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THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR

THE DECADE THAT BEGAN IN 1981 WOULD BE REMEMBERED as a time of appalling disasters, from the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger to the spread of the AIDS epidemic. Less recollected, perhaps, was the era’s distinction as a span of almost uninterrupted upheaval in America’s relations with the Middle East. Preemptive attacks and regional conflicts, revolutions, international conspiracies, and terrorist strikes—punctuated the period and provoked a series of increasingly violent reactions from Washington. Over the course of those ten years, the image of the Middle East in the United States steadily hardened from that of a vaguely menacing conglomeration of states to a phalanx of bloodthirsty regimes that specifically targeted Americans.

Grappling with that transformation would prove to be a Sisyphean task for Carter’s successor, a man of scarcely less rigorous convictions and an even greater fondness for Hollywood-spun myths. Inaugurated on the day of the hostages’ release in Iran, Ronald Reagan, a former California governor and an actor in more than twenty-five movies and fifty television dramas, assumed responsibility for redressing America’s Middle East failures. The new president indicated his intention of returning to the stern Cold War tactic of checking Soviet encroachments on the region and of restoring the Jeffersonian model of countering terrorists. “I don’t think you pay ransom for people who have been kidnapped by barbarians,” he said.

A Decade of Disorder

Reagan had barely settled into the White House when his first Middle East contest commenced. A radical socialist whose rhetoric had taken on a new religious bend, Muammar Qadhafi represented the shift from a pro-Soviet to an Islamic orientation that was subtly transforming Arab politics. The change was manifest in May 1981 when the Libyan leader proclaimed his support for Iran’s struggle against “the Great Satan” and instructed a mob to burn down the U.S. embassy in Tripoli. “He’s not only a barbarian, he’s flaky,” said Reagan, whose florid complexion and soft-spoken style contrasted starkly with the swarthy and blusterous Qadhafi. In retaliation for the embassy sacking, the president closed the Libyan People’s Bureau in Washington and banned oil imports from the North African state. But then Qadhafi again taunted the United States by extending Libya’s territorial waters twenty kilometers into the Mediterranean. Reagan retrieved this gauntlet and ordered a naval task force to demonstrate in the Gulf of Sidra, adjacent to Libya’s coast. A squadron of Soviet-supplied SU-22 fighters flew out to challenge the flotilla, but Navy pilots speedily shot down two of them. For the first time since the Madison administration, American servicemen had engaged an Arab adversary in combat.

The dogfight over Sidra succeeded in quelling America’s contretemps with Libya—for a while. Less than a month later, however, on June 7, a formation of F-16’s was again soaring into action, this time against Iraq. But in place of five-pointed American stars, these aircraft were emblazoned with the sky-blue hexagrams of the Israeli air force. Their objective was the Osirak nuclear reactor, eighteen miles south of Baghdad. After flying 1,100 miles across enemy airspace, the Israeli pilots unleashed their payloads over the French-built facility and in eighty seconds reduced it to a smoking shell. Operation Opera, as it was code-named, was one of history’s most daring aviation raids, but by destroying an Iraqi plant with fighters purchased from the United States, the Israelis placed the White House in a bind.

Reagan’s relationship with Israel was, and would remain, complex. He still regarded oil as America’s paramount interest in the Middle East and resisted any Israeli action that was liable to jeopardize it. In 1981, for example, he supplied AWACS surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia, defeating intense AIPAC efforts to block the sale, and when Arab oil producers protested Israeli steps to annex the occupied Golan Heights, the president suspended a strategic cooperation agreement with Israel. Prime Minister Begin complained that America treated Israel “like a banana republic,” but Reagan in fact revered the Jewish state. Much of this admiration stemmed from his Manichean view of the Cold War, in which Israel had aligned itself with the West against the wicked Soviet empire. More fundamentally, Reagan, raised in the restorationist-minded Disciples of Christ church and closely associated with pro-Zionist American evangelicals, was religiously attached to Israel. He consistently endorsed measures to strengthen Israel militarily and economically and to assist Soviet (and later Ethiopian) Jews to immigrate to their ancestral homeland.

Israel’s bombing of the Osirak reactor challenged that commitment. Fresh from his run-in with Qadhafi, Reagan could commiserate with Israeli fears of a Soviet-backed Arab dictator such as Saddam Hussein, but he also appreciated the fact that the Iraqis had recently launched a full-scale war against Iran. The enemy of America’s enemy in the Middle East had automatically become its friend. Eager to dispel any semblance of collusion in an attack against America’s new de facto ally, Reagan delayed the delivery of additional jet fighters to Israel. He also permitted America’s 

 pertinacious ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, to confer with her Iraqi counterpart in drafting a Security Council condemnation of the raid. The Osirak raid did not, in the end, impair U.S.-Israel relations—later American presidents would thank Israel for denying nuclear capabilities to Iraq—but it did inaugurate ties between America and Saddam Hussein.1

The United States was once again placing its trust in a nationalist Arab leader, though no longer as an anticommunist bastion but rather as a bulwark against Islamic radicals. Still, the policy of backing Arab secularists against Muslim extremists, on the one hand, and of supporting Israel against Soviet proxies, on the other, ultimately proved incompatible. The contradictions between the two were tragically unveiled a year after the raid on the Osirak reactor, with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The Israelis had long prepared for this offensive. The PLO, which had transplanted its state within a state from Jordan to southern Lebanon, was regularly striking at Israeli settlements in the Galilee. But in addition to neutralizing this threat, Israel’s portly, pugnacious defense minister, Ariel Sharon, sought to eliminate the PLO as a competitor for control over the West Bank and Gaza. An audacious commander who had led Israeli retaliation raids in the 1950s and had masterminded the encirclement of Egyptian forces in 1973, Sharon argued for a lightning strike to evict both Arafat and the Syrians from Lebanon and to install an amenable government in Beirut. The plan deeply cleaved Reagan’s White House. The fiercely anticommunist Secretary of State Alexander Haig favored any move that was likely to harm the Soviets and their clients in the Arab world. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, on the other hand, less bellicose and more pragmatic, worried about the damage the war would inflict on America’s Middle East standing. The debate became academic, though, on June 3, 1982, when Palestinian gunmen shot and grievously wounded Israel’s ambassador in London. Three days later, Israel invaded Lebanon.

Piercing the country in a two-pronged assault, some thirty thousand Israeli troops stormed up the coast and into the mountainous Lebanese interior, obliterating an estimated five hundred Syrian tanks and one hundred planes and driving six thousand Palestinian fighters northward to Beirut. Pursuing them, the Israeli army surrounded the city and proceeded to bombard PLO positions and headquarters. A dense murky pall hung over the city, backlit by flares and penetrated only by incendiary rounds. Operation Peace for Galilee, originally described as a limited incursion to secure Israel’s northern border, had mushroomed into a massive siege of a major Arab capital containing tens of thousands of civilians.

“No matter how villainous the attack on Israel’s diplomat in London had been, it has not given Israel cause to unleash its brutal attack on Beirut,” the president scolded Begin. The images of bombed-out neighborhoods, limbless children, and roads teeming with refugees were effacing whatever reverence America still commanded in the Arab world. More perilously, the defeat of Moscow’s Syrian and Palestinian proxies revived the danger of direct Soviet intervention in the conflict. “We’re walking a tightrope,” wrote Reagan. He insisted that the Israelis halt their shelling immediately and pull their forces back from Beirut. Apart from prompting Haig’s resignation, though, these demands went largely ignored. The Israeli bombardment intensified. Desperate, finally, to defuse the crisis, Reagan offered to oversee the transfer of Arafat and his followers to Tunis. Eighty years after Teddy Roosevelt dispatched the Marines to Beirut to protect the Americans living there, Reagan was sending them back to the city to supervise a Palestinian retreat.

Undertaken in conjunction with French and Italian forces, the Marines’ evacuation of PLO fighters and personnel was an unequivocal success. Reagan marked the event by revealing a new Middle East peace plan. Israel, he declared, would pull out of the West Bank and Gaza, which would then be federalized with Jordan. The president subsequently sent a personal emissary, the affable Arab-American diplomat Philip Habib, to try to implement the program. Habib embarked under what appeared to be propitious circumstances. A looming disaster in Lebanon had been averted and a fissure to peace exposed. Under banners proclaiming “Job Well Done,” the Marines waded onto their landing craft offshore.

They were back less than three weeks later. In the midst of Habib’s mediation, on September 14, 1982, the Syrians assassinated the Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel, the Maronite leader with whom the Israelis had hoped to sign an accord. The murder provoked the Israelis into occupying much of Muslim Beirut and allowing Maronite militiamen to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, where they massacred at least eight hundred civilians. The atrocity sparked an international outcry—Ariel Sharon was compelled to resign—and demands for American intervention to protect the Palestinians from further assault. Reagan, unable to resist this pressure, ordered the Marines to turn around and head back to war-shattered Beirut.

Their objective now was no longer to extricate Palestinians but to bolster the beleaguered government of Bashir Gemayel’s brother, Amin. The Marines were once again cast in the role of innocents abroad, perceiving themselves as the defenders of democracy but seen by the Syrians, the Shiites, and the Druze as the imposers of a militant Maronite minority. Like the Iranians, these factions forgot America’s contributions to Syrian and Lebanese independence and instead declared the United States a belligerent in Lebanon’s interminable civil war. Landing, the Marines came under a withering fire, compelling them to shoot back with artillery and tanks and to bombard many of the same neighborhoods recently shelled by Israel. Not since World War II had U.S. ground forces been so actively engaged in Middle East combat. But even their firepower proved insufficient. Army units had to be sent in to reinforce the embattled Marines and warships from the Sixth Fleet positioned to pound enemy strongholds in the Shouf Mountains above Beirut.

