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Old Myths and New Realities
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17161 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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12 / 1990 |
2,231 Words |
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Rashid I. Khalidi
Rashid I. Khalidi is associate professor of history at the
University of Chicago. |
The Gulf crisis has laid to rest a number of long-held myths about the Middle East, even as it may have seen the origins of new ones. At the same time, a number of irreducible political realities have been reaffirmed during this crisis, which has once again confirmed that the Middle East is one of the most dangerous regions on earth, and the place where world peace and the new arrangement of world power emerging in the wake of the Cold War are the most vulnerable.
The myths that have come crashing to earth as a result of the Gulf crisis include the idea once held with great tenacity in Washington that a radical Islamic regime in Iran is a permanent threat to U.S. interests in the region. It is often forgotten that this myth was at the root of the "tilt toward Iraq" engaged in by both the Reagan and Bush administrations, which was the basis of nearly 10 years of American support for Iraq in its war with Iran and afterward.
U.S. policy makers' obsession with the Islamic revolutionary regime in Iran grew out of resentment at the 1979 overthrow of the shah. Washington's lavish support for this particular despot was in turn based on an earlier myth: the threat of the expansion of Soviet power into the Middle East. This myth both necessitated and justified massive American military and other kinds of support for the shah, as well as for regional allies like Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. It led the United States to concentrate almost exclusively on the East-West balance in the Middle East, often at the expense of attention to the area's serious internal problems, and at times inflamed these problems while creating new ones.
The myth of an
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