Arabs (94 page)

 

The Kuwait crisis opened a new chapter of Soviet-American cooperation in international diplomacy. For the first time in its history, the Security Council was able
to take decisive action without being undermined by Cold War politics. Over the four months following the swift passage of Resolution 660 on August 2, the Security Council passed a total of twelve resolutions as the crisis deepened without the risk of a veto. On August 6 it imposed trade and economic sanctions on Iraq and froze all Iraqi assets abroad (Res. 661); the UN tightened the sanction regime again on September 25 (Res. 670). On August 9 the Security Council declared the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait “null and void” (Res. 662). A number of resolutions condemned Iraqi violations of diplomatic immunity in Kuwait and upheld the rights of third-state nationals to leave Iraq and Kuwait. When on November 29 the Soviets joined with the Americans in passing Resolution 678, authorizing member states “to use all necessary means” against Iraq unless it withdrew fully from Kuwait by January 15, 1991, the Cold War in the Middle East came to a formal end.

What most surprised Arab statesmen—and the Iraqis in particular—was the Soviet position. “Many in the Arab world assumed that even if Moscow refused to help Iraq after the invasion it would at least remain neutral, and they were surprised when the Soviet Union helped the Americans to pass resolution after resolution through the UN Security Council,” Egyptian analyst Mohamed Heikal recalled. What the Arab world had not reckoned on was the weakened state of the Soviet Union and its concern to preserve good relations with Washington. Given America’s geostrategic interests in the Gulf, the Soviets knew they could either support the U.S. or confront it, but they could not deter it from action. With nothing to be gained from confrontation, the Soviets opted for cooperation with the United States and left their former Arab ally totally exposed.

The Arab world was slow to recognize the reorientation of Moscow’s policies in the post–Cold War age. As Iraq turned a deaf ear to the UN, and as the United States began to mobilize a war coalition, the Arab world still expected the Soviet Union to prevent the United States from taking military action against its ally Iraq. Instead, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze worked closely with U.S. secretary of state James Baker in drafting the very resolution that authorized military action. “To the amazement of Arab delegations,” Heikal claimed, “it became clear that Moscow would give Washington a license to act.”
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Whereas the Americans and the Soviets enjoyed a moment of unprecedented cooperation over the Kuwait crisis, the Arab world had never been so fragmented. The invasion of one Arab state by another, and the threat of outside intervention, provoked deep divisions among Arab leaders.

Egypt, recently rehabilitated after a decade’s isolation for its peace treaty with Israel, took the lead in organizing an Arab response to the Kuwait crisis. President Mubarak convened a snap Arab summit, the first to be held in Cairo since the Camp
David Accords, on August 10. The Iraqis and Kuwaitis faced each other for the first time since the invasion. It was a tense moment. The amir of Kuwait gave a conciliatory speech, trying to mollify the Iraqis and to advance a diplomatic resolution to the crisis. He hoped to return to where negotiations had left off in the August 1 meeting in Jidda. The Iraqis, however, took an intransigent line. When the amir finished his speech and sat down, the Iraqi delegate Taha Yassin Ramadan protested: “I don’t know on what basis the sheikh is addressing us. Kuwait does not exist any more.”
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The amir stormed out of the hall in protest.

For some Arab leaders, the threat of American intervention was more serious yet than the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. President Chadli Benjedid of Algeria admonished the assembly: “We have fought all our lives to get rid of imperialism and imperialist forces, but now we see that our endeavours are wasted and the Arab nation . . . is inviting foreigners to intervene.”
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The leaders of Libya, Sudan, Jordan, Yemen, and the PLO all shared Benjedid’s concerns, and they pressed for concerted Arab action to resolve the crisis. They hoped to negotiate an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait on terms that both sides could accept without further armed conflict or foreign intervention.

