America's Misadventures in the Middle East
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America's Misadventures in the Middle East
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781935982111 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Just World Books |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 230 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
America's Misadventures in the Middle East
By Chas W. Freeman Jr.
Just World Publishing, LLC
Copyright © 2010 Just World Publishing, LLC.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-935982-11-1
CHAPTER 1
From the Eye of the Storm: The Kuwait Crisis as Seen from the American Embassy at Riyadh
Written in 2000-2001
Introduction
In April 1989, President George Bush asked me to serve as United States ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. After the now-customary senatorial procrastination over confirmation, I began my actual service in Riyadh in November. The embassy and diplomatic mission I headed were then the largest in the world, staffed by nearly 5,000 American civilian and military personnel and Third-Country national employees, many of them implementing assistance programs paid for by our Saudi hosts and not shown on Washington's books.
Saudi-American Relations: Appearance and Reality
Despite the image of close cooperation between the United States and Saudi Arabia that both countries preferred to present to the world, the actual relationship as I took up my duties in Riyadh was a decidedly mixed picture. On the one hand, the intelligence agencies of the two countries were celebrating the success of their joint venture with Pakistan against Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan (an enterprise in which China played a crucial role as a source of military supplies for the warriors of the mujahedeen). Saudi Arabia remained, by far, the largest export market for the United States in the West Asian-North African region known as the Middle East. More than 100,000 Saudi Arabians had pursued higher education in the United States. An equal number maintained second homes in various parts of America.
On the other hand, senior American and Saudi Arabian political, economic, and military officials seldom visited each other. Cabinet-level joint commissions and other institutions created a decade or more before to foster bilateral dialogue and interaction were moribund. Lack of official effort to support American companies' sales efforts had contributed to their loss of significant market share to their European commercial competitors. Israeli-instigated vetoes of proposed arms sales by the U.S. Congress had reduced the United States to fourth place among the suppliers of weapons to the Kingdom, after the United Kingdom, France, and China. There were almost no military exercises or other direct interactions between American and Saudi Arabian forces. As I arrived in Riyadh, a major military sale (of M1-A2 main battle tanks) was in prospect, but neither side had under consideration any significant initiatives to enhance political, economic, or military ties with the other.
As ambassador, I took it as my mandate to put Saudi Arabia back on the Washington policy map and vice versa. I also sought to stimulate more exchanges of official visitors (including congressional delegations), to restore U.S. arms sales and military cooperation to the position of primus inter pares, and to revitalize U.S. exports to the Kingdom. These goals came to seem ironic, in light of Iraq's subsequent occupation of Kuwait (August 2, 1990 — March 2, 1991) and the impact of the Gulf War on U.S.-Saudi Arabian relations.
End of the Old World Order
In the last two months of 1989, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the overthrow of Romania's Stalinist dictator made it evident that both the Soviet Empire and the international divisions it had created were at an end. This realization stimulated the American embassy in Riyadh to attempt to analyze the implications of the end of the cold war for U.S. interests in Saudi Arabia and surrounding states. Among the implications we perceived was that Moscow might no longer be able to restrain the regional ambitions of its erstwhile client states. We speculated that this could be dangerous in the case of Iraq, which had emerged from its eight-year struggle with Iran as the predominant military power in the Arabian/Persian Gulf. We concluded that, among other dangers, in the new circumstances, Iraq might be tempted to use force to assert its long-standing claims to sovereignty over Kuwait or to intimidate other small countries in the Gulf.
General Norman Schwarzkopf held the position of CINCCENT — commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). He had inherited long-out-dated cold war — era plans directed at the defense of Iran from Soviet attack. He was determined to redirect his command toward preparation for more likely contingencies. In November 1989, he received approval from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to make planning for the defense of the Arabian Peninsula the central concern of his command. When General Schwarzkopf discussed this with me in Riyadh in February 1990, I agreed with him that the most realistic planning focus would be to prepare U.S. forces to cope with the contingency of an Iraqi or Iranian invasion of Kuwait, possibly supported by a Yemeni invasion of Saudi Arabia's southern province of Najran, as had happened in 1934. From July 16 to 23, CENTCOM conducted a command-post exercise of the Kuwait contingency (code named "Internal Look"), providing invaluable operational and logistical planning data for the CINCCENT's response, less than two weeks later, to the actual Iraqi surprise in Kuwait.
In early April 1990, in part at my urging, the assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian Affairs (NEA), John Kelly, convened America's Middle East ambassadors at a chiefs of mission meeting in Bonn, Germany. My embassy contributed to this conference our analyses and conclusions about the regional implications of the end of the cold war, in the form of three telegrams. These telegrams speculated, inter alia, about the danger that Iraq might use its military preeminence in the Gulf to commit aggression against Kuwait. It turned out that only the American ambassador at Baghdad, April Glaspie, and I considered this a realistic possibility. Others present dismissed the notion of Iraqi aggression against Kuwait as implausible.
