TWENTY
The Gulf War and
the Peace Process
The cold war ended around 1990, but we live in a world of wrenching
change and rising conflict between and within nations. People are frustrated
with their governments, with the conditions of their daily lives, and with the
lack of the respect from other people or governments that they feel they de¬
serve. Frustration causes uprisings against entrenched regimes, religious
and ethnic strife, demands for more popular participation in politics, and
repressive governments. In the Middle East such problems were less visible
in the 1990s than in other parts of Africa and Asia, but they lurked beneath
the surface and have come back to haunt us in the new millennium. Follow¬
ing the collapse of the USSR, three Caucasian and five Central Asian states
were born. Communism lost its power and allure in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Western news media and politicians conjured up new threats
in "terrorism" and "Islamic fundamentalism." Yet peoples in the Middle
East had even more reasons to fear the power of the West. How did they see
the military buildup in Saudi Arabia, answering Iraq's invasion of Kuwait
in August 1990? And what about the 1991 Gulf War, in which the coalition
of American, European, and Arab forces drove out the Iraqis after aerial at¬
tacks devastated much of their country but did not topple their leader?
The Arab world felt divided, defenseless, and despondent about its in¬
ability to set its own course. Many Arabs who had once hoped to imitate
Turkey's leap into modernity came to believe that imported ideologies and
programs had divided them. Iran's Islamic revolution provided a new di¬
rection to follow, but popular support for the model did not cause Arab
governments to change. Arab leaders began open negotiations with Israel
397