When it came to the vote on the final resolution of the Cairo summit, the divisions within the Arab world were most apparent. The resolution condemned the invasion, disavowed Iraq’s annexation, and called for an immediate withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait. It also endorsed Saudi Arabia’s request for Arab military support against Iraq’s threats to its territory. Mubarak curtailed the debate on the resolution after just two hours and put the text to a vote that split the Arab world into two deeply divided camps, with ten in favor and nine opposed to the final resolution. “It had taken just under two hours to create the deepest divisions the Arab world had ever seen,” Mohamed Heikal wrote. “The last slender chance for an Arab solution had been lost.”
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The American government believed nothing short of a credible threat could force the Iraqis to withdraw from Kuwait. They had no confidence in Arab diplomacy and instead began to recruit Arab allies for military action. The first American forces had already landed in Saudi Arabia on August 8, where they were joined by Egyptian and Moroccan units. The Syrians, long-time enemies of Iraq and interested in rapprochement with the United States since the Soviets had withdrawn their support, were leaning toward joining the coalition and confirmed their participation on September 12. The other Gulf states—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman—also sided with the Saudis and offered troops and facilities to the American-led coalition.

Having split the Arab states into irreconcilable camps by his actions, Saddam Hussein next played to Arab public opinion to turn citizens against their governments in Arab states. He presented himself as a man of action who stood up to the Americans and the Israelis. He condemned the United States of double standards,
of enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions on behalf of oil-rich Kuwait while turning a blind eye to Israel’s repeated violations of UN resolutions calling for withdrawal from occupied Arab lands. By his actions, Saddam Hussein put added pressure on Arab regimes by making them out to be lackeys of the Western powers who sacrificed Arab interests to preserve good relations with the United States. Hussein openly accused his fellow Arab leaders of playing by America’s rules in the new post–Cold War age. And the Arab masses rallied to the one leader who refused to bow to American pressure. Violent demonstrations broke out in Morocco, Egypt, and Syria in protest of their leaders’ decision to join the coalition. Massive rallies were held in Jordan and the Palestinian territories in support of the Iraqis—much to the chagrin of the exiled Kuwaitis, who for years had provided generous support to both the Hashemite monarchy and the PLO.

King Hussein of Jordan and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, who had once enjoyed cordial relations with the Iraqi regime, now found themselves caught between Arab public opinion in support of Saddam Hussein and the international community’s demand that they side with the U.S.-led coalition against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Arafat openly threw in his lot with Saddam Hussein, whereas Jordan’s monarch limited himself to refusing to condemn the Iraqis as he pursued an increasingly unlikely “Arab solution” to the Kuwait crisis. For failing to condemn the Iraqis, King Hussein was accused by both the Bush administration and the Arab Gulf leaders of supporting the invasion of Kuwait. In the aftermath of the crisis, Jordan faced isolation from both the Arab Gulf states and the West. However, King Hussein retained the support of the Jordanian people, averting a crisis that could well have cost him his crown.

Ultimately, Saddam Hussein became a prisoner of his popularity with the Arab street. Once he had claimed the moral high ground on issues like the Israeli occupation of Palestine or withstanding American pressure, he left himself no room for compromise. Nor did arguments that generated Arab public support carry much weight with the American government. The Bush administration refused to broaden the discussion from the immediate context of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. And Saddam Hussein could not afford to withdraw without some face-saving concession on the Palestine-Israel track that the Americans were unwilling to concede. Unwilling to play by America’s rules, Saddam Hussein grew increasingly fatalistic about the prospect of war.

 

By the time the January 15, 1991, deadline set by UN Security Council Resolution 678 had passed, the United States had mobilized a massive international coalition to force Iraq out of Kuwait. American forces accounted for over two-thirds the total, with 650,000 soldiers. The Arab world contributed nearly 185,000 soldiers, with
100,000 Saudi troops reinforced by units from Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain. Britain and France headed the European contribution to the coalition, though Italy and eight other European states also contributed. In all, some thirty-four countries from six continents combined to make a world war against Iraq.

The world held its breath as January 15 passed without incident. The next day, the United States launched Operation Desert Storm with a massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad and of Iraqi army positions in both Kuwait and Iraq. Saddam Hussein remained defiant, threatening his adversaries with the “mother of all battles.” The greatest uncertainty facing the coalition was if Iraq might use chemical or biological weapons, as it had done against the Kurds in the Anfal campaign. U.S. commanders hoped to beat Iraq from the air without exposing their infantry to the risk of gas warfare.

