THE SYNOD

The Persian Gulf

Major Oil-Producing Nations

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Iraq, and Iran possess 64% of the world's proven oil reserves.

Source: Phyllis Bennis, "Middle east Oil," Foreign Policy In Focus, January 1997.

The six Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf are guardians of valuable oil reserves to which the United States seeks access, not just to supplement American reserves (currently around 18% of U.S. consumption) but as a means of maintaining a degree of leverage over the import-dependent European and Japanese markets. During the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, the United States played the combatants off against each other to ensure that neither of these militant regimes would become too influential. With oil, water resources, and sizable populations, both had the potential to become regional powers that could conceivably challenge American interests. Since 1993, the U.S. has articulated a policy of “dual containment�?toward these governments, guarding against potential expansionist ambitions by either against the pro-Western sheikdoms. More recently, however, the extreme hostility toward Iran may be lessening as a result of the election of a more moderate Islamic government in 1997, which has provided a justification for those in Washington already interested in rebuilding ties with the oil-rich and potentially powerful country.

The British had been the dominant power in the Persian Gulf for most of the 20th century, but—in recognition of their decline as a major world power—they announced their military withdrawal from the region in 1969. The United States, which had been increasing its presence in the Middle East since the end of World War II, was determined to fill the void. President Richard Nixon, facing growing opposition to the Vietnam War, knew that sending U.S. combat troops into this volatile region would not be politically feasible. By the early 1970s, antiwar sentiment had lessened, due in part to Nixon’s Vietnamization program, whereby the reliance on South Vietnamese conscripts and a dramatically increased air war had minimized American casualties. As a result, the Nixon Doctrine (also known as the Guam Doctrine or “surrogate strategy�? came into being, wherein Vietnamization evolved into a global policy of arming and training third world allies to become regional gendarmes for American interests.

The Persian Gulf was the primary testing ground, with Iran’s shah—who owed his throne to CIA intervention in the 1950s and had long dreamed of rebuilding the Persian Empire—playing the part of a willing participant. Throughout the 1970s, the U.S. sold tens of billions of dollars worth of highly sophisticated arms to the shah, and sent thousands of U.S. advisors to turn the Iranian armed forces into a sophisticated fighting unit capable of counterinsurgency operations. Such a strategy proved successful when Iranian forces helped crush a leftist insurgency in the southeastern Arabian sultanate of Oman in the mid-1970s.

This strategy came crashing down in 1979, however, with Iran’s Islamic revolution, which resulted from the popular reaction against the highly visible American support for the Iranian regime, the shah’s penchant for military procurement over internal economic development, and his brutal repression against any and all dissent. The vast American-supplied arsenal fell into the hands of a radical anti-American regime. It was then that the Carter Doctrine came into being with the establishment of the Rapid Deployment Force (later known as the Central Command), which would enable the United States to strike with massive force in a relatively short period of time. This extremely costly effort would enable the U.S. to fight a war that would rely so heavily on air power, be over so quickly, and enjoy such a favorable casualty ratio that popular domestic opposition would not have time to mobilize.

This was precisely the scenario for Operation Desert Storm. Though the exact circumstances that would trigger such a war were not known, the military response had in effect been planned for more than a dozen years prior to the Gulf War and was designed in part for domestic political impact. From Washington’s strategic vantage point, it worked well. The massive international mobilization led by the United States forced Iraqi occupation forces out of Kuwait and severely damaged Iraq’s military and civilian infrastructure in less than six weeks and with only several dozen American casualties. The war was a dramatic reassertion of U.S. global power, just as its former superpower rival was collapsing, and it consolidated the U.S. position as the region’s most important outside power.

Ironically, the United States had been quietly supporting Iraq’s brutal totalitarian regime and its leader, Saddam Hussein, through financial credits and even limited military assistance during its war against Iran in the 1980s, including offering components and technical support for programs bolstering the development of weapons of mass destruction. Washington downplayed and even covered up the use of chemical weapons by Saddam’s armed forces against the Iranian military and Kurdish civilians during this period, and the U.S. opposed UN sanctions against Iraq for its acts of aggression toward both Iran and its own population. It was only after Iraq’s invasion of the oil-rich, pro-Western emirate of Kuwait in August 1990 that Saddam Hussein’s regime suddenly became demonized in the eyes of U.S. policymakers and the American public at large.

Continuing Storm:
The U.S. Role in the Middle East

Since the Gulf War

Even prior to the Gulf War, the United States had thrown its immense military, diplomatic, and economic weight behind the monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Though they rule over less than 10% of the Arab world’s total population, these regimes control most of its wealth. Prior to the war, it was difficult for the United States to engage in military exercises or even arrange a port call without asking for permission months in advance. Not any more.

