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HSE 480 READING CHAPTERS 8 & 9

CHAPTER 8

THE SUPERPOWERS AND THE COLD WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Rashid Khalidi

THE INCEPTION OF THE COLD WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Precisely when the Cold War began is subject to some dispute.1 Winston Churchill’s March 5, 1946, speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, declaring that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” is often seen as indicating that the Cold War was already under way by that point.2 We now know that even earlier, at the height of the colossal joint effort against Nazi Germany during World War II, the Cold War rivalry was already presaged by deep suspicions among the wartime allies.

This was especially the case with those old adversaries Churchill and Stalin, whose antagonism to each other’s system was long-standing.3 From a very early stage in the Cold War, the rivalry of the Soviets and the Western powers was notable in the Middle East and the adjacent regions south of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), whence Britain had launched its repeated interventions to crush the Bolshevik regime during the four-year Russian civil war after the 1917 revolution. It is unlikely that either Churchill or Stalin, who were central figures in this earliest phase of the East-West rivalry, ever fully forgot the impact of this deadly struggle. Churchill’s entire career shows that he was always profoundly concerned about Communism in the Middle East, while Stalin’s long-standing obsession with Britain as an imperialist power in the Middle East at times seemed to eclipse his concerns about the growing US role there. American policymakers, less experienced internationally than their British counterparts, often tended to be influenced by the latter’s concerns about the spread of Communism in the Middle East.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the first non-European confrontations between the USSR and the United States and its allies transpired in the Middle East. Much historical work has been done on the origins of the Cold War.4 However, there has been less new research about the central role of this great international rivalry in a number of regional conflicts.5 This is as true of the Middle East as it is of other areas that felt the impact of the Cold War rivalry from the 1940s until the 1990s.6 These regions have been haunted since then by the ghosts of the Cold War. The most striking example is the blowback from US involvement in the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation of that country in the 1980s.7

Immediately after its Soviet rival disappeared in 1990–1991, the United States confidently asserted its unrivaled power in the Middle East by leading a coalition against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf War and by convening the 1991 Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid. The former was the first American land war in Asia since Vietnam. The negotiations that began at Madrid constituted the only serious and sustained international effort at a comprehensive resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict involving all parties since the 1939 St. James Palace Conference. In light of these apparently radical departures in American policy in the Middle East immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would be useful to revise our understanding of the Cold War as simply a prolegomenon to what some have described as a subsequent era of unfettered American dominance over the region. Such a revision would help us to answer at least two questions: Was the United States previously as constrained by the presence of its Soviet rival as it sometimes seemed—and as these two novel departures immediately after the demise of the USSR seemed to indicate? Alternatively, was America in fact more dominant in the Middle East throughout the Cold War era than may have been evident at the time?

These are important questions, since for the United States the Cold War was the ostensible reason for a vastly expanded American post–World War II global presence. Similarly, the perceived Soviet threat was the pretext for the establishment of US military bases spanning the globe and for the development of a vastly enhanced American international intelligence, economic, and diplomatic profile compared to America’s relatively modest role in the world before December 7, 1941. In many regions, this expansion of America’s global reach meant that the wartime arrival of US troops—in terms of the Middle East, this occurred in North Africa and Iran in 1942—was not followed after the end of the war by their disappearance back over the horizon, as had happened in Europe after World War I. These initial wartime deployments of American forces, and the later establishment and postwar maintenance of major US air bases in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Morocco, and Turkey, marked the beginning of an ongoing US military presence in different locales that continued for many subsequent decades. From this perspective, it appears that these early wartime and postwar moves constituted the beginning of an American role as the major Middle Eastern power, a reality that was masked for a time by the power and regional proximity of the USSR.

Although overshadowed at times by other Cold War arenas, the Middle East was not just a secondary region where the United States and the USSR contended. Already during World War II, the crucial strategic importance of the Middle East had been amply demonstrated in terms of its central geographic location on the southern flank of Europe astride vital sea and air lanes and the vast energy reserves it was known to contain. The region’s importance in terms of strategy and oil was further established during the Cold War. This importance has been demonstrated again since the Cold War ended, as evidenced by a series of major recent American initiatives in the region, including the 1991 Gulf War, the 1991–1993 Madrid-Oslo Middle East peace process, the Iraq sanctions regime from 1991 until 2003, and the invasion of that country in 2003 and its subsequent occupation. These initiatives in the Middle East were among the most dramatic actions taken by the United States in the world arena since the end of the Cold War.

THE AMERICAN-SAUDI AXIS

It is useful to start any assessment of the onset of the Cold War in the Middle East with the meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Saudi king Abdul Aziz al-Saud in Egypt on February 12, 1945. Roosevelt, infirm and only two months away from his death, was on his way home from the Yalta conference. Why did the weary president of the most powerful country on earth spend the better part of a day meeting with this apparently minor Middle Eastern potentate? Because of Saudi Arabia’s importance in the eyes of those who were already planning for the postwar era. We know that by this point the vast extent of Saudi oil reserves was familiar to American strategic planners and oil executives.8 Saudi oil had just begun flowing to support the Allied war effort, which was simultaneously strangling both German and Japanese oil supplies, measurably shortening the war. Finally, in 1945 the United States was already planning to acquire a major air base at Dhahran, which it continued using until 1962 and used again for a decade starting with the 1991 Gulf War.9

By this stage, the United States and Britain had launched invasions of Sicily, Italy, and southern France from bases in the Middle East and were supplying massive quantities of lend-lease equipment to the Soviet Union across Iran, which was occupied by British, Soviet, and American troops. Saudi Arabia was only one link in this vast wartime chain, which stretched around the globe, but the kingdom had one crucial characteristic, besides its strategic position and its possession of vast reservoirs of petrochemicals beneath its soil: it was one of only two independent states in this crucial Middle Eastern region that had never been occupied by the troops of European colonial powers and had no foreign bases on its soil. Moreover, Ibn Saud had twelve years earlier signed an exclusive agreement for the exploration and exploitation of its oil reserves with an American consortium of companies that became the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco). This consortium had thereby secured the first major exclusive American oil concession in the Middle East, heretofore an almost exclusive British and French preserve.

President Roosevelt was thus meeting with the absolute ruler of a nation with something unique to offer the United States: an alliance with a Middle Eastern power that was not already part of another great power’s sphere of influence. This gave American access to oil and bases in the kingdom even more meaning. Moreover, importantly for the coming postwar era, Saudi Arabia’s ruler was staunchly anti-Communist. In addition, he did not have to worry about a large body of nationalist public opinion, unlike governments in other major Middle East countries like Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, where large urban populations—organized into political parties, enjoying slowly growing literacy, and attached to a culture of newspapers and books—were deeply anticolonial and suspicious of foreign bases and foreign concessions.

Nevertheless, because of his concerns about his standing in the Arab world and available public opinion in his kingdom, the Saudi king felt unable to go along with the request of his American interlocutor that all the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust be settled in Palestine. He stressed that, happy though he was to cooperate with the United States, he insisted on the importance of one issue—Palestine—about which he said: “What injury have Arabs done to the Jews of Europe?”10 In response, in April 1945, just before Roosevelt died, the president sent a letter to Ibn Saud confirming what he had told him in response to the concerns over Palestine he had expressed during their meeting: that the United States would consult with both Arabs and Jews before acting in Palestine, where it would never act against Arab interests.11

Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, initially denied that the United States had ever made such commitments.12 Although he was later provided with Roosevelt’s April 1945 letter by the State Department, Truman’s Palestine policy, crafted over the next few years, violated both of his predecessor’s commitments—to consult with both Arabs and Jews before taking action over Palestine and to do nothing there that would harm the Arabs. Four American diplomats based in the Middle East who had been brought back to Washington in October 1945 to brief the new president were left cooling their heels for over a month because, Truman finally told them, his advisers “felt that it would be impolitic to see his Ministers to Arab countries, no matter how briefly, prior to the November … elections.” It was to this group that Truman uttered the infamous words: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”13 It is not surprising, given these views, that starting with Truman’s presidency, the issue of Palestine became a continuing irritant to the Saudi monarchy in its dealings with Washington, and it has remained so for many years. It has, however, been an irritant that most Saudi and other Arab leaders came to accept as the price of doing business with the indispensable power of the United States.

By giving an oil concession to an American consortium in 1933, the Saudi monarch had already managed to assert his independence from Great Britain’s heretofore exclusive influence over his kingdom, which the king had long resented bitterly.14 Whether farsighted, fortunate, or both, between 1933 and his meeting with Roosevelt, Ibn Saud managed to link his dynasty firmly to the growing power of the United States, well before many other world statesmen realized the future superpower’s full potential. In the end, this crucial connection was to prove more important to him and to his six sons who succeeded him as kings after 1953 than were their concerns about Palestine.

