The Penguin History of the World

There were indeed numerous signs of what looked like spreading sympathy for radical Islamism in the 1980s. Even the military regime in Pakistan (a country that had been founded by a whisky-swilling secular Muslim) imposed Islamic orthodoxy, albeit as part of a very interest-based Jihad against the Soviet infidels in neighbouring Afghanistan. North Africa presented more alarming evidence of radical Islamic feeling as the decade advanced, less importantly in the bizarre sallies and pronouncements of the excited dictator of Libya – who feared Islamism as much as he hated the United States – than in next-door Algeria. That country had made a promising start after winning its independence, but by 1980 its economy was flagging, the consensus that had sustained the independence movement was crumbling, and emigration to look for work in Europe seemed the only outlet available for the energies of many of its young men. In the 1990 Algerian elections, an Islamist party won a majority of votes for the first time in any Arab country. In the previous year a military coup in the Sudan had brought a military and militant Islamic regime to power there that at once suppressed the few remaining civic freedoms of the people of that unhappy land.

None the less, for all the attractions of Islamic radicalization, there were plentiful signs by 1990 that conservative Arab politicians, as well as their liberal oppositions, were antagonized enough for indigenous resistance to the fundamentalists sometimes to be effective. But the political events of the Middle East were to obscure these signs for a very long time. The ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, patronized by the Americans and the major trouble-maker of the Middle East, was only tactically and pragmatically a supporter of Islam. Although a Muslim by upbringing, he led a secular Ba’athist regime actually based on patronage, family and the self-interest of soldiers. He sought power and technological modernization as a way to it, and there is no evidence that the welfare of the Iraqi people ever concerned him. When he launched his war on Iran, the prolongation of the struggle and evidence of its costs were greeted with relief by other Arab states – notably the other oil-producers of the Gulf – because it appeared at the same time to pin down both a dangerous bandit and the Iranian revolutionaries whom they feared. It was, however, less pleasing to them that the war distracted attention from the cause of the Palestinian question and unquestionably made it easier for Israel to deal with the PLO.

During nearly a decade of alarums and excursions in the Gulf, some of which raised the spectre of further interference with western oil supplies, incidents seemed at times to threaten a widening of armed conflict, notably between Iran and the United States. Meanwhile, events in the Levant embittered the stalemate there. Israel’s continuing occupation of the Golan Heights, her vigorous operations in Lebanon against Palestinian guerrilla bands and their patrons, and her government’s encouragement of further Jewish immigration (notably from the USSR) all helped to buttress her against the day when she might once again face united Arab armies. At the end of 1987, however, there came the first outbreaks of violence among Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories. They persisted and grew into an intermittent but what would prove enduring insurrection, the intifada, The PLO, despite winning further international sympathy by officially recognizing Israel’s own right to exist, was none the less in a disadvantaged position in 1988, when the Iraq–Iran War finally ended. In the following year Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, died and there were signs that his successor might be less adventurous in support of the Palestinian and the fundamentalist Islamic causes.

During the Iraq–Iran War, the United States had favoured Iraq, in part because of American exaggeration of the fundamentalist threat. When, nevertheless, the Americans found themselves at last face-to-face at war in the Gulf with a declared enemy, it was with the Iraqis, not the Iranians. In 1990, after making a generous peace with Iran, Saddam Hussein took up an old border dispute with the sheikhdom of Kuwait. He had also quarrelled with its ruler over oil quotas and prices. It is not easy to believe in the reality of these grievances; whatever they may have meant symbolically to Saddam himself, what seems to have moved him most was a simple determination to seize the immense oil wealth of Kuwait. During the summer of 1990, his threats increased. Then, on 2 August, the armies of Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in a few hours subdued it.