The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (45 page)

American dollars and missiles were indispensable to the defeat of the Soviets. Also indispensable, however, was the collective effort of Islam, in which a wide variety of governments and groups competed with each other in attempting to defeat the Soviets and to produce a victory that would serve their interests. Muslim financial support for the war came primarily from Saudi Arabia. Between 1984 and 1986 the Saudis gave $525 million to the resistance; in 1989 they agreed to supply 61 percent of a total of $715 million, or $436 million, with the remainder coming from the United States. In 1993 they provided $193 million to the Afghan government. The total amount they contributed during the course of the war was at least as much as and probably more than the $3 billion to $3.3 billion spent by the United States. During the war about 25,000 volunteers from other Islamic, primarily Arab, countries participated in the war. Recruited in large part in Jordan, these volunteers were trained by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency. Pakistan also provided the indispensable external base for the resistance as well as logistical and other support. In addition, Pakistan was the agent and the conduit for the disbursement of American money, and it purposefully directed 75 percent of those funds to the more fundamentalist Islamist groups with 50 percent of the total going to the most extreme Sunni fundamentalist faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Although fighting the Soviets, the Arab participants in the war were overwhelmingly anti-Western and denounced Western humanitarian aid agencies as immoral and subversive of Islam. In the end, the Soviets were defeated by three factors they could not effectively equal or counter: American technology, Saudi money, and Muslim demographics and zeal.
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The war left behind an uneasy coalition of Islamist organizations intent on promoting Islam against all non-Muslim forces. It also left a legacy of expert and experienced fighters, camps, training grounds, and logistical facilities, elaborate trans-Islam networks of personal and organizational relationships, a substantial amount of military equipment including 300 to 500 unaccounted-for Stinger missiles, and, most important, a heady sense of power and self-confidence over what had been achieved and a driving desire to move on to other victories. The “jihad credentials, religious and political,” of the Afghan volunteers, one U.S. official said in 1994, “are impeccable. They beat one of the world’s two superpowers and now they’re working on the second.”
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The Afghan War became a civilization war because Muslims everywhere saw it as such and rallied against the Soviet Union. The Gulf War became a civilization war because the West intervened militarily in a Muslim conflict, Westerners overwhelmingly supported that intervention, and Muslims throughout the world came to see that intervention as a war against them and rallied against what they saw as one more instance of Western imperialism.

Arab and Muslim governments were initially divided over the war. Saddam
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Hussein violated the sanctity of borders and in August 1990 the Arab League voted by a substantial majority (fourteen in favor, two against, five abstaining or not voting) to condemn his action. Egypt and Syria agreed to contribute substantial numbers and Pakistan, Morocco, and Bangladesh lesser numbers of troops to the anti-Iraq coalition organized by the United States. Turkey closed the pipeline running through its territory from Iraq to the Mediterranean and allowed the coalition to use its air bases. In return for these actions, Turkey strengthened its claim to get into Europe; Pakistan and Morocco reaffirmed their close relationship with Saudi Arabia; Egypt got its debt canceled; and Syria got Lebanon. In contrast, the governments of Iran, Jordan, Libya, Mauritania, Yemen, Sudan, and Tunisia, as well as organizations such as the P.L.O., Hamas, and FIS, despite the financial support many had received from Saudi Arabia, supported Iraq and condemned Western intervention. Other Muslim governments, such as that of Indonesia, assumed compromise positions or tried to avoid taking any position.

