The Penguin History of the World

Then, in November 1995, came the assassination of the Israeli prime minister by a fanatical fellow countryman. The following year, a conservative prime minister, dependent on the parliamentary support of Jewish extremist parties, took office. His popular majority was tiny, but it was clear that, for the immediate future at least, it was unlikely that anything but an aggressive policy of further territorial settlement by Israel would be forthcoming and that the Oslo agreements were in question. Even the election of a new Labour government in 1999 did not lead to a return to the promise of the Oslo agreement. New negotiations, led by Bill Clinton in the waning days of his presidency, failed spectacularly in achieving any concrete settlement. The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, spent the remaining years of his life (he died in 2004) besieged by Israeli troops in his compound in Ramallah, after a new Palestinian uprising broke out in 2000. In 2006 the Islamist group Hamas – a party dedicated to the extermination of Israel – won control of the Palestinian parliament. Americans were evidently doing no better than other outsiders to the region in grappling with the consequences of the creation of the Zionist programme a century earlier, and the Balfour declaration of 1917.

Nor did United States policy in the Persian Gulf provide lasting solutions there. Sanctions authorized by the United Nations did no good in Iran or Iraq, and patient and assiduous effort by the latter had by the mid-1990s to all intents and purposes broken any chance of maintaining the broad-based coalition of 1991 against it. Saddam Hussein’s government seemed untroubled by the sanctions; they bore heavily on his subjects, but could be tempered by the smuggling in of commodities the regime desired. Iraq was still a large oil exporter and revenues from this source made possible some restoration of its military potential while no effective inspection of the country’s production of weapons of mass destruction – as ordered by the United Nations – was taking place. American policy was as far as ever from achieving its own revolutionary and evident goal of overthrowing the regime, even when (supported only by the British) it fell back again on open aerial warfare for four nights in December 1998, to no avail. Nor did it help American prestige when suspicion arose that the timing of the bombing offensive might have some connection with a wish to distract attention from the impeachment proceedings about to begin in Washington.

Although 1998 had begun with President Clinton stressing in his State of the Union message that domestic conditions indicated that these were ‘good times’ for Americans, this was not proving true in foreign affairs. In August, American embassies were attacked by Muslim terrorists in both Kenya and Tanzania, with heavy loss of life. Within a couple of weeks there was an American reply in the form of missile attacks on alleged terrorist bases in Afghanistan and the Sudan (where the factory attacked was said to have been preparing weapons for germ warfare, a charge whose credibility rapidly faded). The embassy bombings were both linked by Bill Clinton to the mysterious figure of Osama bin Laden, a Saudi extremist, in a speech which also alleged that there was ‘compelling’ evidence that further attacks against United States citizens were planned. When, in November, a Manhattan federal Grand Jury indicted Osama bin Laden and an associate on over 200 charges relating to the embassy attacks, as well as to other attacks on American service personnel and an abortive bombing in 1993 of the World Trade Center in New York, it caused no surprise when he failed to appear in court to answer them. It was believed bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban regime, which had taken control of that country in the ruins of the Soviet war in the mid-1990s.

As 1999 began, Kosovo was at the centre of the troubles of the former Yugoslavia. When spring passed into summer, a strategic commitment at last taken in March of that year to a purely air campaign by NATO forces (but carried out mainly by Americans) against Serbia appeared to be achieving little except a stiffening of its people’s will to resist and an increase in the flow of refugees from Kosovo. The Russians were alarmed by NATO’s action, unsupported as it was by United Nations’ authorization, and felt it ignored their traditional interest in the area. The casualties inflicted on civilians – both Serbian and Kosovan – were soon causing misgivings in domestic opinion within the nineteen NATO nations, while the Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, had apparently had his confidence increased by Bill Clinton’s assurance that there would be no NATO land invasion. What was happening was indeed unusual: the armed coercion of a sovereign European state because of its behaviour to its own citizens.