“The Middle East has entered the nuclear age,” said Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens in October 1991, as he surveyed the region’s strategic environment in the aftermath of the Gulf war and just days before the opening session in Madrid of the Arab-Israeli peace talks. [1] Arens may merely have been reflecting on a reality that needs to be addressed. Or he may have been staking out a preemptive position in advance of demands for arms controls and territorial concessions, by seeking to make the Israeli nuclear monopoly an explicit component of the regional strategic equation. Between the two interpretations lies the key to the impact of non-conventional weapons proliferation on Middle East stability.
Excerpts from the Pentagon’s February 18, 1992 draft of the Defense Planning Guidance for Fiscal Years 1994-1999.
Defense Strategy Objectives
Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.
An ongoing House Banking Committee’s investigation into US policy toward Iraq, led by chair Henry Gonzalez (D-TX), sheds new light on the role of George Bush in pressing for strong US support of the Baath regime in Iraq. Documents released by the committee reveal that at critical moments Bush intervened on Iraq’s behalf during and after the Iran-Iraq war.
Calling Arab Feminists
I am gathering materials for an anthology of writings by Arab feminists. If you are Arab-American, Arab-Canadian or of Arab/Middle Eastern origin and now living in the US or Canada, please consider contributing to this book. It will be published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. The purpose of the anthology is to help create visibility of Arab feminists, to provide a forum where we can speak about issues that concern us, and to help sustain all political activists. To receive a detailed call for submissions, send SASE to: J. Kadi, PO Box 7556, Minneapolis, MN 55407.
Joanne Kadi
Minneapolis
David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919-1939 (Manchester, 1990).
In the recent war with Iraq, US air superiority was crucial in minimizing the US (and other allied) casualties, preparing the ground for a swift advance by land forces. The Middle East, and particularly Iraq, has often been a principal hunting ground for the air forces of Western powers. The recent bombing of Iraq is a species of what David Omissi aptly terms the “frightfulness” with which the colonial powers in the first half of the twentieth century sought to retain their mastery over Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Hooshang Amirahmadi, Revolution and Economic Transition: The Iranian Experience (SUNY, 1990).
Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948-1965 (California, 1990).
In recent years to veiling of Muslim women has become a common image associated with radical Islamist politics. Yet in Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling and Change in Cairo (Columbia, 1990) Arlene Macleod demonstrates that lower middle-class women in Cairo who wear the hijab (new veil) rarely identify with radical Islam. This outstanding book combines feminist privileging of women’s experiences with imaginative deployment of social theory. Macleod’s approach is akin to that of Ph.D. theses by Diane Singerman and Homa Hoodfar that also integrate women’s testimony with gendered class analysis.
There is considerable evidence that the Bush administration saw the Persian Gulf war of 1990-1991 as, among other things, the conflict that could define a new politico-military strategy for the 1990s. The war with Iraq would be the emblematic contest for the post-Cold War period, what the Korean War of 1951-1952 had been for the Cold War era.
The US-led response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait has had many immediate repercussions on the international humanitarian network set up at the dawn of an earlier “new order” — the close of World War II. It also has more than a few similarities to the protection scheme set up then to assist and protect refugees and displaced persons, and similarly reflects the values and concerns of its time.
In March 1991, following Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf war, the Kurds of northern Iraq and Arabs of the south rose up against the Baath regime. For two brief weeks, the uprisings were phenomenally successful. Government administration in the towns was overthrown and local army garrisons were left in disarray. Yet by the end of the month the rebellions had been crushed and the rebels scattered, fleeing across the nearest borders or into Iraq’s southern marshes. Those who could not flee did not survive summary executions.
Arab Women at the Margin?
Here we are again! It is 1991, but Arab women researchers and writers continue to be placed at the margin of the theoretical enterprise, to borrow a metaphor used by African-American writer Bell Hooks to describe how women of color are ghettoized by white feminists, who remain firmly in control at the center. It is ironic that MER 173, “Gender and Politics,” ignores its own editorial policy to assign white feminists the critical task of theorizing about women of color. Aside from the excerpted piece of Deniz Kandiyoti, all the other theoretical pieces in this issue are by white feminists. Nadia Farah’s short article provides information about the Egyptian Women’s Health Book Collective.
John Running, Pictures for Solomon (Northland, 1990).
Phyllis Bennis and Neal Cassidy, From Stones to Statehood (Olive Branch, 1990).
Kamal Boullata, Faithful Witnesses: Palestinian Children Recreate Their World (Windrush, 1990).
Ehud Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right (Oxford, 1991).
Most of the sociopolitical and historical research on Israel to date has oddly concentrated on the so-called left-wing sections of this polity. Even when recently some researchers (like Shapiro, Heller or Shavit) deal with the “right,” they concentrate on this or that portion of it. Ehud Sprinzak’s volume, even though it expressly concerns the “radical right,” shifts the question under analysis to the “right” as a sociopolitical phenomenon. From this point of view it is an important contribution to the study of Israeli political culture.
M. Romann and A. Weingrod, Living Together Separately: Arabs and Jews in Contemporary Jerusalem (Princeton, 1991).
After armies come the academics. Usually the first wave comprises archaeologists and historians who wish to legitimize a particular excursion or expansion. These are followed by economists and anthropologists prying open the benefits and exoticism of the conquered areas. Further down the line are the sociologists and community relations scholars who wish to ascertain the progress so far. Israel’s conquest of the remnant of Palestine has been no different.
