Chapter Eighteen: The Gulf War and Its Legacy, 1990-2001

The 1990s picked up in the Middle East where the 1980s had left off: with conflict and instability endemic to the region. Many of its disputes were longstanding ones. Shiʿa Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia persisted in the fierce, Islamic cold war that they had been waging with each other since 1979, jihadism continued to pose a serious threat to regimes everywhere in the Middle East, and, most consequentially, Israelis and Palestinians remained locked in a bitter, nationalist struggle over the disposition of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. However, not all of the Middle East’s conflicts were old. Most notably, in August 1990, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (r. 1979-2003) precipitated a destabilizing new crisis that threatened both the regional balance of power and the global economy when he occupied the oil-rich Emirate of Kuwait.

Just a few years later, however, the issues and conflicts that lay behind the region’s instability appeared to be resolving. Most obviously, in early 1991, a US-led coalition defeated Saddam Hussein’s vaunted military and ended his efforts to dominate the region. Not long thereafter, Arab states like Egypt succeeded in crushing the jihadi threat while Saudi Arabia and Iran appeared to have negotiated an end to their religious cold war. Most startlingly, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli government seemed poised to end the region’s most bitter and longstanding struggle through a negotiated settlement. For a time, as a result, the people of the Middle East cautiously dared to hope that they might finally be able to move beyond the struggles and disputes that had beset the region since the end of World War I.

The Gulf War, 1991

In many ways, the Gulf War of 1991 was the defining crisis of the decade in the Middle East. Pitting a coalition of states led by the US against Iraq, this brief conflict ended in a decisive military victory for America and its allies and appeared, for a time, to mark a real turning point for the region. Indeed, with serious efforts coming in its wake to resolve longstanding conflicts, the war seemed to mark a watershed event that presaged the beginning of a new-and-brighter era in the Middle East.

Origins

The difficult situation that Saddam Hussein found himself in following the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) led directly to the crisis. His problems were primarily fiscal in nature, and they caught him on the horns of twin dilemmas. First, with the price of oil having fallen precipitously in the late 1980s, he had insufficient revenue to service the massive, $50 billion foreign debt he had incurred fighting the war with Iran and still provide the patronage and welfare benefits needed to keep the Iraqi people quiescent and bound to his regime. Meanwhile, he also lacked the resources either to maintain Iraq’s now- massive 1.3-million-person army or to provide the employment needed to prevent demobilized soldiers from revolting. These were serious problems for Hussein, and they seemed utterly insoluble in light of his Arab creditors’ unwillingness to consider his request to write off the loans that he had incurred to finance the war with Iran. Indeed, absent a rapid, dramatic change in Iraq’s circumstance, his days as its leader were likely numbered.

Saddam Hussein’s huge army may have contributed to the fiscal vise that he found himself in, but it also suggested a way for him to wriggle free. He realized that if he could not persuade his Arab creditors to forgive the loans they had made to Iraq, he could instead use his powerful military to intimidate them into doing so. Accordingly, claiming that he had fought the war with Iran in part to protect Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from a hostile Tehran, the Iraqi leader mounted a strident diplomatic campaign against their governments in the spring of 1990, backed by the implicit threat of force, aimed at coercing them into recharacterizing the loans they had made to Iraq into grants. He even demanded that they provide an additional $30 billion in aid to help rebuild his country’s devastated economy.

As the price of oil plummeted from $21 per barrel in January 1990 to just $11 per barrel that summer, his rhetoric grew even more heated. He claimed that Kuwait owed Iraq $2.5 billion for stealing petroleum from the Rumaila oil field by drilling near the border, and he accused it of deliberately pushing the price of oil down by exceeding its Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quotas. He followed by demanding that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia cut production and by stepping up his call for debt relief. Ominously, he asked Egyptian President Husni Mubarak (r. 1981-2011) and Jordan’s King Hussein (r. 1953-1999) to let the leaders of the Gulf States know “that if they do not give this money to me, I will know how to get it.” Still, despite these threats, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia remained unmoved and refused to restructure Iraq’s debt or to provide reconstruction aid.

With his intimidation campaign having failed, Saddam Hussein began to pursue a riskier but potentially more rewarding course of action. At some point in the late spring or early summer of 1990, he started to consider using Iraq’s powerful army not to intimidate Kuwait but instead to occupy it outright. His thinking here echoed the logic that had informed his decision-making at the start of the Iran-Iraq War. Confident that Washington would not act, he believed that the Gulf States would have no choice but to seek a negotiated settlement, just as he had expected Tehran to have done in 1980. He would then find himself in the enviable position of being able to choose between two appealing options: either annexing the emirate outright or having the Gulf States write off Iraq’s debt in exchange for the withdrawal of his army. Either way, having solved Iraq’s immediate fiscal crisis, Saddam Hussein would not merely have solidified his domestic standing but also finally assumed the dominant position in the Middle East that he had long sought. It seemed to be a golden opportunity, one too good for Hussein to pass up. Accordingly, in late July, he ordered Iraqi troops to begin massing along the Kuwaiti border.

By August, Saddam Hussein was ready to pull the trigger. Despite Kuwait indicating a willingness to make meaningful concessions at talks hosted by Saudi King Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (r. 1982-2005) in Jidda on July 31, he ordered his army to occupy the emirate at dawn on August 2. Other than failing to capture the royal family, the invasion was a total success. Facing no meaningful resistance, the Iraqi army crossed the frontier without difficulty and took control of Kuwait and its vital oil fields in a single day. Saddam Hussein was thrilled at the apparent success of his plan. Indeed, he was so delighted that he cast caution to the wind and announced on August 8 that Iraq was annexing the emirate. In the meantime, satisfied that his control of 20 percent of the globe’s supply of oil gave him real leverage, he ordered his forces to dig in and awaited requests to negotiate.

Operation Desert Shield

Saddam Hussein’s confidence was almost comically misplaced. Rather than fielding desperate requests to negotiate, he instead faced almost immediate condemnation on all fronts. The United Nations (UN) Security Council moved first. Passed on the day of the invasion, Resolution 660 called for Iraq to withdraw immediately and unconditionally from Kuwait. The Arab League followed with its own formal denunciation of the invasion a few days later. Most importantly, President George H. W. Bush (r. 1989-1993) made clear that the US would not tolerate Iraq’s occupation of the emirate. Declaring that “this will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait,” he acted quickly to pressure Saddam Hussein into withdrawing his forces. Taking advantage of the mood of international cooperation that accompanied the end of the Cold War, Prsident Bush secured passage on August 6, 1990, of a second UN Security Council Resolution, number 661, that put teeth into the earlier call for Saddam Hussein to withdraw by imposing a tough sanctions regime on Iraq. Enforced by the US navy, it resulted in Iraq’s exports falling by 90 percent and its imports plummeting by 97 percent.

Bush also moved swiftly to prevent Saddam Hussein from seizing any more of the region’s oil fields. On the same day that the UN Security Council passed Resolution 661, he obtained King Fahd’s leave to begin stationing American troops in Saudi Arabia. Deployed under the codename Operation Desert Shield, the first contingent of soldiers arrived in the kingdom the following day. Hundreds of thousands more would follow.

Why did Bush react so forcefully to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait? Two considerations informed his actions. First, so long as Saddam Hussein retained possession of Kuwait, he would enjoy a chokehold on the globe’s oil supply and would thus be in a position to hold the world economy hostage at his whim. Second, with the Cold War in the process of ending, Bush had hoped to establish a “new world order” under American leadership based on the Wilsonian principles of collective security, self-determination, and the rule of law. In the president’s eyes, Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait amounted to a dangerous frontal assault on that system that the US and its allies had to defeat if his vision for the globe was to go into effect.