And the enemy fought back, harder now and unconventionally. At midday on April 13, 1983, a suicide bomber belonging to Hizbollah (Party of God), an Iranian-backed Shi’ite organization, drove an explosives-laden truck into the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Seventeen Americans, many of them CIA officials, were killed, along with more than forty Lebanese. Six months later, on October 23, another Hizbollah bomber killed 241 servicemen—the deadliest single attack against Americans in the postwar period—at the lightly guarded Marine headquarters. Horrified, Americans watched on their living room TVs as rescue crews exhumed mangled bodies from the wreckage and listened as Reagan vowed to “resist those who seek to drive us out of that area.” At first he seemed determined to fulfill that pledge. Fighters from the carriers Kennedy and Independence struck at Syrian targets—two planes were shot down and one of the pilots humiliatingly captured—and the battleship New Jersey fired its thunderous sixteen-inch guns at the Shouf. But by February 1984, Reagan realized that Lebanon was becoming a Vietnam-like quagmire and recalled all American troops.2

Reagan rebuffed charges that America had “cut and run” from Lebanon, but the irrefragable fact remained that the United States had failed in its task of restraining Syria and its allies and, following the Iranian debacle, appeared to be retreating from the Middle East. The erosion of America’s power in the region was underscored by Lebanon’s cancellation of the peace treaty with Israel brokered by the United States and, more spectacularly, by a scourge of terrorist attacks against American citizens and institutions. Bombers, most likely belonging to Hizbollah, struck the American embassy in Kuwait on December 12, 1983, and the following September blew up an embassy annex in Beirut, killing two American soldiers. Hizbollah bombs killed eighteen American servicemen in a restaurant in Torrejon, Spain, in April 1984, and murdered twenty-two people that September in yet another Beirut embassy blast.

Hijackings and assaults on air terminals suddenly came back into vogue. Hizbollah terrorists executed two Americans when they forced a Kuwaiti plane to land in Teheran in December 1984, and six months later hijacked a TWA jet to Beirut, where they tortured and shot the U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem and dumped his body onto the tarmac. Five Americans were killed in grenade and machine-gun attacks staged by Abu Nidal, a Palestinian group, at the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985. That March, Palestinian terrorists placed a bomb aboard an Athens-bound jet, killing another four Americans.

It seemed that a month could scarcely pass without Americans learning that some of their countrymen had been killed by nameless Middle Eastern thugs. The ubiquity of Arab terror—and the vulnerability of Americans—was hideously illustrated by the takeover of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. Mimicking the Moroccan pirates who boarded the brig Betsey 201 years earlier, members of the Palestine Liberation Front overran the Achille Lauro and held its twelve American passengers at gunpoint. But in contrast to the Betsy’s capturers, the PLF gunmen did not merely incarcerate the Americans but decided to make an example of one of them. Their choice was a handicapped sixty-nine-year-old New Yorker named Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jew. The terrorists pushed Klinghoffer’s wheelchair to the edge of the deck, shot him in the back, and pitched his still-twitching body into the sea.

“Once again, we had a crisis in the Middle East in which American lives were hanging in the balance,” Reagan informed his diary. America’s ability to respond to that threat was circumscribed by the absence of a credible deterrent but also by the dearth of dependable allies. Rather than arrest the Achille Lauro hijackers, Egypt offered them safe conduct to PLO headquarters in Tunis. U.S. Navy fighters intercepted the Egyptian jet carrying the Palestinians’ ringleader, Abu Abbas, and forced it to land in Sicily, but Italian authorities promptly released the prisoner. In countering Middle Eastern terror, it seemed, America would have to respond unilaterally.

The United States indeed acted alone when it again confronted Libya, the primary sponsor of Abu Nidal, in March 1986. Hoping to provoke Qadhafi into a military clash, Reagan ordered the Navy to renew its patrols near the Libyan coast. “Any nation victimized by terrorism has an inherent right to respond with force to deter new acts of terror,” the president explained. “I felt we must show Qaddafi that…we wouldn’t let him get away with it.” Qadhafi lunged at the bait. When Libyan missile boats opened fire on the fleet, Navy fighters blasted the vessels with missiles and bombed land-based radar sites as well.

Reagan had exacted justice for Abu Nidal’s atrocities, but Qadhafi was far from deterred. Two weeks after the clash in Sidra, Libyan agents killed two American servicemen and wounded fifty with a bomb placed in a Berlin discotheque. Reagan retaliated by ordering more than sixty tons of ordnance dropped on Tripoli and Benghazi. Some of the explosives missed their target and killed a number of civilians, including, according to some reports, Qadhafi’s adopted daughter. Operation El Dorado Canyon, as it was called, once again angered America’s allies; France and Spain refused to allow the American fighters to overfly their territory en route to Libya. European sympathy for Libya did not, however, inhibit Qadhafi from staging yet another terrorist attack in Europe, his deadliest ever. On December 21, 1988, a bomb purportedly planted by Libyan operatives aboard Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 passengers, thirty-seven American college students among them, and eleven villagers on the ground.

The United States had again projected its power, without European assistance, against a warlike North African despot. Unlike Yusuf Qaramanli, however, Tripoli’s ruler in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Qadhafi could strike back almost anywhere in the world and with virtual impunity. And nowhere could revenge against the United States be more readily exacted than in Lebanon. In a further act of retribution for the Libya bombings, Qadhafi asked for the execution of Peter Kilburn, a librarian at the American University of Beirut who had been held by Hizbollah for two years. Hizbollah honored the request.

Kilburn’s abduction and murder was symptomatic of the plague of hostage taking and assassinations that afflicted Americans living in Lebanon in the 1980s. Caught between warring factions in the vicious civil war, U.S. citizens became easy prey for the thousands of masked and heavily armed militiamen prowling Beirut’s ruins. The first to be seized was David Dodge, the president of the American University of Beirut and the great-grandson of the university’s founder, Daniel Bliss. Captured by Hizbollah in 1981 and incarcerated for a year, Dodge was released unharmed, but his successor, Malcolm Kerr, was less fortunate. Another son of Middle East missionaries and a renowned scholar of inter-Arab affairs, Kerr was exiting his AUB office in 1984 when two Hizbollah gunmen approached him and shot him in the head. The following year, Hizbollah kidnapped, tortured, and executed the CIA’s Beirut bureau chief, William Buckley, and in 1988 abducted and hanged William Higgins, an American colonel serving with UN peacekeeping forces in Lebanon.

Lebanese factions detained nine other Americans during the decade 1981–91, one of them, the Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, for nearly seven years. “No noise, no speaking,” Anderson recalled of his ordeal. “Even rolling from side to side…to relieve the painful muscle cramps brought on by lying still for hours would earn a slap or a poke with a gun.”3 More incensing than the bombing of U.S. facilities or the assassination of its citizens, the hostage crisis exasperated American leaders. A nation armed with untold numbers of tanks, assault aircraft, warships, and battle-ready divisions seemed impotent in the face of a few lightly armed kidnappers in the Middle East.

Teddy Roosevelt had been able to cable the Moroccan government, “We want Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead,” but for Reagan, faced with the Hobbesian state of Lebanon, there was simply no government to address. The only alternative was to deter the state sponsors of the kidnappers, foremost Iran, by military and economic means, but none of these measures had succeeded. Reagan spent much of his second term in office befuddled by the Iranian conundrum, uncertain whether to intimidate or placate the mullahs. Then, in the summer of 1985, the Israelis offered him a solution. They claimed that moderate elements within the Iranian leadership would obtain the hostages’ release in return for antitank missiles that were desperately needed in the war with Iraq. Enticed by this arrangement, Reagan warranted a scheme in which Israel would secretly convey the missiles to Teheran and the United States would then replenish Israel’s stocks. “We wouldn’t be shipping any weapons to the people in Iran,” the president consoled himself. “I did not think of the operation…as an ‘arms-for-hostage’ deal, because it wasn’t.”

At night, in unmarked boxes on neutral flag ships, Israel began transferring the projectiles. By August, six hundred of them had reached Iran, and another fifteen hundred by December. Yet even as these consignments restored some degree of communication between Tel Aviv and Teheran, they divided policymakers in Washington. While the CIA and the National Security Agency favored the operation, the notion of buying Iranian compliance with weaponry revolted George Shultz, the ursine former treasury secretary and Bechtel Corporation director who had replaced Haig as Reagan’s secretary of state. The president nevertheless continued to sanction the arms transfers, even after November 1986 when the press leaked word of the operation. Reagan at first denied that he had sold missiles to a terrorist-sponsoring regime, but then, a week later, he reversed himself and admitted that the United States had, in fact, supplied some “defensive weapons” to Iran, albeit for an honorable cause. “Our government has a firm policy not to capitulate to terrorist demands,” he insisted. “We did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.”

Reagan’s prevarications cost him enormously in terms of his credibility among Americans, and they failed to secure him credit in Teheran. The Iranians refused to rein in Hizbollah in Lebanon and, in the Gulf, proceeded to launch missile boat attacks against unarmed Kuwaiti oil tankers. Reagan had ignored the seminal lesson of the Barbary Wars: providing arms to pirate states in the Middle East only produces more piracy. To defend America’s oil supply from Kuwait, the president was obliged to send the Navy back into action. Over the course of 1987 and 1988, U.S. warships sank a number of Iranian naval boats and provided armed escorts for endangered Kuwaiti vessels. In the course of these operations, the USS Vincennes accidently downed a civilian Iranian airliner, killing all 290 of its passengers.

While American servicemen fought the Iranians in the Gulf, American arms shipments to the Islamic regime sparked a full-blown scandal in Washington. Proceeds from the missile sales, it was revealed, had been funneled to anticommunist Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua in violation of congressional law. The administration was subjected to a sweeping, nationally televised investigation, but that did not dissuade Reagan from pursuing controversial—and contradictory—policies in the Middle East. At the same time that the United States was arming Iran with antitank missiles, it was also supplying helicopters, mortars, and satellite intelligence to Iran’s mortal enemies in Baghdad.

Though Iraq, no less than Libya, was a patron of Abu Nidal and other terrorist groups, Reagan removed Iraq from the list of terrorism-backing states. Twice, in 1983 and 1984, he sent the presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam Hussein, ignoring evidence that the Iraqi dictator had employed poison gas against thousands of his enemies. “No one had any doubts about [the Iraqis’] continued involvement in terrorism,” a document from the Defense Department confirmed. “The real reason was to help them succeed in the war against Iran.” While unambiguously condemning Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, Rumsfeld also assured Saddam that the United States still stood behind him in his struggle with the ayatollahs and desired “to improve bilateral relations, at a pace of Iraq’s choosing.” Ties between Washington and Baghdad continued to solidify even after an Iraqi Mirage jet mistakenly fired missiles at the Stark, a U.S. frigate patrolling the Persian Gulf in March 1987, killing thirty-seven sailors.