Washington early on perceived Saudi Arabia’s economic and strategic value to postwar planning. Beyond this, it soon turned out to have the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Oil produced by Aramco was crucial to Europe’s postwar recovery, to keeping oil prices extremely low for several decades after World War II, and to increasing the profits of the big American oil companies that dominated the world oil market. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia was one of the first countries in the Middle East where the United States was free to establish bases without having to get permission from, or incur the jealousy of, the traditional powers that dominated the region—Britain and France.15 The Dhahran air base was particularly useful for American global airlift capabilities and for rescue, reconnaissance, and combat aircraft, as a link in the chain of bases strategically located along the Soviet southern frontiers. This was particularly the case in the early years of the Cold War, when American strategic bombers such as the B-29 had a limited range.16 Feeling pressure from Arab nationalist sentiment and the anticolonial propaganda of the Egyptian regime, which intensified in the late 1950s, the Saudi government requested termination of the basing arrangement in 1961, and the US Air Force ceased to base units there the subsequent year, although American contract personnel continued to run the airfield for the Saudi government. The US Air Force ceased to need the base in the early 1960s, when the development of longer-range weapons systems made it possible to give up several American bases, including Dhahran and later Wheelus Field in Libya.

However, starting in 1991, after the advent of a completely different post–Cold War American strategy, one involving a large-scale, long-term, multicountry American military presence in the Middle East, US forces were once again based at Dhahran, as well as in Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and elsewhere in the region. This new strategy came after the demise of the USSR, which removed any existential nuclear danger to the United States itself. However, these newly arrived American forces in the Middle East were not directed against “international communism” and its proxies, as was the case from the mid-1940s through the early 1990s, but rather against local Middle Eastern actors—an entirely different purpose than that for which an earlier generation of US bases in this region was first envisioned.

THE ARAB COLD WAR

As the Cold War penetrated the Middle East and as the United States gradually replaced Britain and France as the dominant Western power in the region, the US-Saudi connection continued to be important. It was cemented in 1957 by the new Saudi monarch, King Saud’s, adherence to the Eisenhower Doctrine.17 This follow-up to the Truman Doctrine—which ten years earlier had marked the first formal American recognition that the Cold War had extended to the Middle East—was enunciated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower before a joint session of Congress in January 1957. In it Eisenhower proclaimed American support for any Middle Eastern government targeted by “overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism.”18 King Saud’s public adhesion to the American camp in the Middle East through his acceptance of this doctrine was a major coup for the United States. American policy thereby separated Saudi Arabia from Egypt, its erstwhile ally in inter-Arab politics and a vocal advocate of non-alignment, as the Egyptian regime of Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser gradually moved closer to the Soviet Union.

For the next decade, Saudi Arabia and Egypt constituted the main poles of two opposed camps within the Arab world, engaged in what Malcolm Kerr described as the “Arab cold war.”19 These camps in turn came to be closely aligned with the United States and the Soviet Union. By this process, a regional cleavage with its own logic and specificity was subsumed into the great Cold War divide. This grafting of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union onto preexisting Middle Eastern rivalries significantly exacerbated those conflicts in some cases. At the same time, the involvement of the Americans and the Soviets in internecine local quarrels provided opportunities for Middle Eastern clients to extract support from their superpower patrons, which the latter sometimes were obliged to extend against the better judgment of key policymakers.20

Saudi Arabia’s value to the United States was soon to emerge in yet another sphere: the ideological arena. One of the key convergences of the Cold War era in the Middle East was between the Soviet Union and leftist and Arab nationalist movements in their various forms, including Nasserism, the Ba’th Party, multiple varieties of Arab socialism, the different Arab Communist parties, and other radical parties and groups. Although this Soviet-Arab coalition seemed united by anticolonialism, a commitment to state-led development, contempt for “bourgeois democracy,” and some other shared values, it was in fact a profoundly uneasy and heterogeneous agglomeration of forces. There were deep divergences and suspicions. There were also sometimes open conflicts between its disparate component parts and between many of these parties and the various Arab regimes on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other. Thus, almost immediately after the Iraqi revolution of 1958, the Communist party in Iraq, backed by the USSR, found itself at odds with the Nasserists, Ba’thists, and other Arab nationalists. This rapidly developed into a lasting conflict inside Iraq and regionally that only became more bitter and sanguinary as time went on. The Egyptian regime and the Soviets eventually were obliged to align themselves with their respective squabbling Iraqi protégés, while keeping their bilateral relations as normal as possible.21 Notwithstanding these problems between would-be allies, for a time, in the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, this grouping of Arab leftists and nationalists appeared to be a formidable coalition, particularly when aligned with a growing number of nationalist Arab regimes and with the USSR. Indeed, in the context of the “Arab cold war,” this coalition seemed to be a winning one, as it claimed to represent the future in the battle against the backwardness of the traditional monarchies and conservative regimes associated with the United States.

This radical wave seemed to place the United States and its allies in a highly unfavorable position. To this apparently unbalanced situation, Saudi Arabia brought the powerful ideological weapon of Islam. This was something the Saudis were uniquely positioned to do, given the centuries-old alliance between the royal family and the rigidly orthodox Wahhabi religious establishment and given the kingdom’s special place as the location of two of the three holiest places in Islam—Mecca and Medina. Particularly after the conservative, pious, and ascetic King Faisal, who was viscerally anti-Communist, took over for his older brother Saud in 1962, Saudi Arabia focused more intensively on Islam as the backbone of its resistance to the self-proclaimed “progressive” Arab regimes. It sponsored various pan-Islamic entities as a counterweight to the pan-Arab bodies and parties dominated by Egypt. It spent its oil wealth liberally on spreading the kingdom’s puritanical and dogmatic Wahhabi form of Islam and on other forms of religious propaganda all over the world. Finally, Saudi Arabia gave refuge to Islamist political activists persecuted by secular Arab nationalist regimes in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. These included members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, some of whom had already been spotted by Western intelligence agencies as potentially useful proxies in the Cold War struggle with the radical Arab protégés of the Soviet Union.

Saudi Arabia’s use of Islam as an ideological tool was thus a major addition to the arsenal of the United States and its allies among the conservative forces in the Arab and Islamic worlds, which in the mid-1960s seemed largely on the defensive in the face of the Soviet-backed “progressive” Arab regimes. This tool proved so useful that it eventually became an important part of the American ideological arsenal in the Cold War, used by the US intelligence services not only in the Arab countries but also in Pakistan and South Asia, Southeast Asia, Soviet Central Asia, and other parts of the Islamic world. Surprising though it may seem today, given the demonization of radical, militant political Islam in American public discourse, for decades the United States was in some respects the major patron of earlier incarnations of just these extreme trends, for reasons linked to the perceived need to use any and all means to wage the Cold War.22

There was of course a price attached to this Cold War–driven approach, not least in terms of the ideals and principles that Americans like to believe their foreign policy is based on. While the Soviet Union aligned itself with authoritarian nationalist regimes, American policy backed absolute monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Arab Gulf states (with the exception of Kuwait) and other nondemocratic, authoritarian regimes in Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Pakistan, and elsewhere from the late 1940s until the 1990s as part of this same Cold War strategy. In so doing, the United States laid little or no stress on promoting democracy, constitutionalism, or human rights in the Middle East. Indeed, in the name of anti-Communism, the United States had previously helped to subvert Middle Eastern democracies with the following actions: supporting the Husni Zaim coup against the constitutionally elected president Shukri al-Quwwatly in Syria in 1949; organizing with Britain the overthrow of Iran’s democratically chosen prime minister Muhammad Mussadiq in 1953 and imposing an autocratic regime under Mohamed Reza Shah; and providing Lebanese president Camille Chamoun with the funds to bribe his way to achieving a parliamentary majority in the 1957 elections.23 In some cases when the United States subverted democracy in the Middle East, Islam served as a screen or an ideological adjunct. In Iran, for example, some elements of the religious establishment became part of the American-supported anti-Mussadiq coalition in 1953. This approach was welcome to the absolutist, antidemocratic elites of the conservative states with which the United States was aligned.

The long-standing inattention of American policymakers to the promotion of democracy and human rights in the Middle East, as well as their Cold War sponsorship of radical Islamic groups and trends, acquire significance in light of more recent conflicts with militant, radical Islamic political movements. Some of these groups, like the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, are lineal descendants of ones the United States was allied with for decades. The Cold War alliance between the United States and these Islamic movements produced bitter fruit long after the Cold War was over. However, this alliance with a politicized, militant, and often extreme form of Islam was a direct function of American policy in the Middle East and beyond during much of the Cold War.

This ideological tool was crucial in rallying conservative forces in the Middle East and beyond at the height of the civil war in Yemen from 1962 to 1967. Egyptian troops and air power backed the pro-Nasserist Yemeni republicans, and Saudi Arabia and its conservative regional allies supported the royalists financially and militarily in a desperate seesaw struggle on the southwestern borders of the Saudi kingdom. Behind both sides in this conflict stood their superpower patrons, the United States and the Soviet Union. The banner of Islam and American backing became the cement that brought together a disparate coalition including Yemeni royalist and tribal forces; the governments of Jordan and Oman, which faced their own radical domestic oppositions; the farther afield governments of Pakistan and Iran under the shah; and Britain and Israel. Included as well in this American-led coalition were elements of the underground Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. As part of this sub rosa regional conflict, Saudi Arabia supported its allies in the Yemeni civil war with weapons and money, Jordan and Iran sent military advisers and some military units to the Dhofar region of Oman to fight against a radical Marxist guerrilla movement that opposed the sultan’s regime and the British advisers who propped it up, and British troops fought to hang on to Aden and South Yemen against a tenacious insurgency. Israel, too, was surreptitiously involved in support of the Saudi-backed royalists in Yemen.24 On the other side, radical groups and Arab nationalist regimes, such as those of Egypt, Algeria, and Iraq, as well as the Soviet Union, gave extensive military support to the Yemeni republicans, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf fighting in Dhofar, and the South Yemeni insurgents.

