The Containment
Myth: US Middle East Policy in Theory and Practice
Stephen Hubbell
Among those
who direct American foreign policy, there is near-unanimity that
the collapse of communism represents a kind of zero hour. The end
of the Cold War so transformed the geopolitical landscape as to
render the present era historically discontinuous from the epoch
that preceded it. Policy makers contend that America's mission abroad
has had to change to keep pace with these new circumstances.
For more than four decades, American intervention around the world
was justified by the need to contain international communism. Containment
proved to be a versatile and protean doctrine: it could be applied
anywhere and tailored to almost any context. In the Middle East,
Soviet expansionism was cited as the rationale behind the 1957 Eisenhower
doctrine (which authorized backing for conservative rulers such
as King Hussein of Jordan and Camille Chamoun of Lebanon, who were
besieged by domestic opponents), and for adventures as varied as
the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, support
for Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars, and the arming of US proxies
in the Gulf. It hardly mattered that containment was singularly
ill-suited to the specificities of the region. (The Arab states
proved to be nearly impervious to Moscow's ideological appeal.)
What did matter was Americans' willingness to accept it as a sufficient
justification for their government's machinations.
The sudden disappearance of the Soviet Union compelled the Bush
and Clinton administrations to ponder new rationalizations for future
interventions abroad. National Security Advisor Anthony Lake voiced
the emerging consensus among the foreign policy elite when he wrote,
"[T]he successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy
of enlargement.of the world's free community of market democracies."1
Commercial and economic considerations and the promotion of democracy,
he suggested, would henceforth replace military and political factors
in guiding foreign policy.
The collapse of the Soviet empire has indeed wrought substantial
changes in the Middle East. As Simon Bromley and Georges Corm point
out in this issue, Moscow's departure from the world stage has considerably
freed the United States to impose its will across the region. States
that resist the Pax Americana face economic and political
isolation and no longer have a superpower sponsor to turn to for
support. Those who persist in challenging Washington's diktat
can, as always, expect to feel the sting of American military might.
Yet no radical break with the past has occurred in US foreign
policy toward the Middle East. What is remarkable is the degree
of continuity in Washington's objectives in the region during and
after the Cold War. Although circumstances have compelled policy
makers to replace containment with a patchwork of contradictory
and internally incoherent "doctrines," the chief purpose of the
new guidelines-like their Cold War-era counterparts-is to obscure
the actual motives of US intervention, which remain largely unchanged.
The twin pillars of American policy since the Gulf War have been
the doctrine of dual containment of Iran and Iraq, and support for
the now-moribund Arab-Israeli "peace process." In each case, the
new policy conceals a surprising continuity with the perennial project
of US interventionism: to secure the maximum possible advantage
for American capital as it seeks access to markets and resources
abroad. In the developing world, this project has necessitated creating
and preserving a political environment friendly to the operation
of international capital. To accomplish this, the US-led bloc has
had to construct and defend an authoritarian order to resist challenges
to its domination, while maintaining Israel's military edge over
the collective might of Arab armies. (The promotion of democracy-a
central tenet of Lake's vision-was never a goal of US policy in
the Middle East, nor is it now.) It is true that the imperatives
of globalization and the transnationalization of capital have altered
to some degree the form and methods of US intervention. But all
available evidence indicates that, whatever doctrine is in favor
in the post-Cold War Middle East, the fundamental goals have not
changed.
The contributors to this issue of Middle East Report address
the complex interaction between the professed and the unstated goals
of US activism in the Middle East. Steve Niva discusses the conundrum
posed by Islam. Although some policy makers cling to the notion
of an eternal "clash of civilizations," he notes that pragmatists
in the Clinton administration have realized that a policy based
on a "clash" with Islam is potentially counter-productive to the
globalizing mission of US capital. Sam Husseini traces the media's
role in manufacturing consent around foreign policy goals. Using
the Gulf mobilization in February as a case study, he finds that
under certain circumstances-when Washington's goals are incoherent
or contradictory-activists can compel the media to present a more
nuanced and honest picture of the true motives behind US intervention.