The administration’s efforts to contain Iranian influence in the Gulf coincided with a clandestine campaign to provide arms, military advisers, and financial assistance to the Arab irregulars battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Administration officials tended to romanticize this resistance, refusing to recognize the contempt which these mujahideen, or holy warriors, held the United States. Americans were also reluctant to acknowledge the hatred of their culture seething in Saudi Arabia or the willingness of Saudi authorities to deflect radical Islamic criticism of their own profligacy onto the United States. America, claimed one widely circulated Saudi cassette, was the enemy of all Muslims, a “nation of beasts who fornicate and eat rotten food.” Few officials in Washington seemed alarmed that their country was fueling the spread of such anti-American propaganda through its purchases of Arab oil and funding some of the most militant Islamists, among them the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden.4

The same Reagan administration famous for steering a straightforward course in its policies toward the Soviet Union was now notorious for running circles in the Middle East. Security concerns had led it to attack Libya while coddling Iraq and to arm both Saddam and the leaders of the Iranian revolution. Steeped in Middle Eastern myths, it provisioned the Arab freedom fighters in Afghanistan and succored the Saudi theocracy while ignoring the threats posed by both. Wavering between considerations of security and faith, the White House at first backed then protested Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, expedited then delayed weapons shipments to the Jewish state, collaborated with Israeli intelligence on a controversial arms-for-hostages scheme but in 1985 prosecuted a former U.S. Navy Intelligence analyst, Jonathan Pollard, as an Israeli spy. Reagan helped evacuate the PLO from Beirut, only to boycott the organization thereafter, and then, in a final volte-face, engaged in a diplomatic dialogue with Arafat.

Parleys with the Palestinian leader represented a sharp departure from previous American policy. Though every administration since Nixon’s had secretly communicated with the PLO, usually in an effort to shield Americans from Palestinian violence, the United States officially refused to recognize the group as long as it perpetrated terror and rejected Israel’s right to exist. Reagan rigorously upheld that policy—“hell no, PLO!” Shultz had led an AIPAC audience in chanting—until December 1987, when a large-scale civic revolt, or intifada, broke out in the West Bank and Gaza. The scenes of Palestinian youths pelting Israeli tanks with stones caught both the Americans and the Israelis off guard, but it also stunned Arafat. The young local leaders of the rebellion did not automatically take their instructions from the Old Man, as he was known, in Tunis. Arafat regained the initiative the following December, though, by suddenly renouncing terror and recognizing Resolution 242. Now that it had met America’s preconditions for acceptance, Reagan had no choice but to acknowledge the PLO as the Palestinians’ representative and to open contacts with Arafat. Discussions between State Department and Palestinian officials covered a range of issues, including the possibility of creating a Palestinian state in the territories. But hopes that the president’s record of consecutive debacles in the Middle East would be crowned by a peacemaking success were squelched by a terrorist assault on an Israeli beach led by Abu Abbas, commander of the Achille Lauro raid. Arafat refused to condemn the attack and Washington suspended the talks.5

America’s inability to sustain a constructive dialogue on Middle Eastern disputes, much less resolve them, was symptomatic of a more chronic malady. Though widely credited with achieving victory in the clear-cut Cold War, Reagan had proved incapable of coping with the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iran-Iraq war, and tensions between secular and Islamic regimes. The vision of establishing a pax Americana in the region had rarely seemed more ephemeral.

Americans, though, seemed largely unaware of this muddle. Their attention was riveted to the dazzling scenes of millions demonstrating for freedom in Eastern Europe and pulverizing the Berlin Wall. Movie audiences cheered as Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future (1985) and Tom Cruise in Top Gun (1986) handily dispatched Libyan assailants, and as Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) smirked and shot a scimitar-wielding Arab in the 1981 blockbuster, Raiders of the Lost Ark. They delighted as a winsome Brooke Shields, cast as the naïve American ingénue in Sahara (1983), was swept away by an Arab horseman in black. They laughed at the bumbling Muslim terrorists who, in the 1982 comedy Wrong Is Right, experimented with suicide bombers and plotted to blow up New York’s Twin Towers.

Hollywood was once again indulging in Oriental fantasies and conflating them with Middle Eastern facts. Reagan himself seemed confused. Exhibiting the first signs of the Alzheimer’s disease that would later claim his life, he occasionally mixed up scenes from his earlier movies with actual world events. Such bewilderment, however, was rapidly becoming prohibitive for Americans. A disorderly decade had ended in the Middle East, but another was dawning, with war.

Sabers and Shields in the Sand

The prospect of large-scale conflict in the Middle East in fact looked distant the day in 1989 that Vice President George H. W. Bush dropped the “vice” from this title and became the nation’s forty-first president. A trim former war hero, Yale baseball captain, and director of the CIA, Bush personified the vigor and skill with which the United States would tackle the region’s quandaries. And the field seemed to have been leveled for his success. The Communist Bloc had crumbled, depriving several Arab dictators of Soviet political patronage and a reliable source of munitions. In the Persian Gulf, the armies of Iran and Iraq, exhausted after ten years of war and more than a million casualties, succumbed to an uneasy stalemate. The Palestinian intifada also appeared to have depleted its steam and the PLO to have rendered itself irrelevant. Though peace was as yet unattainable, the Middle East had at least been defused to the point where American policymakers could think of disposing of some of its more volatile disputes and clearing a lane toward stability.

The veneer of Middle Eastern tranquillity, though, soon proved transparent. Crippled by a war debt approaching a trillion dollars, Saddam Hussein frantically searched for a source of accessible cash and found it in neighboring Kuwait. Alleging that the oil-rich sheikhdom had been artificially detached from Iraq by British imperialists, Saddam laid claim to “Iraq’s 19th province.” In keeping with the fundamentalist trend sweeping the Arab world, the secular Ba’athist Saddam refashioned himself as a modern Saladin and declared holy war against the ungodly Saudis, to whom he also owed billions. Starting in July 1990, thousands of Iraqi tanks and myriad troops began massing on the Kuwaiti border. The world braced for Iraq’s imminent conquest of Kuwait and perhaps of the entire Arabian Peninsula, and the Bush administration confronted its first Middle Eastern crisis.

The president also faced a dilemma. In contrast to John Quincy Adams, who had to choose between asserting American ideals by aiding Greece in its struggle for independence and safeguarding the nation’s commercial investments in Turkey, Bush had to decide between two strategic assets. True, Kuwait supplied the United States with oil, but Iraq’s contributions to the country’s welfare were no less vital. “Normal relations between the United States and Iraq…promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East,” a national security directive issued in 1990 declared. The White House continued to value Iraq for exercising a crucial constraint on Iran and even exerting a moderating influence on the Palestinians. Unable to determine which of its allies to support in the Iraqi-Kuwaiti standoff, Washington strove to remain neutral. “We had no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts,” April Glaspie, America’s representative in Iraq and its first woman ambassador in the Middle East, purportedly assured Saddam. “All we hope is that these issues are solved quickly.”

Americans in the past had tried to stay out of Middle Eastern disputes—in Palestine before 1948, for example—only to be violently dragged into them, and the conflict in the Gulf was unexceptional. When, on August 2, Saddam’s army invaded and proceeded to pillage Kuwait, Bush’s hope for a peaceful solution to the crisis evaporated while the specter of Iraqi-dominated Gulf region condensed. Neutrality was no longer an option. Summoning the UN Security Council, Bush demanded action to free Kuwait of all foreign forces and ordered the Navy to send a flotilla to the Middle East—Operation Desert Shield. “We cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless,” he affirmed, “and we won’t.”

Patiently, conscientiously, Bush proceeded to assemble an international consensus on military intervention in Kuwait. The responses were serendipitously positive. In contrast to their previous reluctance to cooperate with America’s battle against terror, the Europeans were anxious to join any effort to protect their Middle Eastern oil. More surprising still was the readiness of many Arab rulers, fearful of Iraqi threats to their own regimes, to enlist in an anti-Saddam coalition. Their only conditions were that the United States promise them millions of dollars in postwar aid and exclude Israel from the alliance. Fortified by this display of international solidarity, Bush tabled a series of UN resolutions authorizing the use of “all necessary means” to evict the Iraqis from Kuwait.

In a military buildup nearly ten times larger than Operation Torch forty-eight years earlier, more than a half a million U.S. troops, together with multitudes of tanks, planes, guns, and support vehicles, were stationed around Kuwait. Joining them were contingents from thirty-four nations, together constituting the greatest display of military hardware ever arrayed in the Middle East. And yet Bush refrained from unleashing that juggernaut, giving Saddam a final chance to withdraw. In several highly publicized meetings, Secretary of State James Baker, a taciturn Texan, impressed upon his Iraqi counterpart, the garrulous Tariq Aziz, the necessity of evacuating Kuwait. Baker’s efforts proved fruitless. Saddam still refused to recall his forces; on the contrary, he extended his holy war to include Israel and the United States and vowed to wage “the mother of all battles” to retain the “19th province.” The UN subsequently set January 15, 1991, as the deadline by which Saddam could either comply with its decisions or incur the coalition’s wrath.

Bush had performed exemplarily in his first Middle Eastern trial, but the most formidable obstacle still confronted him. More taxing than maintaining an international alliance and sustaining an entire army in the Arabian desert was the president’s task of persuading his fellow Americans of the need to go to war. Many indeed remained to be convinced, suspecting that young Americans would not be fighting for Kuwaiti freedom but rather for secure and affordable oil. Bush, accordingly, expunged any mention of oil from in his speeches and instead stressed the danger that Iraq posed to independent peoples everywhere. “Every day that passes brings Saddam one step closer to realizing his goal of a nuclear arsenal,” the president warned. “He has never possessed a weapon he didn’t use.” British leaders had once compared Nasser to Hitler, but Saddam, in Bush’s description, had surpassed the Führer in his barbarism. Even then, Congress remained divided over whether to authorize the president to rid Kuwait of the Iraqis. On the strength of a mere five-vote majority in the Senate, America went to war.

Operation Desert Storm opened on the evening of January 17 with a withering aerial barrage on Baghdad and other Iraqi command centers. Airfields, radar installations, and communication networks dissolved into flame and flying debris under the impact of precision-guided missiles and pulverizing cluster bombs. The Iraqis appeared to be ready for the blitz. Viewers around the world watched as dense volleys of Iraqi antiaircraft fire, transformed into green globules by night-vision cameras, pulsed across their televisions. But the fusillade proved ineffective in downing coalition jets, and instead of engaging the enemy, Iraqi warplanes fled en masse to Teheran. More lethally, Saddam fired Scud missiles at coalition camps in Saudi Arabia, in one case killing twenty-eight GIs.