There followed a period of diplomatic jockeying on the part of both the US and Iraq. Using a mix of persuasion and the promise of tangible rewards, Bush built a military coalition of nearly thirty states that included Britain, France, Morocco, Egypt, Argentina, Syria, Senegal, New Zealand, and Egypt and secured the diplomatic support of traditional rivals such as the Soviet Union. While the president took a global approach, Hussein instead focused narrowly on the Arab world. Seeking to fragment the coalition by peeling off its Arab states, he shrewdly drew attention to the hypocrisy evident in the contrast between Washington’s forceful approach to the Kuwait crisis and its comparatively kid-glove treatment of Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. He also declared that Iraq was willing to pull out of Kuwait, but only as part of a broader regional settlement in which Israel withdrew from the Occupied Territories and Syria departed from Lebanon.

These arguments had little resonance globally, but they struck a chord in the Arab world. Indeed, demonstrations against participation in Operation Desert Shield broke out in many Arab states, including, notably, countries closely aligned with the US such as Egypt and Morocco, shortly after Saddam Hussein announced his proposal. Meanwhile, drawn to the Iraqi leader’s bellicose rhetoric toward Israel and his willingness to stand up to Washington, the Palestinians demonstrated their support by organizing pro-Iraq rallies in the Occupied Territories and Jordan. Here, Yasir Arafat (1929-2004) was in the vanguard. Having moved closer to Saddam Hussein following the failure of the PLO’s diplomatic push in the late 1980s, he expressed open and enthusiastic support for the Iraqi leader following the occupation of Kuwait, a position that restored his standing among Palestinians disappointed by his inability to turn the concessions he had made in the late 1980s into tangible gains. Thus, Bush’s skillful diplomacy may have gained the support of Arab governments for Operation Desert Shield and almost assuredly tipped global popular opinion in favor of the US, but Saddam Hussein’s successful effort to link the seizure of Kuwait with the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank had clearly won the hearts and minds of the vast majority of Arabs.

Operation Desert Storm

The success of Saddam Hussein’s propaganda message deeply troubled Washington. If given time, his campaign had the potential to peel off enough Arab states to make the effort to stop Iraq politically impossible, thus permitting him to retain control of Kuwait. The Bush administration reacted in two ways. First, abandoning the defensive disposition of Desert Shield in favor of an offensive deployment, the president announced in early November that he was doubling the size of the American force in Saudi Arabia to over 500,000 personnel, nearly as many as had been deployed to Southeast Asia during the height of the Vietnam War. Second, he secured approval of a new, and more forceful UN resolution designed to ensure that Saddam Hussein did not have the time needed to fracture the coalition. Passed on November 15, Resolution 678 authorized the US-led coalition to use “all necessary means” to push Iraq out of Kuwait if it did not withdraw by January 15, 1991.

In two ways, the resolution trapped the Iraqi leader. First, by leaving insufficient time for him to divide the global community or to hive off some of the Arab states, it neutralized his diplomatic strategy. Second, and more important, it confronted the Iraqi dictator with an unpalatable choice. If he capitulated and withdrew his forces from the emirate, he would be discredited and his emboldened Baʿath Party subordinates would likely remove him from power; if he instead remained in Kuwait, the powerful US military would surely attack the Iraqi army and force it to retreat.

Ultimately, Saddam Hussein decided that staying put was the less-risky option. After all, he reasoned, there was hope that high American casualties might spark such intense antiwar protests in the United States that Bush would be forced to call of the attack. In contrast, a retreat coming so close on the heels of the disastrous war with Iran would surely precipitate a coup. Accordingly, he ordered his troops to hunker down for the expected assault.

Code-named Operation Desert Storm, the war began on January 17, 1991, with a lengthy aerial campaign by coalition forces designed to soften up Iraq’s defenses. It focused initially on key military and political targets. Coalition planes attacked air defenses, command-and-control installations, intelligence facilities, Baʿath Party headquarters, and sites suspected of producing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). However, the air offensive did not remain confined to such targets for long. Instead, it soon expanded to include refineries, power stations, water treatment plants, and other civilian infrastructure.

Saddam Hussein knew that he could not hope to compete with the American military. At the same time, however, he believed that if he could change the terms of the struggle, he might yet be able to emerge from the war victorious. Accordingly, even before the fighting had commenced, he had begun devising a strategy to turn the military contest into a more-complex political one that would, he hoped, shatter Bush’s carefully assembled coalition and thus allow Iraq to ride out the storm. He put his plan into effect on the second day of the war. On his orders, the Iraqi military began launching SCUD ground-to-ground missiles at Israel, a country that Bush had pointedly refrained from asking to join the coalition. Unguided, the rockets Iraq fired at the Jewish state were tactically insignificant. At the same time, however, they were freighted with potentially explosive political significance. Were Tel Aviv to reply to them with force in keeping with its Iron Wall ideology, the missile attacks would have folded the Gulf War into the broader Arab-Israeli conflict, and, in so doing, compelled the Arab states to abandon the fight with Saddam Hussein, thus both shattering the coalition that Bush had so carefully put together and permitting Iraq to retain possession of Kuwait. It was a savvy ploy that suggested a subtle grasp of regional political realities.

Ultimately, however, Saddam Hussein’s gambit did not prove to be effective. Through a combination of heavy diplomatic pressure and the deployment of powerful American Patriot anti-missile batteries to Israel, the president succeeded in persuading Tel Aviv to refrain from taking countermeasures. As a result, the coalition remained intact.

Meanwhile, the US-led war effort continued. The aerial bombardment of Iraq and its military forces that had begun on January 17 continued unabated and largely uncontested for six full weeks. Finally, on February 24, the coalition initiated the second phase of its war plan: a massive ground attack in Kuwait and southern Iraq. Every bit as one-sided as the aerial campaign that had preceded it, the one-hundred-hour-long ground assault first drove Hussein’s formations out of Kuwait and then annihilated them when they tried to retreat back to Iraq on a stretch of road that came to be known as the “highway of death.”

Having ejected the Iraqi army from the emirate, the US then faced the tantalizing prospects of taking Baghdad and deposing Saddam Hussein. For a time, Bush was sorely tempted. Doing so would result in a tidy ending to the war and would permanently eliminate a dangerous and destabilizing regime. For two reasons, however, the president ultimately opted not to push on to the Iraqi capital. First, he was leery of tarnishing America’s great victory by getting bogged down in what he feared might become a costly quagmire. Second, his administration believed that regional security required the retention of an Iraqi state sufficiently coherent that it could contain Iran. The president consequently refrained from advancing on Baghdad and instead agreed to a ceasefire on February 28.

Bush may have been content to leave the Iraqi government in place, but he still wished to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Accordingly, in an effort to signal to top- ranking Baʿathists that the US would support a leadership change, he indicated on March 1 that he hoped the Iraqis would take matters into their own hands and depose the Iraqi leader. In the meantime, ignorant of the 10,000-30,000 Iraqi soldiers killed in action and the 2,280 Iraqi civilians who died in the bombing campaign, Americans celebrated a triumph that came at the astonishingly low cost of only 147 US lives.

Postwar Uprisings

However, Bush’s effort to incite a coup in Baghdad would have important if unintended consequences that took much of the lustre off that victory. The president’s call for a change in leadership in Iraq did not produce the intended Baʿathist coup against Saddam Hussein, who retained his grip on power, but instead inspired the outbreak of large, popular Kurdish and Shiʿa revolts against the regime in March 1991.Those rebellions began in the south. On March 1, furious Shiʿa soldiers in Basra attacked symbols of the regime like local Baʿath Party headquarters and the offices of the security services.