Georges Corm and Volker Perthes offer views of US foreign policy
from abroad, where a clearer understanding of the consequences of
American actions is often more readily available.
From Rollback to Dual Containment
The doctrine of dual containment was first introduced
in 1993, two years after the allied victory in the Gulf War. Conventional
balance-of-power theory had held that the region's natural leaders,
Iraq and Iran, should be pitted against one another to prevent either
from becoming dominant and jeopardizing the flow of oil to the West.
By choosing to isolate both nations, however, the Bush administration
committed itself to an ambitious program requiring an expanded US
military and political presence in the Gulf. Dual containment had
two immediate consequences, both of which contradicted the president's
putative vision for a New World Order: US military force had to
be deployed in the Gulf for an extended period to maintain constant
pressure against Iran and Iraq; and Saudi Arabia-heretofore a second-tier
proxy behind Washington's ally of the moment-had to be transformed,
along with its Gulf neighbors, into a credible military counterweight
in its own right. Thus, military force remained as necessary under
the new dispensation as it was before.
The results have been dramatic. In the three years
following the end of the Gulf War, new weapons acquisitions by the
Gulf states (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE) exceeded those
of Iran by nearly 30-to-one.2 Saudi Arabia has emerged
as the world's leading arms purchaser, acquiring weapons systems
worth $36.4 billion from the United States alone between 1994 and
1997.3 (Many of these sales are, of course, financed
by loans from American banks.) The number of American troops based
in the region has swelled to 20,000; US taxpayers spend a staggering
$50 billion annually to maintain and equip them.4 Cooperation
between the domestic intelligence services of the US and Saudi Arabia
has reached unprecedented levels, particularly following the 1996
Khobar Towers bombing. The US Fifth Fleet is now permanently based
in Bahrain. Moreover, the Pentagon announced in 1997 that it was
anticipating a 20-50 year deployment of US troops in the Gulf.5
The goal of this mobilization has been in part to protect the flow
of petroleum by intimidating nations that challenge Washington's
prerogative to set the terms of trade in the oil market.6
The maintenance of military expenditures in the region as the Soviet
threat vanished is further evidence that, although superpower rivals
may come and go, the thirst for oil is eternal.
It would be erroneous, however, to conclude that
maintaining the flow of oil at prices favorable to US interests
is the sole purpose behind US military mobilization. Of equal significance
is Washington's desire to augment the integration of the American
and Gulf states' economies. Profits from the sale of petroleum products
are increasingly recycled back to the US through arms purchases,
as well as through the bank loans such purchases enable.
Dual containment was premised on the notion that
"rogue states" posed the greatest threat to the West following the
Soviet collapse. The priority given to containing the rogue states
(whose ranks are rarely enumerated publicly, but presumed to include
Iran, Iraq, Libya, Cuba, North Korea and, on occasion, Syria and
Sudan) supposedly reflects Washington's growing concern about human
rights, terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
(WMD). The threat posed by the rogues is hardly imaginary: nearly
all of them have chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs
and all have poor human rights records. It is clear, however, that
their rogue status reflects not the magnitude of their crimes, but
the extent of their dissent from US policy. By any rational standard,
nations like Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt should also be listed
among the rogues. Israel's failure to ratify the Nonproliferation
Treaty and the 1972 biological and toxic weapons convention, which
Iran, Libya and Saudi Arabia have all signed, merits no mention
in the Defense Department's annual listing of WMD violators.7
Nor does Egypt's failure to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The bleak climate for human rights in these countries is also ignored.
What sets them apart, of course, is their continuing usefulness
as regional proxies and enforcers of Washington's strategic objectives.
The main virtue of the rogue state doctrine from
the administration's perspective is that it provides a new pretext
to "contain" the same countries whose sovereign rights the US routinely
violated during the Cold War. The fact that three of the five rogue
states are Middle East oil producers, and that two in particular-Iran
and Iraq-are clearly the main targets of the doctrine, points to
the continuing centrality of oil in American strategic calculations.
Iraq's transgression-invading Kuwait in order to boost oil profits
to pay off debts from its war with Iran-flagrantly violated the
rules set by the US and Saudi Arabia to maintain price stability.