The primary target of the Scuds was not Americans, but rather the Israelis. Eager to draw the Jewish state into the war and so drive Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria out of the coalition, Saddam launched thirty-nine of the Soviet-made missiles at Tel Aviv and Haifa, destroying homes and paralyzing the country economically. Israelis stoically donned gas masks and took shelter in rooms specially sealed against chemical and biological attack, but even their forbearance was limited. Though Bush pleaded with Israeli leaders not to respond to Saddam’s provocation, the Israeli army prepared for a search-and-destroy mission against the rocket launchers in Western Iraq. Israeli paratroopers were literally on the runways ready to depart when the president at last devised an answer. Batteries of U.S. Patriot antiballistic missiles and their crews would be rushed to Israel and arrayed against the incoming Scuds. Though most of the Patriots missed their mark, this first-ever sight of American soldiers on their soil hoisted the Israelis’ morale. “I’ve been in the army for sixteen years and, I tell you, I’ve never been to a country that welcomed me like this,” said one of the crews’ commanders, Michael Woods. “It’s, you know, like almost overwhelming.”

Far more destructive than the Scuds, however, was Saddam’s use of the oil weapon. In contrast to the Arab rulers who in 1973 sought to humble the West politically by depriving it of vital petroleum, the Iraqi leader sought to hamper the coalition’s advance by literally saturating it with oil. Iraqi troops dumped more than one million tons of crude into the Gulf and torched Kuwait rigs, creating history’s largest oil spill and fields of inextinguishable flame. Blackened waters and blackened skies combined to cause the deaths of countless fish and waterfowl and contaminate allied troops. The ecological disaster in the Middle East that George Perkins Marsh, the founder of the conservationist movement 150 years earlier, had hoped to avert was raging.

At the height of these atrocities and in spite of delaying tactics by Saddam, the coalition opened its ground campaign, Operation Desert Saber, on February 24. The offensive proved to be more lightning paced and more devastating than any of its planners divined. Charging into Kuwait and southern Iraq, armored and infantry formations outflanked and slaughtered Saddam’s supposedly elite Republican Guards and demolished his tank divisions. “Saddam was what military theorists call an enemy center of gravity,” the Desert Storm commander General Norman Schwarzkopf, whose father had helped overthrow an earlier Middle Eastern leader in Iran, explained. “[If] destroyed, [it] will cause the enemy to lose its will to fight.” Within one hundred hours, Kuwait City was secured and a large portion of the Iraqi army, trapped while retreating on the aptly named Highway of Death, was incinerated. Advancing Marines and soldiers purportedly sang a song made famous by the rock band the Clash that told of bombs bursting between minarets and of muezzins defiantly shouting ragas. “Rockin’ the casbah,” the GIs chanted as they snuffed out the last of the Iraqi resistance. “Rock the casbah.”

American leaders now had to decide whether or not to press the attack deeper into Iraqi territory in order to topple Saddam’s regime. General Colin Powell, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who supervised the campaign, was against pursuing the war. A warm-mannered man who had worked his way up from modest Jamaican origins in the Bronx, New York, Powell acted primarily on humanitarian grounds. The battle had become a “turkey-shoot,” he said, and the United States would merely sully itself morally by continuing to massacre Iraqis. But Powell was  also a cunning strategist who saw a chastened, but still militarily viable, Iraq as an American asset. “Our practical intention was to leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to an Iran that remained relentlessly hostile to the United States,” he explained, and the Bush administration concurred. The vestiges of Saddam’s army were allowed to limp unmolested back to Iraq. Once there, however, they turned their remaining guns on the northern Kurds and the Shi’ites in the south who, with America’s covert encouragement, had rebelled against Ba’athist rule. With a sangfroid similar to that displayed by Kissinger in his earlier abandonment of the Kurds, Bush watched impassively while both communities were decimated.

Operation Desert Farewell, which opened on March 10, effected the rapid withdrawal of American troops from the war zone. Behind them lay a plundered but liberated Kuwait, tens of thousands of Kurdish and Shi’ite victims of Ba’athist savagery, as many as 400,000 Palestinians whom Kuwait had expelled for allegedly supporting Saddam, and an Iraq bereft of a civilian infrastructure but with its army largely intact. Many Persian Gulf leaders now viewed America as their savior. Among Saddam’s innumerable victims in Iraq, however, the United States was seen as a turncoat. More venomous still was resentment aroused in the Arab mujahideen, including a still obscure Osama bin Laden, who had finally driven the Soviet unbelievers from Afghanistan only to find American infidels bivouacked near Mecca and Medina. “It is not the world against Iraq. It is the West against Islam,” they contended, equating the West with America.

The long-term consequences of the conflict later known as the first Gulf War seemed of little concern to most Americans. Spared by military censors from seeing the grislier aspects of the fighting, relieved by the relatively low casualty rate—147 U.S. battle deaths—and by the willingness of coalition members to help pay the war’s $61 billion bill, they reveled in their national might. “What the President did in the Gulf was simply the right thing to do,” Secretary Baker determined. “George Bush took the difficult choices the world expects of American leadership.” Yet not only at home but also abroad America’s prestige had reached a postwar pinnacle, thanks to Bush’s policies in the Middle East. Much of the world had acknowledged America’s hegemony in the region and harmonized with its goals. In contrast to Woodrow Wilson, whose refusal to make war on the Ottoman Empire weakened America’s position at the Paris Peace Conference, the president had committed much of his army to the Gulf and stood poised to dictate its future. “Americans are the most religious people on Earth,” he proclaimed. “And we have always instinctively sensed that God’s purpose was bound up with the cause of liberty.” Having brandished American power, Bush now flourished American ideals.

“We can see a new world coming into view, a world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.” With these words Bush unveiled his vision of the new world order, a millennial era of peace and international fraternity that would begin in the Middle East. The president proceeded to outline his plan for maintaining a permanent U.S. naval presence in the Gulf, for providing funds for Middle East development, and for instituting safeguards against the spread of unconventional weapons. The centerpiece of his program, however, was the achievement of an Arab-Israeli treaty based on the territory-for-peace principle and the fulfillment of Palestinian rights.6

As the first step toward this noble objective, Bush announced his intention to reconvene the international peace conference, this one to be held in Madrid. Secretary Baker traversed the Arab world to rally support for the summit and generate pressure on Israel to forfeit land and uproot settlements. His efforts raised the ire of Yitzhak Shamir, the diminutive yet indomitable former underground leader who had replaced Begin as prime minister. Shamir accelerated the construction of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and resisted all suggestion of negotiating with Arafat. “It was difficult not to believe that the Shamir government was simply expressing its disdain for American interests,” Baker bitterly wrote. Withholding loan guarantees for resettling Soviet Jewish immigrants to Israel, the secretary told Congress that Shamir could call him when he was interested in peace and even revealed his White House phone number (202-456-1414). Browbeaten, the Israelis finally agreed to attend the conference, but only on the condition that Arafat not be invited. Bush readily accepted this demand; alone among Arab leaders, the PLO chairman had sided with Saddam during the war.

To much pomp and publicity, the peace conference opened on October 30, 1991, in the Spanish capital. Millions around the world delighted to the sight of Israeli and Arab leaders gathered in the rococo Royal Palace (from which a portrait of Charles V massacring Moors had been hastily removed) and seated around the same ornate table. “Like the walls of Jericho, the psychological barriers of a half century came tumbling down with resounding finality,” Baker exulted. The seeming breakthrough, however, led only to culs-de-sac. Syria’s crusty foreign minister, Farouk al-Shara, devoted his entire remarks to vilifying Shamir and Shamir offered paltry incentives to Palestinian representatives from the territories. The American delegation nevertheless managed to hammer out a two-tiered framework of bilateral peace talks and multilateral discussions on issues such as water resources, arms control, and refugee resettlement. But the bilateral discussions broke down over Israel’s refusal to consider territorial concessions in the West Bank and Gaza and the Palestinians’ rejection of anything less than a PLO-run state in both. Shamir objected to returning the entire Golan Heights to Syria and the Syrians were unwilling to offer real peace. In the absence of progress on the bilateral plane, many Arab delegations balked at even considering multilateral subjects.

Madrid, Baker concluded, was “a rich tale of determination, false starts, personal and political courage, blind alleys, perseverance, misjudgments, lost tempers, endless negotiations, scores of creative compromises, and both good faith and bad.” It was also a nonstarter. By the end of 1991, the peace process was once again deadlocked. Facing a tough presidential contest, Bush blamed much of the impasse on Israel. The United States, he declared, had provided “nearly $1,000 [in aid] for every Israeli man, woman, and child” but had received only intransigence in return. Such imputations could not, however, camouflage the fact that the administration had committed all of its prestige and influence toward bridging the gap between Arabs and Israelis and had scarcely succeeded in narrowing them.7

American arms had defeated a brutal aggressor in the Middle East and liberated a loyal ally. But the United States had restored tribal rule to Kuwait, rather than instituting representative government, and enabled Saddam to retain his homicidal regime. It had convened a high-profile peace conference, only to fail at attaining even the most preliminary agreements. Though Bush had eschewed the Wilsonian reluctance to commit troops to the Middle East, he nevertheless shared Wilson’s frustration with trying to transform the region along American-style democratic lines. The pax Americana the president had promised seemed almost as unattainable as it had been before the war; the new world order appeared virtually indistinguishable from the old. Arguably the most significant change occurred not in the Middle East but in the White House, which the Bush family vacated in January 1993 to make way for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

A Clash of Visions and Reality

Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place

Where the caravan camels roam

Where they cut off your ear

If they don’t like your face

It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home

With these irreverent lyrics, Walt Disney Productions opened its animated comedy Aladdin (1992), yet another Thousand and One Arabian Nights derivation. Making light of the presumed cruelty of Middle Eastern cultures had once been acceptable and even laudable in the United States, but the publication of Orientalism and the advent of political correctness had rendered such aspersions improper. Incensed by what they regarded as the latest attempt by Hollywood to disparage their heritage, Arab American groups strenuously protested the song. This time Disney relented. Songwriters quickly replaced the offensive couplet “Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face” with the whimsical “Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense.” The movie industry nevertheless continued to insult Americans of Arab, Iranian, and Turkish heritage by perpetuating negative stereotypes of Middle Eastern peoples. The enraged Arab terrorist who tries to blow up an American city in True Lies, a 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy, had already become a staple.

