According to the Iranian media, the seventh year of the war was again to be the “decisive year.” For Iraq it was a year of more “achievements and victories” under the leadership of the “militant leader.” On March 21,1987, the Persian New Year, Saddam Hussein brought thousands of demonstrators to the streets of Baghdad to celebrate the end of the “decisive year” without an Iraqi defeat. Perhaps he was not aware that in Tehran they date the war years from September to September. Then again, to celebrate not being defeated yet as a victory is typical of the demagogy in which the Iraqi leadership indulges.
Aside from the two superpowers, whose superpower most observers believe to be waning, there is a third, potential superpower haunting Western Europe — which is Europe itself. If only it could get it together. And what better occasion to get together than to protect “our oil” from the awful ayatollahs?
Last September 15, a fleet of eight Italian warships, including three minesweepers and three frigates, set sail for the Gulf, amid cheers and protests. On the eve of the sailing, Defense Minister Valerio Zanone explained the strategic significance of the controversial decision: “it establishes a European connection outside the geographical limits of NATO.”
To what extent can agreements on nuclear disarmament between the superpowers contribute to the reduction of tensions in regional conflicts, particularly in the Middle East?
Despite its reputation for having inflexible ideological positions on all foreign policy issues, the Reagan administration actually came to office in January 1981 without a coherent policy for dealing with Iran. At first the new administration was content to let Iran fade from the spotlight of national media attention that it had held during the last 14 months of the Carter administration. The hostage crisis had been resolved, fatefully on the very day Reagan was inaugurated. The administration contributed rhetorically to the Iran-bashing mood of the country, but since Iraq still seemed to have the upper hand in the war that it had begun a few months earlier in September 1980, there was a general perception that Iran was contained and could be ignored.
From the Soviet point of view, Iraq under the Baath Party has been a troubling enigma, in terms of its place in the Third World generally and its political position in Middle East diplomacy. In the first respect, Iraq during the 1970s did not manage to consolidate itself as one of the USSR’s dependable allies, which official Soviet parlance refers to as “states of socialist orientation.” Most Soviet scholars sooner or later reached the conclusion that Iraq has really been on the capitalist path of development, although neither Moscow nor Baghdad could state this openly.
In January 1986, a major crisis broke out within the leadership of the Yemeni Socialist Party, the ruling party in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. In two weeks of fighting many thousands of people lost their lives, and afterward between 30,000 and 70,000 fled to neighboring North Yemen.
The Middle East, the Persian Gulf and the eastern Mediterranean are of particular strategic concern to Moscow because of their proximity to the Soviet Union. In addition, the Soviets view the Middle East in the second half of the 20th century as akin to the Balkans at the turn of the century: they consider the area to be the most likely source of a world war. Since 1979, moreover, the Soviets have confronted the concrete possibility of a major military conflict with the United States in the area north of the Persian Gulf. This prospect has brought the dangers of political turbulence in the Middle East into sharper focus, and altered Soviet perceptions of the immediate strategic significance of various countries in the Middle East.
The new US-Soviet agreement banning intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe appears to signal a new period of dialogue and cooperation between the two superpowers. It seems that the intense hostilities of the early Reagan era have given way to a more relaxed and constructive relationship between Washington and Moscow, with leaders of both countries calling for negotiated solutions to a wide range of previously divisive issues.
The December 1987 Reagan-Gorbachev summit raised once again the issue of linkage between Third World conflicts and East-West relations. Two broad questions are involved. First, how does the nuclear arms race intersect with social and political upheaval in the Third World? The second question involves the character of the East-West conflict as it affects the Third World, and the degree to which great power involvement can cause, exacerbate or potentially resolve conflicts in Asia, Africa and Latin America. A central maxim of much recent writing on East-West relations holds that the nuclear arms race is a means of regulating Third World conflict and impeding escalation to the point of war between the outside powers.
