator from Nevada, George Malone, who assailed the United States for sinking “into the filthy business of bolstering colonial slavery” by aiding France. The United States in fact pressed for the repatriation of King Muhammad V of Morocco and the Tunisian nationalist Habib Bourguiba, both of whom had been banished by the French, and helped their countries to achieve independence in 1956. The Eisenhower administration similarly urged France to show restraint in its suppression of Algerian nationalists. “Having gone so far to try to protect the independence of the Arab nations,” the president said, the United States “did not want to back a French position which might destroy all the good we had done.”

Resentment of America’s role in the coup against Mossadegh would fester among many Iranians, but bitterness over America’s support for the independence of other Middle Eastern states brewed in Britain and France. One senior British official regretted how “some Americans always saw a budding George Washington in every dissident or revolutionary movement,” and another denigrated the “ideal dream” of creating “a chain of independent Muslim states from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean working in grateful cooperation with the American Liberators.” The French general Alphonse Juin railed against the “vast conspiracy” in which “the religious fanaticism and xenophobia of the Middle East joins with American anti-colonialism” to eject the French from North Africa.4

Frustration with America’s vacillating policies in the Middle East increasingly roiled Europe and eventually boiled over in Egypt. The bonds between the United States and the Free Officers’ junta thickened under the Eisenhower administration. Returning from a tour of Cairo and other Middle Eastern capitals in May 1953, Dulles publicly endorsed Nasser’s demand for the complete withdrawal of British forces from Egypt. “From Foster’s personal observation,” Eisenhower wrote Churchill, “I have come to the conclusion that some step should be made soon to reconcile our minimum defense needs with the very strong nationalist sentiments of the Egyptian Government and people.” Dulles was convinced that, once freed of Britain, Egypt would willingly join the Middle East Defense Organization. But the British believed that Nasser was inherently anti-Western and that by supporting him the United States would undermine, rather than fortify, MEDO. “The old colonial attitude toward the natives will drive them into the hands of the communists,” Dulles complained. While British soldiers came under repeated attack from Egyptian guerrillas, Dulles intensified his pressure on London. Finally, in July 1954, Churchill capitulated and agreed to evacuate all British troops from Egypt. This ended a seventy-year occupation which had resulted in part from the rise and fall of Egyptian cotton prices during and after the Civil War.5

But Egypt did not enter MEDO. Nasser now explained that another obstacle to Egyptian membership in the organization remained: the conflict with Israel. Friction between Egyptian and Israeli forces had spiked in the wake of the British withdrawal and threatened to ignite the entire region. Restrain the Israelis, Nasser informed Dulles, and compel them to forfeit territory as a down payment on peace, and Egypt would surely join MEDO.

The offer deeply appealed to Dulles. Like many of the State Department officials who were descended from missionaries, he reviled the Jewish state—“the millstone around our necks,” he called it—and generally empathized with the Arabs. He agreed with the department’s assessment that Israel could achieve peace by ceding large portions of territory to the Arabs. But peace, for Dulles, was not only a means of assuring Middle East defense but also an exalted end in itself. Conditioned by his religious upbringing to feel a special attachment to Palestine, the secretary felt morally bound, if not celestially ordained, to restore tranquillity in the Holy Land.

The combined thrust of these strategic and theological impulses led Dulles to invite the British, only weeks after he had helped evict them from Egypt, to participate in an attempted mediation between Egypt and Israel. By the end of 1954, a team of Anglo-American planners had produced Alpha, a covert plan in which Israel relinquished swaths of territory to Egypt and Egypt promised to display nonbelligerency toward Israel. Predictably, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion of Israel rejected the proposal—Egypt should not be rewarded for its aggression in 1948, he explained—but Dulles was willing to pressure him to yield. All he needed was Nasser’s approval.

The Egyptian leader had just then embarked on an ambitious project to establish his primacy in inter-Arab politics and his prominence, along with India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, in the nonaligned movement. The first objective vitiated any chance that Nasser would make peace with the Arabs’ ultimate enemy, while the second negated the possibility of Egyptian membership in MEDO. Rejecting Alpha’s terms, Nasser proceeded to oppose Britain’s military alliance with Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq—the so-called Baghdad Pact—and to recognize Red China. In September 1955, he purchased massive quantities of Soviet arms via Czechoslovakia. Dulles nevertheless launched a second peace initiative, this one dubbed Gamma, in which a special presidential envoy shuttled between Nasser and Ben-Gurion in an attempt to arrange a meeting between the two. The emissary, the former defense secretary Robert B. Anderson, arrived in the region in the early spring of 1956 only to learn that Nasser had no intention of discussing peace and little interest in receiving him.

Dulles, enraged by this snub, authorized yet another operation, Omega, designed to effect regime change in Egypt by all means short of assassination. In addition to strengthening the friendly governments of Jordan and Lebanon and staging a pro-Western coup in Syria, Omega sought to promote King Saud as an “Islamic pope” who would supersede Nasser as the Arabs’ leader. Most draconian, though, was Omega’s stipulation for the withholding of U.S. aid for constructing the Aswan Dam. The project, first proposed by the American military explorer Erastus Sparrow Purdy in 1874, was the pride of Egypt’s ruler.6

Nasser refused to bow to the sanctions, however, and on July 23, 1956, he stunned the world by announcing Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. The move, Nasser, explained, was aimed at “the exploiters, the imperialists, and the stooges of imperialism” who had conspired to undermine Egypt by inhibiting the spread of its influence and cutting off funding for Aswan. In the eyes of the British, major shareholders in the Canal, Nasser had become a second Hitler and the seizure of Suez another Anschluss. “My object is to get rid of Colonel Nasser and his regime,” swore Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Nasser was also bankrolling Algerian guerrillas, a gesture that scarcely endeared him to the French. If Egypt got away with the nationalization scheme, Foreign Minister Christian Pineau warned from Paris, France would be reduced to a third-rate power and Europe would be “totally dependent on the Arabs’ goodwill.” French and British leaders immediately began drafting a military offensive against Egypt and seeking a green light for the attack, tacit or express, from the United States.7

The Suez crisis once again confronted the United States with difficult choices: either back a nonaligned nationalist with strong ties to Moscow or side with the two powers most capable of safeguarding the Middle East. The Americans had given priority to strategic over ethical concerns in Iran by colluding with Britain to oust Mossadegh, but in Egypt their ideology prevailed. The conflict, Dulles claimed, was not between Nasser and the West but rather between Middle Eastern nationalism and the imperialism of Europe. “The United States cannot be expected to identify herself one hundred per cent either with colonial powers or the power uniquely concerned with the problem of getting independence as rapidly and as fully as possible,” he opined. Though he secretly assured the British and the French that he never ruled out the use of force against Egypt, Dulles publicly opposed any resort to arms.