The deepening schism in the depiction of the Middle East in the movie theaters was also widening in libraries and lecture halls. The field of Middle Eastern studies flourished in the United States of the 1990s. Well over one hundred colleges and universities were now offering courses on related subjects and the Middle East Studies Association—MESA, founded in 1966—boasted over twenty-six hundred members. Reared on multiculturalism and postcolonialist theories, many of these scholars voiced harsh disapproval of America’s policies in the Middle East, in particular its support for Israel and for autocratic Arab rulers. They pressed for an explicit endorsement of the PLO and of democratic opposition forces in the region and, in some cases, lionized the anti-American leaders in Damascus and Teheran. Such sentiments were no longer confined to Middle East departments, however, but proliferated throughout the humanities and even into branches of science. “There is the fact that the U.S. has supported oppressive, authoritarian, harsh regimes, and blocked democratic initiatives,” said Noam Chomsky, an esteemed MIT linguist and world-renowned liberal socialist, born in 1928 to Zionist parents in Philadelphia. “The U.S. is making a very clear statement: the U.S. is going to run this area of the world by force, so get out of the way.”

Less pervasive were the views of Bernard Lewis, who continued to advocate robust ties between United States and Israel and saw America as the Middle East’s principal, if not only, hope for democratic change. Among the few scholars to endorse publicly Lewis’s pessimistic appraisal of the Middle East was Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard specialist on government. In his seminal 1993 work Clash of Civilizations, the seemingly meek and retiring Huntington described a world no longer split between the rival ideologies of communism and capitalism, but torn rather by a visceral conflict between the Western, mostly Christian, countries and Islam. “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” he wrote. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

Unlike Lewis, though, Huntington did not foresee a cardinal role for the United States in averting this collision. America would, however, be its primary victim.8

Huntington’s thesis appeared to be confirmed on the morning of February 26, 1993, when a van packed with explosives drove into the underground parking lot of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. A Kuwaiti, Ramzi Yousef, was driving the van, but the bomb was made by Abdul Rahman Yasin from Iraq. Both were carrying out the instructions of a blind Egyptian cleric named Omar Abdul-Rahman, who, from his mosque in Brooklyn, headed an extremist Islamic group with links to al-Qaeda (the Base) of Osama bin Laden. By toppling the Trade Center’s Twin Towers, the tallest buildings in New York and one of the outstanding symbols of American mastery, Abdul-Rahman hoped to inaugurate a general holy war against the West. Ramzi lit the fuse on the 1,310-pound bomb and fled the lot on foot. The blast, which erupted just after midday, blew a ninety-foot-wide gap through four floors of concrete, killed six people, and wounded more than one thousand. Six of the conspirators were eventually arrested and remanded to prison for a total of 240 years.

The Twin Tower bombing was the first major terrorist strike on the continental United States, but though it clearly faced an unprecedented Middle Eastern menace, the federal government refrained from mobilizing all of its military and intelligence services. The month-old administration of Bill Clinton determined to treat terrorism as a crime rather than as a threat to national security. The president’s reluctance to engage Muslim terrorists militarily was reinforced in October 1993 by the killing of eighteen American servicemen in a failed effort to capture the Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid—the Black Hawk Down incident. The murder, eighteen months later, of 168 civilians by the white supremacist bombers of the federal building in Oklahoma City, further strengthened Clinton’s preference for combating terror with police officers rather than soldiers. “I was pleased with the effectiveness of our law-enforcement work, but troubled by the evident vulnerability of our open society to terror,” he wrote.

Though a former Rhodes Scholar, law professor, and Arkansas governor, Clinton had only minimal experience in foreign affairs and no more than a passing familiarity with the Middle East. But he understood that part of Bush’s defeat in the 1992 elections was due to his preoccupation with Iraq and Arab-Israeli mediation and his failure to focus on domestic issues. And Americans, enjoying a period of seemingly limitless prosperity, generally welcomed the president’s inward-looking gaze. They shared Clinton’s conviction that terrorism could be defeated by relieving the poverty and the ignorance that bred it and by isolating its bankrolling states. Relieved of the burdens of combating al-Qaeda and other extremist groups militarily, the people of the United States could enjoy the fruits of the century’s final and halcyon decade.

In the Middle East, Clinton’s approach meant avoiding major initiatives, either military or diplomatic, while maintaining the status quo in the Persian Gulf. Through a policy of “dual-containment,” the United States would apply economic sanctions against Iran and Iraq and keep up the pressure on Saddam. In addition to enforcing the “no-fly zones” that prohibited Iraqi aircraft from operating over Kurdish and Shi’ite areas, Clinton twice ordered missile strikes against Iraqi installations—the first, in retaliation for Saddam’s attempted assassination of former President Bush in 1993 and the second, five years later, as punishment for interfering with UN arms inspectors. Clinton was especially supportive of the inspectors’ efforts to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Ba’athist regime, he believed, was the apex of an “unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals” that would become “all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.”9

In general, though, Clinton refrained from resorting to force as a means of securing America’s interests in the Middle East. There seemed little need. The Soviet challenge had faded into memory and native nationalism was essentially defunct. Terrorist bombers had indeed claimed multiple victims in the United States, but the Islamic threat could be met with vigilance rather than puissance, Clinton felt. Nor did he feel any compulsion to mediate between the Israelis and the Arabs. Raised a Baptist and warned by his childhood pastor, “God will never forgive you if you don’t stand by Israel,” Clinton was nevertheless content to cultivate amiable relations with the Jewish state without wasting precious presidential time on a futile peace process. That complacency might have continued if not for a phone call from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel on September 9, 1993, informing him that Israel and the PLO, after decades of mutual bloodletting, had reached a secret accord.

While the United States had yet to renew its dialogue with the Palestinian organization, representatives of the recently elected Rabin government had been covertly negotiating with Arafat’s associates in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. Now, with the outlines of a treaty worked out, Rabin and Arafat sought to seal it with a presidential stamp. If disquieted by the fact that neither side had seen fit to consult him about the talks, Clinton was nevertheless happy to godfather their pact. Frenzied preparations ensued for a public signing at the White House to be held a mere four days later. The president’s role was reduced to ensuring that both leaders attended the event and that Arafat would not attempt to kiss the reticent prime minister’s cheeks. Clinton spent the sleepless night before the ceremony reading the book of Joshua—incongruously, a chronicle of Jewish conquest—and in the morning wore a tie adored with golden horns to remind him of those Joshua blew to topple Jericho’s walls. “Now the horns would herald the coming of a peace that would return Jericho to the Palestinians,” he thought. The next day, in the presence of thousands of Arab, Israeli, and American well-wishers, a radiant Clinton reenacted Carter’s historic three-way handshake. “Shalom, salaam, peace,” he bade the signatories, “go as peacemakers.”

Like Sadat and Begin, Arafat and Rabin would go on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, but the Declaration of Principles they initialed that day on the White House lawn was far from a fleshed-out treaty. Beyond providing for mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, for the renunciation of terror and incitement, and for the gradual realization of Palestinian national rights, the popularly named Oslo process did not specify when the Israelis would vacate the West Bank and Gaza or how those territories would revert to Arab rule. Decisions on the final status of Jerusalem, claimed as a capital by both parties, and of the millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants scattered worldwide, were postponed to an indefinite future. The Israelis exploited this ambiguity to expand their settlements in the territories, while Arafat and the Palestinian Authority created by Oslo made only desultory efforts to clamp down on terror or to educate Palestinians for peace.

Confronted by the inability of Arab and Israeli negotiators to move from general principles to concrete peace arrangements, Clinton, much like Carter, was compelled to mediate between the sides. Huge swaths of the president’s schedule were blocked out to enable him to forge interim agreements between the parties. The White House hosted the battle-dressed Arafat so often that Clinton’s critics, recalling his radical student days, charged him with reliving some Sixties fantasy of Third World guerrilla leaders. But the president in fact never bonded with Arafat. A far closer rapport blossomed between him and Jordan’s King Hussein and his statuesque American wife, the Princeton-educated Queen Noor. Clinton’s deepest affection, though, was reserved for Rabin, the quiet warrior and intrepid statesman, whom he came to view as the father he never fully had. “We had become friends in that unique way people do when they are in a struggle that they believe is great and good,” Clinton remembered. “With every encounter, I came to respect and care for him more.” Together with the king and the prime minister, as thousands of guests and the international media gathered in the Judean desert in October 1994, Clinton presided over the signing of an Israel-Jordan peace treaty. The clusters of blue, white, and green balloons released over the ceremony signaled the start of another peacemaking effort, as Clinton began exploring the possibility of exchanging the Israeli-held Golan Heights for Syria’s reconciliation with Israel.

But the prospect of sacrificing the Golan, Gaza, and the West Bank infuriated those Israelis who revered those territories as sacred and vital to their nation’s defense. Mass rallies were held denouncing Rabin’s policies and excoriating him as a traitor. Arafat’s failure to rein in terror groups, evidenced by the first bus bombing in Jerusalem, in August 1995, further fueled the opposition. After attending a peace rally in Tel Aviv on November 4, Rabin was shot by a lone Jewish gunman and died shortly afterward. Ashen and distraught, Clinton appeared before reporters at the White House and became the first president to utter an epitaph in Hebrew—“shalom, chaver,” good-bye friend.10

Shimon Peres, Israel’s perennial foreign minister and primary architect of Oslo, succeeded Rabin and tried to restore the process’s momentum. But persistent bombings undermined his effort and, in 1996, caused him to lose the elections to the Likud’s truculent, MIT-educated leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. The combination of a right-wing government in Israel and a Palestinian Authority rife with corruption and factional splits necessitated an even greater investment of Clinton’s energies. These produced yet another interim accord, negotiated at Maryland’s Wye Plantation in October 1998, in which Israel ceded more territory and received further Palestinian pledges for peace. By that time, however, efforts to achieve Palestinian-Israeli accords were already being sidetracked by the need to defend Americans from yet another onslaught of Middle Eastern terror.

