The Summer of Arab Discontent

Fouad Ajami

From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1990/91

Article preview: first 500 of 8,267 words total.

Summary:  Assesses the effects of Iraq's annexation of Kuwait on the unity of the Arab world, and the recognition among Arab elite opinion generally that US assistance will be necessary to advance Arab interests. Professor of Middle Eastern studies, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University.

Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. He is author of The Arab Predicament and other works.

Routine, it turned out, was but a brief interlude between two audacious bids. No sooner had the Arab/Muslim world said farewell to the wrath and passion of the Ayatollah Khomeini's crusade than another contender rose in Baghdad. The new claimant was made of material different from the turbaned saviour from Qum: Saddam Hussein was not a writer of treatises on Islamic government nor a product of high learning in religious seminaries. Not for him were the drawn-out ideological struggles for the hearts and minds of the faithful. He came from a brittle land, a frontier country between Persia and Arabia, with little claim to culture and books and grand ideas. The new contender was a despot, a ruthless and skilled warden who had tamed his domain and turned it into a large prison.

Three years earlier the Kuwaitis had dodged a bullet. The turmoil of the final year of the Iran-Iraq War had come closer to them. They turned to the Americans, seeking protection for their oil exports. The Reagan administration was on the rebound then from the fiasco of its arms sales to Iran; it obliged the Kuwaitis, re-flagged their tankers, and the danger subsided. But alas, countries cannot be re-flagged like ships and tankers. In the summer of 1990 Kuwait was left to the tender mercies of the Iraqis. The Kuwaitis were in the way of a state possessed of considerable power and a sense that the world around it owed it a great debt for the service it had performed in its long struggle against the Iranian Revolution. Saddam had been protector and gendarme. He now came to collect what he saw as the fair wages of the work he had done.

He struck in August, dusting off a fraudulent claim to the wealthy principality next door. Before he swept into Kuwait, Saddam had gone through the motions of negotiating with the Kuwaitis: the single negotiating session, held in Saudi Arabia, lasted two hours. Then came the dash for the loot on August 2, 1990.

Not the most articulate of leaders, Saddam Hussein found his themes as he went along. He annexed the dreams and resentments of other Arabs, appealing to their atavistic impulses. Hurriedly he rolled out his own map of a phantom Arab nation and picked up an old weapon. In the barracks and the academies there had once been a vision of Arab history-a memory of a time when the Arab world was supposedly one and whole, a tale of betrayal at the hands of European powers, and the dream of a leader who would set history right again. That was the material that Gamal Abdul al-Nasser of Egypt had worked with three decades ago, and that was the material that Saddam would try to revive.

With great stridency Saddam Hussein railed against the "colonial borders" of the Arab world. Those borders were false and contrived, he said, and they had placed Arab demographic weight on one side and Arab wealth on the ...

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