Since forces aligned with the United States claimed to defend the Middle East against atheistic Communism and its secular Arab nationalist allies, a particular form of militant political Islam thus provided an ideological banner and a critical rallying point. The instrumental employment of radical Islamism as a tool of policy continued to provide a lasting focus for American, Saudi, and Pakistani regional policies, reaching its apogee during the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1988 and eventually spawning the Taliban and al-Qa’ida. This was long after the high tide of radical Arab nationalism had ebbed in the wake of the crushing defeat inflicted by Israel on Egypt and Syria in June 1967, and after Egypt and many other Arab countries had ended their alignment with the Soviet Union. However, the monster spawned in the waning days of the Cold War continued to thrive long after it had ended.

THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT AND THE COLD WAR

The events of the “Arab cold war” were only one example of the many ways in which the larger American-Soviet Cold War had a major impact on the Middle East. The alignment of each of the superpowers with one or another side of the Arab-Israeli conflict was another. Starting in the 1960s and until the end of the Cold War in 1991, the United States backed Israel, while the Soviet Union supported most of the Arab states engaged in the conflict. This fixed alignment did not, however, go back to the earliest phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestine war of 1947–1949. During that crucial formative period, the United States and the USSR were on the same side: They both voted in the UN General Assembly in 1947 to partition Palestine in a way that gave the 32 percent Jewish minority 55 percent of the country. Both raced to recognize the independence of the new Jewish state that resulted from that decision on May 15, 1948, and both surreptitiously helped to arm Israel during the war that ensued. Soviet arms, delivered through Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1948, were crucial to Israel’s ultimate military victory.

The main reason for the United States taking the position it did, against the professional advice of the State Department and the Pentagon, was simple and can be summed up by President Truman’s words regarding the composition of his constituents (quoted earlier in the chapter).25 The Soviet position, which shifted from anti-Zionism to support for the creation of Israel in a few short months, owed a great deal to Stalin’s obsessive concern about Britain’s power in the Middle East, which he did not seem to realize was waning rapidly; his suspicions of what he saw as British Arab clients like Transjordan, Iraq, and Egypt; and his mistaken belief that a Jewish state might align itself with the USSR.26

Israel and the Soviet Union soon drifted apart, with Israel moving closer to the United States and the Soviet Union eventually developing closer relations with Arab countries that sought to free themselves from direct and indirect control by the old European colonial powers. Thereafter, Britain and France became the main arms suppliers to Israel. Their weapons helped Israel win its next two wars against Arab states—the Suez war against Egypt, which Israel fought in alliance with the British and French in 1956, and the war of June 1967 against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Crucially, France also provided Israel with the wherewithal to produce nuclear weapons, which it did surreptitiously starting in the mid-1950s.27

The tripartite Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956 marked another moment when the United States and the USSR found themselves on the same side, in opposing the aggression of the two old colonial powers and their Israeli ally against Egypt. This came at one of the high points of the Cold War, when Soviet forces were engaged in bloodily suppressing the Hungarian uprising and the United States and the Western powers were loudly decrying Soviet brutality. However, the two superpowers both opposed the tripartite attack on Egypt over the Suez, albeit—as in 1948—for different reasons. The Soviets were happy to point to Western imperialist aggression while they put down an uprising in their own imperial backyard. Meanwhile, President Eisenhower was furious at Britain and France for acting without consultation, for doing so with overtly neocolonial motives, and for distracting world public opinion from Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe. The subtext of American displeasure was that Britain and France did not know their place in the new world of the Cold War, where there were only two superpowers and Washington made all the important decisions on the Western side.28

The Suez war was the last time until the end of the Cold War that the superpowers found themselves on the same side of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Soon the Arab cold war began, the Eisenhower administration’s limited sympathy for the Egyptian regime of Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser was exhausted and the American-Soviet rivalry ratcheted up in the Middle East. The Eisenhower Doctrine resulted from this escalation. It was directed not just at the Soviet Union but at Arab states, like Egypt, that were aligned with the USSR; in the Manichean vision of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, such countries were “controlled by International Communism.”29 The Soviet Union had been supplying Egypt with arms since 1955 (the original arms deal here too was made via Czechoslovakia) and soon was supplying other Arab countries as well. Thereafter the USSR provided aid for the construction of Egypt’s Aswan Dam, after the United States reneged on its commitment to do so. The United States was arming Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other allies, and by the 1960s had begun to supply Israel with weapons, initially surreptitiously via West Germany. This arms supply relationship became more overt in the subsequent administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as the former sent Hawk antiaircraft missiles and the latter A-4 Skyhawk attack bombers to Israel.

The 1967 war, however, marked the full alignment of the United States with Israel and the beginning of Israel’s heavy reliance on American weapons systems, starting with the top-of-the-line F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers supplied by the Johnson and Nixon administrations. The massive dependence of Israel on billions of dollars annually in US military and economic aid came a few years later, following the 1973 war. By this time, the United States had come to see Israel as its most valuable ally in the Middle East region in the global struggle with the USSR and its proxies. Israel fit perfectly into the Nixon administration’s strategy of Vietnamization—finding local proxies to serve US interests—and it was seen as more valuable even than Iran under the shah, as demonstrated by America’s willingness to deliver to Israel weapons that neither Iran nor NATO allies received.

Policymakers in the Johnson and Nixon administrations faced a scenario in which they saw the USSR and China as pinning the United States down in Southeast Asia at little cost to themselves through what they myopically perceived as their Vietnamese proxies. They looked to Israel to even the score against the Soviet Union’s proxies, Egypt and Syria, at little direct cost to the United States. The Soviets in turn could not allow themselves to be left behind. They upped the ante further after the 1967 war by writing off Egypt’s and Syria’s debts for military equipment destroyed or captured by Israel during the war, and by delivering massive amounts of new arms, notably surface-to-air missiles, including the SAM-2, SAM-3, and the new SAM-6. The two superpowers raised the stakes during the 1968–1970 war of attrition along the Suez Canal, when the Egyptians pushed their air defenses to the edge of the Suez Canal, making possible a crossing of this great antitank barrier a few years later. During this fierce phase of the Arab-Israeli wars, Soviets advised Egyptian air defense crews and Soviet pilots directly engaged in combat, and the most advanced combat aircraft, antiaircraft missiles, and radar were sent to Egypt. Naturally, the United States countered with deliveries of top-of-the-line military equipment to Israel.30

Finally, in the 1973 war, Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ordered the airlift of massive quantities of military equipment to Israel when its stocks were in danger of running out. This escalatory sequence from 1967 until 1973 was driven, incidentally, as much by the clients on both sides as by the competition between their superpower patrons, as Israel refused to negotiate seriously with Egypt in spite of American remonstrance, and the Egyptians insisted on a military option in spite of the deep reluctance of the Soviet military.31 Throughout this six-year period, both superpowers sent their respective allies advanced weaponry and became more directly committed themselves. In the final stages of the 1973 war, the United States placed its armed forces worldwide on a general nuclear alert, DEFCON 3, in response to reports that several Soviet paratroop divisions had been placed on alert and that the USSR was shipping nuclear warheads to its forces in the Mediterranean.32 The Soviets were reacting to Israel’s refusal to obey a UN-mandated cease-fire, as its armored forces continued to roll toward Cairo after crossing the Suez Canal. In a message to Nixon, Soviet Communist Party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev demanded a joint superpower intervention to end the war, failing which the Soviets threatened to intervene unilaterally. They were apparently on the point of doing so when Kissinger raised the ante by ordering a nuclear alert while at the same time calling for a halt to the Israeli advance. Though this event has received less attention than the Cuban missile crisis a decade earlier, here again the superpowers had seemingly been brought to the brink of a nuclear confrontation, this time by their proxy competition in the Arab-Israeli arena.

By this point, the Cold War rivalry as played out through the Arab-Israeli conflict had taken on a dynamic of its own. This can be seen in the behavior of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and in the actions of their Soviet opposite numbers. Nixon and Kissinger’s objective was to expel the Soviets from Egypt and to win it over to the United States’ side. This objective incidentally fit in perfectly with the aims of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat, who was eager, together with his military high command, to get out from under the Soviet thumb and receive American support (which he eventually did win). The Soviets’ aim was to retain their foothold in the region at all costs. Much of their large military presence in Egypt by this point—more than twenty thousand “advisers”—was in fact involved in maintaining a naval base under exclusive Soviet control that was used to keep track of the movements of US submarines carrying submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) in the Mediterranean.