From these modest beginnings, anti-regime activities quickly spread. Within days, all of the Shiʿa-dominated towns and cities in southern Iraq were in open revolt against Hussein and had forced government troops and officials to withdraw. Meanwhile, inspired by news of the Shiʿa rebellion, the Kurds launched their own revolt against the Baʿathist state a few days later. Over the ensuing two weeks, they established control of Iraq’s mountainous north and even occupied the strategic city of Kirkuk. Thus, by mid-March, Saddam Hussein’s situation looked very grim indeed. With half the country in rebellion, his days as Iraq’s leader appeared to be numbered.

Unfortunately for the Shiʿa and Kurds, however, the Iraqi president was well prepared for their revolts. He had held his elite Republican Guard units in reserve in anticipation of unrest, and he wasted little time in unleashing them on the rebels. They began their counteroffensive in the south. Using indiscriminate force that left tens of thousands of civilians dead and that compelled even more to flee, the Republican Guard troops quickly crushed the poorly organized Shiʿa revolt. With southern Iraq now pacified, Saddam Hussein then redeployed his soldiers to the north. Once again using overwhelming force, they quickly put down the Kurdish uprising.

The return of government forces created an even bigger panic in the north than it had in the south. Fearing a repeat of the recent al-Anfal campaign, two million Kurds responded to the Iraqi army’s counterattack by fleeing into the mountains, a mass movement that created an immediate and grave humanitarian crisis. Pressure quickly mounted on Washington to provide help. In response, President Bush agreed to supply assistance through Operation Provide Comfort and to impose a No Fly Zone north of the thirty-sixth parallel that ensured a quick end to the regime’s military operations in that part of the country. Later, in August 1992, the US extended the No Fly Zone to the region south of the thirty-second parallel.

While the Shiʿa and Kurds endured enormous privation as a result of the regime’s efforts to crush their rebellions, they were not the only civilians to suffer following the Gulf War. Also experiencing trying times in the wake of the conflict were the Palestinians, in their case, as retribution for the PLO’s rash decision to side with Saddam Hussein. That punishment came in several forms. Most obviously, Kuwait deported 300,000 Palestinian guest workers to Jordan in the conflict’s immediate aftermath. Massively disruptive, this action not only created enormous suffering for the affected Palestinians but, by terminating the annual, $400 million flow of remittances that guest workers in Kuwait sent to their families in the Occupied Territories, also deprived the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip of foreign currency and thus further depressed their perennially weak economy. To top it off, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had already suspended their heretofore generous financial support of the PLO in response to Arafat’s declaration of solidarity with Hussein. The Gulf War was thus as much a defeat for the Palestinians as it had been for Iraq. Having effectively bet everything on Saddam Hussein and lost, they had seemingly found rock bottom.

In contrast, thanks to his army’s success in suppressing the uprisings, Saddam Hussein was able to hold on to power despite his phenomenally poor handling of the Kuwait invasion. Still, the war had imposed serious restraints on the Iraqi leader. Passed on April 12, 1991, UN Security Council Resolution 687 called on Iraq to destroy all WMDs and their production facilities and required it to submit to on-site visits by UN inspection teams. Until they could verify that Iraq had complied with the resolution, the embargo, with limited exemptions for food and medicine, would remain in effect. Thus, Saddam Hussein may have retained his grip on power, but with his army substantially weakened by the war and with his WMD program shut down, he was no longer in a position to threaten his neighbors.

A New Beginning?

Despite the failure to remove Saddam Hussein from power, the Gulf War appeared for a time to have constituted a vital inflection point for the Middle East that set in motion a series of changes that appeared like they would resolve many of the region’s most enduring conflicts. The progress was tangible. The Lebanese civil war came to a conclusion, Mubarak’s government ended the jihadis’ terror campaign in Egypt, and Saudi Arabia and Iran began to engage in talks aimed at achieving détente in the religious cold war they had been waging against each other since 1979. Most importantly, the PLO and Israel entered into peace talks that seemed to be leading to a genuine resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Accordingly, hopes rose that the Middle East was finally entering an era of peace and stability.

Lebanon: The Taif Accord

The conclusion of the Lebanese Civil War in the early 1990s was the first indication that the Middle East might be entering a more hopeful period. Ironically, the strife that had bedeviled Lebanon since 1975 only came to an end after the country had first slid yet further into chaos during the selection of a new president in 1988. Already a persistent source of conflict, the choice of a new head of state was even more fraught than usual that year owing to the ongoing civil war. Thanks to that conflict, the country had been unable to hold parliamentary elections since 1972 and many legislators were either dead or living abroad. Unable to muster quorum as a result, parliament lacked the legal standing to select a new president. In such situations, the constitution assigned the powers of the president to the sitting prime minister until a new election could be held, meaning, in this case, that the Syrian-backed Sunni prime minister, Selim al-Hoss (1929- ), stood poised to serve as Lebanon’s interim chief executive.

This situation deeply alarmed the Maronite head of the army, Michel Aoun (1933- ). Fearing that al-Hoss might dismantle the confessional system that guaranteed Christians a substantial share of political power, he established a rival interim government. Receiving arms shipments from Iraq, Aoun was well positioned to assert his claim to power. In fact, he even felt strong enough to start a war with Syria in March 1989 aimed at liberating the country from Assad’s control. The result was six months of intense but inconclusive fighting that solved nothing even as it further impoverished the people of Lebanon and forced tens of thousands more to flee the country.

The significant civilian death toll horrified people in the Arab world and created pressure for a political settlement. Accordingly, at the behest of the Arab League, the Saudi King Fahd, the Algerian president, and the king of Morocco began working in the spring of 1989 to secure a diplomatic solution to the conflict that would be acceptable to all parties. Though the going was tough, they succeeded in getting the different factions to agree to a ceasefire and in arranging for the Lebanese parliament to convene in Taif, Saudi Arabia in the fall of 1989 for the purpose of arriving at a final resolution of the civil war. Sixty-two members of parliament, now a full seventeen years into their terms, took part in the talks.

The resulting Taif Accord promised to restore peace to a land riven by years of factional infighting. The agreement retained the distribution of offices along confessional lines that dated to the National Pact of 1943 and, bowing to reality, acknowledged Syria’s dominant position in Lebanon. Importantly, however, it also replaced the earlier practice of reserving six parliamentary seats for the Christians for every five held by Muslims with a new arrangement that accorded each faith an equal number of deputies. It also shifted substantial power from the Maronite president to the Sunni prime minister. Carefully negotiated, the Taif Accord received nearly unanimous acceptance in Lebanon. Critically, however, Aoun and his Iraqi-armed militia continued to oppose the deal. Though tantalizingly close, Lebanon was still not yet free of the civil war that was entering its fifteenth year.

It was at this point that the Gulf conflict helped to finally bring the Lebanese Civil War to an end. Bush needed Syria’s participation in the coalition against Iraq in order to counter Saddam Hussein’s argument that the American-led effort was a case of modern-day imperialism. Deftly taking advantage, Assad made clear that his price was a free hand in Lebanon. Accordingly, compelled to prioritize the effort to eject Iraq from Kuwait, the Bush administration gave its tacit sanction to a major Syrian offensive in Lebanon that began in October 1990. The resulting campaign ended in a decisive victory for Assad’s troops. With the UN embargo on Iraq preventing Aoun’s forces from receiving further weapons and ammunition, the Syrian military handily defeated his Christian militia and swiftly reunited the country under a government based on the arrangement that had been negotiated in Taif. Damascus followed by compelling all the militias to disarm and disband, a move that ensured that peace would endure. The only exception was Iran’s powerful protégé in Lebanon, Hezbollah, which was permitted to continue its increasingly sophisticated insurgency against Israeli forces in the security zone that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) maintained in southern Lebanon. Thus, with the exception of the far south, Lebanon was at peace for the first time in fifteen years, albeit under Syrian dominance.

