Egypt has been central to providing an Arab cover for the US-led military expedition to the Persian Gulf, in addition to Saudi Arabia. As of December 1990, Egypt’s 15-20,000 troops constituted the third largest force confronting Iraq, after the United States and Saudi Arabia itself. Joint military exercises during the 1980s prepared the way for this US-Egyptian military cooperation, whose value is more symbolic than substantial. In The United States and Egypt: An Essay on Policy for the 1990s (Brookings, 1990), William Quandt surveys the development of the US-Egyptian relationship since the early 1970s, examines the strains it may experience in the 1990s and offers some recommendations to policymakers responsible for managing them.
The first “instant book” on the Gulf crisis has already reached stores across the United States. In his October 22 column in The Nation, Alexander Cockburn related how Judith Miller of the New York Times sought unsuccessfully to induce Samir al-Khalil, the pseudonymous author of Republic of Fear, to collaborate with her on a shlockbuster version for the American public. Instead we now have Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, which Miller co-authored with Laurie Mylroie, until recently an assistant professor of “government” (i.e. political science) at Harvard.
House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Lee Hamilton (D-IN) offered the first criticism by a Washington insider of the Bush administration’s handling of the Gulf crisis when, on September 18, 1990, he blamed Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs John Kelly for not sending a firm signal to Iraq that the United States would come to the defense of Kuwait if it were attacked. Kelly had told the committee two days before the Iraqi invasion that the US had no formal commitment to protect Kuwait from outside threats.
Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence of February 14, 1989 continues to affect the lives of people far removed from its original target — author Salman Rushdie. More than a year later, in Dearborn, Michigan, local sympathizers of the ayatollah within the Arab American community disrupted a talk on Rushdie’s Satanic Verses by Nabeel Abraham, an Arab American activist and member of the MERIP board of directors. Abraham talked about his experience with journalist Jonathan Scott.
Why were the protesters so fiercely opposed to your lecture?
Even before the current confrontation in the Gulf, Iraq was an extremely militarized country, preoccupied with internal and external “security threats. ” When I traveled to Iraq in early 1990, I was struck by the extent of militarization in parts of the country. The whole of Iraqi Kurdistan was covered by a net of military and paramilitary installations. It was difficult to drive or walk more than a few hundred yards without seeing or being seen by soldiers in an outpost, or in a military installation of considerable size. Traveling south of Basra, I found the Fao peninsula completely honeycombed with military camps. In the Umm Qasr area, security was so tight that I was not even allowed to get out of the car, much less to take pictures.
The scale of the US military deployment in the Persian Gulf — half of all US combat forces worldwide — is something of a shock, even to the Pentagon. “Nobody ever thought they’d be free to commit all those forces,” one military official said.
Egypt was facing a severe foreign exchange shortage when the Gulf crisis broke out. Its debt arrears were piling up and it was finding it more and more difficult to obtain new loans. The Gulf crisis threatens to make this situation even worse. Here’s how:
Remittances sent home by some 1 million Egyptian workers in the Gulf amounted to at least $4.25 billion in 1989. About half of these workers have returned home, causing an estimated annual loss of $2.4 billion.
Suez Canal tolls were $1.38 billion in 1989. The government expects a 10-20 percent drop over a year due to the loss of Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil tanker traffic and the decline in shipments of goods to those two countries.
Egyptians pride themselves on their historic endurance and their ability to survive under almost all conditions. But even before the Gulf crisis erupted in August, there had been a great sense of worry and uncertainty regarding the future. The juncture of a new century with a new millennium is noticed in a nation used to counting its age in thousands of years. [1]
In the ongoing debate, one current argues that Egypt’s future rests in its historic stability, political and otherwise. An opposing current questions the “validity” of the political system, declaring that this “stability” is nothing but a dangerous and lulling inertia.
The Gulf crisis cannot be regarded as a purely local or regional issue, or a crisis whose worldwide significance is derived only from the importance of Arab oil. More fundamentally, it has become the main testing ground for the rapprochement between East and West as applied to North-South relations. Can the South be included in the new world game or is it condemned to react violently against it?
Are the United States and the Arab world “on the edge of war,” as the editors of Middle East Report put it in their September-October 1990 editorial? I think not. Rather, Iraq, a criminal state, has extended the violence that rules inside its own borders into Kuwait. This act by itself and before the intervention of the United States threatens to destroy the modern Arab state order as we have known it. That order may not be much. But it is all we have. And the overriding issue is how to stop Saddam Hussein from replacing it with something immeasurably worse.
The Gulf crisis? The threats of Saddam Hussein? The Western and other hostages? Two worldviews clash over these questions — two public opinions, each engaging masses of people, ardently take opposite sides, each with good arguments.
How is it possible for “Westerners” (in the broadest sense) not to evoke Hitler? Saddam remorselessly violates the most elementary rules of international law. He breaks his word repeatedly. His unscrupulous expansionism is a menace to all. Where will he be stopped if the world allows him this first conquest?
As the United States stands on the brink of its first full-scale war with an Arab country, it is incumbent on all of us to share our expertise and our experience with the broader public. The consequences of a major war in this region have not been fully thought out — by the public, by the politicians or by the administration. This country is going into a major conflict at least half-blind. Yet there is only a feeble public debate on the momentous issues at stake.
Ahmad al-Khatib has been active for many years in the Kuwaiti opposition movement and was a member of Kuwait’s parliament until its dissolution in 1986. Al-Khatib attended the assembly of Kuwaitis in Jidda, called by the ruling Al Sabah, in October 1990. Fred Halliday spoke with him in London upon his return from that meeting.
How did the Kuwaiti opposition see the situation within the country before the invasion on August 2? The parliament had been dissolved in 1986, but in early 1990 widespread mobilization for a return to democracy occurred. How did the Sabah family respond to your demands?
Samih Farsoun, a contributing editor of this magazine and professor of sociology at American University, recently visited the Middle East. He spoke with Joe Stork in early November 1990.
What is your assessment of the impact of this crisis on the balance of forces in the region?
Since August 5, 1990, we have seen the most extensive and rapid US military mobilization since the end of World War II. As of early October, more than 200,000 US troops in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf region are drawing combat pay. President Bush declares this deployment was necessary to defend Saudi Arabia, but the size and composition of the US forces clearly pose a threat of offensive military action against Iraq.
Jean-Pierre Thieck — activist, scholar, journalist and friend of MERIP — died of AIDS in Paris on July 5, 1990, at the age of 41. A descendant of a grand rabbi of Tunis on his mother’s side, his upbringing in the thick of the Paris communist milieu manifested itself in youthful political activism and in life-long and strong (but never uncritical) sympathy for the oppressed and their struggles.
Revolutionary Flagellation
Barbara Harlow’s lavish celebration of the “prison text” The Shamed (MER 164-165) has considerably clouded her aesthetic judgment. “The Shamed presents itself as a novel at once realistic and allegorical, mobilizing social forces against each other,” she tells us, and then “Adel Amr’s prison text must also be read as a counter-novel, a cultural documentary and political manifesto, in which the traditional novel’s conventions and paradigms of romance and family are precisely those formulas that are manipulated by the Israeli state and its prison apparatus.”
Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: Saddam’s Iraq (California Press, 1989).
This book, first published a year ago at a time when — with a few honorable exceptions — most criticism of Iraq and its president was strangely muted, is a sophisticated and brilliantly savage denunciation of Arab populist politics, a politics of hate, lies, fantasy, brutality and despair. It shows how the larynx becomes a people’s mind, its consciousness and the mainspring of its action, how individuals are suborned, coerced, made instruments, stripped of will and dignity.