“Such cynicism towards allies destroys true partnership,” Eden protested. Pineau actually accused the United States of collaborating with the Kremlin to keep Nasser in power and prevent the emergence of a genuine Egyptian democracy. Exasperated by Dulles’s double-talk, the French began clandestinely arming the Israelis and encouraging them to attack Egypt first. Ben-Gurion welcomed the proposal, convinced that Nasser’s Soviet-equipped army mortally threatened the Jewish state. The British, who had never reconciled themselves to Israel’s existence, initially hesitated, but by September they, too, were party to the plot. Israeli forces would strike within the vicinity of the Suez Canal and create a pretext for Anglo-French intervention to “protect” the vital waterway.

Just after daybreak on October 29, 1956, the sky over Sinai’s Mitla Pass, twenty-five miles from the canal, was dotted with descending canopies. Landing, Israeli paratroopers fought a savage battle with Egyptian units in the pass while, farther to the north, Israeli armored formations smashed through Egyptian defenses en route to Suez and Gaza. France and Britain then threatened to intervene militarily unless all troops, Israeli and Egyptian, were withdrawn from the area of the canal. Egypt, as anticipated, rejected this ultimatum and an Anglo-French armada prepared to sail. Eden assured Dulles that the gathering invasion was not “a harkening back to the old colonial and occupational concepts” but rather an attempt to “strengthen the weakest point in the line against Communism.” Dulles, however, fumed. He accused his former World War II allies of acting more barbarously than the Soviets whose tanks were just then crushing an anticommunist revolt in Hungary. “The United States would survive or go down on the basis of the fate of colonialism,” the secretary bellowed. “Win or lose, we will share the fate of Britain and France.”

While French and British planes bombed Egyptian airfields, the Americans and the Soviets together approved a General Assembly resolution condemning the aggression against Egypt and authorizing the deployment of UN peacekeeping forces along the canal. Ignoring the resolution, British and French forces landed in Egypt on November 5 with the intent of occupying the canal within a week. Two days later, however, amid fierce Egyptian resistance, the Soviets threatened to intervene militarily against the invaders and the United States levied massive economic pressure on Britain. Intimidated by these tactics, the Anglo-French expedition was compelled to withdraw, disgraced, leaving Suez under exclusive Egyptian control. Israel, too, buckled under the threat of American sanctions and withdrew its forces from Sinai and Gaza. Though UN forces continued to pacify these areas and Israeli ships now passed unhindered through the Straits of Tiran, the Arabs construed Israel’s retreat as their triumph. As a result of the United States’s actions, Nasser emerged from the Suez Crisis as the region’s unrivaled master.8

Spurred by romantic notions of Middle Eastern nationalism and an anticolonialist creed, the United States had banded with its perennial Soviet enemy against its European friends and saved an Egyptian dictator whom Dulles had plotted to depose. In return for pursuing this meandering course, America earned contempt from the Soviet Union, acrimony from the British and the French, and antagonism from many Arabs. Rather than express gratitude to the nation that had saved him, Nasser denounced the United States as the new imperialist power in the Middle East. “The USA is being urged to take over the place of bankrupt and impotent Britain and France and to impose her influence over the Middle East,” alleged Nasser’s young spokesman, Anwar Sadat. Within a year of the Suez crisis, Nasserist agitation was undermining pro-Western governments throughout the area.

America, however, was virtually powerless to resist this onslaught. Having completed the work begun by Truman of ridding the Middle East of European imperialists, Eisenhower now found himself saddled with his allies’ burdens but without the means of shouldering them. The United States did not maintain significant forces in the Middle East, nor did it have a legal basis for intervening forcibly in the region. “We have to act now or get out of the Middle East,” he told Dulles. “To lose this area by inaction would be far worse than the loss in China, because of the [Middle East’s] strategic position.” Like Truman before him, Eisenhower needed a doctrine. Consequently, on January 5, 1957, the president asked Congress for $400 million to help steel Middle Eastern countries against any state “controlled by International Communism” and for permission to send American troops to defend them. “Seldom in history has a nation’s dedication to principle been tested as severely as ours,” he asserted, and Congress overwhelming concurred.

America’s dedication would indeed be tested the summer of 1958, when mobs in Baghdad brutally overthrew the Iraqi government, publicly dismembering its prime minister and king. The conservative regimes of Jordan and Lebanon also faced anti-Western revolts. Panicked by the prospect of an Egyptian-executed, Soviet-backed takeover of the entire Middle East, Eisenhower invoked his doctrine. U.S. Air Force planes were dispatched to resupply the British paratroopers who were interceding in Jordan and U.S. forces were sent to bolster the beleaguered Lebanese government. On a scorching July morning, some 8,500 GIs splashed onto …

28

THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR

THE DECADE THAT BEGAN IN 1981 WOULD BE REMEMBERED as a time of appalling disasters, from the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger to the spread of the AIDS epidemic. Less recollected, perhaps, was the era’s distinction as a span of almost uninterrupted upheaval in America’s relations with the Middle East. Preemptive attacks and regional conflicts, revolutions, international conspiracies, and terrorist strikes—punctuated the period and provoked a series of increasingly violent reactions from Washington. Over the course of those ten years, the image of the Middle East in the United States steadily hardened from that of a vaguely menacing conglomeration of states to a phalanx of bloodthirsty regimes that specifically targeted Americans.

Grappling with that transformation would prove to be a Sisyphean task for Carter’s successor, a man of scarcely less rigorous convictions and an even greater fondness for Hollywood-spun myths. Inaugurated on the day of the hostages’ release in Iran, Ronald Reagan, a former California governor and an actor in more than twenty-five movies and fifty television dramas, assumed responsibility for redressing America’s Middle East failures. The new president indicated his intention of returning to the stern Cold War tactic of checking Soviet encroachments on the region and of restoring the Jeffersonian model of countering terrorists. “I don’t think you pay ransom for people who have been kidnapped by barbarians,” he said.