For both superpowers, these and other Cold War aims were far more important than the ups and downs of the Arab-Israeli conflict itself or peace between Arabs and Israelis.33 Partly as a consequence of the single-minded concentration of both superpowers on besting each other, that conflict came no closer to final resolution during the Cold War. There were a number of efforts toward such a resolution, most of them desultory: a brief single session of a peace conference at Geneva in 1973; three disengagement agreements negotiated by Henry Kissinger, two between Egypt and Israel and one between Syria and Israel; the American-Soviet joint communiqué of 1977 calling for a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement to be negotiated at a multilateral peace conference; and the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, which emerged after President Jimmy Carter’s 1978 mediation at Camp David. Yet in spite of these initiatives, no comprehensive resolution of the conflict was achieved. Gaining advantages in their rivalry with one another ultimately was far more important to the superpowers than was peace in the Middle East, which consequently got relatively low priority in their efforts in the region.

THE COLD WAR AND THE KURDS

There are many other instances of how the overarching Cold War rivalry distorted outcomes in the Middle East. Decisions on economic development, domestic policies, the balance of forces between political parties, and majority-minority relations within states in the region were affected by the machinations of the Soviets and the Americans in their unceasing rivalry with one another.

To take one case, consider the tragic example of how the Kurds in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey became pawns in regional rivalries that came to be subsumed in the confrontation between the superpowers. The episodes of this ill-starred story began with the proclamation of the Kurdish Mahabad Republic in January 1946, when Soviet troops were still occupying northern Iran, including Iranian Kurdistan. This initiative marked the establishment of the first autonomous Kurdish entity, one that Stalin initially supported but soon abandoned.34 One of the key leaders of the Mahabad Republic, its defense minister, the Iraqi Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani, escaped and ended up in the Soviet Union. He returned in 1958 to his native Iraq, where his Kurdish Democratic Party launched a series of revolts against different governments in Baghdad, including a major uprising with Iranian, American, and Israeli support against the Ba’th regime in 1974–1975. This ended with the betrayal of the Kurds in the 1975 Algiers agreement between Iran and Iraq with the collusion of Henry Kissinger. The United States had blessed the Iran-Iraq accord, which entailed the United States and Iran abandoning their support for the ongoing Kurdish revolt against the Iraqi regime that these two powers had helped instigate. Thereafter Kissinger excused this betrayal before an appalled congressional committee with the words, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”35

The Iraqi regime slaughtered, with gas and other means, thousands of Kurdish villagers in the course of the Iran-Iraq war of 1979–1988, during which the superpowers played both sides of the street in their tireless efforts to gain advantage over each other. Thus the United States and its allies encouraged the Iraqi Ba’thist regime to go to war with the Islamic revolutionary government in Iran, supplying Iraq with intelligence and with the means to engage in gas warfare against Iran (and also its own Kurdish population), while the Reagan administration later surreptitiously contacted Iran as part of the illegal Iran-Contra conspiracy, delivering to it much-needed parts for Hawk SAM missiles. The Soviets, meanwhile, were no less callous and self-serving, supplying arms to the Iraqi forces while also selling armored vehicles and missiles to the Iranians. In all of this, the Kurds were left to their fate by the two superpowers, which cynically exploited them against what they perceived as each other’s regional proxies, and then just as cynically dropped them when they were no longer of any use. This recurring trope in Kurdish history, of adoption and then abandonment by great power protectors, which had its precedent in similar behavior by the British at the end of World War I, risks being repeated once again in northern Iraq and Syria should the United States eventually decide that it no longer needs the Kurds as proxies in that distant, landlocked region.36

Even as the Iran-Iraq war, which devastated the Kurds as well as both warring countries, was starting, the Soviet Union made an ultimately fatal decision to invade Afghanistan to prop up a crumbling pro-Soviet regime. In so doing, it sent the Red Army across a Cold War line that had not been crossed since the end of World War II and set off alarm bells all over the Western world. The Carter administration responded vigorously by supplying support to anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas, the mujahideen, in a bid to bleed Soviet forces. Carter was succeeded in the White House by the much more assertive Reagan administration, which saw in Afghanistan an opportunity to do much greater harm to the Soviet Union. Indeed, Afghanistan opened for the Reagan team the long-sought prospect of bringing down the entire “evil empire.” Reagan’s administration included a number of the most vigorous proponents of the aggressive prosecution of the Cold War since the mid-1950s. In some senses they were more aggressive than even Dulles had been: for all his messianic anti-Communist bluster, Eisenhower’s secretary of state had been committed to the Cold War doctrine of containment propounded by the pragmatic George Kennan.37 By contrast, many of the neoconservatives in the Reagan administration favored a radical strategy of “rolling back” Communism, a belligerent approach that had never become established doctrine in Washington, even at the height of the Cold War. With the most viscerally anti-Communist administration since that of Herbert Hoover in office, rollback of regimes perceived to be under Soviet influence the world over became its policy.

Activating the old radical Islamist allies with which it had worked during the Cold War and the Arab cold war, the CIA under William Casey, with the support of the Saudi, Pakistani, and other intelligence services, helped to field a force of Afghans, together with Arab volunteers and others that it brought in from all over the Islamic world. This eventually proved to be more than a match for the Soviet occupation forces and their Afghan allies, who went down to a staggering defeat. But after the bloodied Red Army crossed back into the Soviet Union in 1988, the lethal, divided, and ill-disciplined mujahideen movement that these cold warriors had helped to fashion eventually metastasized into forces that continued to engage in an endless war that engulfed Afghanistan. That war raged for decades afterward, largely directed against the United States. Militant networks that grew out of the thousands of Arab and other Muslim volunteers brought to Afghanistan by the American and allied intelligence services developed into al-Qa’ida, which in turn spawned the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). All of these brutal, nihilistic, and violent organizations and forces are ghosts of the Cold War, bastard children born of the blowback of a now conveniently forgotten era.

Soon after the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan and after the Iran-Iraq war ended in mutual exhaustion, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and the rest of Eurasia began to crumble, and the Soviet Union itself finally disappeared in 1991. The Cold War was over, but its tragic sequels, its toxic debris, and its unexploded mines continue to cause great harm in the present day. The tragic outcome of 9/11 represents one of these sequels, the evil work of the distant but very real ghosts originally conjured up by the United States to wage the last phases of the Cold War. The Cold War is over and the Soviet Union is no more, but those ghosts are still with us, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

CONCLUSION

Did the Cold War in the Middle East prevent the United States from exercising unfettered hegemony over that region until the Soviet Union was out of the way? Or was the American perception of Soviet power exaggerated, and was the USSR in fact less of an obstacle to American domination of the Middle East than it may have seemed? My inclination is toward the latter view. The Middle East, like most of the other major arenas of Cold War rivalry, was immediately adjacent to the USSR. There were no such Cold War battlefields in the immediate vicinity of the United States, with the exception of Cuba and, for a brief period in the 1980s, parts of Central America. Thus, from soon after 1945, it was the United States that was containing the Soviet Union and stationing forces and strategic weapons all around the USSR’s frontiers and those of its satellites, and not vice versa.

Even after the USSR detonated an atomic bomb in 1949, shifting the strategic balance somewhat in its favor, it had no assured delivery system for nuclear weapons until the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) in the mid-1960s. Thereafter, both powers soon became capable of destroying one another many times over. These are all indications, nevertheless, of the great superiority of the United States over the USSR. This superiority was most importantly based on the far greater economic power of the United States and its postwar dominance of the European and Japanese economies; the two alone produced more than the Soviet economy little more than a decade after World War II.

To be sure, the USSR also had certain advantages. By its very location it dominated the Eurasian landmass, and it had vast land armies. It also had an initial ideological advantage in Europe because of the presence of strong Communist parties there, and a similar advantage in much of the developing world in the face of the persistence of European colonialism. This ideological edge operated in the Middle East for a time. Although the USSR was a great power, in many respects it was not truly a superpower, lacking the economic might of the United States or the global reach that the latter enjoyed with its fleets, air forces, and far-flung military bases. All of these American strategic advantages can be seen operating in the Middle East, where a quiet struggle was waged, first in the Mediterranean, when in the 1960s the US Navy first based Polaris SLBM-carrying submarines targeting the USSR and the Soviets sought naval and air bases in the region to counter them. These advantages could be seen operating again in the 1970s when the US deployment of longer-range Poseidon SLBM-carrying submarines turned the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean into a similar theater of naval competition. In the Middle East and elsewhere, the United States was taking the initiative by stationing strategic weapons in the USSR’s backyard, not vice versa (with the brief exception of Khrushchev’s Cuban adventure). Thereafter, the United States was able to use its formidable economic power to help wean Egypt and other Arab states away from their former Soviet patrons with generous promises of aid.

Thus, while the struggle for influence in the Middle East seesawed back and forth and at times looked desperate to some in Washington, the United States always had the strategic upper hand. This became apparent when formerly radical Arab nationalist regimes like that of Egypt under Sadat in the 1970s and later that of Iraq under Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war defected to the American side. For all the rhetoric in Washington about countries in the Middle East “controlled by international communism” in the 1950s, these Arab nationalist regimes and their elites were never drawn ideologically to the USSR. Quite the contrary, all of them were deeply, fundamentally anti-Communist, and none were staunchly anticapitalist (the sole exception in the entire Middle East was South Yemen). Even where Communist parties had a role in the domestic politics of Middle Eastern countries, Communists were never close to being in control of them. The attraction of Middle Eastern rulers to both sides in the Cold War was purely based on naked power. As it became apparent to most Middle Eastern elites that the United States was richer and more powerful than the Soviet Union, they eventually tended to gravitate toward Washington. Even the revulsion caused by Washington’s bias in favor of Israel was not enough to alienate many Arab governments. We have seen this in the case of Saudi Arabia. It was equally true of other reliably pro-American regimes. After Sadat’s “apostasy” in leaving the pro-Soviet camp in 1972, it became increasingly clear that the United States could have its Israeli cake and eat it too, something that still appears true today.

