Rethinking the Middle East

Bernard Lewis

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992

Article preview: first 500 of 8,386 words total.

Summary:  The Gulf War has affected regional political consciousness and undermined traditional percpetions, e.g. of pan-Arab unity and of the effectiveness of oil as a weapon. Its chief impact will be to force the countries of the Middle East into realizing that they must start to define their own security interests

Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University. This article is adapted from the 1992 Henry M. Jackson Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Washington.

In the period immediately following the ceasefire in the Gulf War many voices were raised saying, "Everything has changed. The Middle East will never be the same again; this is a new world, a new Middle East, and all the problems and answers are different." And then, when the new world order failed to materialize in days, or weeks or even months, many voices—some of them the same voices—were heard saying, "Nothing has changed. Everything is back where it was before, the same actors playing the same parts and acting out the same scripts."

Momentous events may happen quickly, as they surely did in Kuwait and Iraq last year, but some time is needed to understand the changes that events have revealed, accelerated or caused. By now it is becoming increasingly clear that there are indeed many changes in the Middle East, and that while these vary considerably in their scope, scale and range, few things and few participants remain as they were before.

These changes are related to two sequences of events: one short?term and regional, namely the war in Kuwait and Iraq; the other long?term and global, namely the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Some changes may perhaps be ascribed directly to these events; others—probably most—had been in progress for some time and were revealed, and perhaps also accelerated, by the cataclysmic events in the region and in the world.

II

We may begin with the regional events—the Gulf War and its aftermath. Many of the consequences of this war are still problematic. Some are becoming clear and can be listed without much danger of disagreement. One of them, a cause rather than a consequence of the Persian Gulf crisis and war, is the failure—some would say the demise—of pan?Arabism and perhaps even of the Arab world as a political entity. The decline of pan?Arabism as a force shaping the policies of Arab governments can be measured in the level and intensity of their support for other Arab governments and peoples. In 1948 the Arab states were unanimous in rejecting the U.N. partition resolution and in attempting, by military as well as political and economic measures, to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state—and also, incidentally, the Arab state—proposed by that resolution. By 1982, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, entered its capital and evicted the Palestine Liberation Organization, the reaction in Arab countries was remarkably restrained. One reason for this restraint was the Iran?Iraq War. Both governments and public opinion in the Arab world were sharply divided by the war, and Syria, a major Arab country, was a nonbelligerent ally of Persian Iran against Arab Iraq.

Perhaps even more striking was the American air raid on Tripoli in 1986, when Middle East experts gave warning that this action against Libya would unite the whole Arab world against the West, and against the United States in particular. Nothing of the kind happened. In 1967 a false rumor that the United States ...

End of preview: first 500 of 8,386 words total.