A Decade of Disorder

Reagan had barely settled into the White House when his first Middle East contest commenced. A radical socialist whose rhetoric had taken on a new religious bend, Muammar Qadhafi represented the shift from a pro-Soviet to an Islamic orientation that was subtly transforming Arab politics. The change was manifest in May 1981 when the Libyan leader proclaimed his support for Iran’s struggle against “the Great Satan” and instructed a mob to burn down the U.S. embassy in Tripoli. “He’s not only a barbarian, he’s flaky,” said Reagan, whose florid complexion and soft-spoken style contrasted starkly with the swarthy and blusterous Qadhafi. In retaliation for the embassy sacking, the president closed the Libyan People’s Bureau in Washington and banned oil imports from the North African state. But then Qadhafi again taunted the United States by extending Libya’s territorial waters twenty kilometers into the Mediterranean. Reagan retrieved this gauntlet and ordered a naval task force to demonstrate in the Gulf of Sidra, adjacent to Libya’s coast. A squadron of Soviet-supplied SU-22 fighters flew out to challenge the flotilla, but Navy pilots speedily shot down two of them. For the first time since the Madison administration, American servicemen had engaged an Arab adversary in combat.

The dogfight over Sidra succeeded in quelling America’s contretemps with Libya—for a while. Less than a month later, however, on June 7, a formation of F-16’s was again soaring into action, this time against Iraq. But in place of five-pointed American stars, these aircraft were emblazoned with the sky-blue hexagrams of the Israeli air force. Their objective was the Osirak nuclear reactor, eighteen miles south of Baghdad. After flying 1,100 miles across enemy airspace, the Israeli pilots unleashed their payloads over the French-built facility and in eighty seconds reduced it to a smoking shell. Operation Opera, as it was code-named, was one of history’s most daring aviation raids, but by destroying an Iraqi plant with fighters purchased from the United States, the Israelis placed the White House in a bind.

Reagan’s relationship with Israel was, and would remain, complex. He still regarded oil as America’s paramount interest in the Middle East and resisted any Israeli action that was liable to jeopardize it. In 1981, for example, he supplied AWACS surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia, defeating intense AIPAC efforts to block the sale, and when Arab oil producers protested Israeli steps to annex the occupied Golan Heights, the president suspended a strategic cooperation agreement with Israel. Prime Minister Begin complained that America treated Israel “like a banana republic,” but Reagan in fact revered the Jewish state. Much of this admiration stemmed from his Manichean view of the Cold War, in which Israel had aligned itself with the West against the wicked Soviet empire. More fundamentally, Reagan, raised in the restorationist-minded Disciples of Christ church and closely associated with pro-Zionist American evangelicals, was religiously attached to Israel. He consistently endorsed measures to strengthen Israel militarily and economically and to assist Soviet (and later Ethiopian) Jews to immigrate to their ancestral homeland.

Israel’s bombing of the Osirak reactor challenged that commitment. Fresh from his run-in with Qadhafi, Reagan could commiserate with Israeli fears of a Soviet-backed Arab dictator such as Saddam Hussein, but he also appreciated the fact that the Iraqis had recently launched a full-scale war against Iran. The enemy of America’s enemy in the Middle East had automatically become its friend. Eager to dispel any semblance of collusion in an attack against America’s new de facto ally, Reagan delayed the delivery of additional jet fighters to Israel. He also permitted America’s 

 pertinacious ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, to confer with her Iraqi counterpart in drafting a Security Council condemnation of the raid. The Osirak raid did not, in the end, impair U.S.-Israel relations—later American presidents would thank Israel for denying nuclear capabilities to Iraq—but it did inaugurate ties between America and Saddam Hussein.1

The United States was once again placing its trust in a nationalist Arab leader, though no longer as an anticommunist bastion but rather as a bulwark against Islamic radicals. Still, the policy of backing Arab secularists against Muslim extremists, on the one hand, and of supporting Israel against Soviet proxies, on the other, ultimately proved incompatible. The contradictions between the two were tragically unveiled a year after the raid on the Osirak reactor, with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The Israelis had long prepared for this offensive. The PLO, which had transplanted its state within a state from Jordan to southern Lebanon, was regularly striking at Israeli settlements in the Galilee. But in addition to neutralizing this threat, Israel’s portly, pugnacious defense minister, Ariel Sharon, sought to eliminate the PLO as a competitor for control over the West Bank and Gaza. An audacious commander who had led Israeli retaliation raids in the 1950s and had masterminded the encirclement of Egyptian forces in 1973, Sharon argued for a lightning strike to evict both Arafat and the Syrians from Lebanon and to install an amenable government in Beirut. The plan deeply cleaved Reagan’s White House. The fiercely anticommunist Secretary of State Alexander Haig favored any move that was likely to harm the Soviets and their clients in the Arab world. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, on the other hand, less bellicose and more pragmatic, worried about the damage the war would inflict on America’s Middle East standing. The debate became academic, though, on June 3, 1982, when Palestinian gunmen shot and grievously wounded Israel’s ambassador in London. Three days later, Israel invaded Lebanon.

Piercing the country in a two-pronged assault, some thirty thousand Israeli troops stormed up the coast and into the mountainous Lebanese interior, obliterating an estimated five hundred Syrian tanks and one hundred planes and driving six thousand Palestinian fighters northward to Beirut. Pursuing them, the Israeli army surrounded the city and proceeded to bombard PLO positions and headquarters. A dense murky pall hung over the city, backlit by flares and penetrated only by incendiary rounds. Operation Peace for Galilee, originally described as a limited incursion to secure Israel’s northern border, had mushroomed into a massive siege of a major Arab capital containing tens of thousands of civilians.

“No matter how villainous the attack on Israel’s diplomat in London had been, it has not given Israel cause to unleash its brutal attack on Beirut,” the president scolded Begin. The images of bombed-out neighborhoods, limbless children, and roads teeming with refugees were effacing whatever reverence America still commanded in the Arab world. More perilously, the defeat of Moscow’s Syrian and Palestinian proxies revived the danger of direct Soviet intervention in the conflict. “We’re walking a tightrope,” wrote Reagan. He insisted that the Israelis halt their shelling immediately and pull their forces back from Beirut. Apart from prompting Haig’s resignation, though, these demands went largely ignored. The Israeli bombardment intensified. Desperate, finally, to defuse the crisis, Reagan offered to oversee the transfer of Arafat and his followers to Tunis. Eighty years after Teddy Roosevelt dispatched the Marines to Beirut to protect the Americans living there, Reagan was sending them back to the city to supervise a Palestinian retreat.

