10 Things to Know about U.S. Policy in the Middle East

By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet. Posted September 26, 2001.

1. The United States has played a major role in the militarization of the region.

The Middle East is the destination of the majority of American arms exports, creating enormous profits for weapons manufacturers and contributing greatly to the militarization of this already overly-militarized region. Despite promises of restraint, U.S. arms transfers to the region have topped $60 billion since the Gulf War. Arms sales are an important component of building political alliances between the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries, particularly with the military leadership of recipient countries. There is a strategic benefit for the U.S. in having U.S.-manufactured systems on the ground in the event of a direct U.S. military intervention. Arms sales are also a means of supporting military industries faced with declining demand in Western countries.

To link arms transfers with a given country's human rights record would lead to the probable loss of tens of billions of dollars in annual sales for American weapons manufacturers, which are among the most powerful special interest groups in Washington. This may help explain why the United States has ignored the fact that UN Security Council resolution 687, which the U.S. has cited as justification for its military responses to Iraq’s possible rearmament, also calls for region-wide disarmament efforts, something the United States has rejected.

The U.S. justifies the nearly $3 billion in annual military aid to Israel on the grounds of protecting that country from its Arab neighbors, even though the United States supplies 80 percent of the arms to these Arab states. The 1978 Camp David Accord between Israel and Egypt was in many ways more like a tripartite military pact than a peace agreement in that it has resulted in more than $5 billion is annual U.S. arms transfers to those two countries. U.S. weapons have been used repeatedly in attacks against civilians by Israel, Turkey and other countries. It is not surprising that terrorist movements have arisen in a region where so many states maintain their power influence through force of arms.

2. The U.S. maintains an ongoing military presence in the Middle East.

The United States maintains an ongoing military presence in the Middle East, including longstanding military bases in Turkey, a strong naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean and Arabian Sea, as well as large numbers of troops on the Arabian Peninsula since the Gulf War. Most Persian Gulf Arabs and their leaders felt threatened after Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait and were grateful for the strong U.S. leadership in the 1991 war against Saddam Hussein's regime and for UN resolutions designed to curb Iraq's capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, there is an enormous amount of cynicism regarding U.S. motives in waging that war. Gulf Arabs, and even some of their rulers, cannot shake the sense that the war was not fought for international law, self-determination and human rights, as the senior Bush administration claimed, but rather to protect U.S. access to oil and to enable the U.S. to gain a strategic toehold in the region.

The ongoing U.S. air strikes against Iraq have not garnered much support from the international community, including Iraq's neighbors, who would presumably be most threatened by an Iraqi capability of producing weapons of mass destruction. In light of Washington’s tolerance -- and even quiet support -- of Iraq’s powerful military machine in the 1980s, the United States' exaggerated claims of an imminent Iraqi military threat in 1998, after Iraq’s military infrastructure was largely destroyed in the Gulf War, simply lack credibility. Nor have such recent air strikes eliminated or reduced the country’s capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, particularly the most plausible threat of biological weapons.

Furthermore, only the United Nations Security Council has the prerogative to authorize military responses to violations of its resolutions; no single member state can do so unilaterally without explicit permission. Many Arabs object to the U.S. policy of opposing efforts by Arabs states to produce weapons of mass destruction, while tolerating Israel’s sizable nuclear arsenal and bringing U.S. nuclear weapons into Middle Eastern waters as well as rejecting calls for the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the region.

In a part of the world which has been repeatedly conquered by outside powers of the centuries, this ongoing U.S. military presence has created an increasing amount of resentment. Indeed, the stronger the U.S. military role has become in the region in recent decades, the less safe U.S. interests have become.

3. There has been an enormous humanitarian toll resulting from U.S. policy toward Iraq.

Iraq still has not recovered from the 1991 war, during which it was on the receiving end of the heaviest bombing in world history, destroying much of the country’s civilian infrastructure. The U.S. has insisted on maintaining strict sanctions against Iraq to force compliance with international demands to dismantle any capability of producing weapons of mass destruction. In addition, the U.S. hopes that such sanctions will lead to the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime. However, Washington’s policy of enforcing strict sanctions against Iraq appears to have had the ironic effect of strengthening Saddam’s regime. With as many as 5,000 people, mostly children, dying from malnutrition and preventable diseases every month as a result of the sanctions, the humanitarian crisis has led to worldwide demands -- even from some of Iraq’s historic enemies -- to relax the sanctions. Furthermore, as they are now more dependent than ever on the government for their survival, the Iraqi people are even less likely to risk open defiance.

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