The adversarial relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, the two great powers of this era, is key to understanding Washington’s and Moscow’s policies in the Middle East. In the Persian Gulf, for instance, Washington’s secret arms sales to Iran and subsequent naval buildup were both prompted by the Reagan administration’s fear of Soviet political advances in the region. And Washington’s strategic interest in the Middle East goes beyond oil and markets, as successive administrations have used war and turmoil there to construct a base structure capable of supporting US military operations in and around the southern part of the Soviet Union.
Bishara Bahbah, Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection (New York: St. Martin’s Press with the Institute for Palestine Studies, 1986).
David Lamb, The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage (New York: Random House, 1987).
More accessible than academic or political studies, journalism has long been the vehicle for most popular knowledge of the Middle East. Recently, with the increase in the number of foreign correspondents writing full-length books on their experiences in the Arab region, journalistic writings have also supplanted another genre: the once common travelogues of Western Orientalists, tourists and colonial officers. David Lamb’s book falls squarely within this “new” tradition, as even its title proclaims. (The tendency to journalistic history is not limited to the Arab world, as Lamb’s previous book was titled The Africans.)
Grace Halsell, Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1986).
While there is nothing particularly new about Christian fascination with the Biblical “holy land,” Grace Halsell provides an important contemporary portrayal of the means by which this has been molded to enhance the political legitimacy of modern Israel. She documents the growth of a “cult of Israel” among the ranks of “born-again” Christians in the United States.
Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986).
Where the United States chooses to intervene actively, as in the Middle East, Central America and southern Africa, American politics can be a matter of life and death. Serious examinations of the American political scene are therefore of more than local interest. This study is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical analyses of American politics.
Laurence Michalak and Jeswald W. Salacuse, eds., Social Legislation in the Contemporary Middle East (Berkeley, CA: IIS, 1986).
Dani Rabinowitz, Ru’ah Sinai (The Sinai Spirit) (Tel Aviv: Adam Publishers, 1987). [Hebrew]
Ever since Israel occupied the Sinai desert in 1967, that piece of earth has consistently made Israeli headlines. Its media presence was only enhanced after Camp David and Israel’s withdrawal in 1979 and 1982. The public’s insatiable interest in the Sinai is today reflected in copious newspaper articles, books both popular and scholarly, expensive coffee-table books, top 40 pop tunes and diverse television programs. Central to this preoccupation is the Israeli fascination with the Bedouins.
The Manhattan telephone directory, like that of any major American city, reflects the United States’ melting pot in action. Flipping through its pages and browsing through the names of a million individuals, one realizes quickly that some of them do not melt very readily. Comparing the directory of 20 years ago and that of today reveals certain changes in the origins of immigrant groups and their meltability. The 1987 Manhattan telephone directory is filled with traditional Jewish names, and there is nothing new about that. But Israeli names are not Jewish, and that is why they stick out in Manhattan and elsewhere in the United States.
Edward W. Said, a contributing editor of this magazine, is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His 1978 book, Orientalism, has had an enormous impact on Western understanding of the Middle East. His most recent book, with Jean Mohr, is After the Last Sky. James Paul spoke with him in New York in July 1987.
How did Orientalism originate?
The debacle suffered by the Egyptian left at the polls in 1987 — 2 percent of the vote as compared to 4.5 percent in the 1984 parliamentary elections — provoked a soul-searching debate in Tagammu‘, the legal party of the left.
The following article appeared in Kol Ha’ir on May 1, 1987:
As Hadassah Hospital prepares to begin performing heart transplants, it has decided to refrain from transplanting Jewish hearts into Arab bodies, and vice versa. This policy was revealed during a tour which Professor Shmuel Pinhas, the hospital’s director, arranged for members of the Jerusalem city council. Pinhas announced that “the hospital plans to begin carrying out heart transplants in the near future, but in order to avoid problems it will not carry out interethnic transplants.” It was explained that by “interethnic” he meant “between Jews and Arabs.”