Figure 1
Oil Reserves and U.S. Imports
Region	Oil Reserves (billions of barrels)	% of U.S. imports
Middle East	673.7	23.5
(Persian Gulf)	(667.0)	(23.4)
South & Central America	89.5	.23.2
North America	85.1	29.7
Africa	75.4	16.9
Former Soviet Union	65.4	0.1
Asia/Pacific	43.1	1.7
Europe	20.7	4.4
Sources: BP Amoco, Statistical Review of Worl Energy 1999 (Chicago: BP Amoco, 1999) Available on the internet at: http://www.bpamoco.com/worldenergy/ Energy Information Administration, "Imports of Crude OIl and Petrolium Products into the United States by Country of Origin." Available on the Internet at: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petrolium/data_publications/ petrolium_supply_annual/psa_volume1/current/txt/table21.txt

There is now an effective, permanent U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf. The financial costs are extraordinary—running between $30 and $60 billion annually, according to conservative estimates—and are shared by the U.S. and the gulf monarchies. Though there appears to be a bipartisan consensus in Washington that there is a clear strategic imperative to maintaining such an American presence, there are critics—even among conservatives—who argue that such a presence is too costly for the American taxpayer and creates a situation where American military personnel are effectively serving as a mercenary force for autocratic sheikdoms.

Most Persian Gulf Arabs and their leaders felt threatened after Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait and were grateful for the strong U.S. leadership in the 1991 war against Saddam Hussein’s regime. At the same time, there is an enormous amount of cynicism regarding U.S. motives in waging that war. Gulf Arabs, and even some of their rulers, cannot shake the sense that the war was not fought for international law, self-determination, and human rights, as the Bush administration claimed, but rather to protect U.S. access to oil and to enable the U.S. to gain a strategic toehold in the region. It is apparent that a continued U.S. presence is welcome only as long as Arabs feel they need a foreign military presence to protect them.

Iraq still has not recovered from the 1991 war, during which it was on the receiving end of the heaviest bombing in world history. The U.S. has insisted on maintaining strict sanctions against Iraq to force compliance with international demands to dismantle any capability of producing weapons of mass destruction. In addition, the U.S. hopes that such sanctions will lead to the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. However, Washington’s policy of enforcing strict sanctions against Iraq appears to have had the ironic effect of strengthening Saddam’s regime. With as many as 5,000 people, mostly children, dying from malnutrition and preventable diseases every month as a result of the sanctions, the humanitarian crisis has led to worldwide demands—even from some of Iraq’s historic enemies—to relax the sanctions. Furthermore, as they are now more dependent than ever on the government for their survival, the Iraqi people are even less likely to risk open defiance. Unlike the reaction to sanctions imposed prior to the war, Iraqi popular resentment over their suffering lays the blame squarely on the United States, not the totalitarian regime, whose ill-fated conquest of Kuwait led to the economic collapse of this once-prosperous country. In addition, Iraq’s middle class, which would have most likely formed the political force capable of overthrowing Saddam’s regime, has been reduced to penury. It is not surprising that most of Iraq’s opposition movements oppose the U.S. policy of ongoing punitive sanctions and air strikes.

In addition, U.S. officials have stated that sanctions would remain even if Iraq complied with United Nations inspectors, giving the Iraqi regime virtually no incentive to comply. For sanctions to work, there needs to be a promise of relief to counterbalance the suffering; that is, a carrot as well as a stick. Indeed, it was the failure of both the United States and the United Nations to explicitly spell out what was needed in order for sanctions to be lifted that led to Iraq suspending its cooperation with UN inspectors in December 1998.

The use of U.S. air strikes against Iraq subsequent to the inspectors�?departure has not garnered much support from the international community, including Iraq’s neighbors, who would presumably be most threatened by an Iraqi biological weapons capability. Nor have U.S. air strikes eliminated that capability. In light of Washington’s tolerance—and even quiet support—of Iraq’s powerful military machine in the 1980s, the Clinton administration’s exaggerated claims of an imminent Iraqi military threat in 1998, after Iraq’s military infrastructure was largely destroyed in the Gulf War, simply lack credibility. Nor have such air strikes eliminated or reduced the country’s biological weapons capability. Furthermore, only the United Nations Security Council has the prerogative to authorize military responses to violations of its resolutions; no single member state can do so unilaterally without explicit permission.

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