U.S. strategy toward Iraq
The Nixon and Carter doctrines
By Brian
Becker
This is excerpted from Becker's "The Three Phases of U.S.
Strategy Toward Iraq." The complete document can be found on
the Web at www.workers.org/ ww/2000/iraq0224.html.
The Nixon Doctrine provided the operational framework for
U.S. strategy from the late 1960s until the Iranian Revolution
of 1979.
Although it was bloody and aggressive, the Nixon Doctrine
was essentially a defensive response by imperialism to the Arab
revolutionary wave that swept through the Middle East and north
Africa, starting with the Egyptian revolution that brought
Gamal Abdel Nasser and other bourgeois nationalist and
revolutionary forces to power.
The entire Middle East had been transformed into a
revolutionary cauldron in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Iraqi revolution of 1958 prompted Eisenhower to send
14,000 marines to Lebanon the next day. This was a greater
troop number than the Lebanese army. One day later the British
sent 6,000 troops to shore up the Jordanian regime. They also
mobilized troops into Kuwait.
Without U.S. and British military intervention, the
Jordanian and Kuwaiti regimes would have been swept away in the
revolutionary tidal wave emanating from the uprising in
Iraq.
The Algerian revolution, known as the revolution of a
million martyrs, secured independence from France in the early
1960s. The Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in 1964
and quickly became an instrument of armed struggle for
Palestinian statehood. Overturns in Libya and Yemen created new
anti-imperialist governments. In the Sudan the Communist Party
grew to be a truly massive party, the largest communist
movement in Africa.
The main feature of the Nixon Doctrine was reliance on proxy
forces, principally Israel and Iran, to function as the
gendarme for U.S. interests in the Gulf. It grew out of the
military successes achieved by Israel against Egypt, Jordan and
Syria in the Six-Day War in 1967.
Israel's military offensive seized the Sinai from Egypt, the
Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank from Jordan. The
political fallout from the war was seismic. It led to a wave of
demoralization and division inside the Arab nationalist
movement. More than any other single episode, the Israeli
blitzkrieg-style military operation blunted the revolutionary
wave in the Arab world.
The U.S. treated Israel as an absolute client from 1967
onwards. Israel would receive billions each year in military
and economic assistance from the U.S. and function as a
powerful club holding back the Arab revolution.
Shah of Iran
Besides Israel, the other pillar of the Nixon Doctrine was
reliance on the Shah of Iran. The Iranian monarchy was to
police the Gulf region on behalf of the United States.
It was the Shah's armies, armed with $19 billion in U.S.
weaponry, which destroyed the revolutionary movements in Oman
and Dhofar, menaced Yemen, and funded and organized the Kurdish
military opposition inside Iraq in 1972. This was U.S.
retaliation for Iraq's decision to finish the nationalization
of the oil fields in northern Iraq-where most Iraqi Kurds
live.
Iran also served as the largest "listening post" for CIA
operations against the USSR. Iran and the Soviet Union shared a
1,000-mile-long border.
The Nixon Doctrine was based on the use of brute military
force, but it was assumed that the military club would be
wielded by proxy forces. It was not conceivable, given the
political climate of the late 1960s and 1970s-and with the
Vietnam War still raging-that the U.S. military could use its
own forces in the Middle East. This task was entrusted to the
Shah and to Israel.
The Shah was a dependable ally because his rule was
exclusively secured by the 1953 CIA-led counter-revolution. The
Israeli state, as a settler regime, was inherently in conflict
with its far more numerous indigenous Arab neighbors, and was
also entirely dependent on the United States as its ultimate
guarantor and protector.
Monarchy or parliament
made no difference
It didn't matter in the Nixon Doctrine what form of
government existed in the U.S. allies/clients in the Middle
East. The form of government was vastly different in Iran than
it was in Israel. The first was a blood monarchy, an absolutist
totalitarian regime. The other was a parliamentary democracy,
but based on a theocratic settler regime that embodied
institutional discrimination and exclusion of the indigenous
Arab people. Imperialism was "loyal" to Israel and to the Shah
regardless of the contrasting political form of the
governments.