Inadvertent Signals to Baghdad
In late April 1990, I became aware that the U.S. Navy proposed to cut in half or even end the four to eight-ship naval presence it had maintained in the Gulf since the 1940s. The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) was under severe budgetary pressure to reduce the number of ships in the U.S. Navy, one of which was specially equipped as a command vessel and much in demand elsewhere. He had reportedly concluded that, with the end of the cold war, the Gulf was no longer of sufficient strategic importance to the United States to justify a continuing naval presence of any consequence there. Similarly, the Department of State proposed to close the U.S. Consulate General at Dhahran, the only foreign consulate in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province (where the Kingdom's oil reserves and production are concentrated), on the grounds that U.S. post — cold war interests there were insufficient to justify a continuing presence there.
Like other concerned ambassadors in the region, I strongly supported CINCCENT General Schwarzkopf 's objections to the CNO's proposal to draw down the U.S. Navy from the Gulf. He, in turn, supported the continuation of the American presence at Dhahran. In June, Chairman Powell agreed that the Navy should stay. In July, my objections to the proposed closure of the consulate at Dhahran won a temporary stay of execution for that post.
Iraq almost certainly took notice both of the comparatively low ebb in Saudi-American interaction and of the Navy's and the Department of State's proposals to draw down the American presence in the Gulf. Both were widely known and discussed within the American community in Saudi Arabia. Baghdad also surely recalled that, notwithstanding the U.S. Navy's escort of Kuwaiti oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq War, Kuwait had long been the Gulf country most critical and least supportive of this presence. The United States had no significant military interaction with Kuwait, still less any shadow of a defense commitment to it. Washington issued no instructions suggesting it was reconsidering this stance. (The Bush administration later found it convenient to make Ambassador Glaspie a scapegoat for the absence of American action to deter Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. Congress chided her for the famous failure to threaten dire consequences should Iraq invade Kuwait when Saddam Hussein unexpectedly summoned her on July 25. But she had no authority to utter such threats and would quite correctly have been severely disciplined had she appeared to commit the United States to war on her own.) All this signaling of apparent U.S. disinterest in the region may have played a role in Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's miscalculation of the American response to his lunge over the Kuwaiti border on August 2.
Inattentiveness and Disbelief
In any event, as great events (like the decolonization of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany) unfolded elsewhere, Washington's attention was not on the Gulf. Even when Saddam Hussein threatened Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over alleged cheating on oil production quotas set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), U.S. policymakers essentially ignored him. They focused instead on his threats in the same speech to "rain fire" on Israel — if it, once again, committed acts of aggression against Iraq. (In retrospect, the underpinning for Saddam's bluster was probably his belief in an imminent breakthrough in Iraq's program to build missile-deliverable nuclear bombs. Its motives lay in the fiscal crisis that overproduction of oil and consequent low prices had conspired to produce in Baghdad.)
Nor did the Gulf countries themselves take Saddam seriously when he began to threaten military action against Kuwait. It was an article of faith among them that Arabs did not fight other Arabs. Iraq had received massive financial support from Kuwait (as well as Saudi Arabia and the UAE) when it was in danger of being over-run by Iran in the early 1980s. The notion that Iraq would repay this crucial assistance with a military attack on its benefactors was easily discounted.
As Iraq escalated its threats against the Gulf Arabs, Jordan opened secret negotiations with Baghdad on unification of the two countries. Rumors were also heard, during June and July, that King Hussein was somehow about to reassert his family's ancient claim to the Hijaz. (The Hijaz is the old name for the Saudi Western Province, in which the holy cities of Makkah [Mecca] and Madinah [Medina] are located). King Hussein began occasionally to refer himself as "Shareef," the title used by the ruler of Makkah in the pre-Saudi period. The Saudi royal family dismissed this as just more evidence of the well-attested history of mental instability in Jordan's ruling family. Meanwhile, tensions rose on Saudi Arabia's unsettled borders with Yemen. But no one intuited a connection between these events or posited a conspiracy led by Baghdad.
Riyadh's relations with Kuwait were then strained. Among other reasons, Saudi Arabia shared Iraq's suspicions of Kuwaiti cheating on oil quotas. Still, Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry echoed the Kuwaiti position that actions to deter Iraqi aggression were unnecessary and could, in fact, prove counterproductive. Saudi Arabia, like Kuwait, did not put its forces on alert. Only the UAE saw the threat as serious enough to justify deterrent actions.
In early July, Abu Dhabi asked the U.S. Air Force to mount a then-unprecedented joint-air exercise in the Emirates. Despite objections from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states (which I advised Washington to ignore), the United States agreed. The result was that the UAE was the only Gulf state in a state of military alert and readiness when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Asked by the United States in May, June, and July whether they had need of deterrent gestures, the Kuwaiti government repeatedly rejected the suggestion. (The highest levels of the Kuwaiti government reiterated this complacent judgment in response to a renewed offer of support from the American ambassador on the evening of August 1, just hours before the Iraqi invasion.)