Undertaken in conjunction with French and Italian forces, the Marines’ evacuation of PLO fighters and personnel was an unequivocal success. Reagan marked the event by revealing a new Middle East peace plan. Israel, he declared, would pull out of the West Bank and Gaza, which would then be federalized with Jordan. The president subsequently sent a personal emissary, the affable Arab-American diplomat Philip Habib, to try to implement the program. Habib embarked under what appeared to be propitious circumstances. A looming disaster in Lebanon had been averted and a fissure to peace exposed. Under banners proclaiming “Job Well Done,” the Marines waded onto their landing craft offshore.

They were back less than three weeks later. In the midst of Habib’s mediation, on September 14, 1982, the Syrians assassinated the Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel, the Maronite leader with whom the Israelis had hoped to sign an accord. The murder provoked the Israelis into occupying much of Muslim Beirut and allowing Maronite militiamen to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, where they massacred at least eight hundred civilians. The atrocity sparked an international outcry—Ariel Sharon was compelled to resign—and demands for American intervention to protect the Palestinians from further assault. Reagan, unable to resist this pressure, ordered the Marines to turn around and head back to war-shattered Beirut.

Their objective now was no longer to extricate Palestinians but to bolster the beleaguered government of Bashir Gemayel’s brother, Amin. The Marines were once again cast in the role of innocents abroad, perceiving themselves as the defenders of democracy but seen by the Syrians, the Shiites, and the Druze as the imposers of a militant Maronite minority. Like the Iranians, these factions forgot America’s contributions to Syrian and Lebanese independence and instead declared the United States a belligerent in Lebanon’s interminable civil war. Landing, the Marines came under a withering fire, compelling them to shoot back with artillery and tanks and to bombard many of the same neighborhoods recently shelled by Israel. Not since World War II had U.S. ground forces been so actively engaged in Middle East combat. But even their firepower proved insufficient. Army units had to be sent in to reinforce the embattled Marines and warships from the Sixth Fleet positioned to pound enemy strongholds in the Shouf Mountains above Beirut.

And the enemy fought back, harder now and unconventionally. At midday on April 13, 1983, a suicide bomber belonging to Hizbollah (Party of God), an Iranian-backed Shi’ite organization, drove an explosives-laden truck into the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Seventeen Americans, many of them CIA officials, were killed, along with more than forty Lebanese. Six months later, on October 23, another Hizbollah bomber killed 241 servicemen—the deadliest single attack against Americans in the postwar period—at the lightly guarded Marine headquarters. Horrified, Americans watched on their living room TVs as rescue crews exhumed mangled bodies from the wreckage and listened as Reagan vowed to “resist those who seek to drive us out of that area.” At first he seemed determined to fulfill that pledge. Fighters from the carriers Kennedy and Independence struck at Syrian targets—two planes were shot down and one of the pilots humiliatingly captured—and the battleship New Jersey fired its thunderous sixteen-inch guns at the Shouf. But by February 1984, Reagan realized that Lebanon was becoming a Vietnam-like quagmire and recalled all American troops.2

Reagan rebuffed charges that America had “cut and run” from Lebanon, but the irrefragable fact remained that the United States had failed in its task of restraining Syria and its allies and, following the Iranian debacle, appeared to be retreating from the Middle East. The erosion of America’s power in the region was underscored by Lebanon’s cancellation of the peace treaty with Israel brokered by the United States and, more spectacularly, by a scourge of terrorist attacks against American citizens and institutions. Bombers, most likely belonging to Hizbollah, struck the American embassy in Kuwait on December 12, 1983, and the following September blew up an embassy annex in Beirut, killing two American soldiers. Hizbollah bombs killed eighteen American servicemen in a restaurant in Torrejon, Spain, in April 1984, and murdered twenty-two people that September in yet another Beirut embassy blast.

Hijackings and assaults on air terminals suddenly came back into vogue. Hizbollah terrorists executed two Americans when they forced a Kuwaiti plane to land in Teheran in December 1984, and six months later hijacked a TWA jet to Beirut, where they tortured and shot the U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem and dumped his body onto the tarmac. Five Americans were killed in grenade and machine-gun attacks staged by Abu Nidal, a Palestinian group, at the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985. That March, Palestinian terrorists placed a bomb aboard an Athens-bound jet, killing another four Americans.

It seemed that a month could scarcely pass without Americans learning that some of their countrymen had been killed by nameless Middle Eastern thugs. The ubiquity of Arab terror—and the vulnerability of Americans—was hideously illustrated by the takeover of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. Mimicking the Moroccan pirates who boarded the brig Betsey 201 years earlier, members of the Palestine Liberation Front overran the Achille Lauro and held its twelve American passengers at gunpoint. But in contrast to the Betsy’s capturers, the PLF gunmen did not merely incarcerate the Americans but decided to make an example of one of them. Their choice was a handicapped sixty-nine-year-old New Yorker named Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jew. The terrorists pushed Klinghoffer’s wheelchair to the edge of the deck, shot him in the back, and pitched his still-twitching body into the sea.

“Once again, we had a crisis in the Middle East in which American lives were hanging in the balance,” Reagan informed his diary. America’s ability to respond to that threat was circumscribed by the absence of a credible deterrent but also by the dearth of dependable allies. Rather than arrest the Achille Lauro hijackers, Egypt offered them safe conduct to PLO headquarters in Tunis. U.S. Navy fighters intercepted the Egyptian jet carrying the Palestinians’ ringleader, Abu Abbas, and forced it to land in Sicily, but Italian authorities promptly released the prisoner. In countering Middle Eastern terror, it seemed, America would have to respond unilaterally.

The United States indeed acted alone when it again confronted Libya, the primary sponsor of Abu Nidal, in March 1986. Hoping to provoke Qadhafi into a military clash, Reagan ordered the Navy to renew its patrols near the Libyan coast. “Any nation victimized by terrorism has an inherent right to respond with force to deter new acts of terror,” the president explained. “I felt we must show Qaddafi that…we wouldn’t let him get away with it.” Qadhafi lunged at the bait. When Libyan missile boats opened fire on the fleet, Navy fighters blasted the vessels with missiles and bombed land-based radar sites as well.