Today the slogans used to mobilize public opinion in the
United States against the Iraqi government have to do with the
political form of government. Iraq is a "dictatorship" or
"Saddam is a brutal despot."
The political form of government is of great consequence for
the people in any country, but it has not even secondary
importance to the imperialist establishment. Support for or
opposition to any particular political form of government does
not drive or motivate U.S. strategy.
What really drives U.S. policy and motivates any specific
strategy or foreign policy doctrine is the dominant class
interests of U.S. capitalism in a region of the world. This is
what is missing in public consciousness and is precisely what
any legitimate anti-sanctions or anti-war movement must reveal.
Otherwise, the broad public and the anti-war movement are left
in a fog, completely susceptible to the propaganda of the
Washington political establishment.
Iranian Revolution
shatters Nixon Doctrine
The 1979 revolution in Iran was one of those great
historical events that shake the established world at its
foundations. The fact that it was later hijacked by
conservative clerical obscurantism does not negate how stunned
and threatened U.S. imperialism was by this genuine people's
revolution. Fifty thousand died as the battles between peaceful
protesters and the U.S.-backed Iranian regime grew fiercer each
week in the months leading up to the revolution.
President Jimmy Carter, who had just saluted the loyal
puppet on the Peacock Throne as an "island of stability in a
sea of turmoil," had to quickly reshape U.S. policy. One of the
two pillars of the Nixon Doctrine had not only vanished but
actually seemed to transform into its opposite.
Iran in 1979 not only ceased to be a puppet regime, one that
had ably relieved the Pentagon of the dangerous and dirty work
of direct suppression in the region, but it became a bastion of
anti-imperialist agitation mainly directed against the United
States, which was rightly targeted for having been the deposed
Shah's most important patron.
The Carter Doctrine, also known as the doctrine of Rapid
Deployment Forces (RDF), supplanted the Nixon Doctrine.
Elements of Carter Doctrine
A Rapid Deployment strategy combined two features: (1) New
technologies in aircraft and troop transport vehicles and a new
generation of powerful and more compact conventional weapons
and (2) the use of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the other Gulf
States as a location for Pre-Positioned Bases.
Pre-Positioned Bases were complete U.S. military bases in
terms of storage and supply--minus any actual military
personnel. This had the advantage of allowing the Saudi
monarchy and the other frightened ruling royal families in the
Gulf to accommodate the demands of the Pentagon while still
insisting that soldiers from the United States were not
occupying their "sacred" territories.
Anti-imperialist sentiment in the Arab world was still too
high and the waves of the Iranian revolution were still
resonating too forcefully throughout the region for these
ruling monarchies to dare admit that they were out-and-out
clients of Washington.
The Carter Doctrine was based on the assumption that the
Pentagon might eventually have to do the work of policing the
Gulf itself. The Pre-Positioned Military Bases did eventually
become the staging area for Operation Desert Storm in 1990.
Without the construction of the Pre-Positioned Bases during the
decade between 1979-1990 it would have been impossible for Bush
to so rapidly deploy hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers to
the Gulf between August and November 1990.
Although the Carter Doctrine or Rapid Deployment envisioned
the direct use of large-size U.S. military forces to protect
"U.S. interests" in the Middle East, it was still a far-off
pipe dream for policy planners in 1979-1980. The anti-war
sentiment at home was still strong from the recently concluded
Vietnam War and the anti-imperialist sentiment in the Middle
East was still too big an obstacle.
The decision to allow Pre-Positioned Bases by the ruling
royal families in the Gulf was the consequence of their fear
that the Iranian revolution would sweep away their fragile
monarchies. They still had to be balanced by a concern that
they not appear to have become absolute puppets of the United
States.
The U.S. fully achieved its goal of gaining access for
Pre-Positioned U.S. Bases during the Iran-Iraq War.
This article is copyright under a Creative
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