The Iraqis responded to the air war by firing long-range Scud missiles at Israel and against American positions in Saudi Arabia. Without warning, eight Scuds struck Haifa and Tel Aviv in the early morning hours of January 18, inflicting material damage but no fatalities. As sirens blared, Israeli radio stations advised citizens to don gas masks and take shelter in sealed rooms for fear that the Iraqis might deploy chemical warheads on the Scuds.

Yitzhak Shamir’s government met in emergency session to decide how to retaliate, but the Bush administration managed to persuade the Israelis to stay out of the war. Saddam Hussein clearly hoped to transform the war for Kuwait into a broader Arab-Israeli conflict that would confound the American-led coalition. Mohamed Heikal recounted how Iraq’s missile strikes against Israel confused the loyalties of Arab soldiers in the coalition. When a group of Egyptian and Syrian soldiers encamped in Saudi Arabia heard that Iraq had fired Scud missiles at Israel, they celebrated with shouts of
Allahu Akbar
—“only to remember an instant later that they were supposed to be against Iraq. Too late—seven Egyptians and several Syrians were disciplined.”
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In all, some forty-two missiles were fired at Israel, some falling short and striking Jordan and the West Bank, others intercepted by Patriot missiles. The Scuds provoked more fear than casualties. Many Palestinians in the Occupied Territories cheered Saddam Hussein’s strikes against Israel. Frustrated by the stalemate of the Intifada and Israeli iron-fist policies to break the popular uprising, and now confined to home by a strict twenty-four-hour curfew, the Palestinians were glad to see the Israelis under attack for a change. When journalists filmed Palestinians dancing on their rooftops, cheering on the Scuds, Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh explained their reaction to a British newspaper: “If Palestinians are happy when they see a missile going from east to west, it is because, figuratively speaking, they have seen missiles
going from west to east for the last 40 years.” Nusseibeh was to pay for his missile-spotting comments; a few days later he was arrested on the spurious grounds of helping the Iraqis guide their Scuds against Israeli targets, for which he was given three months in Ramle Prison.
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The Iraqis fired forty-six Scuds against Saudi Arabia. Most were intercepted by Patriot missiles, though one Scud struck a warehouse in Dhahran used as a barracks for American soldiers, killing 28 and injuring over 100, the highest number of casualties sustained by American forces in any single incident in the war.

Analysis of missile wreckage reassured American commanders that the Iraqis were not using biological or chemical agents. The failure to deploy unconventional weapons emboldened coalition forces to take their war from the air to the ground, and on February 22, President George H. W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein a final ultimatum to withdraw from Kuwait by noon the following day or face a ground war.

By February, Iraq and its army had suffered more than five weeks of unprecedented aerial bombardment, which dwarfed the impact of its crude Scuds on Israel and Saudi Arabia. Coalition aircraft sustained a rate of up to 1,000 sorties a day, deploying laser-guided precision weapons with high explosives and cruise missiles against Iraqi targets. Baghdad and the cities of southern Iraq endured extensive bombing raids that destroyed power stations, communications, roads and bridges, factories, and residential quarters.

Though there are no official statistics for civilian deaths in the Desert Storm Gulf War—estimates range from 5,000 to 200,000—there is no doubt that thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and wounded by the intense bombardment. In the worst single incident of the war, the U.S. Air Force dropped two 2,000-pound “smart bombs” on an air-raid shelter in the Amiriya district of Baghdad, killing over 400 civilians, most of them women and children taking refuge from the intense bombardment of the city. The Iraqi army too had suffered heavy casualties from the sustained bombardment, and morale was low by the third week of February.

Facing imminent eviction from Kuwait, the Iraqi government responded with acts of environmental warfare intended to punish Kuwait and the neighboring Gulf states. Already in late January, Iraqi forces deliberately pumped four million barrels of oil into the waters of the Persian Gulf, creating the world’s greatest oil slick, a lethal mass 35 miles long and 15 miles wide (56 kilometers long by 24 kilometers wide). Given the fragility of the Gulf as an ecosystem, and coming after years of damage inflicted by the Iran-Iraq War, the oil slick was an environmental catastrophe of unprecedented scale.