Reagan had exacted justice for Abu Nidal’s atrocities, but Qadhafi was far from deterred. Two weeks after the clash in Sidra, Libyan agents killed two American servicemen and wounded fifty with a bomb placed in a Berlin discotheque. Reagan retaliated by ordering more than sixty tons of ordnance dropped on Tripoli and Benghazi. Some of the explosives missed their target and killed a number of civilians, including, according to some reports, Qadhafi’s adopted daughter. Operation El Dorado Canyon, as it was called, once again angered America’s allies; France and Spain refused to allow the American fighters to overfly their territory en route to Libya. European sympathy for Libya did not, however, inhibit Qadhafi from staging yet another terrorist attack in Europe, his deadliest ever. On December 21, 1988, a bomb purportedly planted by Libyan operatives aboard Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 passengers, thirty-seven American college students among them, and eleven villagers on the ground.

The United States had again projected its power, without European assistance, against a warlike North African despot. Unlike Yusuf Qaramanli, however, Tripoli’s ruler in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Qadhafi could strike back almost anywhere in the world and with virtual impunity. And nowhere could revenge against the United States be more readily exacted than in Lebanon. In a further act of retribution for the Libya bombings, Qadhafi asked for the execution of Peter Kilburn, a librarian at the American University of Beirut who had been held by Hizbollah for two years. Hizbollah honored the request.

Kilburn’s abduction and murder was symptomatic of the plague of hostage taking and assassinations that afflicted Americans living in Lebanon in the 1980s. Caught between warring factions in the vicious civil war, U.S. citizens became easy prey for the thousands of masked and heavily armed militiamen prowling Beirut’s ruins. The first to be seized was David Dodge, the president of the American University of Beirut and the great-grandson of the university’s founder, Daniel Bliss. Captured by Hizbollah in 1981 and incarcerated for a year, Dodge was released unharmed, but his successor, Malcolm Kerr, was less fortunate. Another son of Middle East missionaries and a renowned scholar of inter-Arab affairs, Kerr was exiting his AUB office in 1984 when two Hizbollah gunmen approached him and shot him in the head. The following year, Hizbollah kidnapped, tortured, and executed the CIA’s Beirut bureau chief, William Buckley, and in 1988 abducted and hanged William Higgins, an American colonel serving with UN peacekeeping forces in Lebanon.

Lebanese factions detained nine other Americans during the decade 1981–91, one of them, the Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, for nearly seven years. “No noise, no speaking,” Anderson recalled of his ordeal. “Even rolling from side to side…to relieve the painful muscle cramps brought on by lying still for hours would earn a slap or a poke with a gun.”3 More incensing than the bombing of U.S. facilities or the assassination of its citizens, the hostage crisis exasperated American leaders. A nation armed with untold numbers of tanks, assault aircraft, warships, and battle-ready divisions seemed impotent in the face of a few lightly armed kidnappers in the Middle East.

Teddy Roosevelt had been able to cable the Moroccan government, “We want Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead,” but for Reagan, faced with the Hobbesian state of Lebanon, there was simply no government to address. The only alternative was to deter the state sponsors of the kidnappers, foremost Iran, by military and economic means, but none of these measures had succeeded. Reagan spent much of his second term in office befuddled by the Iranian conundrum, uncertain whether to intimidate or placate the mullahs. Then, in the summer of 1985, the Israelis offered him a solution. They claimed that moderate elements within the Iranian leadership would obtain the hostages’ release in return for antitank missiles that were desperately needed in the war with Iraq. Enticed by this arrangement, Reagan warranted a scheme in which Israel would secretly convey the missiles to Teheran and the United States would then replenish Israel’s stocks. “We wouldn’t be shipping any weapons to the people in Iran,” the president consoled himself. “I did not think of the operation…as an ‘arms-for-hostage’ deal, because it wasn’t.”

At night, in unmarked boxes on neutral flag ships, Israel began transferring the projectiles. By August, six hundred of them had reached Iran, and another fifteen hundred by December. Yet even as these consignments restored some degree of communication between Tel Aviv and Teheran, they divided policymakers in Washington. While the CIA and the National Security Agency favored the operation, the notion of buying Iranian compliance with weaponry revolted George Shultz, the ursine former treasury secretary and Bechtel Corporation director who had replaced Haig as Reagan’s secretary of state. The president nevertheless continued to sanction the arms transfers, even after November 1986 when the press leaked word of the operation. Reagan at first denied that he had sold missiles to a terrorist-sponsoring regime, but then, a week later, he reversed himself and admitted that the United States had, in fact, supplied some “defensive weapons” to Iran, albeit for an honorable cause. “Our government has a firm policy not to capitulate to terrorist demands,” he insisted. “We did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.”

Reagan’s prevarications cost him enormously in terms of his credibility among Americans, and they failed to secure him credit in Teheran. The Iranians refused to rein in Hizbollah in Lebanon and, in the Gulf, proceeded to launch missile boat attacks against unarmed Kuwaiti oil tankers. Reagan had ignored the seminal lesson of the Barbary Wars: providing arms to pirate states in the Middle East only produces more piracy. To defend America’s oil supply from Kuwait, the president was obliged to send the Navy back into action. Over the course of 1987 and 1988, U.S. warships sank a number of Iranian naval boats and provided armed escorts for endangered Kuwaiti vessels. In the course of these operations, the USS Vincennes accidently downed a civilian Iranian airliner, killing all 290 of its passengers.

While American servicemen fought the Iranians in the Gulf, American arms shipments to the Islamic regime sparked a full-blown scandal in Washington. Proceeds from the missile sales, it was revealed, had been funneled to anticommunist Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua in violation of congressional law. The administration was subjected to a sweeping, nationally televised investigation, but that did not dissuade Reagan from pursuing controversial—and contradictory—policies in the Middle East. At the same time that the United States was arming Iran with antitank missiles, it was also supplying helicopters, mortars, and satellite intelligence to Iran’s mortal enemies in Baghdad.