This leaves us with one last question. This arises in light of the unprecedented unrest that has plagued the Middle East in the decades since the end of the Cold War, including major direct military interventions by the US and Russia and the collapse of what previously seemed to be strong states into anarchy in the midst of fierce civil wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. This question is whether, in spite of its many negative effects on the region, some of which have been described in this chapter, the Cold War may have served to limit or at least restrain direct external intervention, and thereby to stabilize the region. Certainly the multiple Arab-Israeli wars, the Yemeni civil war, and the devastating Iran-Iraq war all took place in the midst of the Cold War. Both superpowers and their allies provided the arms with which these wars were fought, and they thereby exacerbated these and other regional conflicts. Nevertheless, if nothing else, during the Cold War the superpowers’ fear that unrestrained conflict in the Middle East would lead to a direct confrontation between them may have provided some limits to what could happen. It would be a great irony if one day we were to look back on the era of intense superpower rivalry in the Middle East from 1945 until 1990 with nostalgia as one of relative stability and calm in comparison to what followed.

CHAPTER 9

THE 1967 ARAB-ISRAELI WAR

US Actions and Arab Perceptions

Fawaz A. Gerges

On more than one level the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war (also known as the Six-Day War) was a watershed in the recent history of the Middle East. In particular, the confrontation radically transformed the nature of regional politics and the relationship between local states and the superpowers. On the one hand, the Arab-Israeli dispute became the most dominant single foreign policy issue in the external relations of the Arab states. The main focus of regional instability shifted from inter-Arab politics to Arab-Israeli interactions. The war also set the stage for the contemporary Arab-Israeli peace process. For the previous ten years, the dispute between Israel and the Arabs had been kept on ice, moving neither toward resolution nor toward war.1 In this sense, the Six-Day War was a catalyst that forced Israel and the Arabs as well as their superpower patrons to participate in the quest for peace. On the other hand, the bloody escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict made local players much more dependent on their superpower allies. As a result, the Arab-Israeli conflict became increasingly entangled in the US-Soviet Cold War rivalry. Thus, bipolarity on the international stage was reflected on the regional level. The increased reliance of the local states on the superpowers restricted their freedom of action and compromised their independence.

This chapter examines the impact of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war on Arab nationalist perceptions regarding the input that the United States had in the crisis, in order to examine how these perceptions influenced Arab attitudes toward the US and Soviet roles in the peace process. I argue that the Six-Day War had a devastating negative impact on Arab views regarding the US role, as well as on Arab beliefs about the efficacy of the Soviet Union and its reliability as a superpower ally. Although Arab nationalists, particularly in Egypt, were highly critical and suspicious of President Lyndon B. Johnson, they recognized the indispensable and preponderant role of Washington in the post-1967 peace process. They believed the United States wielded much influence over its client, Israel, and held most of the cards in the peace process.

In contrast, Arab rulers, and not just Egyptian president Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser, became conscious of the limited nature of Soviet power and prestige in world politics. Their experiences with the Soviet Union during the 1967 crisis convinced them that Moscow did not have the means or the will to defend the Arabs. This belated realization played a decisive role in the mellowing of Egyptian radicalism during the post-1967 period and, one might venture to claim, in the revolutionary reorientation of Egyptian foreign policy throughout the 1970s.

Thus, this chapter must address several critical questions: How did the Arab confrontational states, particularly Egypt, respond to their crushing defeat at the hands of Israel in June 1967? How did they perceive the role of the superpowers in the war, and did their perceptions of the two contrasting superpower positions influence their behavior toward the peace process? What was the impact of the US-Soviet rivalry on the dynamics of peacemaking? Why did President Johnson abandon previous US support for the 1949 armistice regime, and how did this radical change in US policy complicate the quest for peace? To what extent did the dramatic alteration in the regional balance of power inhibit both Israel and Arab rulers’ willingness and ability to compromise? In this sense, did the 1967 war sow the seeds of a bloodier conflagration in the Middle East?

ARAB PERCEPTIONS OF THE US ROLE IN THE 1967 ARAB-ISRAELI WAR

The polarization of the Arab-Israeli conflict along East-West lines was directly related to the crushing defeat of the Arab states in 1967 and their perceptions that the United States had colluded with Israel to destroy the “revolutionary Arab regimes which had refused to be a part of the Western sphere of influence.”2 Nasser, the leading Arab nationalist, believed that his regime was the main target of the US-sponsored Israeli attack. He told Mohamed Heikal, a confidant of his, that Johnson had succeeded in “trapping us.” For Nasser, this collusion entailed a complex set of political and diplomatic tricks and maneuvers. Moreover, the Egyptian leadership—not just Nasser—believed that the Johnson administration had indirectly colluded with Israel by covering its flanks and neutralizing the Soviet Union and by deliberately deceiving Egypt and lulling it into a state of complacency.3

The Egyptians pointed to the fact that although the United States had secured from Egypt a commitment not to fire first, it had failed to extract a similar pledge from Israel. They said that Egypt was under overwhelming pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union not to fire first. They argued that the Johnson administration impressed on Soviet leaders the urgent need to call upon its Egyptian ally to desist from any military adventure. To show his goodwill, Nasser had declared publicly that he would not be the one to initiate hostilities. He said he was given the impression that Israel had also committed itself not to shoot first.4

Little wonder, then, that the Arab nationalists were very bitter after Israel’s preemptive strike on June 5. They felt overwhelming resentment and anger toward the Johnson administration, fueled initially by official Egyptian and Jordanian accusations that the United States had participated alongside Israel in the first air attacks against the Arab forces.5 Although unfounded, these accusations served to confirm a widely held Arab stereotype of US hostility. In particular, the Egyptians felt deceived by the United States; they also believed that the United States had involved an unwitting Soviet Union in its strategy to mislead Egypt.

Nasser asserted that the US government had helped Israel in several ways by providing it with intelligence and weapons. For example, Israel’s June 8 attack on the USS Liberty—a US intelligence ship stationed off the Sinai coast—convinced the Egyptian leader of Johnson’s complicity: the Liberty supplied Israel with critical intelligence about Egyptian military installations. In this context, Nasser claimed that Johnson had known and had approved of Israeli war plans in advance. As Nasser put it, the US role in the war was a continuation of its shutting off of aid to Egypt: having failed to subdue Egypt through economic warfare, Johnson instigated Israel to use physical force instead.6 Nasser said the United States “must be made to feel the brunt of its collusion with Israel. We must bring the weight of mobilized Arab anger to bear on her. The severing of relations is imperative.”7 This perception, or rather misperception, was shared by all the confrontation Arab states (most importantly, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq), which promptly broke diplomatic relations with Washington.

To understand the rationale behind Arab perceptions, one has to focus on the nature of the relationship between the Johnson administration and the Arab nationalist forces, particularly on the steady deterioration of US-Egyptian relations since the end of 1964. The gradual suspension of US food aid to Egypt beginning in 1965, coupled with the direct supply of arms to Israel and other conservative states in the area, embittered Egyptian leaders and convinced them that Johnson not only was determined to humiliate and starve their country to death but also was working closely with their regional enemies to overthrow the revolutionary Arab governments.8 In September 1965 the Egyptian ambassador to Washington informed a senior US diplomat that the Egyptian leadership believed that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was seeking to topple the Nasser regime.9

By the end of 1966 Nasser seemed to have lost hope for US policy, viewed as irredeemably pro-Israeli and anti-Egyptian.10 The mood in Washington was equally hostile: “We’re not angry [with Nasser]; we’re fed up,” wrote Harold Saunders, a key National Security Council (NSC) official dealing with the Middle East.11 The US ambassador to Egypt, Lucius Battle, also said that a good deal of uncertainty and tension and a general sense of discouragement existed in US-Egyptian relations. The two countries, asserted the ambassador, were on a “slippery slope headed toward confrontation of the 1957–58 type.” He warned his superiors in Washington to bear in mind that they were approaching a watershed in their relationship with Egypt.12

THE ARAB VIEW OF THE US ROLE IN THE PEACE PROCESS

The general Arab view of the US role in the 1967 war and in the subsequent peace process should be studied squarely within this context of polarized suspicion and distrust. The Arab nationalists had no faith in the Johnson administration as a neutral mediator in the quest for peace. To them, an identity of interests existed between the White House and Israel, manifesting itself in Johnson’s unequivocal support of Israel in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly and Security Council and subsequent actions, which were designed to ensure Israel’s military superiority over all its Arab neighbors.13 Arab rulers had a fixation with the United States, which, in their opinion, determined questions of war and peace in the Middle East. They failed to appreciate the complexity of US-Israeli relations and the wide degree of autonomy that Israeli leaders exercised in their ceaseless quest for absolute security.