While Muslim governments were initially divided, Arab and Muslim opinion was from the first overwhelmingly anti-West. The “Arab world,” one American observer reported after visiting Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia three weeks after the invasion of Kuwait, “is . . . seething with resentment against the U.S., barely able to contain its glee at the prospect of an Arab leader bold enough to defy the greatest power on earth.”
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Millions of Muslims from Morocco to China rallied behind Saddam Hussein and “acclaimed him a Muslim hero.”
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The paradox of democracy was “the great paradox of this conflict”: support for Saddam Hussein was most “fervent and widespread” in those Arab countries where politics was more open and freedom of expression less restricted.
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In Morocco, Pakistan, Jordan, Indonesia, and other countries massive demonstrations denounced the West and political leaders like King Hassan, Benazir Bhutto, and Suharto, who were seen as lackeys of the West. Opposition to the coalition even surfaced in Syria, where “a broad spectrum of citizens opposed the presence of foreign forces in the Gulf.” Seventy-five percent of India’s 100 million Muslims blamed the United States for the war, and Indonesia’s 171 million Muslims were “almost universally” against U.S. military action in the Gulf. Arab intellectuals lined up in similar fashion and formulated intricate rationales for overlooking Saddam’s brutality and denouncing Western intervention.
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Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR’s thinking, “he is our bloody tyrant.” In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the West. Arab intellectuals, one study reported, “despise the Iraqi regime and deplore its brutality and authoritarianism, but regard it as constituting a center of resistance to the great enemy of the Arab world, the
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West.” They “define the Arab world in opposition to the West.” “What Saddam has done is wrong,” a Palestinian professor said, “but we cannot condemn Iraq for standing up to Western military intervention.” Muslims in the West and elsewhere denounced the presence of non-Muslim troops in Saudi Arabia and the resulting “desecration” of the Muslim holy sites.
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The prevailing view, in short, was: Saddam was wrong to invade, the West was more wrong to intervene, hence Saddam is right to fight the West, and we are right to support him.

Saddam Hussein, like primary participants in other fault line wars, identified his previously secular regime with the cause that would have the broadest appeal: Islam. Given the
U-shaped distribution of identities
in the Muslim world, Saddam had no real alternative. This choice of Islam over either Arab nationalism or vague Third World anti-Westernism, one Egyptian commentator observed, “testifies to the value of Islam as a political ideology for mobilizing support.”
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Although Saudi Arabia is more strictly Muslim in its practices and institutions than other Muslim states, except possibly Iran and Sudan, and although it had funded Islamist groups throughout the world, no Islamist movement in any country supported the Western coalition against Iraq and virtually all opposed Western intervention.

For Muslims the war thus quickly became a war between civilizations, in which the inviolability of Islam was at stake. Islamist fundamentalist groups from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere denounced it as a war against “Islam and its civilization” by an alliance of “Crusaders and Zionists” and proclaimed their backing of Iraq in the face of “military and economic aggression against its people.” In the fall of 1990 the dean of the Islamic College in Mecca, Safar al-Hawali, declared in a tape widely circulated in Saudi Arabia, that the war “is not the world against Iraq. It is the West against Islam.” In similar terms, King Hussein of Jordan argued that it was “a war against all Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq alone.” In addition, as Fatima Mernissi points out, President Bush’s frequent rhetorical invocations of God on behalf of the United States reinforced Arab perception that it was “a religious war” with Bush’s remarks reeking “of the calculating, mercenary attacks of the pre-Islamic hordes of the seventh century and the later Christian crusades.” Arguments that the war was a crusade produced by Western and Zionist conspiracy, in turn, justified and even demanded mobilization of a jihad in response.
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Muslim definition of the war as the West vs. Islam facilitated reduction or suspension of antagonisms within the Muslim world. Old differences among Muslims shrank in importance compared to the overriding difference between Islam and the West. In the course of the war Muslim governments and groups consistently moved to distance themselves from the West. Like its Afghan predecessor, the Gulf War brought together Muslims who previously had often been at each other’s throats: Arab secularists, nationalists, and fundamentalists; the Jordanian government and the Palestinians; the P.L.O. and Hamas; Iran
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and Iraq; opposition parties and governments generally. “Those Ba’athists of Iraq,” as Safar al-Hawali put it, “are our enemies for a few hours, but Rome is our enemy until doomsday.”
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The war also started the process of reconciliation between Iraq and Iran. Iran’s Shi’ite religious leaders denounced the Western intervention and called for a jihad against the West. The Iranian government distanced itself from measures directed against its former enemy, and the war was followed by a gradual improvement in relations between the two regimes.