Saudi-Iranian Rapprochement

The Gulf War also played a part in producing a thaw in the religious cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Frosty since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, relations between the two countries had deteriorated considerably in the mid-1980s. Critical in worsening the climate between them had been the Bloody Friday clash between Iranian pilgrims and Saudi security forces during the hajj in 1987 that had resulted in the deaths of 400 people. As we have seen, Riyadh had followed that incident by breaking relations with Tehran and by increasing its financial support for the Iraqi war effort, while Iran had responded by urging Muslims to go to war with the Saudis and by threatening to attack countries that supported Iraq.

Two developments made possible the start of a rapprochement in 1990. First, Iran had recently experienced an important change in leadership. Following the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death (1902-1989) in 1989, the Iranian president, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (1939- ), became Supreme Leader while the relatively pragmatic Ayatollah Ali Akbar Rafsanjani (r. 1989-1997) succeeded to the presidency. Though they largely shared Khomeini’s values, these men were considerably more flexible and willing to compromise and were thus open to a deal with the Saudis. Second, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait had scrambled the regional balance of forces and turned Iraq, the country Riyadh had heretofore relied upon to contain Iran, into a dangerous enemy. Feeling enormously vulnerable as a result of this sudden shift, the Saudis were now willing to consider sweeping foreign-policy changes that would have been off the table even just a few months earlier.

Both states saw much to gain from improved relations. Concerned about the threat that Iraq had become, the Saudi government now perceived Iran as a potential partner in the containment of Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, Tehran wanted to increase the number of Iranians who could participate in the hajj and hoped to raise its OPEC allotment so that it could generate the funds desperately needed to reconstruct its war- shattered economy. Accordingly, the Iranian and Saudi foreign ministers began to hold meetings in New York in early 1991 designed to lay the groundwork for a lasting détente. That effort bore fruit in March 1991 when they jointly announced that their countries would be resuming diplomatic relations and that Saudi Arabia was more than doubling the number of Iranians who could participate in the hajj. Thus, with their shared fear of Iraq, the two bitter rivals appeared at last to have abandoned the Islamic cold war that they had been waging since the Iranian Revolution in favor of a new relationship based on cooperation.

The Saudi response to a terror attack in the kingdom made clear just how durable the rapprochement with Iran was. In June 1996, militants detonated a massive truck bomb in front of an eight-story building that was part of the al-Khobar Towers development, a residential complex in which American service personnel stationed in the Kingdom were housed. Shearing off the entire face of the building, the huge explosion killed nineteen Americans and wounded another four hundred. While suspicion initially fell on former Service Bureau head Osama bin Laden (1957-2011), the US soon uncovered evidence indicating that the perpetrators were in fact members of a shadowy, Iran-linked Shiʿa terrorist group known as Hezbollah al-Hejaz. The revelation of this evidence was shocking, but it did not lead Riyadh to break relations or even to censure Iran. Instead, fearing that criticism might weaken the position of the Iranian moderates they had been courting and thus imperil the five-year-old rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran, Saudi officials chose to keep mum.

Jihadism Contained

In the wake of the Gulf War, even the jihadi threat appeared to be on the wane. Indeed, the 1990s would prove to be a tough decade for the militant Islamists. Throughout the Middle East, the organizations that had arisen in the late 1970s and early 1980s suffered significant defeats in the mid 1990s at the hands of the near enemy: the secular regimes in the region whose downfall they hoped to achieve. Egypt was a case in point. There, the terror campaign that Ayman Zawahiri’s (1951-2022) Islamic Jihad and Omar Abdel Rahman’s (1938-2017) Jama’a Islamiyya had launched in 1992 to overthrow the government had gone so badly that the jihadis felt compelled to issue a unilateral ceasefire in 1997. What explained their lack of success? Why had their effort failed so quickly and so totally?

Two issues undid the jihadis’ campaign in Egypt. First, the brutal terror attacks they launched alienated ordinary Egyptians. Two incidents in particular turned public opinion against the militant Islamists. One was a failed car-bomb attack on the prime minister in 1993 that wounded twenty-one bystanders and killed a schoolgirl, Shayma Abdel-Halim. Angry at Islamic Jihad for its callousness, the huge crowd that turned out at her funeral vented their fury at the militants by chanting “[t]errorism is the enemy of God!” The other occurred four years later. On November 17, 1997, Jama’a Islamiyya gunmen disguised as police officers entered the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor and systematically murdered four Egyptians and fifty-eight tourists including a five-year-old girl and four Japanese newlywed couples. The incident did not go over well in Egypt. The savagery of the attack, the resulting collapse in the country’s economically critical tourism industry, and the attendant job losses infuriated the Egyptian people and cost the jihadis what little support they had managed to retain.

Second, Mubarak’s state security succeeded in grievously weakening Islamic Jihad and Jama’a Islamiyya through a ruthless and highly effective crackdown in the mid 1990s that involved mass arrests and the demoralizing harassment of the jihadis’ wives. The incompetence of Islamic Jihad’s leadership greatly aided the government in this effort. While the organization had adopted a cell structure so that an arrested member could only disclose the names of a handful of associates, a standard practice in insurgent and terrorist groups stretching back at least to the nineteenth century, its membership director had inexplicably maintained a database with the names, addresses, aliases, and hideouts of the entire organization’s membership. As a result, state security forces were able to arrest some eight-hundred members, nearly everyone who belonged to Islamic Jihad, in a single, coordinated operation. Incapacitated in this way, the organization was unable to recover and drifted off into irrelevance. Thus, while non-violent Islamist groups continued to make gains in Egypt, the jihadis had been reduced to irrelevance, crushed by Mubarak’s effective security services.

The Peace Process, 1991-1995

Perhaps the clearest sign that the Middle East was in the process of putting the strife of the twentieth century behind it was the opening of a dialogue between Israel and the PLO aimed at finally ending the region’s most enduring conflict. Like the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement and the end of the Lebanese Civil War, the peace process had its roots in the Gulf War. Stung by Saddam Hussein’s accusation of hypocrisy, President Bush opted to use some of the substantial political capital he had gained from his victory to convene a conference aimed at finally resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of Resolution 242. Though the resulting negotiations did not follow the path that the president had laid out, they nonetheless produced tangible progress and raised hopes that the long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians was at last coming to an end.

The Madrid Conference

Getting all of the relevant parties to agree to meet was a tall order. Particularly problematic were Israel and Syria, which, for very different reasons, did not want to take part. For Assad, the issue was Lebanon. Fearful that the talks might put pressure on Syria to cede the position he had so carefully constructed in that country, he resisted efforts to compel his government to attend. Meanwhile, outright opposed to the idea of engaging in talks based on Resolution 242’s call for the exchange of land for peace, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s (r. 1986-1992) Likud government waged a bitter campaign to avoid participating.

Thanks to the end of the Cold War, however, both Israel and Syria were peculiarly susceptible at that time to American pressure. Bereft of Soviet diplomatic support and military aid, Syria had become thoroughly isolated and thus vulnerable over the prior few years. Israel was in an even more exposed situation. In a stark reversal of longstanding policy, Moscow had recently agreed to permit hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel. This dramatic change in Soviet policy delighted Tel Aviv, but it also required the Jewish state to undertake a crash housing-construction program that could only be financed with an American loan guarantee. Bush deftly exploited these weaknesses to compel the two countries to come to Madrid. Taking advantage of Syria’s diplomatic isolation, he first strongarmed Damascus into participating in the conference. Then, making clear that the US would only provide financial underwriting for the Israeli housing loan if Tel Aviv took part, he followed by forcing Shamir to capitulate and agree to send a delegation.