The latest spate of attacks began at ten in the evening of June 25, 1996, when a fuel truck crammed with five thousand pounds of dynamite blew up the Khobar Towers, a building used to billet U.S. servicemen in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Nineteen Americans were killed by the blast, which was attributed to Hizbollah and al-Qaeda, and 372 wounded. Two years later, on August 7, 1998, al-Qaeda killed 244 people and wounded more than 4,000 with simultaneous bomb blasts at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The scenes of dazed rescue workers ferreting for bodies in the rubble, first witnessed in Beirut in the 1980s, and of rows of flag-enshrouded coffins being conveyed into American cargo planes, once again became commonplace. Exultant, bin Laden announced the birth of a new organization, the International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders, and declared open war on the United States. “Every Muslim…in any country,” he ordained, is obliged to “kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military.”

American intelligence services were convinced that al-Qaeda would eventually mount a major attack within the United States, yet Clinton’s response remained minimal. Bound by a ban on political assassination issued by the Ford administration, the president preferred to capture, rather than to kill, bin Laden, or to encourage Egyptian or Afghan agents to liquidate him. American forces, meanwhile, were already committed in Kosovo, protecting Albanians from the Serbs, and bombing Belgrade—the public, Clinton believed, would not support a major operation in the Middle East. The president was under fire from Congress for attempting to cover up his dalliance with a White House intern. Legally and politically constrained, Clinton ordered a limited retaliation for the embassy bombings, launching cruise missile strikes against al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory suspected of making chemical weapons. America’s battle, he stressed, was aimed at “fanatics and killers,” not at Islam, and would be “a long ongoing struggle.” Yet even this low-key response was denounced by Clinton’s critics as an attempt to deflect attention from his impeachment and interpreted by the terrorists as a sign of weakness. Bin Laden escaped unscathed from the attack and though the missiles devastated the Sudanese camp, no traces of toxic substances were detected in its ruins.

By the end of his eight years in office, Bill Clinton had become an exceptionally seasoned—and indelibly scarred—veteran of the Middle East. He had refrained whenever possible from projecting America’s military strength against Islamic extremists but then discovered that the extremists were determined to bring their battle to the United States. Upholding the highest American virtues, he had striven to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians, only to be repeatedly dismayed. The alliance between the United States and repressive Arab regimes, especially in the Persian Gulf area, was tighter than ever, while the gap between rich and poor in the Middle East grew wider. Clinton’s original vision of Americans joining with the peoples of the region in the search for nonviolent resolutions of their disputes and in the quest for equitable development had, by the end of 1999, been shattered, the victim of intractable conflicts and cold economic calculations. Fittingly, Clinton’s experience in the Middle East concluded with further disappointment and pain, in failures of faith and power.

In a last-ditch attempt to save the Oslo process, Clinton acceded to a request by Israel’s new prime minister, Ehud Barak, a left-leaning former commando, to hold talks on a final peace treaty with Arafat. Convening the two leaders at Camp David in July 2000, a mere six months before the end of his presidency, Clinton spent nearly two weeks struggling to narrow the gap between them. According to the American and the Israeli participants, the Palestinians were offered an independent state in 90 (later expanded to more than 95) percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and in the eastern half of Jerusalem. Israel would also cede a small part of its Negev desert to Gaza. Israeli settlements were to be consolidated into blocks adjacent to the 1967 border and Palestinian refugees would receive significant monetary compensation. Arafat, however, contended that Clinton and Barak proffered him no more than noncontiguous areas— “Bantustans”—in the West Bank and refused to grant him sovereignty over Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif or, as Jews call it, the Temple Mount, including the Western Wall. The Clinton bridging proposals also failed to provide the refugees full repatriation to Israel. Arafat departed from Camp David, pausing only to compliment Clinton on his greatness. “I am not a great man,” Clinton sighed. “I am a failure, and you have made me one.”

That September, following a visit to the Temple Mount by Ariel Sharon, now head of the Israeli opposition, the Palestinians accused Israel of attempting to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque on the Haram al-Sharif and launched a second intifada. In contrast to the first uprising, though, which was largely nonviolent, this rebellion was replete with suicide bombers and ambushes that soon claimed hundreds of Israeli lives. The Israelis lashed back by destroying Palestinian Authority buildings, isolating West Bank cities, and assassinating militant leaders. The bloodshed blotted out the once effulgent vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace and portended the strife that would soon blanket much of the region. Clinton devoted the last weeks of his presidency to a breakneck effort to establish a cease-fire and restart the talks. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, teetering on her high heels, ran after Arafat as he bolted the American embassy in Paris, where truce negotiations were being held. “Close the gate!” she shouted at the Marine guards, as if sealing the entrance would not only confine Arafat within the grounds but also hold back the swells of Middle East mayhem. “Close the gate!” she hollered, in vain.

Americans, caught up in a bitterly close presidential election, were scarcely of a mind to monitor these events. The limited attention they could spare for the Middle East was taken up by an al-Qaeda suicide bomber who, on October 12, rammed an engine-powered inflatable boat into the U.S. destroyer Cole while it was docked in a Yemeni port. The boat held enough explosives to kill seventeen sailors and wound thirty-four. “We are at war,” exclaimed CIA Chief George Tenet. “I want no resources or people spared in this effort.”11 Yet few of his countrymen seemed discomfited by the fact that the government had refrained from declaring war on terrorism or from bolstering national defense. The forty-by-sixty-foot hole ripped in the Cole’s hull seemed to symbolize the gap in America’s strategic thinking on the Middle East. In the tradition of Wilson, Kennedy, and Carter, Clinton had preferred ideals over steel in his approach to the region and showed a warm predilection for myths. But none of these policies had proven effective either in attaining peace or in preventing terror. The United States never retaliated for the Cole attack—a fact duly noted in Afghanistan, now under the control of the puritanical Taliban regime, and in the headquarters of al-Qaeda.

Conflagration

The twenty-first century dawned on an America generally galvanized in its hopes for the future but also deeply fractured on a range of contemporary debates: free-market capitalism versus the welfare state, the demand for energy versus the desire to preserve the environment, relations between government and church. Differences also arose over America’s involvement in the Middle East, over the country’s alliance with Israel, and over the ties between big business and Arab oil. By contrast, there was little discussion on the dangers posed by Islamic extremism and the ways that the United States might defend itself. Americans seemed more agitated by the millennium’s potentially debilitating impact on computers—the Y2K bug—than by the prospect of a terrorist assault at home. Back in 1789, the fear of attacks by Middle Eastern pirates on the new nation’s shores prodded Americans to ratify their Constitution and unite. In 2000, though, the threat of a major terrorist strike within the United States went largely unnoticed by the citizens of the United States, who were busy disputing foundational issues.

Terrorism against America was foremost, however, in the mind of Osama bin Laden. He had already authorized an operation in which sleeper cells of al-Qaeda agents would awaken, hijack U.S. airliners, and fly them into major commercial and government buildings. Amply funded by Islamic charities from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, at least nineteen terrorists succeeded in infiltrating American cities, establishing new identities, and, in several cases, enrolling in flight training programs.

Numerous warnings regarding al-Qaeda’s activities were received by the CIA and other intelligence services. “The system was blinking red,” recalled Tenet. But American officials appeared to be slumbering at the helm. George W. Bush came into office declaring his intention to combat terror rigorously, but the new president in fact took few steps to strengthen the nation’s defenses. The White House was ineffective in persuading Yemen to cooperate in the hunt for the Cole’s attackers and reluctant to pressure the Saudis to crack down on terrorist-funding charities. Even after a French citizen of Moroccan descent, Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested at a Minnesota pilots’ school in August 2001 and found in possession of 747 flight manuals, the administration reacted sluggishly. Bush raised the alert levels at American embassies and approved a plan to fire a drone-borne missile at bin Laden in Afghanistan, but refrained from upgrading domestic security. “The most important failure was one of imagination,” a government commission later determined. “We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.”

The American people should also have grasped the danger. Terrorist assaults, ending with the Cole and going back to hijackings and assassinations of the early 1970s, had become a reality of American life. The fact was reflected in popular culture, in films like The Siege (1998), in which New York is razed by Islamist bombers and reels under martial law, and Three Kings (1999) featuring childlike GIs bedeviled by Iraqi sadism. Menacing images of the Middle East, such as those sketched by Lewis and Huntington, were pervasive. Yet, confident in their military, Americans still had difficulty conceiving how a group of untrained men from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon could penetrate their country and attack its most prominent city and capital. Some, influenced by the theories of Said and Chomsky, believed that Arabs and Iranians had far more to fear from Americans than vice versa. Others were still mollified by myths. Millions of Americans in 2000 thrilled at the Emmy-winning made-for-television movie The Arabian Nights, complete with a tale-telling Scheherazade, a swashbuckling Ali Baba, and Sindbad the Sailor. Many viewers of that film might have wondered why the inhabitants of so mystical a land, flying airliners rather than carpets, would strike at the United States, a nation that had never harmed them.

Those lingering Middle Eastern fantasies died, however, abruptly, at 8:46 in the morning of September 11, 2001. At that moment, a Los Angeles–bound American Airlines jet that had been commandeered by Al-Qaeda terrorists crashed, together with ninety-two people and 10,000 gallons of fuel aboard, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The sight of vermilion flames pluming from both sides of the building, of tons of debris, inanimate and human, plummeting to the streets below, would be cauterized into American memory. So, too, would the horror of hijacked United Airlines flight 175 striking the South Tower seventeen minutes later. “Please have fun in life and live your life the best you can,” one of the passengers aboard that flight, Brian Sweeney, said in a message to his wife left moments before impact. “Know that I love you and no matter what, I’ll see you again.” Within less than half an hour, a third civilian airliner slammed into the western flank of the Pentagon in Washington, while a fourth, apparently intended for the White House or the Capitol but forced down by fearless passengers, plowed into a Pennsylvania field. By 10:30, the Twin Towers had collapsed and surrounding structures were teetering. A cloud of viscous, death-white smoke enveloped the southern portion of Manhattan, the very place from where, two hundred years earlier, the USS Essex had departed for America’s first war in the Middle East.

Nearly three thousand Americans had been killed, the largest single massacre of civilians in the nation’s history. The first reaction was shock. Confusion shrouded the identity of the hijackers, their motivation, and their modus operandi. Did other terrorist cells exist, people frantically asked, and, if so, what were their next objectives? As if to imitate The Siege, security forces grounded all flights, cordoned off tunnels and bridges, and detained hundreds of Arab and Muslim Americans. National monuments were placed under heavy guard, among them the USS Constitution, anchored in Boston Bay, which authorities feared might be targeted for its role in the triumph over Barbary.