Though Iraq, no less than Libya, was a patron of Abu Nidal and other terrorist groups, Reagan removed Iraq from the list of terrorism-backing states. Twice, in 1983 and 1984, he sent the presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam Hussein, ignoring evidence that the Iraqi dictator had employed poison gas against thousands of his enemies. “No one had any doubts about [the Iraqis’] continued involvement in terrorism,” a document from the Defense Department confirmed. “The real reason was to help them succeed in the war against Iran.” While unambiguously condemning Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, Rumsfeld also assured Saddam that the United States still stood behind him in his struggle with the ayatollahs and desired “to improve bilateral relations, at a pace of Iraq’s choosing.” Ties between Washington and Baghdad continued to solidify even after an Iraqi Mirage jet mistakenly fired missiles at the Stark, a U.S. frigate patrolling the Persian Gulf in March 1987, killing thirty-seven sailors.

The administration’s efforts to contain Iranian influence in the Gulf coincided with a clandestine campaign to provide arms, military advisers, and financial assistance to the Arab irregulars battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Administration officials tended to romanticize this resistance, refusing to recognize the contempt which these mujahideen, or holy warriors, held the United States. Americans were also reluctant to acknowledge the hatred of their culture seething in Saudi Arabia or the willingness of Saudi authorities to deflect radical Islamic criticism of their own profligacy onto the United States. America, claimed one widely circulated Saudi cassette, was the enemy of all Muslims, a “nation of beasts who fornicate and eat rotten food.” Few officials in Washington seemed alarmed that their country was fueling the spread of such anti-American propaganda through its purchases of Arab oil and funding some of the most militant Islamists, among them the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden.4

The same Reagan administration famous for steering a straightforward course in its policies toward the Soviet Union was now notorious for running circles in the Middle East. Security concerns had led it to attack Libya while coddling Iraq and to arm both Saddam and the leaders of the Iranian revolution. Steeped in Middle Eastern myths, it provisioned the Arab freedom fighters in Afghanistan and succored the Saudi theocracy while ignoring the threats posed by both. Wavering between considerations of security and faith, the White House at first backed then protested Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, expedited then delayed weapons shipments to the Jewish state, collaborated with Israeli intelligence on a controversial arms-for-hostages scheme but in 1985 prosecuted a former U.S. Navy Intelligence analyst, Jonathan Pollard, as an Israeli spy. Reagan helped evacuate the PLO from Beirut, only to boycott the organization thereafter, and then, in a final volte-face, engaged in a diplomatic dialogue with Arafat.

Parleys with the Palestinian leader represented a sharp departure from previous American policy. Though every administration since Nixon’s had secretly communicated with the PLO, usually in an effort to shield Americans from Palestinian violence, the United States officially refused to recognize the group as long as it perpetrated terror and rejected Israel’s right to exist. Reagan rigorously upheld that policy—“hell no, PLO!” Shultz had led an AIPAC audience in chanting—until December 1987, when a large-scale civic revolt, or intifada, broke out in the West Bank and Gaza. The scenes of Palestinian youths pelting Israeli tanks with stones caught both the Americans and the Israelis off guard, but it also stunned Arafat. The young local leaders of the rebellion did not automatically take their instructions from the Old Man, as he was known, in Tunis. Arafat regained the initiative the following December, though, by suddenly renouncing terror and recognizing Resolution 242. Now that it had met America’s preconditions for acceptance, Reagan had no choice but to acknowledge the PLO as the Palestinians’ representative and to open contacts with Arafat. Discussions between State Department and Palestinian officials covered a range of issues, including the possibility of creating a Palestinian state in the territories. But hopes that the president’s record of consecutive debacles in the Middle East would be crowned by a peacemaking success were squelched by a terrorist assault on an Israeli beach led by Abu Abbas, commander of the Achille Lauro raid. Arafat refused to condemn the attack and Washington suspended the talks.5

America’s inability to sustain a constructive dialogue on Middle Eastern disputes, much less resolve them, was symptomatic of a more chronic malady. Though widely credited with achieving victory in the clear-cut Cold War, Reagan had proved incapable of coping with the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iran-Iraq war, and tensions between secular and Islamic regimes. The vision of establishing a pax Americana in the region …

10

Liberty University

School of Graduate

Counterterrorism

Submitted to Dean Curry

Course: PPOG540

Abdirahim M Muhumed

December 11, 2021

Contents
Counterterrorism 1
Definition of terms 1
Terrorism 1
Counterterrorism 2
Attacks 2
Malicious 2
Suspect 2
Why counterterrorism? 2
The 9/11 attacks 3
How counterterrorism is addressed 4
Effects of counterterrorism regulations 6
Conclusion and recommendations 8
References 10

Counterterrorism

Over numerous years, terrorism has continued to present severe threats to the security and peace of nations, which affects the overall population’s rights and socio-economic development. It seeks to undermine the values that unite a given country. Ultimately, the global threat is a persistent act. It does not have any border, religion, or nationality. The international community must come together to tackle the challenge by implementing various ways.[footnoteRef:1] For most law enforcement agencies, policymakers, and the population, the topic of terrorism threats and the means to fight it is an essential concern. The government’s responsibility is to protect the people within their jurisdiction from any attacks. [1: Huq, Aziz Z. “Community-led counterterrorism.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 40.12 (2017): 1040]

The overall strategy and way to fight terrorism is counterterrorism. After extensive research, while utilizing the library resources, I learned that counterterrorism monitors terrorists identify individuals who may be radicalized, provides at-risk people, and builds additional security.[footnoteRef:2] It is a strategy that contributes to safeguarding the security of a country through government approaches, collaboration, and coordinating working arrangements.  [2: Silke, A., 2018. The study of terrorism and counterterrorism. In Routledge handbook of terrorism and counterterrorism, 1.]

Definition of terms

A few terms will repeatedly appear throughout the study, thus the need to define them. This includes:

Terrorism is the use of intimidation and violence unlawfully, mainly in the quest for political aims against a civilian.[footnoteRef:3] [3: Silke, A., 2018. The study of terrorism and counterterrorism, 1]

Counterterrorism– refers to measures designed to prevent or combat terrorism.

Attacks are the act of taking an aggressive military action against n civilian or enemy forces using armed forces or weapons [footnoteRef:4] [4: Huq, Aziz Z. “Community-led counterterrorism.” (2017): 1042]

Malicious– intended or intending to harm.

Suspect– Having an impression or idea of the presence, existence, or truth of a given something without having much proof.

Why counterterrorism?