On July 20, 1990, the Iraqi army conducted a large combined-arms exercise in central Iraq. At the end of July, Iraqi forces deployed near the Kuwait border. Kuwait's forces finally went on alert. The best guess of U.S. intelligence analysts was that the worst that might happen would be an Iraqi seizure of Kuwaiti oil fields south of Rumaila. Baghdad had occupied these fields once, years before, demanding and receiving cash from Kuwait as a precondition for withdrawal. But, even this level of Iraqi military initiative seemed unlikely to most observers. Saudi Arabia had begun a mediation effort between Baghdad and Kuwait. The Iraqis and Kuwaitis were scheduled to meet August 1 in Jeddah.
On July 30, I polled my country team at AmEmbassy Riyadh. They advised me (with one notable dissent from my deputy chief of mission) that they saw no reason I should not proceed with long-standing plans for home leave in August. Washington concurred. Whatever happened between Iraq and Kuwait was expected to be limited and bilateral in nature. No one foresaw anything occurring that would directly involve the United States or become much of an issue in U.S.-Saudi Arabian relations. At most, some speculated, the Arab League might take over the Saudi effort to clean up whatever mess the Iraqis and Kuwaitis produced. At worst, they said, I might have to return early from home leave. Before dawn on July 31, I left Riyadh as long planned.
Shock, Surprise, and Resolve
By August 1, 1990, I was at my vacation home in Bristol, Rhode Island. At 3 in the morning on August 2, I was awakened by jet lag. I tuned my shortwave radio to the BBC, hoping to hear the results of the previous day's Iraqi-Kuwaiti negotiations in Jeddah. Less than four hours after these negotiations concluded with both sides agreeing to reconvene a week later in Baghdad, I learned, Iraq had invaded Kuwait.
Saddam Hussein had combined deception with rapid military movement to achieve total surprise. It later appeared that he had been secretly planning his attack on Kuwait for at least five years. The convening of talks in Jeddah led Kuwait and others in the Gulf to discount Iraqi military deployments and preparations for invasion. The July 20 Iraqi army exercise, when reexamined with the benefit of hindsight, turned out to have been a full rehearsal for the August 2 invasion. The actual movement of Iraqi forces, guided into Kuwait by a visiting basketball team from Baghdad composed of Iraqi commandos, was massive and overwhelming. By August 3, the Iraqi Republican Guard was digging in along the border with Saudi Arabia.
It took Washington a few hours to realize that Iraq had not just seized a few oil fields but all of Kuwait. By happenstance, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had long been scheduled to join President Bush at the Aspen Institute in Colorado on August 2. As a fortuitous result of this encounter, the American and British response to Iraq's aggression was jointly concerted. The Anglo-American response, soon joined by France, was also more resolute than it might otherwise have been.
By August 3, it had become clear that Baghdad had acted without preconcertation or backing from Moscow. The USSR seemed ready to join France, the United Kingdom, and the United States in opposing Iraq's seizure of Kuwait. Simple lack of objection from China would permit the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for the first time to act as the guardian and enforcer of international law its founders had hoped it might become. Iraq had attempted to inaugurate the post cold war world order with an assertion that "might makes right." But the defining characteristic of this new world order might instead, I hoped, be collective repudiation of such lawless behavior and effective action by the international community to reverse and punish it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from America's Misadventures in the Middle East by Chas W. Freeman Jr.. Copyright © 2010 Just World Publishing, LLC.. Excerpted by permission of Just World Publishing, LLC.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword, by Dr. William B. Quandt,Map 1: The Persian Gulf Region,
PART I: From Desert Storm to the Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq,
1. From the Eye of the Storm: The Kuwait Crisis as Seen from the American Embassy at Riyadh,
2. Objectives and End Games in the Middle East,
Map 2: Saudi Arabia and Its Region,
PART II: Into the Ambush of Iraq,
3. Reflections on a War with Iraq,
4. American Unilateralism at Play in the Land of the Two Rivers,
5. Flip-Flops, Confusion, and the Asphyxiation of Political Debate,
6. Occupations and Their National Security Consequences,
Map 3: Israel and its Region,
PART III: Policy Consequences,
7. The GCC and the Management of Policy Consequences,
8. American Foreign Policy and the Arab World,
9. American Interests, Policies, and Results in the Middle East: Energy, Israel, Access, and the Containment of Muslim Rage,
10. West Asia and the Next President: More of the Same Won't Do,
11. U.S.-Arab Relations: Forks in the Way Forward,
PART IV: In Defense of Diplomacy and Intelligence,
12. Why Not Let Them Hate Us, as Long as They Fear Us?,
13. National Security in the Age of Terrorism,
14. Empire without Diplomacy,
15. Can American Leadership Be Restored?,
16. Diplomacy in the Age of Terror,
17. Why Not Try Diplomacy?,
18. America in the World: Magoo at the Helm,
19. On Intelligence,
PART V: Perspectives on Saudi Arabia,
20. Saudi Arabia and the Forces of Globalization,
21. Saudi Arabia's Foreign and Domestic Dilemmas,
22. The Arabs Take a Chinese Wife: Sino-Arab Relations in the Decade to Come,
23. Saudi Arabia: The End of Progress without Change,
Glossary,