Americans of an earlier epoch might have reacted to such an attack by holding all Muslims responsible and declaring war on Islam. The clash of civilizations foretold by Huntington could not have been more luridly illustrated than by the crash of hijacked planes. And yet Americans were generally loath to lump the peace-abiding Muslim majority together with the mass murderers of 9/11. “[If] these are Islamic terrorists…they have defiled their own religion,” Tom Clancy, a novelist who had written presciently of a terrorist plot to crash a plane into the Capitol, told CNN later that morning. “Islam does not permit suicide. It says you go to hell if you do something like this.”12 The fact that Clancy, a fiction writer, had been consulted as an expert on terrorism indicated the degree to which fantasy and fact remained blurred in America’s Middle East perceptions. But the White House also underscored that the nation’s enemy was Islamic fanaticism and not Muslims or the Islamic faith.

The United States, nevertheless, was irrefutably at war. The urgent questions were: with whom, where, and how would Americans strike back? The answers could be furnished only by the president, a man intimately and multifariously connected to the Middle East, the focus of intense loyalties and vehement opposition. The victor in an acrimoniously contested election, revered by some Americans for his defense of family values and his conservative social and economic policies, he was reviled by others for his artlessness, his insensitivity to welfare and ecological issues, and his simplistic piety. Nevertheless, in the panicky aftermath of 9/11, Americans rallied around George W. Bush and looked to him for leadership. And the president promptly complied. More than any other postwar president, Bush mapped the course of America’s meandering relations with the Middle East.

He was the sum of many of America’s diverse experiences in the region, a warrior-diplomat like George Bethune English and a warrior-evangelist like William Francis Lynch, an amalgam. In the manner of Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt, Bush expressed few qualms about projecting force against America’s adversaries in the area or changing hostile regimes. “The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts,” he vowed after 9/11, pledging to “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Yet in the fashion of Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, Franklin, Bush was deeply appreciative of the value of oil and reluctant to alienate its suppliers, especially in Saudi Arabia. He shared Andrew Jackson’s solicitude for American trade with the Middle East and maintained his father’s relationships with American corporations doing business there. In contrast to George H. W. Bush, though, a straitlaced Episcopalian, the junior Bush gravitated toward the vastly more popular and politically influential evangelical churches. This made him the spiritual heir and not merely the genetic descendant of Professor George Bush who in the 1840s advocated the creation of a Jewish state, and of the colonial theologians who warned of the dangers of militant Islam. Not inadvertently did Bush describe the struggle against Islamic terror as a “crusade to rid the world of evildoers.” Along with this religious zeal, however, the president also espoused the secular fervor of the neoconservatives—many of them former liberals disaffected by the Left’s abandonment of Israel and its leniency toward communist crimes—who preached the Middle East’s redemption through democracy. The merging of sacred and civic missions in Bush’s mind placed him firmly in the Wilsonian tradition. But the same faith that deflected Wilson from entering hostilities in the Middle East spurred Bush to decide in favor of war.

The location of America’s reprisal was selected at Camp David on September 15. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a noted neoconservative, lobbied for retaliating against Iraq, which, he believed, was almost certainly linked to al-Qaeda. But Colin Powell, who was now the secretary of state, joined with Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in recommending Afghanistan, where the Taliban continued to harbor bin Laden. Bush agreed with Powell and set out to replicate the multinational coalition assembled by his father ten years earlier. Ridding Afghanistan of tyranny and terror would be a global, rather than a parochially American, campaign.

Aerial attacks against Taliban positions in Afghanistan began less than a month after 9/11. American jet fighters provided ground support for local anti-Taliban forces—the Northern Alliance—as they moved on the major cities of Kabul, Jalalabad, and Kandahar. By the end of November, the Marines were in action in Afghanistan as well, reducing pockets of Taliban resistance and hunting for bin Laden along the mountainous Pakistani border. Bush managed to persuade eighteen nations, including Britain, Russia, Germany, and France, to contribute troops to the campaign and to participate in the country’s postwar reconstruction. Though bin Laden eventually escaped capture and Taliban guerrillas continued to operate from inaccessible redoubts, Operation Enduring Freedom was deemed successful. Now, with the military phases of the war largely completed, the United States could once again focus on matters of faith. Americans assisted in promulgating an Afghani constitution and in holding elections in which Afghani women, for the first time in history, stood for parliament.

Afghanistan’s liberation might have sufficed to avenge the atrocity of 9/11, but Bush was convinced that America was embroiled in a long-term war with terror in which United States had only tenuously regained, but had yet to maintain, the initiative. The old policies of deterrence and containment first employed against the Soviets in the Middle East and later against Iran and Iraq no longer sufficed, he believed, to counter terrorist cells operating within the United States and potentially wielding weapons of mass destruction. Following the examples of Truman, Eisenhower, and Carter, all of whom had adopted new approaches to security threats from the region, Bush devised a doctrine. The United States would not wait and react to terrorist attacks but would rather combat any organization or country that engaged in or promoted terror. The tactic of preemption that Johnson and Nixon had opposed when wielded by Israel was now American policy. The United States would also devote its energies to furthering democracy in the Middle East, both as a matter of principle and as the best means of eliminating the hatred and backwardness in which terrorism thrived. “America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish,” Bush told graduating cadets at West Point in June 2002. “We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves—safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life.” Once again, Americans would be striving to refashion the Middle East in their own image, beginning with Ba’athist Iraq.

Though proof of the ties between Saddam and bin Laden was scanty, Bush had determined to make Iraq the test case of his new doctrine. He did not lack for a casus belli. Saddam had tried to assassinate his father in 1993 and had consistently violated the no-fly zones. Most damning, though, for Bush, were Iraq’s persistent attempts to produce weapons of mass destruction—WMD, for short—and to hide them from United Nations inspectors. Such actions betrayed a contempt for American power similar to that displayed by al-Qaeda and placed Iraq on an “axis of evil” alongside Iran and North Korea. Describing Saddam as a “grave and gathering danger” to world peace, Bush again began preparing for war.

Over the course of 2002, U.S. forces stepped up air attacks against Iraqi radar and defense installations and vastly expanded their presence in the Gulf. Massive depots of fuel and ammunition arose in the Kuwaiti desert together with veritable cities of air-conditioned military tents. On the diplomatic plane, the administration encouraged expatriate Iraqis opposed to Saddam Hussein, among them the MIT alumnus Ahmed Chalabi, a Shi’ite, to form a pro-Western and democratic government in exile. Bush was also busy domestically, persuading Americans of the necessity of war. To this end, the White House leaked classified CIA reports on Iraq’s existing WMD programs and intimated that Saddam was conspiring to achieve nuclear capabilities as well. Some Americans took issue with these claims, but the public, eager to back the president so soon after 9/11, in general needed little persuading. Neither did Congress. By overwhelming majorities, both the House and the Senate in October approved the massive use of military power against Iraq. “The days of Iraq flouting the will of the world, brutalizing its own people, and terrorizing its neighbors must—and will—end,” Bush declared. “Iraq will either comply with all U.N. resolutions, rid itself of weapons of mass destruction, and end its support for terrorists, or it will be compelled to do so.”13

Unlike the first Gulf War, which many Americans opposed and Congress only narrowly authorized, this second offensive against Iraq commanded widespread domestic support. But while the world community joined with the United States in defeating Saddam in 1991, numerous countries now balked at enlisting in Bush’s latest “coalition of the willing.” Though Kuwait and Saudi Arabia begrudgingly allowed their deserts to be used as staging grounds for the attack, no Arab state would contribute troops to the invading force or actively participate in the overthrow of Saddam. A more grievous blow to Bush’s alliance-building efforts was the opposition of Russia and several Western European states, most prominently Germany and France. Though they had closed ranks with America in freeing Kuwait in 1991 and in Afghanistan ten years later, many Europeans now expressed strong reservations about the proposed Iraqi incursion. They rejected America’s attempts, through its regimen of international sanctions, to restrict their business dealings with Iraq and expressed resentment over Bush’s unilateralist economic and environmental policies. As the image of the collapsing Twin Towers faded, the French and German governments resumed their long-standing efforts to distance themselves from America’s antiterrorism tactics in the Middle East and to engage the region on an independent, nonconfrontational basis.

Divisions between the United States and Europe over Middle Eastern issues were further deepened by Bush’s support for Israel and Ariel Sharon, who gained the premiership in 2001. Though widely expected to retaliate immediately for Palestinian suicide bombers, Sharon waited for over a year, strengthening his relations with Bush, before launching a major counteroffensive in the West Bank. Israeli forces killed hundreds of members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and arrested thousands more. Arafat was confined to his half-ruined headquarters in Ramallah, where he would remain until his death two years later. Bush responded to these actions by recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself and blocking UN Security Council efforts to intervene. His pro-Israeli positions pleased the majority of Americans who continued to favor the Jewish state, including the evangelicals, but angered many Western Europeans. Committed to the survival of the Palestinian Authority and concerned about rising disaffection among their own Muslim populations, members of the European Union moved to distance themselves from the U.S.-Israeli front. Bush took steps to mitigate this ire by becoming the first president in history publicly to endorse the creation of a Palestinian state and by offering to work with the EU on a “road map” for resolving the conflict. But the Europeans would not be appeased. Protesters teemed through the streets of Brussels, Antwerp, and Paris with posters decrying the “evil axis” of Bush and Sharon and comparing them both to Hitler.

Approaching the crucial Security Council vote on Iraq in February 2003, Bush could count only on Great Britain to back his Iraqi invasion plan. In a final bid to rally international support for the resolution, Bush emphasized the threat of Iraq’s biological and chemical arms. “Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world,” said Secretary of State Powell in a multimedia presentation to the council. The secretary presented tapes of intercepted transmissions and satellite photographs that presumably documented the existence of Iraqi WMD. Saddam had also collaborated with al-Qaeda, Powell alleged, and had conspired to acquire nuclear bombs.

Yet the council remained incredulous. The question was not whether Saddam possessed WMD—even Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector, believed he did—but whether that threat was effectively circumscribed by international monitoring and sanctions. A majority of the council’s members agreed with Blix that the current measures were succeeding and that war was neither necessary nor warranted. Flummoxed, Bush resolved to proceed irrespective of the UN position and, on March 18, issued an ultimatum giving Saddam forty-eight hours to leave his country or face all-out invasion.