In contrast, the PLO did not enjoy formal representation at the talks in Madrid. Its absence was a function of Arafat’s ill-fated decision to back Iraq in the Gulf War. Angry at the Palestinian leader for this move, Bush acted to punish him by refusing to permit the PLO to take part in the conference. It is important to note, however, that the president’s ban was only a partial one. Thanks to the organization’s loose affiliation with a group of Palestinians from the territories who were participating in the conference as members of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, the PLO did have a voice in the proceedings, albeit an indirect one.

Opening in Madrid to great anticipation on October 30, 1991, the conference did not prove fruitful. Instead, under the glare of intense press coverage, the discussions quickly deadlocked. The Palestinians insisted on nothing less than full, uninhibited self-determination and the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Firmly opposed to ceding any of the land acquired in 1967, the Shamir government rejected this position out of hand and countered with an offer of autonomy for the Palestinian people on land that remained under Israeli control, a proposal that was utterly unacceptable to the Palestinians. As a result, the conference failed to produce the hoped-for breakthrough. Still, the talks marked an important milestone. Not only were the Palestinians and Israelis negotiating directly for the first time, but they were doing so on the basis of Resolution 242 and its call for the exchange of land for recognition.

Oslo I Agreement, September 1993

While the public nature of the Madrid conference prevented the two sides from making progress in the formal talks, a separate, secret negotiating track in Oslo, Norway that began in December 1992 under Norwegian auspices soon showed promise. For different reasons, both sides had become more open to negotiations by that point. While still wary of the PLO, newly elected Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (r. 1974-1977, 1992-1995) was interested in ending the costly occupation of the territories and was increasingly prepared to make real concessions to do so. Accordingly, he authorized two Israeli academics to take part in the talks. Meanwhile, having steadily shed supporters to Hamas, Arafat, too, was willing to compromise and agreed to send the treasurer of the PLO, Ahmed Qurei (1938-2023), to participate in the discussions. Conducted without pressure because of their informal nature, the talks soon produced real progress toward a final settlement of the century-old conflict over Palestine. As a result, in August 1993, a shocked and delighted world learned that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators had secretly produced a draft of a comprehensive settlement.

Known as the Oslo I Accord, the agreement had two components. The first was an exchange of letters of mutual recognition on September 9,1993. Signed four days later on the White House lawn and consummated by an awkward handshake between Arafat and Rabin, the second component, the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self- Government Arrangements, outlined the phased devolution of power in the Occupied Territories from Israel to a provisional Palestinian government over a period of five years on the basis of Resolution 242. It called for the PLO to first assume control of the West Bank town of Jericho and the entirety of the Gaza Strip. In later phases, Israel would cede authority over health, welfare, taxes, education, and internal security in the rest of the West Bank to an elected Palestinian Council and would gradually withdraw its police and military forces from populated areas. Tel Aviv would retain control of external defense and foreign affairs as well as the security of the Jewish settlements until the two sides concluded a final agreement at the end of the five-year period. Importantly, both parties agreed to defer discussion of contentious topics such as borders, the right of refugees to return to their homes, settlements, Jerusalem, and, above all, the Temple Mount until final status negotiations took place in hopes that the success of the phased approach would build the trust needed to resolve those thorny issues.

The Oslo I Accord marked a dramatic change in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, one that suddenly made possible a number of important breakthroughs. Substantially weakening the rationale for the Arab states’ continued rejection of Israel’s legitimacy, for example, it permitted Israel to normalize relations with Jordan and to open liaison offices in Morocco and Tunisia. More dramatically, the agreement allowed Arafat to establish a government in the Occupied Territories, and it secured for the first time Tel Aviv’s acknowledgement that the Palestinians constituted a people.

At the same time, however, the accord also generated fierce opposition. Rejectionist Palestinians howled that Arafat had rashly squandered the PLO’s strongest card, recognition of Israel, by failing to secure the formal acceptance of a Palestinian state in return. They also complained that the deal was impossibly vague and noted that it did not ban further settlement construction. Many Israelis expressed similar disdain for the accord. Some questioned Arafat’s commitment to peace and wondered whether the deal imperiled the Jewish state’s security. Others, particularly militant members of the settlement movement, protested the very notion of ceding any land whatsoever to the Palestinians. One of them, the American-born Baruch Goldstein (1956-1994), took matters into his own hands. Seeking to derail further progress, he murdered twenty-nine Muslims while they prayed in the Mosque of Abraham in February 1994 before some of the survivors managed to beat him to death. Likewise opposed to a compromise settlement, Hamas responded with a pair of deadly suicide bombings aimed nominally at achieving retaliation but really at undermining the trust on which future progress depended.

Oslo II, September 1995

While the violence succeeded in temporarily halting talks and in pushing back the timeline that Israel and the PLO had agreed to in 1993, it failed to prevent further negotiations. Conducted in secret, those talks soon produced a new agreement. Signed by Arafat and Rabin in Washington in September 1995, the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, known colloquially as the Oslo II Accord, laid out the next steps in the peace process. It articulated the powers that Arafat’s government would exercise, scheduled elections for the Palestinian Council and presidency, provided for the establishment of routes connecting the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, and authorized the creation of a Palestinian seaport. It also permitted Tel Aviv to construct a network of bypass roads linking the West Bank settlements with each other and with Israel proper. Meanwhile, of great symbolic importance, it called for the Palestinian Council to formally strike language from the Palestinian National Charter calling for Israel’s destruction.

Finally, it divided the West Bank into three zones, the A, B, and C Areas, for the purpose of establishing where, when, and to what extent the Palestinian Council would exercise authority. Constituting 4 percent of the territory, the A Areas included the main Palestinian population centers of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Qalqilya, Tulkarm, and Hebron and would, by the terms of the interim agreement, fall under immediate Palestinian control. Consisting of smaller Palestinian villages, the 25 percent of the West Bank that comprised the B Areas would occupy an interim position. They would come under immediate Palestine Council civil authority while Israel continued to retain responsibility for security. Finally, the settlements, military bases, and unoccupied land that made up the balance of the West Bank constituted the C Areas and would remain under Tel Aviv’s control pending final status negotiations. Importantly, this division of the West Bank was dynamic. That is, it called for the C Areas to gradually shrink as Israel withdrew its forces and ceded responsibility for that land to Palestinian civil control.

The Oslo II Accord began to go into effect almost immediately after Arafat and Rabin signed it. Palestinian police replaced Israeli security forces in the main Palestinian towns in the fall of 1995 save for Hebron, for which the agreement had stipulated a later withdrawal date, and elections went off as scheduled in January 1996. Predictably, Arafat handily won the presidency, and PLO candidates swept a solid majority of seats on the council. In April 1996, the new government followed by voting to delete the language in the Palestinian National Charter that called for Israel’s destruction. These were welcome steps and, collectively, they appeared to constitute a watershed moment. Indeed, to many observers, it seemed that the main source of instability and conflict in the Middle East was finally coming to an end—, change that suggested that the region as a whole was at last poised to enter a new era of peace and stability.

A Return to Conflict

Such sentiments proved to be sadly misplaced. Starting in the mid-1990s, conflicts that had appeared to be winding down instead suddenly roared back to life. In the Gulf region, American efforts to contain both Iran and Iraq produced steadily rising tensions thanks to Baghdad’s increasingly assertive resistance. In the Occupied Territories, meanwhile, the effort to establish a just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians collapsed amid growing violence and mutual recriminations. Finally, even as the jihadis faced defeat at the hands of the near enemy, a new struggle pitting transnational jihadis against the far enemy, the United States, began to take shape. As a result, hopes that the people of the region were finally moving beyond the conflicts that had dominated the twentieth century gradually and painfully evaporated.

