Foreign Policy in Focus Special Report: Continuing Storm: The U.S. Role in the Middle East

Major Oil-Producing Nations

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Iraq, and Iran possess 64% of the world's proven oil reserves.

Source: Phyllis Bennis, "Middle east Oil," Foreign Policy In Focus, January 1997.

The six Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf are guardians of valuable oil reserves to which the United States seeks access, not just to supplement American reserves (currently around 18% of U.S. consumption) but as a means of maintaining a degree of leverage over the import-dependent European and Japanese markets. During the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, the United States played the combatants off against each other to ensure that neither of these militant regimes would become too influential. With oil, water resources, and sizable populations, both had the potential to become regional powers that could conceivably challenge American interests. Since 1993, the U.S. has articulated a policy of “dual containment” toward these governments, guarding against potential expansionist ambitions by either against the pro-Western sheikdoms. More recently, however, the extreme hostility toward Iran may be lessening as a result of the election of a more moderate Islamic government in 1997, which has provided a justification for those in Washington already interested in rebuilding ties with the oil-rich and potentially powerful country.

The British had been the dominant power in the Persian Gulf for most of the 20th century, but—in recognition of their decline as a major world power—they announced their military withdrawal from the region in 1969. The United States, which had been increasing its presence in the Middle East since the end of World War II, was determined to fill the void. President Richard Nixon, facing growing opposition to the Vietnam War, knew that sending U.S. combat troops into this volatile region would not be politically feasible. By the early 1970s, antiwar sentiment had lessened, due in part to Nixon’s Vietnamization program, whereby the reliance on South Vietnamese conscripts and a dramatically increased air war had minimized American casualties. As a result, the Nixon Doctrine (also known as the Guam Doctrine or “surrogate strategy”) came into being, wherein Vietnamization evolved into a global policy of arming and training third world allies to become regional gendarmes for American interests.

The Persian Gulf was the primary testing ground, with Iran’s shah—who owed his throne to CIA intervention in the 1950s and had long dreamed of rebuilding the Persian Empire—playing the part of a willing participant. Throughout the 1970s, the U.S. sold tens of billions of dollars worth of highly sophisticated arms to the shah, and sent thousands of U.S. advisors to turn the Iranian armed forces into a sophisticated fighting unit capable of counterinsurgency operations. Such a strategy proved successful when Iranian forces helped crush a leftist insurgency in the southeastern Arabian sultanate of Oman in the mid-1970s.

This strategy came crashing down in 1979, however, with Iran’s Islamic revolution, which resulted from the popular reaction against the highly visible American support for the Iranian regime, the shah’s penchant for military procurement over internal economic development, and his brutal repression against any and all dissent. The vast American-supplied arsenal fell into the hands of a radical anti-American regime. It was then that the Carter Doctrine came into being with the establishment of the Rapid Deployment Force (later known as the Central Command), which would enable the United States to strike with massive force in a relatively short period of time. This extremely costly effort would enable the U.S. to fight a war that would rely so heavily on air power, be over so quickly, and enjoy such a favorable casualty ratio that popular domestic opposition would not have time to mobilize.

This was precisely the scenario for Operation Desert Storm. Though the exact circumstances that would trigger such a war were not known, the military response had in effect been planned for more than a dozen years prior to the Gulf War and was designed in part for domestic political impact. From Washington’s strategic vantage point, it worked well. The massive international mobilization led by the United States forced Iraqi occupation forces out of Kuwait and severely damaged Iraq’s military and civilian infrastructure in less than six weeks and with only several dozen American casualties. The war was a dramatic reassertion of U.S. global power, just as its former superpower rival was collapsing, and it consolidated the U.S. position as the region’s most important outside power.

Ironically, the United States had been quietly supporting Iraq’s brutal totalitarian regime and its leader, Saddam Hussein, through financial credits and even limited military assistance during its war against Iran in the 1980s, including offering components and technical support for programs bolstering the development of weapons of mass destruction. Washington downplayed and even covered up the use of chemical weapons by Saddam’s armed forces against the Iranian military and Kurdish civilians during this period, and the U.S. opposed UN sanctions against Iraq for its acts of aggression toward both Iran and its own population. It was only after Iraq’s invasion of the oil-rich, pro-Western emirate of Kuwait in August 1990 that Saddam Hussein’s regime suddenly became demonized in the eyes of U.S. policymakers and the American public at large.