- Highly critical of Gates’s management, par-
ticularly during the antitrust suit crisis.
Edstrom, Jennifer, and Marlin Eller.Barbarians Led
by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside—How the
World’s Richest Corporation Wields Its Power. New
York: Henry Holt, 1998. A critical look at Micro-
soft at the time of the antitrust suit.
Rohm, Wendy Goldman.The Microsoft File: The Secret
Case Against Bill Gates. New York: Times Business, - Details of Microsoft’s actions to dominate
the microcomputer operating-system market.
Slater, Robert.Microsoft Rebooted: How Bill Gates and
Steve Ballmer Reinvinted Their Company. New York:
Portfolio, 2004. Microsoft’s response to the anti-
trust suit.
Wallace, James, and Jim Erickson.Hard Drive: Bill
Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. New
York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992. Extensive biogra-
phy of both Gates the man and Gates the business
tycoon.
Leigh Husband Kimmel
See also Apple Computer; Business and the econ-
omy in the United States; Computers; Gates, Bill; In-
ternet; Jobs, Steve.
Middle East and North America
Definition Actions and events that shaped, and
were shaped by, relations between governments
and peoples in the Middle East and North
America
Events in the Middle East and related events inside the
United States during the 1990’s deepened, expanded, and
changed the direct and overt involvement of the United
States, especially militarily, in Middle Eastern affairs.
Prior to 1979 few Americans knew or even cared
much about events or peoples in the Middle East.
Western stereotypes of Middle Easterners abounded,
although they did not fit the facts of the region.
While Americans identified Middle Easterners with
Arabs and Arabs with Muslims, in fact almost half of
the people in the Middle East are not Arab (for ex-
ample, the Turks in Turkey and Persians in Iran)
and fewer than one-fourth of the world’s Muslims
are Arabs. The complacence and lack of awareness
of Americans about the Middle East changed with
the advent of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the
emergence of power of the Ayatollah Khomeini in- The overthrow of Iran, an American political
ally, and the subsequent takeover of the U.S. em-
bassy in Iran’s capital, Tehran, brought the region’s
social and political unrest to the attention of many
Americans, even though other important relevant
events had also taken place that same year, such as
the signing of the Camp David peace agreement be-
tween Egypt and Israel.
Another important event that occurred in 1979
was the assuming of political and military control of
Iraq by Saddam Hussein. While the majority of Iraqis
were Shia Muslims, Hussein represented the ruling
Sunni Muslims, and he maintained a brutal regime.
Iran was predominantly Shia Muslim, and Hussein
was concerned about the expansion of Iran’s Islamic
Revolution, particularly in light of Khomeini’s calls
for “Western-oriented” Arab leaders (such as Hus-
sein) to be overthrown. An immediate result of the
rise of Khomeini and Hussein was the Iran-Iraq War,
which lasted from 1980 to 1988. This war engaged
the United States in particular because of the inter-
ruption of oil exports from the region, resulting in
the United States “reflagging” Kuwaiti oil tankers
late in the war.
The Gulf War A consequence of the eight-year-long
Iran-Iraq War was that both nations exhausted their
economic resources. In 1990, because of this and re-
ports exposing that the United States, under Presi-
dent Ronald Reagan’s administration, secretly had
been providing weapons to both countries while
publicly declaring its opposition to Iran (an episode
that came to be known as the Iran-Contra scandal),
Hussein declared that other Arab nations, particu-
larly the oil-rich U.S. ally of Kuwait, owed Iraq eco-
nomic restitution, since Iraq had depleted its re-
sources protecting Arabs from Persians (Iranians)
and Sunnis from the Shia revolution. Neither the
United States nor the leaders of the nations neigh-
boring Iraq fully agreed with Hussein. Despite multi-
ple diplomatic efforts and interpretations, in Au-
gust, 1990, Iraq attacked Kuwait. Immediately, the
United States formed a coalition of nations to send
troops to the region and repel the invasion. The ef-
fort was dubbed Operation Desert Shield, which in-
cluded troops, equipment, and financial resources
from thirty-four countries from around the world,
including Canada and many Middle Eastern na-
tions. The stated mission was to defend Kuwait,568 Middle East and North America The Nineties in America