The Failure of the Oslo Accords, 1995-2000

Perhaps the biggest setback was the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Begun with such high hopes, it started to come apart just a few months after the signing of the Oslo II Accord. It did so thanks to the determined opposition of extremist groups on both sides. Unwilling to accept anything less than a total victory, rightwing Israelis and Hamas militants waged parallel terrorist campaigns to prevent the achievement of a final negotiated settlement. That strategy began to gain traction in November 1995, when a young Israeli named Yigal Amir (1970- ) assassinated Prime Minister Rabin just after the latter had spoken at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. A messianic Zionist, Amir shared the belief of many on Israel’s religious right that God Himself had made possible the conquest of the West Bank and that, by extension, ceding any of it amounted not merely to treason but to outright apostasy, a crime, in Amir’s eyes, that was justly punishable by death. Hamas was not to be outdone. It moved to undermine the faltering trust on which the peace process rested by launching a wave of suicide bombings in February and March 1996 that killed sixty Israelis. The attacks had the desired effect. They not only furthered frayed the mutual confidence that had made peace talks possible, but more importantly, helped tip the Israeli election held in May 1996 in favor of the Likud candidate for prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu (r. 1996-1999, 2009-2021, 2023- ), who narrowly defeated Labor’s Shimon Peres (r. 1977, 1984-1986, 1995-1996).

In retrospect, Rabin’s death marked a clear turning point in the Oslo process. While he had been a tough negotiator and had expressed doubts about the establishment of a Palestinian state, he had also approached the talks with a pragmatic outlook and a willingness to compromise. Netanyahu, in contrast, showed no such flexibility. On the contrary, he was militantly opposed to any further progress on the peace process and was absolutely dead set against the creation of a Palestinian state.

Indeed, Netanyahu’s election amounted to putting the fox in charge of the hen house, a reality made emphatically clear in a formal statement of policy that his government released a few weeks after the election. Called the “Basic Guidelines,” it explicitly rejected the possibility of a Palestinian state, declared that Israeli control of Jerusalem was “nonnegotiable,” and called for a dramatic expansion in the number of settlements in the Occupied Territories. Netanyahu further hindered progress by dragging his feet in implementing many provisions in the Oslo II Accord, including withdrawal from Hebron and the phased handover of C Areas, and by making clear that he had no intention of engaging in final status negotiations. Pressure from the administration of President Bill Clinton (r. 1993-2001) belatedly forced Netanyahu to hand over Hebron and to promise to agree to the Wye River Memorandum in October 1998, which committed Israel to make further withdrawals from C Areas. Thanks to intense opposition from rightwing cabinet members, however, the prime minister reneged on that pledge just weeks after he had made it.

Netanyahu’s efforts to sabotage the negotiations contributed to a precipitous decline in the Palestinians’ confidence in the peace process. This change marked a substantial turnabout in Palestinian attitudes. Initially, they had greeted news of the talks between the PLO and the Israeli government with great anticipation. The announcement of the Oslo Accords had raised hopes not only that they soon would be citizens of a Palestinian state but that they would also experience greater freedom as the negotiations gradually unfolded. However, the peace process had not met those expectations. Instead, rather than enjoying improved conditions, the Palestinians confronted stepped-up harassment and a steadily rising Israeli presence, particularly in the West Bank.

Two issues in particular rankled Palestinians who lived there. First, thanks to the Israeli government’s aggressive construction of new settlements, the settler population doubled between 1993 and 2000, a trend hardly suggestive of the idea that the Palestinians would soon have their own state or that they would ever be free from Israeli repression. Second, the construction of Israeli-only bypass roads that the Oslo II Accord had permitted had not only resulted in the expropriation of Arab land but also in the further fragmentation of the West Bank. This last trend was ominous in the eyes of the Palestinians. Increasingly, they concluded from it that the Israelis had not taken part in the peace process with the intention of arriving at a compromise agreement but had instead done so for the purpose of dividing the Palestinians of the West Bank into a series of isolated, more easily controlled enclaves. The concurrent establishment of Israeli checkpoints outside the Palestinian population centers powerfully reinforced this conclusion. Prior to the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians of the West Bank had suffered under Israeli rule but had at least enjoyed unhindered freedom of movement within the territory; now, as a result of the checkpoints, they had to endure lengthy waits and searches if they wished to travel even short distances. These changes were dispiriting, and they soured growing numbers of Palestinians not only toward the peace process but also toward Arafat and the PLO.

The prospects for continued progress were little better on the Israeli side. It is true that the collapse of Netanyahu’s cabinet and the election of a Labor government under Ehud Barak (r. 1999-2001) in May 1999 had briefly renewed hopes that Israel might make further concessions. However, Barak’s political support had rapidly evaporated as a result of domestic political problems and Israel’s botched withdrawal from southern Lebanon in the spring of 2000, a situation that left the Likud Party poised to retake control of the government. In response, President Clinton decided to take a bold and risky step designed to breathe life into the faltering peace process. Looking to cement his legacy, he invited Barak and Arafat to a summit at Camp David in July 2000 in hopes that he could broker a deal that was acceptable to both parties.

The summit saw real breakthroughs on some issues but ultimately ended in failure and mutual recriminations. True to expectations, Barak showed vastly greater flexibility than had Netanyahu. At one point, he even proposed ceding 91 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians, by far the most generous proposal that Israel had yet made. Substantial as that offer may have been, however, it nonetheless included provisions that were unacceptable to the Palestinians. It would have permitted Israel to retain permanent possession of the Jordan River Valley and to maintain final say over the disposition of the West Bank’s finite water resources. Most importantly, if implemented, Barak’s proposal would have left the Palestinians with non-contiguous territories, meaning that they would have had to endure the hated Israeli checkpoints in perpetuity.

These issues notwithstanding, it is entirely likely that the two sides might have found common ground had they had the opportunity to complete the necessary preparatory work of narrowing differences over difficult issues and of establishing common frames of reference in the months leading up to the meeting. After all, the differences between their positions were comparatively narrow. However, Barak’s tenuous political position in the summer of 2000 denied them the luxury of being able to engage in preliminary talks. Accordingly, the attendees were compelled to make snap decisions in the tense atmosphere of a summit meeting, a circumstance that was hardly conducive to compromise or a willingness to make substantial concessions. Thus, though intended to achieve a breakthrough, the talks instead served only to further frustrate the Israelis and to embitter and disillusion the Palestinians, particularly after Barak and Clinton unfairly blamed Arafat for the meeting’s failure.

Having had their expectations once more raised, the Palestinians greeted the collapse of the Camp David summit with anger and frustration. Where, they asked, was the independence that they had been promised? Where was the freedom from harassment that they had come to expect? Coming as it did after seven years of peace talks, it was an infuriating moment for the Palestinians, one that left the Occupied Territories poised to explode.

The spark that ignited them came in the form of a visit by Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon (r. 2001-2006) in September 2000 to what is surely the most contested piece of real estate on Earth: the hill that Jews refer to as the Temple Mount and that Muslims know as the Haram al-Sharif. Accompanied by a phalanx of security personnel, Sharon made his appearance to assert Israel’s claim to the site and to embarrass and weaken Barak, against whom he was then running for prime minister. Deliberately provocative, his action was the final straw for the Palestinians. Already seething over the failure of the Oslo process to meet the expectations it had raised, they responded by launching a new, unplanned uprising known as the Second Intifada.

It began the day after Sharon’s visit. Muslims leaving the Haram al-Sharif after Friday prayers spontaneously protested his provocative move by rioting and throwing rocks at the police. Israeli security forces escalated the situation by responding with overwhelming force including live fire that killed four Palestinians and wounded another one hundred. From that point, the riots quickly got out of hand. Drawing inspiration from the recent success of Hezbollah guerrillas against the IDF in Lebanon, the Palestinians sought to use mass, populist violence to compel the Israelis to unilaterally cede the entirety of the territories. However, the Second Intifada failed to attain that goal. Instead, the rioting and the forceful Israeli response merely served to destroy the few lingering shreds of trust on which the negotiations of the prior seven years had rested, especially after Sharon won election as prime minister in February 2001. In this way, weakened by the deliberate actions of hardliners on both sides, the peace process that for a time had seemed so promising came to a bitter and ignominious end.

