The Three Gulf Wars and What They Have Meant for Stability in the Middle East
Although not typically framed in the terms of a Gulf War, the first war involving Iraq that the US had an active interest in was the the long, drawn-out war between Iraq and Iran that fell quickly upon the return to Islamic fundamentalism in the latter country when the Shah-led government backed by the US collapsed in the face of overwhelming religious devotion to the policies of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Although playing Monday morning quarterback can lead to headaches like you wouldn’t believe, one can’t help but entertain the possibilities of today’s geopolitical situation in the Middle East had the US either never supported the despotic Shah, or at the very had not stubbornly decided to back that losing pony right up to the very end.
It was, of course, that rise to power in the key state of Iran of a fundamentalist Islamic leader that helped set in motion the sea change in the geopolitics of the region. It is too easy to lay blame merely with the events taking place in Iraq-surely the US determination to bring the Soviets into their own Vietnam-style quagmire in Afghanistan had much more profound and far-reaching effects on the current situation than the return of Khomeini-but even so it was definitely the loss of control over Iran that created a volatile powderkeg which perhaps still hasn’t quite exploded. Probably the biggest mistake the American government made during this time-apart from funding the mujahadeen in Aghanistan, those freedom fighters who would eventually transform into the Taliban terrorists-was the singularly stupid decision by the Reagan administration to essentially back both parties in the Iraq/Iran war.
The United States was overwhelmed with fear of the ramifications that Khomeini’s rise to power could portend; nothing scared them more-with the apparently exception of the Soviets-than the stated promise of Khomeini to spread his style of fundamentalist Islamic revolution over the board and into the neighboring country of Iraq. Why? Because Iraq contained one of the world’s largest oil deposits. The US policy that was put in place hoped to prevent this admittedly disturbing scenario from playing out, while also trying to undermine the rising Islamic fundamentalist movement at large. With the goal of retaining that vast deposit of oil the positively strange bedfellows of the US, France and the Soviet Union began providing weapons and military assistance to Iraq.
So far, so good. Unfortunately, deep within the Reagan White House-the actual White House itself-there developed what can only be views as perhaps the single most lunatic plan in the history of American foreign policy. When it was ultimately discovered that the US had not only been sending weapons to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but to Iran in that nutty plan designed to free hostages, the US was forced to retract their stated neutrality and openly support Iraq.
It would not be until the Gulf War of 1991 that US soldiers would actually be involved in combat-as far as we know-and if the irony that those US soldiers were fighting against the very same weapons their own country had sold the enemy seemed to be lost on Americans, you can be sure it wasn’t anything but lost on most Arabs. Although the second Gulf War in 1991 may hold some justification as a reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the current war can only be seen as an example of US imperialism and anti-Islamic stance. Many Arab nations even view the protection of Kuwait with a raised eyebrow; after all, where was the US interest in protecting the region from militaristic occupation when Israel was pushing across borders?
Only the tragic situation that developed out of Afghanistan as the US pursued its single-minded devotion to stamping out communist no matter what the cost has created more instability in the Middle East than the three Gulf Wars. For a culture built on a religious devotion tied explicitly to set moral principles, the Islamic theocracies of the Middle East cannot but be expected to view the shifting allegiances and moralities of the US and other western countries with not only suspicion, but outright distaste. American citizens were held hostage in Iran for 444 days, yet just a few short years later the US found to be secretly selling arms to that very country. America has spent the last decade and a half calling Saddam Hussein a butcher when it we who sold him the knife. The rift between the Islamic countries and the western nations may not be quite as large as it was during the Middle Ages, but that’s cold comfort when one considers how much high the sakes are today. With violence erupting daily across the region; the potential for an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah; the potential for that engagement to spill over to include Syria and Iran; and the possibility of a potential nuclear showdown between Iran and the US, the bloody violence that took place during the Crusades is poised to look like a cakewalk.
The US presence in all three Gulf Wars has contributed in different ways to a distrust of not only America specifically, but democracy in general. Therefore, the pipe dream of the Bush administration that Iraq could become a beacon through which democracy spread throughout the Middle East looks even more unlikely today than when he began planning his invasion of Iraq on January 21, 2001.