In both 1956 and 1967, Nasser and his Arab counterparts did not consider seriously the possibility that Israel, by manipulating the polarized international system, was capable of acting on its own in the pursuit of its national interests, with or without superpower collusion. Israel was simply seen as an instrument and agent of the Western powers and imperialism, performing at the behest of its masters; Israel was not working for itself alone but was serving as a US tool to dominate the Arab world. In the words of Algerian president Houari Boumedienne, “Israel played a secondary role in the 1967 war. The battle was American, and only the performance was Israeli.” Likewise, Nasser said that the United States—not Israel—was the main party with which to discuss the occupation of Arab territories.14 Although some of this was merely hyperbole, Arab politicians really believed that the United States held the key to war and peace in the region. Reading the recollections, speeches, and some minutes of the meetings of Arab officials, one gets the impression that Johnson had the power and the means to force Israel to withdraw to the prewar borders but did not want to employ them.15

Despite the vehemence of his attack on US policy, Nasser was in no position to confront the United States in the region. When the dust settled over the desert, Nasser found the bulk of his army destroyed, the Sinai occupied, his coffers empty, and his political career in jeopardy. Unlike after the war of 1956, Nasser could not turn a military defeat into a political victory. In fact, the Six-Day War was markedly different from the Suez crisis. In 1956 Nasser could rightly claim that Egyptian capabilities were no match for the combined forces of Britain, France, and Israel. In spite of his efforts, Nasser could not repeat the same political performance in 1967. The “most powerful state in the Middle East” had been decisively beaten and humiliated by a young, vigorous, and small nation.

As a result, Nasser’s status and position in the Arab world were weakened. With the totality of defeat, Nasser’s long-term goal of constructing a new Arab order disappeared. Undermined were the symbols and ideas of secular Arab nationalism that had served as the building blocks for this order. The revolutionary ideal was discredited in Arab politics. In inter-Arab relations, the overall balance of forces shifted dramatically in favor of the Arab conservatives, who held the power of the purse and who shaped the politics of the inter-Arab state system during the post-1967 period.

Furthermore, the Arab nationalists could no longer rely on the sympathy of world public opinion or on the active intervention of the superpowers. They did not understand the changed international situation in the late 1960s. The United States was bogged down in Vietnam and was not terribly focused on the Middle East. Likewise preoccupied at home and abroad, the Kremlin leadership was building bridges to the West in the hope of gaining economic and political concessions. The Soviets were against a war in the Middle East that might involve them in a direct clash with the United States (and thus endanger their new approach to the West).16 The Arab radicals were mistaken in their assumption that the Soviets would intervene in a Middle East war. Such thinking was symptomatic of the prevailing, pervasive tendency of the regional actors to inflate their own importance. After the 1967 war, Nasser told his colleagues that he had not weighed carefully the changes in Soviet foreign policy after the death of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.17

More significant to the Kremlin leadership were the nuclear stalemate with the United States and the perennial question of international security. In the Six-Day War, US and Soviet policymakers communicated at the highest levels to contain the conflict and to prevent its spread and expansion. They exerted considerable pressures on their local allies to accept a cease-fire. Although the war was short, the superpowers used the hotline more than once to clarify any misunderstanding that might force them into an unwanted confrontation. In the aftermath of the war, top US and Soviet officials held talks to try to find a political solution.18

Although the Soviets were critical of Israel’s actions in June 1967 and were supportive of the Arabs, they did not take concrete measures—except to promise to re-supply arms—to help their friends. The Soviets could not even offer their Arab allies much support in the UN Security Council because of US objections to any resolution stipulating that Israel withdraw behind the 1949 armistice lines.19 It was not until June 10 that the Soviet Union took drastic steps to halt the Israeli advance on the Syrian front. According to Johnson, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin used the hotline to inform him that as the result of Israel’s ignoring all UN Security Council resolutions for a cease-fire, a very crucial moment had arrived. Kosygin foresaw the risk of a “grave catastrophe” unless Israel unconditionally terminated its military operations within the next few hours. Otherwise, the Soviet premier warned, his government would take all “necessary actions, including military.” In addition, the Soviet Union severed diplomatic relations with Israel and threatened to take stronger measures unless the latter ceased hostilities immediately.20

Although he recognized that the Soviet Union was sensitive about its special relationship with Syria, Johnson said that he was determined to resist Soviet intrusion in the Middle East. His immediate response was to issue orders to the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet to move closer to the Syrian coast so as to send a warning signal to the Kremlin: “There are times when the wisdom and rightness of a President’s judgment are critically important. We were at such a moment. The Soviets had made a decision. I had to respond.”21

But neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had the stomach for a clash. The Soviets knew that pressure from the US government was the only way to stop an Israeli advance deep into Syria. Their warning to Johnson was designed to impress upon him the need to halt Tel Aviv’s march toward Damascus. Soviet calculations proved correct. According to senior Israeli officials, on June 10 the Johnson administration informed its ally that the situation had reached a dangerous point and that Soviet intervention was no longer inconceivable. Israel agreed to a cease-fire on the same day, following the occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights.22

A crisis between the superpowers was thus averted. Their high-level contacts had effectively prevented an open clash between them. As the CIA put it, the Soviet Union had no intention of intervening militarily in the war and so did what it could to avoid confrontation. Another major concern of the Kremlin leadership, argued a CIA intelligence assessment, was to forestall a disastrous Arab defeat that would make the Kremlin the target of Arab criticisms.23 As a superpower, the Soviet Union was more concerned about its relationship with the United States than with any abstract obligations to its regional partners. The logic of superpower politics took priority over other interests.

Given the ambivalent position of the Soviet Union, one would have expected Nasser to swallow his pride and mend fences with the Johnson administration. In the case of the Suez conflict, Nasser knew that it was the United States rather than the Soviet Union that ultimately forced the tripartite coalition to cease fire and withdraw. In 1967, however, Nasser believed that Johnson had unleashed Israel’s military action against Egypt to topple his progressive regime. He asserted that, unlike Eisenhower, who played the leading and most effective role in thwarting the tripartite aggression, Johnson played a decisive role in Israel’s swift victory over the Arabs.24

By using the last weapon in his arsenal—severing diplomatic relations with the US government—and by making accusations against the United States, Nasser embittered Johnson and made him more determined to prevent Nasser from regaining a position of pan-Arab leadership. The US president made it clear that the United States “could not afford to repeat the temporary and hasty arrangements” between Egypt and Israel after Suez. Johnson now had the opportunity to try a different approach, by supporting Israel’s hold on the newly occupied territories pending Arab consent to make peace with Israel.25

Indeed, as soon as the fighting started, Johnson, as former ambassador Richard Parker puts it, “showed a clear and lasting bias in favor of Israel and a disregard for the public commitments he and his administration had made to oppose aggression from any quarter.”26 The United States became more closely allied with Israel in opposition to vital Arab interests. The extremely pro-Israeli stand of US public opinion, coupled with Arab hostility and Johnson’s dislike of Nasser, enabled Johnson to adopt a policy of “unquestioning support for Israel.”27 The extent of the Arab defeat took US officials by surprise. They had expected Israel to win but were unsure about the duration or immediate results of an Arab-Israeli contest. On the first day of the war, the uncertainty and uneasiness of the administration were reflected in its call for all combatants to work for a cease-fire and return to old positions before the start of hostilities.28

The US stand changed dramatically, however, as soon as the completeness of Israel’s victory became known. In a memorandum to the president on June 7, his special assistant, Walt Rostow, wrote that the Israeli victory created new conditions that the US government quickly should move to exploit. The following day Rostow warned that the greatest risk would be to fail to appreciate the political consequences of Israel’s military triumph. He summarized the US official position as being opposed to any UN resolution that would require Israel to concede war gains except in return for an Arab-Israeli final settlement.29 No doubt Rostow was fully aware that the new bargaining situation created by the war was asymmetrical.

The Johnson administration hoped to use the new asymmetrical situation to extract peace treaties and recognition of Israel’s existence from the Arabs. Some US officials argued that the humiliating defeat of Egypt and Syria provided the United States with a golden opportunity to take “big” political measures in the region, since “Soviet policy was in ruins.”30 Even before the war was over the administration had concluded that Nasser’s fate was sealed. US diplomats in the field were certain that a general anti-Nasser convulsion would shake Egypt and the Arab world, and indeed that the domestic survival of his regime was in doubt, as was the allegiance of other Arab states.31

US intelligence agencies also believed that the Egyptian leader’s days were numbered, and they began to think seriously about the post-Nasser era. Likewise, the US Department of State thought that the fall of Nasser’s regime would lead not only to the reestablishment of US relations with Egypt but also to the resurrection of US interests in the whole Arab arena.32 The dominant view in Washington was that no quick palliative solutions or temporizing compromises should be accepted. In the words of the undersecretary of state for political affairs, Averell Harriman, the United States would never have another opportunity as propitious to deal with the underlying problems besetting this turbulent region “so vital to our own and Western Europe’s security.”33 Ironically, Nasser interpreted the US position as motivated by a desire to freeze the present situation, hoping that his regime, along with all revolutionary Arab regimes, “would fall, to be replaced by another more receptive to U.S. interests, or alternatively to instill utter despair in us, driving us to make peace with Israel on its conditions.”34

The basic outlines of US long-term strategy were defined as follows: (1) cessation of hostilities between Israel and its Arab neighbors; (2) Arab recognition of Israel; (3) support of moderate Arab forces—the leader of which was Saudi Arabia—at the expense of the Arab radicals: Egypt, Syria, and Iraq; (4) a bigger role for Turkey and Iran in the Middle East; (5) regional arms control arrangements; and (6) a new mechanism for social and economic development.35 In the eyes of the US, the denouement of the war provided a great opportunity to solve the festering Arab-Israeli conflict and to redraw the political map of the region. A central element of this strategy was cutting Nasser’s prestige and influence in the Arab world and revising regional political alignments.