Historical Disagreements: The Oslo Accords

Unsurprisingly in light of the intense feelings that have long surrounded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, scholars began offering sharply differing interpretations of the Oslo Accords almost from the moment that Arafat and Rabin signed the first agreement in 1993. Some historians cast the negotiations in a largely positive light. While acknowledging the peace process’s obvious limitations and eventual failure, they argue that it constituted a major step toward the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. For example, the historian Kirsten Schulze contends that the Oslo I Accord was of historic significance because it involved each party recognizing that the other was a legitimate nation and that they could together arrive at a solution to the long-standing crisis. Avi Shlaim also takes a positive view of the first accord. He contends that the talks in Norway constituted a genuine breakthrough and that Israel’s willingness to negotiate with the PLO amounted to a diplomatic revolution. Above all, he maintains that the shift from the mutual denial of each other’s right to self-determination to a shared acceptance that each side had a legitimate claim to part of the territory constituted a change of such consequence as to render the Oslo Accords worthy of the epithet historic.

However, this view does not represent a consensus of scholars. On the contrary, noting that the agreements offered few real concessions to the Palestinians, many historians vehemently dispute the idea that the Oslo Accords marked a substantial step toward peace. Writing shortly after the signing of the first agreement, for example, the brilliant and influential Palestinian-American academic Edward Said denounced the deal as a poorly negotiated deal that conceded control of the West Bank to Israel in exchange for what amounted to a highly constrained form of autonomy. More recently, the historian Ussama Makdisi has extended Said’s critique. He maintains that the Oslo Accords’ failure to achieve the removal of Israeli settlements or to explicitly endorse the establishment of a Palestinian state rendered the agreements painfully one-sided. Indeed, he concludes that the accords left the Palestinians with essentially the same limited autonomy arrangement that Begin had offered in 1978, save that Arafat’s pseudo-government now had the added responsibility of helping to ensure Israel’s security.

The historian Rashid Khalidi offers perhaps the most damning indictment of the peace process. He argues that the Oslo Accords were a disaster for the Palestinians in every regard and that they made a just settlement of the ongoing conflict more, rather than less, difficult. In his eyes, the agreements were completely one-sided and secured for the Palestinians no more than a highly restricted form of self-rule in a fragment of the Occupied Territories, an arrangement that merely served to lay the foundation for future oppression and conflict. Indeed, he concludes, the agreements had achieved so little and cost so much for the Palestinians that a failure to reach a deal would have been better than the deal that emerged from Oslo.

Khalidi is particularly unstinting in his criticism of Yasir Arafat’s management of the negotiations. He locates the genesis of the PLO chair’s mishandling of the Oslo process in his shortsighted decision to back Saddam Hussein in the conflict between Iraq and the United States in 1990-1991. Desperate to restore relevance to the PLO in the wake of Hussein’s defeat, Arafat followed that disastrous move by plunging headlong into the peace talks. Signing deals that Palestinian experts had not yet vetted, he agreed to let Israel retain total authority over key issues such as borders and water. Even worse, Khalidi argues, was Arafat’s decision to recognize Israel in exchange for its recognition of the PLO. Khalidi allows that Rabin’s formal acknowledgment of the Palestinians as a people marked a significant shift in Israel’s position. However, he also notes that this concession came at the cost of the only meaningful card Arafat had to play, recognition of Israel, and asserts that the PLO chair should have kept it in his hand until Israel committed to a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories.

Iraq: Dual Containment

The Gulf area experienced a similar rise in tension during the mid-to-late 1990s. In that region, the rising conflict was a product of Washington’s ongoing effort to restrain both Baʿathist Iraq and revolutionary Iran. Since the end of the Gulf War, the US had sought to achieve those ends through an approach called “dual containment.” Designed to neutralize Saddam Hussein while simultaneously preventing Iran from taking advantage of his weakness to expand its influence into Iraq. It was a complex policy that relied on a combination of force, economic leverage, and extensive international cooperation to keep both countries weak.

Washington’s efforts to limit Tehran’s influence were fairly straightforward. Involving an escalating series of sanctions designed to weaken Iran’s economy, the campaign initially banned American oil companies from participating in the extraction of Iranian petroleum and barred American citizens from doing business in the country. More controversially, after 1996 the sanctions regime expanded to include penalties on foreign companies that invested more than token amounts of money in Iran’s oil industry.

Centering on the aggressive enforcement of Gulf War-era UN Security Council Resolutions, the American effort to restrain Iraq was more complex. It involved three components. First, Washington aggressively pursued an intrusive arms inspection regime, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), that the UN had authorized for the purpose of uncovering and destroying Iraq’s WMD programs.

Second, it vigorously enforced UN financial and trade sanctions that were to remain in effect until the Security Council had determined that Iraq was in full compliance with all UN resolutions. Finally, the US maintained and expanded the existing No Fly Zones over northern and southern Iraq and launched punitive air attacks when Iraqi forces resisted.

For the first few years, dual containment was successful. The Iraqi regime went to substantial lengths to mislead the arms inspectors, but it nonetheless grudgingly permitted them access to its weapons’ production facilities. Meanwhile, the strict enforcement of sanctions on Iran prevented Tehran from taking advantage of Iraq’s weakness. More encouragingly, the election of the moderate Mohammad Khatami (r. 1997-2005) as Iran’s president in 1997 appeared to suggest that Iran was no longer the ideological threat it had once been, and that the US could consider loosening the enforcement of the sanctions it had imposed on Tehran.

However, there was no corresponding thaw in Iraqi-American relations. Instead, beginning in the mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein became increasingly aggressive in his efforts to win international support for an end to the UN sanctions on his country. He began by exploiting reports that there had been a massive increase in infant mortality in Iraq following the end of the Gulf War. More detailed investigations later revealed that these studies were based on doctored Iraqi figures and that the child-mortality rate had not meaningfully increased. In the immediate term, however, Saddam Hussein’s effort proved surprisingly effective in generating pressure on the UN Security Council. Indeed, the Iraqi campaign was so successful that the UN responded in 1995 with a new carveout to the sanctions’ regime called the Oil-for-Food Program. Designed to end the suffering of the Iraqi people while simultaneously keeping sanctions in place, it permitted Iraq to sell large quantities of petroleum with the stipulation that it use the proceeds to buy only food, medicine, and other necessities.

Pleased to have cracked the sanctions regime, Saddam Hussein next moved to eliminate it altogether. To do so, he first sought to drive a wedge between the US, which pressed for the continued vigorous enforcement of sanctions, and countries like France, Russia, and China that increasingly wanted to pursue commercial opportunities in Iraq. He followed by stepping up his resistance to UNSCOM’s arms control inspections. Claiming that the inspectors were intruding on Iraqi security sites, he began stonewalling them in 1997 before ceasing to comply with the inspection regime altogether in the fall of 1998.

Iraq’s increasing defiance put the Clinton administration in a bind. On the one hand, the American public showed no stomach for another war with Iraq. On the other, dual containment had clearly failed to curb Saddam Hussein. Further complicating matters, a group of newly influential conservative policymakers known as “Neocons” began to pressure the administration to abandon containment in favor of outright regime change. Clinton rejected that course but did respond to Hussein’s unilateral termination of the inspection program with a massive four-day air assault on Iraq in December 1998 codenamed Operation Desert Fox. The president also signed the Iraq Liberation Act in October of that year, which made regime change formal American policy. The act was largely symbolic and did not meaningfully change the US approach to Iraq, but it did signal Washington’s increased willingness to pursue a more confrontational approach. It also made clear the frustration of many in the US government with the fact that nearly a decade after they had celebrated a victory believed to have neutralized Saddam Hussein, they still found themselves locked in an expensive conflict with him that showed no signs of resolution.

