The Penguin History of the World

There followed a remarkable mobilization of world opinion against Iraq in the United Nations. Saddam sought to play both the Islamic and the Arab cards by confusing the pursuit of his own predatory ambitions with Arab hatred for Israel. Demonstrations of support for him in the streets of Middle Eastern cities proved of very low value. Only the PLO and Jordan spoke up for him officially. No doubt to his shocked surprise, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt actually became partners in the improbable alliance that rapidly formed against him. Almost equally surprising to him must have been the acquiescence of the USSR in what followed. Most startlingly of all, the United Nations Security Council produced (with overwhelming majorities) a series of resolutions condemning Iraq’s actions and, finally, authorizing the use of force against her to ensure the liberation of Kuwait.

Huge forces were assembled in Saudi Arabia under American command. On 16 January 1991 they went into action. Within a month Iraq gave in and withdrew, after suffering considerable losses (allied casualties were insignificant). Yet this humiliation did not obviously threaten Saddam’s survival. Once again, the turning-point in the Middle East that so many had longed for had not arrived; the war disappointed both Arab revolutionaries and western would-be peacemakers. The greatest losers were the PLO, and Israel was the greatest gainer; Arab military success at her expense was inconceivable for the near future. Yet at the end of yet another war of the Ottoman succession, the Israeli problem was still there. Syria and Iran had already before the Kuwait crisis begun to show signs that, for their own reasons, they intended to make attempts to get a negotiated settlement, but whether one would emerge was another matter, even if, for the United States, it was clearly more of a priority than ever for this to happen.

Perhaps it was an advance that the alarming spectre of a radical and fundamentalist pan-Islamic movement had been for a time dissipated. For practical purposes, Arab unity had again proved a mirage. For all the distress, unrest and discontent with which many Muslims faced the West, there was virtually no sign that their resentments could yet be co-ordinated in an effective response, and less than ever that they would do without the subtly corrosive means of modernization that the West offered. Almost incidentally, too, crisis in the Gulf appeared to reveal that the oil weapon had lost much of its power to damage the developed world, for, though one had been feared, there was no new oil crisis. Against this background, in 1991, American diplomacy at last persuaded Arabs and Israelis again to take part in a conference on the Middle East.

Great transformations had meanwhile taken place elsewhere and they also bore upon events in the Middle East. Yet they did so only because they shaped what the United States and the USSR could do there. In 1980 the American presidential election campaigns had deliberately exploited the public’s fears of the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly, this re-awoke animosity at the official level; the conservative leaders of the Soviet Union showed renewed suspicion of the trend of United States policy. It seemed likely that promising steps towards disarmament might be swept aside – or even worse. In the event, the American administration came to show a new pragmatism in foreign affairs, while, on the Soviet side, internal change was to open the way to greater flexibility.

One landmark was the death in November 1982 of Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor and for eighteen years general secretary of the Communist Party. His immediate replacement (the head of the secret service, the KGB) died soon after and a septuagenarian, whose own death followed even more quickly, succeeded him before there came to the office of general secretary in 1985 the youngest member of the Politburo, Mikhail Gorbachev: he was fifty-four. Virtually the whole of his political experience had been of the post-Stalin era. His impact upon his country’s, and the world’s, history was to be remarkable.