Two days later, a quarter of a million troops—more than 90 percent of them Americans—thundered into Iraq. Banned from entering northern Iraq through neighboring Turkey, the troops had set out from Kuwait, in the extreme southeast. Breaking a record set by Eaton and his Marines in the Western Desert, the modern Marines marched more than five hundred miles through inhospitable and nearly impassable terrain in order to engage the enemy. And engage they did, ruthlessly, annihilating Saddam’s armored corps and his ostensibly elite divisions. A special Marine detachment, nicknamed Task Force Tripoli in honor of the Barbary Wars, took Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit. Coalition warplanes and cruise missiles meanwhile repeated their 1991 barrage on Baghdad and on other strategic locations in an intensive assault code-named Shock and Awe. Television screens around the world once again glowed with the greenish baubles of Iraqi antiaircraft fire raking the night sky ineffectually. But the haunting images of blazing rigs and blackened waters would not be revisited, due to the rapid-moving British and American units that seized Iraqi oil fields and refineries. Other outfits secured strategic bridges and airfields, facilitating the ground forces’ advance.

Victory would come swiftly but not as handily or as resistance-free as in the first Gulf War. Fierce sandstorms pelted the coalition columns and Iraqi snipers harassed them as they slogged through the towns of Najaf, Kufa, and Nasiriya. But neither the grit nor the sleet of bullets and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) could stall the inexorable offensive. While Iraq’s buffoonish information minister, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahaf, known to the press as Baghdad Bob, continued to insist that the Americans were “snakes moving in the desert” and that there was “no presence of infidels in the city,” the invaders converged on the capital. On April 9, Iraqis thronged around Marine Corporal Edward Chin as he looped a steel cable around a statue of Saddam Hussein that had been draped with the Stars and Stripes. Late nineteenth-century Americans had celebrated their primacy by erecting an ancient Egyptian obelisk in Central Park and proclaimed their principles by building a torch-bearing colossus, originally intended for Suez, on Bedloe’s Island. But now, just after the twenty-first century’s turn, Americans flaunted their strength and advertised their idealism by tearing down an effigy in Iraq. Hooking the cable to his M88 tank retriever, Chin wrenched Saddam from his pedestal, while the Iraqis ululated and danced.

For one incandescent moment, America appeared to have reconciled the countervailing themes of its Middle East involvement. Victorious soldiers now patrolled the fabled city of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and prepared to bestow liberty on a people yearning for it. After the disappointments of the nonaligned Mossadegh and Nasser, the autocratic Sadat and the gun-toting Arafat, America stood ready to realize its dream of a secular Middle Eastern leadership committed to democracy, nonviolence, and the West. For the first time, the vision of a pax Americana radiating out of Iraq and enlightening the entire region seemed reachable. Piloting a Viking jet, Bush descended deus ex machina–like onto the deck of the Abraham Lincoln on May 1 and declared the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The battle had in fact scarcely begun. No sooner was Baghdad liberated than looters ransacked its buildings and vital services—water, electricity, and health care—broke down. Though Saddam was captured and his notorious sons Uday and Qusay were killed, opposition to the occupiers escalated. Thousands of former Iraqi troops, demobilized under an ill-advised de-Ba’athification policy, swelled the insurgency’s ranks, while the overstretched American forces struggled to police a country twice the size of Idaho with a population of twenty-six million. Daily and with increasing deadliness, U.S. troops were blasted by improvised explosive devices and riddled in roadside ambushes. Several American civilians, many of whom were engaged in efforts to reconstruct Iraq, were kidnapped and filmed while knife-wielding Islamists beheaded them. Relations between the administration and the Iraqi opposition soured; Ahmad Chalabi switched his allegiance to Sayyid Ali Husaini Sistani, Iraq’s leading Shi’ite cleric. And in spite of intensive searches throughout the country, no compelling physical evidence was uncovered of the existence of WMD.

Still, America’s intervention in Iraq produced several positive outcomes, some of them of monumental import. Defying death threats from the insurgents, the Iraqi people succeeded in forging a constitution and in holding free elections. Muammar Qadhafi, the bête noir of successive American presidents, voluntarily abjured his search for nuclear weapons and sued for renewed relations with the United States. Aroused by the Iraqi example, a wave of democratization seemed to sweep the Middle East—in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where opposition groups began to sprout, and in Lebanon, which finally succeeded in freeing itself from direct Syrian occupation. “We believe that freedom can advance and change lives in the greater Middle East,” Bush, extolling these accomplishments, proclaimed. “Whenever people are given a choice in the matter, they prefer lives of freedom to lives of fear.”

The Egyptian and Saudi regimes quickly quashed these democratic stirrings, however, and Lebanon remained implicitly under Syria’s thumb. Islamic extremist parties such as Hamas, which dominated the democratic Palestinian elections of 2006, gained popularity throughout the region at the expense of modernizing secular movements. Libya gave up its nuclear program, but Iran initiated one that was far larger, better defended, and vastly more threatening to the region. The Iraqis had united under a national constitution and leadership, but the country soon succumbed to sectarian bloodshed between Shi’ites and Sunnis and among Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Kurds. Suddenly, in addition to democratizing, the United States was engaged in the even more herculean task of state-making in the Middle East. American troops who came to unseat a tyrant now toiled at holding a nation together, braving shrapnel while shifting through the detritus of bombed-out marketplaces and mosques.

“You aren’t going to war to change the Iraqis,” a War Department handbook issued during World War II had assured the GIs who were stationed in Iraq. “Just the opposite. We are fighting this war to preserve the principle of ‘live and let live.’” The handbook contained the usual list of do’s and don’ts—“keep away from mosques, avoid any religious or political discussions, do not drink liquor or eat pork, never strike an Iraqi, and never make advances to Moslem women or try to attract their attention.” Sixty years later, the mission assigned to American servicemen and women in Iraq had changed immeasurably, yet the warnings provided to them remained astonishingly similar. The laminated Iraqi Culture Smart Card issued to U.S. forces in Iraq advised them, “Shake hands only with your right hand, never offer a Muslim alcohol or pork, and don’t engage in religious discussions.” In contrast to the World War II pamphlet, however, the Smart Card also detailed the country’s many mutually hostile factions and contained lifesaving hints on how to distinguish among them. But even this information often proved inadequate in negotiating Iraq’s ethnic minefields and preserving American lives. Brian Turner, a poet who served as an infantry officer in Iraq, offered a more practical guide:

If you hear gunfire on a Thursday afternoon,

it could be for a wedding, or it could be for you.

Inshallah means Allah be willing.

Listen well when it is spoken.

You will hear the RPG coming for you.

Not so the roadside bomb.

There are bombs under the overpasses,

in trashpiles, in bricks, in cars….

Men wearing vests rigged with explosives

Walk up, raise their arms, and say Inshallah.

There are men who earn eighty dollars

to attack you, five thousand to kill.

Small children who will play with you,

old men with their talk, women who offer chai—

and any one of them

may dance over your body tomorrow.

American troops struggled to maintain unity within Iraq while, back home, the consensus on the war rapidly unraveled. Mounting casualties among U.S. soldiers stoked the growing opposition to the fighting, as did proof of the massacre of Iraqi civilians by American troops and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Critics of the president accused him of having exaggerated or even falsified evidence of Saddam’s WMD and of violating civil liberties under the banner of Homeland Security. In response, Bush’s defenders rallied to assert that America was in fact winning the war, that the Iraqi army had been reconstructed, and that the insurgency was on the wane. The states that survived an agonizing split between blue and gray were once again divided, this time between blue and red. So complete was the break that commentators, when writing about Iraq, seemed to be describing entirely different countries. “We have given liberty to the stepchildren of the Arab world,” determined the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami. “We have overturned an edifice of material and moral power that dates back centuries.” But the ex-neoconservative philosopher Francis Fukuyama lamented the “self-fulfilling prophecy” that Bush had created in Iraq, a land where “Jihadist gunmen can train on real-live American targets.” The public intellectual Christopher Hitchens extolled the “federal and democratic Iraq” that “could undercut the Saudi and Iranian duopoly” and bring dignity to “a people immiserated by three decades of war and fascism.” But the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, an early proponent of the war and acerbic critic of its conduct, excoriated the “faith-based” Bush for launching “a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction.”14

The schism in public opinion regarding Iraq paralleled the deepening rifts in popular perceptions of the Middle East. College faculties grew increasingly polarized between those professors who still faulted America for the region’s ills and those who accosted universities for varnishing the Islamist threat. At the same time, the movie industry continued to wrestle with the question of how best to depict the Middle East and its inhabitants. Produced in 2006, the film Munich portrays some Palestinian terrorists as articulate and sympathetic, while the al-Qaeda hijackers in United 93, also released that year, are unexceptionally murderous. Syriana (2005) features good and bad Arabs, suicide bombers and Pollyannaish Americans, but ultimately blames the Middle East’s morass on avaricious oil companies and CIA assassins. Old myths meanwhile persisted, even in the post-9/11 years. Hidalgo (2004) tells the story of Frank Hopkins (Viggo Mortensen), a Pony Express rider who, disconsolate over the disappearance of the Old West, finds a fresh and unsullied frontier in the oases, dunes, and dreamlike encampments of Arabia.

The debate over the essential nature of the Middle East and its relations with the United States shows no signs of waning. The American people, who traditionally sought to transform the region into a mirror of the United States, can today see their own splintered reflection in Iraq’s fractured face. And those fissures are likely to spread. Ahead loom possible large-scale collisions with Iran and with a profusion of Islamic militant groups. Americans may once again be dragged into eruptions of Arab-Israeli violence. Oil, an energy source for which the world has yet to find a replacement, and which grows scarcer and costlier each year, may continue to fuel conflagrations that will consume American wealth and manpower. Though the domestic debate over Iraq has shifted from one of victory versus defeat to immediate versus phased withdrawal, American troops are expected to remain in the country at least through 2008. If so, then the United States will have concluded three decades of virtually uninterrupted clashes in the Middle East. But the end of one thirty years’ war may merely herald the outbreak of other, potentially more devastating, conflicts lasting long into the twenty-first century.

Yet, in spite of these cataclysms, the United States can be expected to pursue the traditional patterns of its Middle East involvement. Policymakers will press on with their civic mission as mediators and liberators in the area and strive for a pax Americana. American churches and evangelist groups will still seek to save the region spiritually. And the producers of films about the mysterious, menacing Orient will never lack for audiences. The themes that evolved over the course of more than two centuries of America’s interaction with the Middle East will continue to distinguish those ties, binding and animating them for generations.

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