Counterterrorism is an integral and exciting topic to explore in relation to America’s foreign policy. It is efforts against terrorism to engender attempts or conditions that terrorist organizations could engage in when carrying their malicious activities. From research, the essential part of the topic is learning the origin of counterterrorism.[footnoteRef:5] The topic was invented to explore terrorism and define the impacts that it causes, especially in the past years. Essentially, terrorists target the border infrastructure, usually the weakest links. Counterterrorism involves implementing good practices and international standards of sound, cooperative,[footnoteRef:6] and modern integrated border management to stop terrorists and related illicit trafficking flows. It also involves preventing violent extremism favorable to terrorism, and it requires multidimensional cooperation between civil societies, regional and international organizations, and member states. [5: Terrorism as a problem predates the 1980s, but the Reagan administration’s approach differed from earlier ones because it used counterterrorism as a justification for making war on sovereign nations like Nicaragua. In the confusing and tumultuous 21st century the terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘war on terrorism’ are often tossed around by the media and the political leadership in the United States, but few Americans really understand that these commonplace terms signify a landmark transformation in how the United States uses and justifies its use of force in the world.] [6: da Cruz, José de Arimatéia. “Counterterrorism Strategy from an extended Global online Level.”103]

Counterterrorism is paramount in any nation. Through it, massive terrorists can be killed, detained, or taken out of action. Through the cooperation of various countries, it becomes practical to work together to identify and develop programs needed to ensure no terrorism. Countries through specific bodies may carry counterterrorism activities such as promoting the international legal framework implementation against terrorism,[footnoteRef:7]and enhancing legal cooperation in criminal matters relating to terrorism. Also, they may need counterterrorism by suppressing and preventing terrorism financing or countering the internet use by individuals who have terrorism intentions. Moreover, they can also counter violent extremism and radicalization that lead to tourism-this becomes a success only when a multidimensional approach is used. [7: Travis, Philip. “We’re Going to Nicaragua: The United States, Nicaragua, and Counterterrorism in Central America during the 1980s.”n.d.]

Similarly, there may be dialogue promotion and cooperation on issues related to counterterrorism between the private sector and State authorities (through public-private partnerships). Also, there may be strengthening of national efforts to implement security resolutions on the non-proliferation of mass destruction weapons.[footnoteRef:8] Consequently, promoting and preventing fundamental freedoms and human rights in the context of countering terrorism measures may be an effective strategy. Moreover, an essential activity to ensure counterterrorism is strengthening travel documents’ security. [8: Silke, A., 2018. The study of terrorism and counterterrorism, 4
]

The 9/11 attacks

Terrorism did not commence on 11th September 2001. Prior to the attacks on this day, there were frequent attacks, but the attacks on this day changed the world significantly. The attacks in America claimed many lives of innocent Americans, indicating that terrorism had morphed into a phenomenon that could cause enormous destruction and massive pain.[footnoteRef:9] The incidence involved hijacking four planes and conducting suicidal attacks against the United States passengers. The magnitude of these attacks was felt everywhere and had become a global phenomenon. [9: Winter, Aaron. “The United States of America: Counterterrorism pre-9/11, 619]

It is essential to relate this event with the concept of counterterrorism. Also, connecting it to the bible teachings would assist every Christian to remember the incident with respectfulness. From the Holy Scriptures, always rejoice with those rejoicing and mourn with those who are grieving (Romans 12: 15). It is essential to remember the suffering people and act as we are suffering with them (Hebrews: 23: 3).

As the country continues mourning the incident, it gave birth to counterterrorism. The present administration tries to find the event’s footing to mitigate and prevent any instance of the “second attack”, as many referred to it.[footnoteRef:10] They had to think of how the next attack could be if it were to occur and take the best steps to prevent it. Security became paramount, and from then, the government started allocating massive sums of money to protect the United States, despite the nature of the threat evolving continuously. [10: Tankel, Stephen. “US counterterrorism in the Sahel: from indirect to direct intervention”,875]

How counterterrorism is addressed

When addressing the strategy, various regional and international approaches are utilized to address it in broad. For decades, organizations have put efforts into bringing the regions and global communities together to condemn the malicious acts,[footnoteRef:11] while simultaneously developing legal frameworks to enable states and neighboring countries to fight such threats collectively. [11: Silke, A., 2018. The study of terrorism and counterterrorism, 7]

There are counterterrorism programs that have been designed since the 9/11 attacks. Although the government has been fighting tirelessly, it faces minor attacks or attempts to conduct malicious acts. For instance, there was an incident in 2009 when an attacker, Najibullar Zari, had plotted the subway system to attack New York City.[footnoteRef:12] Since then, the United States has transformed the FBI and restricted its operation to necessitate better detection, penetration, and dismantling of any terrorists’ enterprises. This serves as part of a shift to threat-based, national security organizations. The approaches employed include establishing clear priorities emphasizing terrorism prevention while protecting civil liberties and privacy rights. Also, the United States has doubled FBI intelligence analysts and increased the number of linguists.[footnoteRef:13] Similarly, some agents are shifted from various programs such as criminal programs to matters related to counterterrorism and creating threat fusion cells to discourse the counterterrorism priorities of the FBI. [12: Sinai, Joshua. “The United States of America: Domestic Counterterrorism since 9/11, 639] [13: Huq, Aziz Z. “Community-led counterterrorism.” (2017): 1049
]

The government has built immense infrastructure to protect terrorists from attacking the nation. This involved creating the Department of Homeland Security. Also, the United States united with the international community to counterterrorism. Through bodies such as the United States, some strategies become a success. For instance, the travel by terrorists are detected, and disrupted-terrorists and inspiring terrorists are a transnational threat,[footnoteRef:14] and this is a priority to the community. This approach involves collecting passenger information and utilizing passenger name records (PNR) and advanced passenger information (API) to necessitate improved use of the international database. Detecting passengers’ information involves analyzing data from various transportation modes such as land modes, air, and maritime (Travis, 2016). The known and suspected terrorists are identified by cross-checking against the international or national watch lists and databases, including the previously unknown or INTERPOL threats. [14: da Cruz, José de Arimatéia. “Counterterrorism Strategy from an extended Global online Level.”107]

The global partners and the United States use America’s tools to counterterrorism, strengthen military approaches, and emphasize non-military capabilities. For instance, the decimation of ISIS and pushing the group to extinction in Syria and Iraq has led to recapturing the territories previously held by ISIS.[footnoteRef:15] The consistent counterterrorism capabilities and actions have greatly combatted terrorism in the United States. Through the responsible bodies, the government also focuses on controlling the online space as a way of countering terrorism. This is by exercising solid regulatory powers and rapidly deleting extremist inflammatory content. [15: Travis, Philip. “We’re Going to Nicaragua: The United States, Nicaragua, and Counterterrorism in Central America during the 1980s.”n.d.]