An external enemy also reduces conflict within a country. In January 1991, for instance, Pakistan was reported to be “awash in anti-Western polemics” which brought that country, at least briefly, together. “Pakistan has never been so united. In the southern province of Sind, where native Sindhis and immigrants from India have been murdering each other for five years, people from either side demonstrate against the Americans arm in arm. In the ultraconservative tribal areas on the Northwest Frontier, even women are out in the streets protesting, often in places where people have never assembled for anything other than Friday prayers.”
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As public opinion became more adamant against the war, the governments that had originally associated themselves with the coalition backtracked or became divided or developed elaborate rationalizations for their actions. Leaders like Hafiz al-Assad who contributed troops now argued these were necessary to balance and eventually to replace the Western forces in Saudi Arabia and that they would, in any event, be used purely for defensive purposes and the protection of the holy places. In Turkey and Pakistan top military leaders publicly denounced the alignment of their governments with the coalition. The Egyptian and Syrian governments, which contributed the most troops, had sufficient control of their societies to be able to suppress and ignore anti-Western pressure. The governments in somewhat more open Muslim countries were induced to move away from the West and adopt increasingly anti-Western positions. In the Maghreb “the explosion of support for Iraq” was “one of the biggest surprises of the war.” Tunisian public opinion was strongly anti-West and President Ben Ali was quick to condemn Western intervention. The government of Morocco originally contributed 1500 troops to the coalition, but then as anti-Western groups mobilized also endorsed a general strike on behalf of Iraq. In Algeria a pro-Iraq demonstration of 400,000 people prompted President Bendjedid, who initially tilted toward the West, to shift his position, denounce the West, and declare that “Algeria will stand by the side of its brother Iraq.”
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In August 1990 the three Maghreb governments had voted in the Arab League to condemn Iraq. In the fall, reacting to the intense feelings of their people, they voted in favor of a motion to condemn the American intervention.

The Western military effort also drew little support from the people of non-Western, non-Muslim civilizations. In January 1991, 53 percent of Japanese polled opposed the war, while 25 percent supported it. Hindus split evenly
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in blaming Saddam Hussein and George Bush for the war, which
The Times of India
warned, could lead to “a far more sweeping confrontation between a strong and arrogant Judeo-Christian world and a weak Muslim world fired by religious zeal.” The Gulf War thus began as a war between Iraq and Kuwait, then became a war between Iraq and the West, then one between Islam and the West, and eventually came to be viewed by many non-Westerners as a war of East versus West, “a white man’s war, a new outbreak of old-fashioned imperialism.”
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Apart from the Kuwaitis no Islamic people were enthusiastic about the war, and most overwhelmingly opposed Western intervention. When the war ended the victory parades in London and New York were not duplicated elsewhere. The “war’s conclusion,” Sohail H. Hashmi observed, “provided no grounds for rejoicing” among Arabs. Instead the prevailing atmosphere was one of intense disappointment, dismay, humiliation, and resentment. Once again the West had won. Once again the latest Saladin who had raised Arab hopes had gone down to defeat before massive Western power that had been forcefully intruded into the community of Islam. “What worse could happen to the Arabs than what the war produced,” asked Fatima Mernissi, “the whole West with all its technology dropping bombs on us? It was the ultimate horror.”
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Following the war, Arab opinion outside Kuwait became increasingly critical of a U.S. military presence in the Gulf. The liberation of Kuwait removed any rationale for opposing Saddam Hussein and left little rationale for a sustained American military presence in the Gulf. Hence even in countries like Egypt opinion became more and more sympathetic to Iraq. Arab governments which had joined the coalition shifted ground.
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Egypt and Syria, as well as the others, opposed the imposition of a no-fly zone in southern Iraq in August 1992. Arab governments plus Turkey also objected to the air attacks on Iraq in January 1993. If Western air power could be used in response to attacks on Muslim Shi’ites and Kurds by Sunni Muslims, why was it not also used to respond to attacks on Bosnian Muslims by Orthodox Serbs? In June 1993 when President Clinton ordered a bombing of Baghdad in retaliation for the Iraqi effort to assassinate former President Bush, international reaction was strictly along civilizational lines. Israel and Western European governments strongly supported the raid; Russia accepted it as “justified” self-defense; China expressed “deep concern”; Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates said nothing; other Muslim governments, including that of Egypt, denounced it as another example of Western double standards, with Iran terming it “flagrant aggression” driven by American “neo-expansionism and egotism.”
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Repeatedly the question was raised: Why doesn’t the United States and the “international community” (that is, the West) react in similar fashion to the outrageous behavior of Israel and its violations of U.N. resolutions?