Below is a summary chronicling some of the major steps the U.S. has taken since 1980 in the growth of its commitment to the Gulf region, including Iraq:
1. “Carter Doctrine” – On January 23, 1980, President Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union speech said, “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” This came to be known as the “Carter Doctrine,” and served as one of the foundations for major American roles in the second and third Gulf Wars.
2. “Baker Testimony” — On September 23, 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker testified before a congressional committee that the United States sought a “permanent military presence” in the Gulf. What was not elaborated at the hearing was the fact that the United States had been trying for years to establish a permanent center for military operations in the Gulf region, an effort which naturally had been rebuffed by the Arabs. Part of the plan had been fulfilled with the re-flagging of Kuwaiti tankers, a 1987 initiative that put them under the protection of the U.S. Navy during the first phase of the Gulf Wars. Baker also left unsaid a long-term strategic interest of the United States: to control the flow of Gulf oil, not solely because of American domestic needs (7%) but more importantly because Europe and Japan were almost completely dependent on this oil. The United States, declining in power economically relative to other world powers, sought ways to stay in the game and maintain a competitive edge.
3. “Gulf War II, 1990-1991″ – The war was launched to expel Saddam’s forces from Kuwait and ended with Pres. George H. Bush’s proclamation of a “new world order” in a speech to a joint session of Congress on March 6, 1991. The official U.S. meaning of this phrase was that America, since the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, saw itself as the sole “righter of wrongs around the world.” Arabs were more skeptical and believed that the phrase was a ruse designed to mask America’s true interest in the Middle East: to maintain the flow of relatively cheap oil from the region to other parts of the world. Typifying this view among Arabs, Qasam Khadir Abbas later described the ‘new world order’ in a 1997 study, as, “a tyrannical system of rule which the United States imposed after the breakup of the Soviet Union giving it authority over those world powers which endeavor to resist it.” (quoted from the literature supplement of Al-Majalla, no. 933, December 28, 1997, p. 6).
4. “No Fly Zones” – On April 7, 1991, the so called northern “no-fly zone” over Iraq, located north of 36 degrees latitude, was established by the United States, France, and Great Britain to protect the Kurds from Saddam Hussein. A similar “no-fly zone” in the south was established on August 27, 1992 to protect Iraq’s Shia (two thirds of Iraq’s population). This zone ran south of 32 degrees latitude, and was later extended to 33 degrees latitude after France and several other NATO countries ceased patrolling these zones. Some raised questions about the legality of the zones arguing that they had not been authorized by the United Nations. The U.S. countered that the zones were in line with Security Council Resolution 688 of April 5, 1991 which condemned Iraq’s repression of its civilian population. (BBC, Nov. 18, 2002) This is the point in time when Iraq was “legally” stripped of its sovereignty by the international community.
5. “Defense Planning Guidance, 1992″ — On March 8, 1992, the New York Times published a draft of a Pentagon document that had been leaked to the press. The document was entitled “Defense Planning Guidance.” It was authored by Zalmay Khalilzad and Abram Shulsky and overseen by Paul Wolfowitz, then an undersecretary for policy. As George Packer explains, “…the document described a world of dangers and power struggles in which America had to remain the superpower, for its own security and for stability everywhere else.” (The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005), 13)
6. 1993 U.S. Missile attack on Baghdad – On June 26, 1993, President Clinton ordered a missile attack (23 Tomahawk missiles) on Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad in retaliation for an alleged plot by Iraqi agents to assassinate former President George H. Bush as he visited Kuwait the previous April. On June 5, 1994, a court in Kuwait convicted ten Iraqis and three Kuwaitis in connection with the plot.
7. “U.S. bombardment of northern Iraq” — On September 3, 1996, the United States launched the first of two aerial attacks targeting air defense installations in northern Iraq. The attacks were in retaliation for Iraqi incursions into Kurdish safe areas. Iraq had come to the aid of the Kurdistan Democratic Party which had been battling the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan backed by Iran in and around the city of Erbil. Reaction from one official in Syria typified that of all Arab countries except Kuwait (which strongly endorsed the U.S. action against Iraq): “Now the United States is violating the sovereignty of an Arab country as Iraq violated the sovereignty of Kuwait when it occupied it in August 1990.”
8. “Project for the New American Century, December, 1997″ : http://www.nmhschool.org/tthornton/mehistorydatabase/factsontheground.php#pnac1997
9. ”Iraq Liberation Act” — On October 31, 1998. President Clinton signed a bill committing the U.S. to overthrowing Saddam Hussein (see Packer 24, 39, 78).
Links are to material at the History of the Middle East Database.
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