Recommended Reading
The Yom Kippur War of 1973, with its drastic consequences for the UK and the rest of the Western world, more or less coincided with the start of my teaching career, and so this is one reason why the Middle East became such a fascinating subject for me. I remember reading an interesting book on the subject called Britain's Moment in the Middle East by Elizabeth Wiskemann outlining Britain's muddling of the region through its contradictory promises: the McMahon Letter, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, culminating in the Balfour Declaration. This indeed was to be followed by Britain's mandate of Palestine and the newly created Iraq from which the British ignominiously retreated in 1923 due to the problem of insurgency (this highlights the problem of politicians taking convenient lessons from history. Blair in 2003 decided to cite the example of appeasement in the late 1930s as one of his reasons for going into Iraq. In this of course he had not moved on from Eden in 1956 over Suez. Then the Americans refused to follow the British. In 2003, the British followed the Americans. It would have saved a lot of British lives, in my opinion, if Blair had learned from this earlier example of the dangers of dallying with the Middle East). I was in Tel Aviv recently and I saw grates on the pavement laid by the British post office; a sign of the once British occupation of the region until May 1948. There is not a lot of physical evidence remaining of this occupation but politically the region has been on the verge of a volcanic eruption since.
Since then the Middle East has been the playground of the Americans. They, in my opinion, have not faired any better than the British before them. Like the British they have relied on hard power and quite frankly it has not worked. Robert Fisk's article Another Day in the Bloody History of Iraq (2003) writes 'Like the Sha'ab massacre on Thursday - when at least 21 Iraqi civilians were killed or burned to death by two missiles fired by an American jet - Shu'ale is a poor Shia Muslim neighbourhood of single storey corrugated iron and cement food stores and two-roomed brick homes. These are the very people whom Mssrs Bush and Blair expected to rise in insurrection against Saddam. But the anger in the slums was directed against the Americans and the British yesterday.... for their part the Western allies said they were investigating the carnage. But the coding is in Western style, not in Arabic.' In fact no serious attempt was made by either Bush or Blair to authorise even an estimate of Iraqi dead - what Bush cynically called 'collateral damage'. This was followed by the triumphalist declaration by Bush that the war was over. Events were to prove him wrong and the insurgency which was the downfall of the British back in 1923 now returned to haunt them both. Blair's popular rating plummeted and in the subsequent 2005 election his Commons majority was reduced to 66 from well over 100 in 2001. Bush was to end his term of office in 2008 with one of the lowest popular ratings in US history.
However, for many, including in the West, this outcome for what I call 'an unholy alliance' is totally insufficient. Blair has faced three or four judicial or Commons reviews but each time the results have been disappointing. Bush appears to have gone into splendid retirement. There were severe doubts about the legality of the war in Iraq and the evidence used appeared at least to have been manipulated to justify military action. The British motivation appears to stem from Blair himself; his wish to play with the big boys in the playground. The American motivation for going into Iraq are as diverse as they appear deceptive. It is certainly the case that Bush regarded Iraq as 'unfinished business' from the First Gulf War (or the Second, if you count the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-89 as the First) in 1990-91. His father had been criticised for not finishing the job - that is, getting rid of Saddam. These criticisms largely came from the Republican Right - the neo-conservatives or neo-cons. These were the authors of 'The Project for the New American Century' in which it was envisaged that the unipolar world the United States had inherited from the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, should now be rewarded with absolute world supremacy in the 21st century. If Bush was not a member of this organisation, then his Vice President (Dick Cheney) was, and so it went to the heart of US foreign policy. Colin Powell, Bush's Secretary of State and the chief architect of the successful and legal campaign of 1990-91, at the time tried, without success, to counter its influence.The President wasn't listening.
I recently read another book on this very subject America Alone by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke. This book is interesting in that the authors reflect on the mistakes made before, during and after the invasion of Iraq, and all the more remarkable as they counted themselves as neo-cons. So we have an insider glimpse into this organisation. This is an example of their insights: ' Days before the second anniversary of 9/11, a Washington Post poll revealed that seven in ten Americans thought Saddam Hussein had played a direct part in the terrorist attacks. There were many reasons to indict Saddam and to welcome his removal, but this was not one of them. That the American people two years after 9/11 entertained such demonstrable misperceptions about who was responsible for the most significant event in the the nation's recent history should not be a matter of pride for any of us. An uninformed democracy is a vulnerable democracy. But these misperceptions should surprise no-one. They arose as the result of deliberate government action...Wolfowitz (senior Defence advisor to Bush) would later acknowledge that Iraq's supposed supply of WMD had never been the most compelling case for war: For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.'
The neo-cons have had their day - at least for now. It must be remembered that the neo-cons, disappointed with Clinton's foreign policy, used the cover of his eight year administration, to infilitrate Republican policy-making, and to emerge into the heart of Bush's administration in 2000. So what are they getting up to during Barak Obama's presidency? However, the whole of US foreign policy since the 1950s has been dominated by one issue - support for Israel. This has put the whole of US policy in the Middle East in jeopardy. It has meant that the United States has not acted as an honest broker in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. President Carter's brokering of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979 turned out to be a virtual one-off. Bush's Road Map is now defunct and the Oslo Accord, on which so much hope rested on a permanent solution to the Middle East crisis, is in danger of going the same way. It is an unforgivable failure as the United States is the only power with any real leverage among the Israeli political class. Also it has left a gaping illogicality in its approach to the various Arab states. It has intervened in Iraq and Afghanistan supposedly to spread democracy in the region, yet it refuses to acknowledge the democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza. One can go on. Finally, Tony Blair is currently the EU troubleshooter in the region - hardly a name the Palestinians would associate with a friend of Middle Eastern Islam!