Achievement of this objective would require the active involvement of Turkey, Iran, and Israel. For a decade these states had campaigned hard to become integral players in the inter-Arab state subsystem. According to an intelligence assessment by the CIA, before the war Israel had hoped to construct a loose coalition of Iran, Turkey, Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, and moderate Arabs. It follows that the primary Israeli war aim was the destruction of Nasser as the leader of the pan-Arab nationalist movement. If that goal could be achieved, Israeli officials assumed that Israel, Turkey, and Iran would become the dominant regional actors by representing an overwhelming balance of military power.36

In the aftermath of the war, both Israel and Iran lobbied the US government to support more substantial roles for them in the area. Israeli officials informed their US counterparts that their victory over the Arabs created new opportunities to build a more viable order in the Middle East. They argued further that the United States and its regional allies would be the main beneficiaries of this order.37 The shah of Iran also informed the Johnson administration that “Nasser must be eliminated as otherwise he [could] again inflame Arab sentiments.” Iran would be more than pleased, he added, to play a more active part and to be a solid pillar in the region, as Japan was in the Far East.38 (Indeed, some time later, the Nixon Doctrine of 1969 envisaged hegemonic roles for Iran in the Gulf and Israel in the Fertile Crescent. President Richard M. Nixon and his assistant for national security, Henry Kissinger, saw Iran and Israel as the policemen and the protectors of US interests in the region.39)

These arguments impressed the Johnson administration, which accepted Tel Aviv’s view that no withdrawal should take place except in return for a peace agreement. Johnson placed the major responsibility for the war on Egypt and refused to pressure Israel to concede any territories, as Eisenhower did in 1957. He said Israel must be accepted as a reality in the area and must be recognized by the Arabs.40 Johnson spelled out five principles that were essential to peace: (1) the recognized right to national life (for all parties to the dispute); (2) justice for the (Palestinian) refugees; (3) innocent maritime passage (through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Tiran); (4) limiting the arms race (in the region between Arabs and Israelis); and (5) political independence and territorial integrity (for all). Both the Israelis and the Arabs saw Johnson’s Five Great Principles of Peace as wholly supporting Israel. The convergence of interests between the United States and Israel was almost complete, marking the beginning of a special relationship between the two countries.41 Thus, the Six-Day War brought about a major shift in US policy toward the Middle East.42 The president and his aides decided not to return to the old failed policy supporting the 1949 armistice regime. This attitude explained the administration’s posture of distant reserve toward the question of Arab-Israeli peace.43

THE ARAB VIEW OF THE SOVIET ROLE

Given their perceptions of an unholy US-Israeli alliance, the Arab confrontation states—Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, with the exception of Jordan—felt compelled to turn to the Soviet Union for political and military support. They recognized, however, the limited nature of Soviet power and influence.44 The Soviet failure to provide direct military assistance to the Arabs had important repercussions on Soviet-Arab relations. Egyptian, Iraqi, and Algerian leaders were disappointed with the lack of tangible Soviet assistance. They suspected the Soviets of either being “scared of the Americans” or having sacrificed their Arab allies on the altar of détente with Washington. Egyptian officials criticized the Soviet Union for actually playing the role demanded of it by Johnson during the crisis in May and June; some senior Egyptian officials were skeptical about the value of Moscow as a friend, whereas others even suspected a collusion between the United States and the Soviet Union. Arab rulers realized that the security requirements of their superpower ally vis-à-vis the United States took priority over Middle East regional concerns.45

This realization convinced the Arabs that their alliance with the Soviet Union was tactical rather than strategic. In this context, the Six-Day War marked a watershed in Arab-Soviet relations. The Arabs questioned the nature of their alliance with the Kremlin; though Israel enjoyed full protection by the United States, the Arabs did not receive an equal Soviet commitment.46 It could be argued that one of the main reasons for the decline of Soviet influence in the Arab world in the early 1970s lay in Arab perceptions of Moscow’s stand during the war.

Yet despite the feeling of abandonment and indignation, Nasser and the other Arab nationalists could not afford a final divorce from the Communist giant—especially after they cut their political links with the United States and Great Britain. The Soviet Union became their last refuge. Nasser believed that the regional and global configuration of forces were in US and Israeli favor, thus he needed Soviet military and political support to rebuild his military and to counterbalance US and Israeli hegemony. Immediately after the war Nasser moved swiftly to end the ill feeling that was souring Arab-Soviet relations. Nasser publicly praised Kremlin leaders for their political, economic, and military assistance. He informed Soviet officials that he wanted to strengthen and deepen Egyptian-Soviet relations and that he was ready to sign any pact to organize and structure the relationship between their two countries on a more permanent basis.47 Moscow’s deepening involvement with Egypt and Syria took the Arab-Israeli conflict still deeper into the Cold War rivalry between the superpowers. The Arab-Israeli dispute became a global military-strategic problem, not a regional political problem.48 The peace process thus became entangled in the web of great power politics.

To the Soviets, the immediate results of the war must have been gratifying. Nasser’s crushing defeat humbled him, and he became more receptive to Soviet requests. No longer could he afford to challenge Moscow’s influence in the region, as he had in 1959; this reassured the Soviets. By regulating the flow of arms to Egypt and Syria, the Kremlin would have a greater impact on their policies. Nasser was left in no doubt as to Moscow’s preference for a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.49 Time and again, the Soviets would procrastinate and decline to supply their Arab friends with offensive weapons. The war had taught the Soviets that they needed to exercise more control over their regional allies, and the war’s aftermath enabled them to do so. In the next three years the question of arms deliveries became one of the most effective clubs the Soviets wielded over the Arabs.50

The Egyptians were frustrated with their treatment by the Kremlin. In fact, Anwar Sadat described the period after the war as a clash between Egypt and the Soviet Union.51 In the long run, Soviet behavior bred suspicion and bitterness in Arab ranks, especially in Egypt. Sadat claimed that one of the reasons motivating Nasser to accept the 1970 Rogers Initiative—a peace initiative by US secretary of state William Rogers—was Nasser’s belief that the Soviet Union was a “hopeless case.”52 Hence, it was a only matter of time before the Egyptians would rebel against what they perceived to be Soviet heavy-handedness.

In the short term, Soviet political and material influence increased considerably in the Arab world. Soviet leaders kept their promise to restore lost Arab inventories, with the exception of offensive weapons. Soviet military personnel also were sent in increasing numbers to Cairo and Damascus to assist in defense of deep strategic and industrial targets. However, the flourishing Soviet presence in the region was tactical and temporary, the product of a devastating upheaval that left Egypt, the nerve center of the Arab order, with few international options to pursue. The Arabs could not help comparing US support of Israel with the Kremlin’s lukewarm commitment to the Arabs. Thus, the seeds of mistrust and suspicion had been sown in Arab-Soviet relations. Although Nasser could not distance himself from his Soviet ally, he eventually reopened his relationship with the United States, and by the time of his death from natural causes in 1970 he had come to recognize the indispensable role of Washington in the peace process. Sadat claimed that Nasser had told him that “whether we like it or not, all the cards of this game [i.e., the Arab-Israeli conflict] are in America’s hands. It’s high time we talked and allowed the U.S.A. to take part in this.”53

Although Sadat’s account is exaggerated and self-serving, it is also important, as it foreshadows the future direction of US-Egyptian relations. More than once Nasser tested the degree of US commitment to a balanced approach to the Middle East crisis. For example, following Richard Nixon’s election to the presidency in 1968, Nasser decided to make a fresh start with the United States by initiating a dialogue with the new US leader. In fact, Nasser and Jordan’s King Hussein informed Nixon that they were prepared to accept a diplomatic solution with Israel and that they were constrained neither by Syria’s opposition nor by opposition from other Arab radicals. Egyptian prime minister Mahmoud Fawzi also told Nixon privately that as part of a regional settlement Israel would have freedom of navigation in the Suez Canal. The Egyptians hoped that the Nixon administration would reciprocate by adopting evenhanded policies toward the Arabs and the Israelis. They were disappointed, however, with the lack of a positive US response. According to scholar William Quandt, Kissinger was not persuaded. Thus, the Nixon administration did not change its attitude and maintained close ties with Israel by preserving Israel’s military superiority over Arab neighbors without pressing its leaders to withdraw from recently occupied Arab territories.54

Nasser still thought that Nixon—unlike Johnson—could play a positive role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. In May 1970, the Egyptian leader personally appealed to Nixon to adopt an evenhanded policy and become actively engaged in the quest for peace. He said Egypt had not given up on the United States, despite US military and political support to Israel: the United States must either order Israel to withdraw from the recently occupied territories or, if it was unable to go that far, refrain from extending any further assistance to Israel as long as the latter occupied Arab lands. Although Egypt and the United States did not have diplomatic relations, Nasser said this did not prevent the two countries from cooperating to achieve peace.55 According to Sadat, this appeal to Nixon implied a desire on Nasser’s part to pursue a political course of action.56 Although Nixon responded to the appeal, and Rogers in fact outlined a peace initiative, Nasser and the United States could not overcome differences. It would take Nasser’s successor (ironically, that turned out to be Sadat) and other new leaders to revive the old connection with the United States—at the sole expense of the Kremlin.