Iraq's crime will not soon be forgotten. Moreover, the embargo on
Iraqi oil has provided a windfall for regional producers. Saudi
Arabia alone is estimated to have earned more than $100 billion
as a result. As one oil expert told the Associated Press, "Saudi
Arabia would like the embargo on Iraqi oil maintained as long as
possible."8 (US banks, which hold tens of billions of
dollars in outstanding Saudi loans, are also deeply concerned about
maintaining Saudi profit levels.) The economic collapse in Asia,
on which the oil-producing states had placed much hope for future
sales, has further increased the necessity of keeping Iraqi oil
off-line and thereby forestalling a glut in the market.
The brutal sanctions imposed by the US on Iraq
are tantamount to a permanent blockade. Because the US has shown
little inclination to lift the sanctions, the purpose behind them
must be to marginalize Iraq permanently, rather than induce a change
in behavior. As Martin Indyk said in his 1993 speech outlining the
dual containment policy, "[T]he current regime in Iraq is a criminal
regime, beyond the pale of international society and, in our judgment,
irredeemable." 9 Iraq's confrontation with Washington
in February of this year was motivated at least in part by Saddam
Hussein's desire to force the international community to specify
how Iraq could bring itself into compliance with UN Security Council
resolutions. Iraqis frequently express fear that the sanctions will
not be lifted regardless of what their leadership does.
The isolation of Iran, by contrast, is far weaker.
Although the administration imposed sanctions in 1996 on foreign
companies investing more than $40 million in Iran and forced the
cancellation of a lucrative contract between Conoco and the oil
ministry, there is considerable business pressure to lift the embargo.10
Iran's test on July 22 of medium-range missiles acquired from North
Korea provoked a sharp rebuke from the Clinton administration, but
the evidence suggests that the US-Teheran relationship may not be
adversely affected. Secretary of State Albright has gone out of
her way to support the new president, Mohammad Khatami, in his rivalry
with Iran's religious leader, Ali Khamenei. As Michael Klare points
out in this issue, the rapprochement with Iran exposes the inadequacies
of the rogue state doctrine, and policymakers may eventually have
to discard it.
Israel, Palestine and the
"Peace Process"
The Palestinian-Israeli "peace process" is over.
The seductive promise of Oslo has been revealed to be a cruel hoax,
a "dying succubus," in Edward Said's phrase. As one observer wrote:
"The Oslo process...is less a negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians
than an internal Israeli debate about how much territory, authority
and sovereignty to offer the Palestinians."11 It has
become clear since last September that, without increased pressure
from Washington, the Netanyahu government will continue to stake
out a maximalist claim to territory in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
(Gaza is rarely mentioned these days, leaving the impression that
Israel regards further withdrawals or "redeployments" of its troops
as unnecessary.) Settlement activity continues unabated, as do land
seizures, house demolitions, curfews, acts of random violence and
the steady, grinding impoverishment of the Palestinian majority.
Remarkably, Binyamin Netanyahu's government has flagrantly violated
the terms of the accord while managing to preserve the illusion
that "peace" is still possible. What accounts, then, for the Clinton
administration's tenacious insistence that the interests of the
United States, and of the people of the region, are best served
by this transparent charade?
Phyllis Bennis and Khaled Mansour examine the 50-year
history of relations between the two countries and find that the
strategic interests of the United States have corresponded neatly
with Israel's territorial ambitions for many decades. Ever since
Israel proved its prowess in the 1967 Six-Day War, it has been immensely
valuable to the US as a "proxy that can fight."12 Israel
provided the front-line troops for the battle against Arab nationalist
movements and regimes, whose nationalization programs and advocacy
of autarky and import-substitution were anathema to the American
business elite. Thus it was thanks largely to rational self-interest
that support for Israel became a central tenet of US policy in the
region.