Transnational Jihad

The sanctions and American punitive attacks on Iraq played a part in fueling a new struggle that pitted the United States against a shadowy transnational terrorist organization called Al-Qaeda that Osama bin Laden had first organized in 1988 while the Afghan insurgency was winding down. The seeds of that conflict first took root during the chaotic days immediately following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. As we have seen, Riyadh had responded to Saddam Hussein’s aggression by agreeing to the deployment of American forces to Saudi Arabia. That decision shocked Osama bin Laden. He strongly agreed that Iraq needed to be pushed out of Kuwait, but he recoiled at the thought of thousands of non-Muslim Westerners being stationed on land that he viewed as sacred.

In response, he devised a strategy to resolve the crisis that relied not on Western forces but instead on Muslim guerrillas patterned on the “Afghan Arabs” who had fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Parlaying the influence he had gained from his work in Afghanistan, he was able to present his plan to several powerful Saudi princes. The strategy he laid out was a bold one. Claiming that he could quickly raise an army of 100,000 disciplined, well-trained fighters, he argued that his soldiers would force the Iraqis to retreat using the same tactics that had compelled the USSR to abandon Afghanistan in 1988. Exuding absolute confidence in his approach, he blithely assured one prince that “we are ready to get the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.” He was thus shocked when Riyadh rejected his proposal out of hand. Dubious that Bin Laden could raise the promised troops or defeat Iraq’s enormous army, King Fahd instead preferred to stick with America’s more-dependable military might.

Bitter about Saudi Arabia’s decision to allow Westerners into the land of the Holy Places, Bin Laden prepared to go to war with both the US and the kingdom. However, he did not immediately organize attacks against. Instead, facing Saudi government pressure for his criticism of the royal family, he first moved to establish a new base of operations in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum in 1992. There, under a friendly Islamist government that happily entertained both anti-Western terrorists such as Carlos the Jackal (1949- ) and jihadi figures like Zawahiri, he prepared for the coming conflict by building up Al-Qaeda’s infrastructure and organizational capacity. As part of that effort, he created training camps, founded a series of businesses at which he employed many jihadis, planned terrorist attacks, and cemented his ties with members of Egypt’s Jama’a Islamiyya and Islamic Jihad.

Above all, he spent his time in Sudan publicly castigating Riyadh for permitting the US military deployment in Saudi Arabia to continue. Fahd had pledged that it would last only until the end of the Gulf War. With Saudi-based US aircraft enforcing the southern No Fly Zone in Iraq, however, it certainly appeared to have become permanent. Bin Laden’s criticism of the Saudi dynasty for its continued willingness to permit Washington to base forces in the kingdom irritated Riyadh and led it to successfully pressure the government in Khartoum to kick Bin Laden out of Sudan in 1996. He found sanctuary in Afghanistan where a group of religious students called the Taliban had recently established an austere, Wahhabi-based Islamist state.

It was during this time that Bin Laden developed a radical new construction of jihad. Heretofore, a consensus had existed that the movement needed to defeat the near enemy, meaning the secular regimes that dominated the Middle East, and reestablish shariʿa law before the Muslim world would have the strength to confront the far enemy. Bin Laden turned this strategy on its head. He argued that instead of focusing on the near enemy, an approach that had nearly destroyed the jihadi organizations in the 1990s, militant Muslims should go to war with the far enemy. But how would this plan work? How would attacking the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country help the jihadis to achieve their goals? For Bin Laden, the key was Washington’s reaction. He argued that attacking America would spur the US to mount a response so devastating that it would finally rouse the globe’s Muslims to action against the West. In the process, the now-reawakened Muslim community would overthrow the apostate, near enemy states and replace them with Islamist ones. Living under God’s law, the Islamic world would then defeat the far enemy and once again assume its rightful position of global leadership.

Bin Laden’s new idea sharply divided the militant organizations. Some, most notably Ayman Zawahiri, enthusiastically endorsed his new, transnational approach and urged jihadis to attack the head of the snake. In contrast, many others argued that waging war against the only remaining superpower was folly and refused to take part. Indeed, Jama’a Islamiyya went so far as to release a statement affirming that “[w]e are not a party in any front that confronts Americans.”

However, Bin Laden and Zawahiri were unmoved by these objections, and instead pressed ahead with their transnational campaign. Most notably, in February 1998, Al-Qaeda announced the establishment of a new organization, the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, and issued a formal declaration of war on the United States. It charged the US with three offenses: occupying the sacred land of Arabia, making war on the Iraqi people via sanctions and punitive attacks, and supporting Israel. Importantly, it also declared that all Muslims bear an individual duty to kill Americans in order to end its war on the Islamic world.

Moreover, the organization did not confine itself to a war of words. Instead, it followed the declaration with its first large-scale terror operation. Timing the attack to coincide with the eighth anniversary of the first Desert Shield deployment, Al-Qaeda suicide bombers simultaneously detonated truck bombs outside the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. Twelve Americans and 212 Africans died in those attacks, and another four thousand people were injured. Alarmed, Washington retaliated by launching cruise missiles at an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and at a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan it incorrectly suspected of producing chemical weapons. Undeterred by the American response, Bin Laden followed with a series of largely failed terror operations across the globe during the celebration of the new millennium, and then with a successful suicide-bombing attack on the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole in Aden harbor that killed seventeen sailors and nearly made the vessel the first American warship sunk in combat since the end of the Second World War. Meanwhile, planning continued for a major attack on the American homeland, one to be of such scale and impact that it would ignite the Islamic-Christian clash of civilizations that Bin Laden believed would finally reunite the umma under shariʿa law. That attack ultimately manifested itself on September 11, 2001. On that day coordinated terrorist attacks were carried out against the United States. Nineteen hijackers seized four commercial airplanes; two were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, one struck the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers resisted. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in modern history. The attacks profoundly reshaped US foreign and domestic policy, leading to the “War on Terror,” the invasion of Afghanistan, and major changes in global security practices.

Conclusion

Thus, by the year 2000, the earlier hope that the Middle East was poised to move beyond the conflicts that had characterized the region during the twentieth century had faded. It is true that the religious cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia had ended, but other conflicts persisted. Baghdad and Washington continued to clash over enforcement of the UN sanctions regime, transnational jihadis were increasingly determined to incite a conflict with America, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that had seemed so tantalizingly close to a peaceful resolution now appeared to be as depressingly insoluble as ever. Most of these issues are still active today, with the exception that regime change was effected in Iraq in 2003 resulting in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the ideological conflict between Saudia Arabia and Iran came back with a vengeance in the 200s.

There was also an important change to the geostrategic balance in the Middle East that seemed to further complicate events in the area. The US now had a substantial military presence in the region, one that had become, in the words of the historian Andrew Bacevich, “permanent and sustained, rather than occasional and episodic” and that had, by its very presence, stoked the conflict between the emerging transnational jihadis and the West. Still, if the optimism of the early 1990s had faded, the Middle East nonetheless seemed no worse off than it had been in recent decades. Indeed, few at the turn of the century had the least inkling about the shocking events and metastasizing conflicts that would come to characterize the Middle East during the first decade of the new millennia.

There is a point where a historian must decide when history has crossed the line into current events. While there is much more we could cover, it is here that we have decided we have reached that point and so turn the job over to our colleagues in Political Science. While we have attempted to capture as much of the history of the Middle East as we could, by its very nature, a textbook must be concise and selective. We hope you will take this book as a good starting point and continue on in your studies into this complex region of the world. To help you out, check out the “additional reading” section.