THE KHARTOUM SUMMIT

Nasser accepted the convening of a summit of Arab heads of state in Khartoum, Sudan, at the end of August 1967. The Arab militants—Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—felt that a counteroffensive was urgently needed to stem the tide of US advance in the region. In their view, the termination of diplomatic relations with the United States was not adequate to force it to change its policy. Thus, the Syrians, Algerians, Iraqis, and Palestinians called for a complete boycott of the United States and for a strategic alliance with the Soviet Union. They argued that the peace process would lead to Arab surrender and a US-Israeli dictate. On the regional level, they advanced the idea of a popular war against Israel and of a revolutionary crusade against the conservative Arab regimes. The Syrian rulers, in particular, took an anti-Western posture and poured abuse on reactionary Arab regimes that had remained on the sidelines during the latest round of Arab-Israeli hostilities. Syria boycotted the Khartoum summit because it refused to accept the Arab reactionary states as partners.57

However, the clarification of the Soviet position played a decisive role in Nasser’s decision to accept the convening of the summit. Its purpose was to define a collective Arab strategy toward Israel and the West. In Khartoum, Nasser joined the Arab moderates in supporting a political rather than military solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. They also agreed to keep the dialogue with the West, and they opposed the militants’ proposal to suspend Arab oil production.58 An oil embargo, Nasser argued, would harm Arab economies more than those of the West and would almost certainly antagonize the West. Nasser’s new realism manifested itself in his unwillingness to ask the conservative Arab regimes to sever diplomatic relations with the US government. He also informed Jordan’s King Hussein that he was free to pursue a separate negotiated settlement—including signing a defense treaty with the United States—to recover the West Bank and Jerusalem.59

Nasser’s behavior was designed not only to mend his fences with the Arab conservatives but also to keep open lines of communication with the United States. He said he wanted to give the United States an opportunity to prove to its few remaining Arab friends that it was serious about reducing its total alignment with Israel. Nasser was not convinced by the arguments of the militants to cut all links with Washington. The war and its aftermath made the Egyptian leader acutely aware of the influential weight of the United States in the region. As Nasser himself put it, “Political positions cannot be built on myths but facts. We do not want [to] and cannot fight America.” Thus, the Egyptian leader asked Saudi King Faisal to serve as his channel of communication with the Johnson administration.60

Nasser parted company with the Arab radicals on the Arab-Israeli conflict itself: he was not impressed by their call for a total war against the Jewish state. He knew full well that the regional balance of power favored Israel, which had won the sympathy and respect of world public opinion and a decisive edge in international diplomacy. Nasser also took into account the superpower agreement to resolve the problem by political means. Moreover, as mentioned previously, both the Soviet Union and the nonaligned movement informed the Arabs that they would prefer to see a peaceful way out of the Arab-Israeli labyrinth.61

For all these reasons, the Egyptian president joined the moderates in Khartoum in support of a political rather than military solution to the conflict. This fact should not be confused by the summit’s three declarations on Israel—“no peace, no negotiations, no recognition.” The Sudanese premier noted that the three noes were adopted as an instrumental response, a political gesture, to the uncompromising stand of the PLO. Afterward, Nasser, Hussein, and other Arab officials made it clear both publicly and privately that they were prepared to live in peace with Israel in return for Israel’s complete withdrawal from Arab territories occupied in 1967 and for a just solution to the Palestine problem. The summit, noted Hussein, empowered Egypt and Jordan to seek a political solution. In particular, Hussein was convinced that a political solution was the only feasible option open to the Arabs. This belief led him to coordinate his efforts with the United States as well as to serve as a link between the United States and Egypt.62

It was in this spirit that Egypt and Jordan accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242, which was adopted unanimously by the major powers in November 1967. This resolution called for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories—not “the” territories—occupied in the recent conflict and the termination of the state belligerency between Israel and its Arab neighbors.63

Nasser subsequently accused Johnson of supporting Israel in resisting the implementation of the terms of Resolution 242; instead the Johnson administration applied considerable political pressure in an attempt to force Egypt (and Jordan) into a separate peace settlement with Israel: the basis of any agreement with Egypt centered on total Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Egyptian territories in return for Egypt terminating the state of war with Israel. Nasser refused to conclude a separate deal with Israel and called for a comprehensive solution: “The issue is not only about withdrawal from Sinai. It is much bigger than that. The issue is to be or not to be.” To Nasser, accepting a separate agreement with Israel meant coming to terms with the reality of defeat and abandoning the core of the Arab policy upon which he had built his political career.64

The Egyptians were angered when Johnson started to develop intimate ties with Tel Aviv. They believed that Johnson’s actions were not confined to safeguarding Israel but were also assisting it in its occupation of Arab lands. To Nasser and his colleagues, the US president was pushing Egypt to depend further upon the Soviet Union for military, economic, and political support. Egyptian foreign minister Mahmoud Riad said that Nasser felt puzzled by the element of self-destruction in US policy that was driving the Arabs into Soviet arms: “The United States leaves us no choice.”65 Egyptian leaders could not understand the radical change in the US position toward the peace process after the 1967 war, especially Johnson’s abandonment of previous US support for the 1949 armistice regime. They believed that the US-Israeli drive aimed at “forcing Egypt to accept the fait accompli in the hope that the Arab area would surrender to U.S. and Israeli demands.”66

This was another attempt by Johnson, asserted Nasser, to humiliate the Arabs, thus adversely affecting US-Arab relations. By the end of 1967, given Nasser’s perception of Johnson’s hostility, he had concluded that the peace process was dead as long as the balance of power favored Israel; it was only by correcting this imbalance that the United States would be induced to reassess its position. Nasser said that redressing the imbalance, and escalating military pressure, would have a radical impact on the whole Middle East situation, particularly on the positions of the superpowers, and would convince the superpowers of the need to stop maneuvering and to act decisively. Thus, Nasser’s subsequent choice of a “war of attrition” can be seen as a result of the lack of progress toward a political settlement in the two years after the 1967 war and of his desire to break the political and military stalemate, something Anwar Sadat would do as well in 1973. CONCLUSION

Although the Six-Day War set the stage for the Middle East peace process, it did not motivate or force Israel and the Arabs to reach a compromise. Israel’s overwhelming victory over the Arabs brought about a radical shift in the regional balance of power in its favor. This shift in the configuration of forces, coupled with the strong pro-Israeli position of the US government, hardened the positions of the two antagonists. Although most Arab rulers declared their readiness to live in peace with their Jewish neighbor, none of the Arab confrontational states—except for Jordan—was willing to conclude formal peace treaties with Israel. They were very weak militarily for any risky initiative on the diplomatic front. For Nasser and his Arab counterparts, to give the sort of commitments the United States and Israel were demanding would have meant accepting the reality of defeat, thus endangering the very survival of their regimes. Furthermore, despite their rude awakening in June 1967, Arab leaders were not yet ready to come to terms with Israel; they were still prisoners of their historical fears and prejudices.

Israel, on the other hand, was a satisfied power. As a result of their swift victory over the Arabs, Israeli officials demanded a high price for their withdrawal from some, but not all, of the recently occupied Arab territories. Given the disarray, fragmentation, and impotence of the Arab world and unwavering US support, some Israeli elements believed that they could indefinitely hold on to the occupied Arab territories. By the time UN Resolution 242 was passed, Israel was no longer interested in exchanging land for commitments of any kind from the Arabs. As the then deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, Rodger Davies, put it: “Israel’s appetite had grown with the eating.”68

The diplomatic stalemate in the Middle East was directly related to the deepening polarization of the Arab-Israeli conflict along East-West lines. As mentioned previously, Arab nationalist perceptions of US involvement in the 1967 war influenced their attitudes toward the US role in the peace process. They believed that the Johnson administration had colluded with Israel against the forces of Arab nationalism. Subsequent US abandonment of its previous support for the 1949 armistice regime reinforced the widely held Arab view of US hostility.

As a result, Arab nationalists did not trust the United States to act as a neutral mediator in the quest for peace; they turned instead to the Soviet Union for political and military succor—despite their recognition of the limited nature of Soviet power—hoping to redress the regional imbalance. Moscow’s further involvement with Egypt and Syria took the Middle East crisis still deeper into the Cold War rivalry between the superpowers. The entanglement of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the web of great power politics complicated the peace process and made Israel and the Arabs less willing to compromise. Thus, far from being a catalyst for peace, the 1967 war sowed the seeds of yet another bloody conflagration in the region.