Yet the end of the Cold War has brought about a
re-examination of the strategic partnership. Arab nationalism is
no longer a threat to US interests, and the International Monetary
Fund's ability to impose austerity on the economies of the region
is virtually unlimited. One would expect, then, that Israel's diminishing
value as a partner might prompt Washington to take a harder line
with Netanyahu in his dealings with the Palestinians in the interests
of securing regional stability. The reason this is not so, Bennis
and Mansour argue, can be explained by the growing influence of
non-rational actors-specifically a millenarian movement of Christian
conservatives-in the formation of US policy. The Israeli government's
success in nullifying existing agreements without any commensurate
cost in security terms or serious reproach from the international
community has emboldened the Christian right and its allies in Congress.
They argue that a continued alliance with Israel brings greater
benefits-both political and spiritual-than would a just settlement
of the Palestinian problem. Congressional conservatives, who in
decades past were often vulnerable to accusations of anti-Semitism,
have realized that demagoguery in defense of Israel will always
be rewarded, whereas criticism, no matter how cautiously couched
in praise, will always be punished.
The Clinton administration, for its part, has adopted
a cautious attitude. For the moment at least, it lacks the political
capital to oppose forcefully the burgeoning coalition between evangelical
Christians, Congress and the Israeli right-wing. The administration
is also no doubt aware that the demoralization and disorganization
of the Palestinian people will, for the foreseeable future, severely
restrict their ability to respond to Israeli aggressions. Thus,
there is little pressure on Washington to reconsider its unwavering
support of Israel. Moreover, many policy makers view a regional
economic order dominated by a conservative, capital-friendly Israeli
government as the best long-term prospect for US interests.
As we have seen, during the Cold War era, the formation
of US foreign policy was cloaked in mystifying, geopolitical rhetoric.
The end of that epoch allows a more candid examination of the nature
of US hegemony in the region. Washington now possesses more resources
than ever before to enforce its will and to punish those states
or movements that seek to "go it alone." Through its predominant
influence in international lending institutions such as the IMF,
the US can virtually micromanage the economies of developing nations
and inflict draconian penalties for nonconformity. Through its influence
in multilateral forums such as the United Nations, it can impose
crushing economic sanctions. If such methods fail, Washington can
announce unilateral trade embargoes and penalize countries that
violate them. Lastly, of course, US military might can be summoned
to restore "order." The lofty promise of a "multipolar" world to
replace the bipolar world of the Cold War era was just a mirage.
Whatever the future holds for the countries of the region, as well
as for the world's only superpower, it is all too clear that the
"era of empire" is still with us.
Stephen Hubbell, an editor of this magazine,
is the former Cairo correspondent for The Nation.
Endnotes
1 Anthony Lake, "Confronting Backlash States,"
Foreign Affairs 73/2 (March/April 1994).
2 Richard F. Grimmet, Conventional Arms
Transfers to the Third World, 1988-1995 (Washington, DC: Congressional
Research Service, US Library of Congress, 1996) p. 53.
3 Scott Peterson, "For Oil and Allies, US
Offers a $50 Billion Solution," Christian Science Monitor,
August 6, 1997, and Tim Weiner, "Russia and France Gain on US Lead
in Arms Sales, Study Says," The New York Times, August 4, 1998.
4 Scott Peterson, op. cit., and F. Gregory
Gause, "Arms Supplies and Military Spending in the Gulf," Middle
East Report 204 (July-September 1997).
5 Peterson, "For Oil and Allies."
6 See Michael Tanzer, "Oil and the Gulf
Crisis," in Beyond the Storm: A Gulf War Reader, Phyllis
Bennis and Michael Moushabeck, eds. (Northhampton, MA: Interlink,
1998).
7 Dana Priest, "US Goes Easy on Allies in
Arms Control," The Washington Post, April 14, 1998.
8 Charles Hanley, "US-Saudi Web Thickens,"
Associated Press, April 13, 1997.
9 F. Gregory Gause, "The Illogic of Dual
Containment," Foreign Affairs 73/2 (March/April 1994).
10 Lawrence G. Potter, "The Persian Gulf
in Transition," Headline Series, Foreign Policy Association.
11 Geoffrey Aronson, "Report on Israeli
Settlement in the Occupied Territories," Foundation for Middle East
Peace, 8/1, January/February 1998.
12 See A.F.K. Organski, The $36 Billion
Bargain: Strategy and Politics in US Assistance to Israel (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
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