Consequently, securities authorities have partnered with major online platforms operators, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Microsoft. The United States and the global partners also coordinate with Global Internet Forum to fight terrorism.[footnoteRef:16] They use a hashtag database that effectively captures terrorist materials. This enables blocking (cross-platform). The occurrence of threats after the 9/11 threats has led to the invention of crisis protocol that ensures swift or worldwide blocking of any filmed acts of terrorism.  [16: da Cruz, José de Arimatéia. “Counterterrorism Strategy from an extended Global online Level.”110]

Effects of counterterrorism regulations

The existing relationship and context in local regions shape the regulations of counterterrorism impacts on suspect populations. Terrorism activities affect civilians in different ways, and it mainly affects the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms and human rights. Implementing measures impacts all individuals, including children, adults (civilians), and the suspect population[footnoteRef:17]. In most cases, the measures on children are heightened depending on their age and bearing in mind that they are mostly ignored in the debates on terrorism prevention and radicalization. For instance, children are accepted from detention in case of a severe offence committed by a child. The detention should be outweighed by the safeguarding interest of the child and the development of considerations in action that affect the child. [17: Mythen, Gabe, and Sandra Walklate. “Counterterrorism and the reconstruction of (in) security: Divisions, dualisms, duplicities.”, 1109]

States may also adopt anti-discrimination legislation consisting of punitive and preventive actions to combat any incitement to hatred. The State should always be defined by action, which must be adopted in the context of the international discussions on the prohibition of national,[footnoteRef:18] religious, or racial hatred advocacy constituting incitement to hostility, discrimination, or a reminder to put measures to implement 2012 Rabat Plan policies’ recommendations to guarantee people with the freedom of expression [18: Tankel, Stephen. “US counterterrorism in the Sahel: from indirect to direct intervention.”, 886]

In areas with numerous suspects, the regulations tend to breach equality and human rights laws. Also, the regulations may run a risk of undermining confidence and trust in the security and police services. For the suspect population, their experience on counterterrorism regulations may represent the disconnection between the emphasis on terrorism and critical social issues’ level of importance.[footnoteRef:19] Similarly, some communities may be wrongly suspected, and the population may respond to them by engaging exceptionally and challenging the misperceptions and myths that people may be holding about them. The regulations also tend to raise the population’s vulnerability and anxiety level. [19: Mythen, Gabe, and Sandra Walklate. “Counterterrorism and the reconstruction of (in) security: Divisions, dualisms, duplicities.”, 1111]

Conclusion and recommendations

Counterterrorism is an essential strategy in ensuring terrorism mitigation. The primary goal of the counterterrorism effort is to prevent any malicious acts by terrorists. As such, identifying terrorists before they carry any activity is an essential step, and it requires accurate collection and analysis of their corresponding personal information. However, any case of imperfect understanding of the characteristics to look for, alongside inaccurate and imperfect data, may draw unwarranted attention to innocent people. The records pertaining to the personal information of suspects becomes challenging to explore without interfering with non-terrorists privacy. 

The laws and practices for the strategy are not necessarily experienced in isolation. However, they contribute to a broader sense among the nationalities, especially for the suspect population. In recent years, there has been an increase in threats from terrorism and other violent extremism, which may be due to advancements in technology. Although governments are putting measures to fight terrorism, the remaining parts require new strategies to implement in future. Terrorism activities exacerbate inequality and governance challenges within societies and countries, which increases the risk of conflicts. 

In future, there is a need for the government through respective bodies to work with regional and national entities in fighting against these challenges. Also, a global digital consultation is an essential strategy that assists in seeking the society views on counterterrorism and the gender that is mainly affected by the violence and counterterrorism approaches. Moreover, the prevent strategy can be implemented in most countries and the world. It is a preventive strand that prevents people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorist activities in their countries and overseas. Professionals such as nurses, lecturers, doctors, and teachers are required to report any case if they come across a patient, student, or pupil who nay at risk of extremism. This would assist professionals in becoming part of the counterterrorism state, usually in an unexpected way.

References

da Cruz, José de Arimatéia. “Counterterrorism Strategy from an extended Global online Level.” In Online Terrorist Propaganda, Recruitment, and Radicalization, pp. 103-112. CRC Press, 2019. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.1201/9781315170251-6/counterterrorism-strategy-extended-global-online-level-jos%C3%A9-de-arimat%C3%A9ia-da-cruz

Huq, Aziz Z. “Community-led counterterrorism.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 40.12 (2017): 1038-1053. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2016.1253988

Mythen, Gabe, and Sandra Walklate. “Counterterrorism and the reconstruction of (in) security: Divisions, dualisms, duplicities.” British Journal of Criminology 56, no. 6 (2016): 1107-1124. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azw030

Silke, A., 2018. The study of terrorism and counterterrorism. In Routledge handbook of terrorism and counterterrorism (pp. 1-10). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315744636-1/study-terrorism-counterterrorism-andrew-silke

Sinai, Joshua. “The United States of America: Domestic Counterterrorism since 9/11.” In Routledge handbook of terrorism and counterterrorism, pp. 635-647. Routledge, 2018 https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315744636-55/united-states-america-joshua-sinai

Tankel, Stephen. “US counterterrorism in the Sahel: from indirect to direct intervention.” International Affairs 96, no. 4 (2020): 875-893. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa089

Travis, Philip. “We’re Going to Nicaragua: The United States, Nicaragua, and Counterterrorism in Central America during the 1980s.” Contemporary Voices: St Andrews Journal of International Relations 7, no. 2 (2016). https://jtr.st-andrews.ac.uk/articles/10.15664/jtr.1217/

Winter, Aaron. “The United States of America: Counterterrorism pre-9/11.” in Silke, A. (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Terrorism and Counterterrorism Abingdon, UK Routledge, 2018. pp. 615-634 https://repository.uel.ac.uk/item/846vx