Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond

[KingSweden24]

The Battles of the Golan and Masnaa​

The Golan Heights had been occupied - in the view of the UN and Syria, illegally - since 1967, when they were seized in the Six Day War and turned into an effective fortress for the IDF. Its position was hugely strategic both due to its physiographic features - a vast, raised plateau running fifty kilometers from the Ruqqad River's deep gorge to the southern slopes of Mount Hermon, which had been used by Syria as a prime position to lob artillery shells into Israel prior to 1967 and credibly threaten much of the north of that country, and now in 1982, as it had in 1973, gave Israel the prime position to defend its north and also a clear sallying ground from which to launch assaults in the direction of Damascus.

The Syrian offensive against the Golan in 1973 had been an initial success for a few days thanks to the element of surprise, but that was not replicable in 1982. For one, without Egypt occupying the vast majority of Israeli attention to the south, and with Jordan a less-than-official participant in the war (though by May 20th a Jordanian expeditionary force had been attached to the Syrians at Nawa), it was widely expected that Syria would bear the brunt of fighting directly, even with so much of the IDF having pressed into southern Lebanon. Two, the IDF was not so easily surprised this time, and Syrian spies had confirmed that the Golan was put on full alert the same night that the Osirak strike was launched. As such, an immediate attack would have done the Syrians little good - the Golan was already a nest of artillery, anti-aircraft, and pillboxes.

Nonetheless, Rifaat al-Assad - the commander in charge of the operation - was hugely frustrated that it had taken Syria over a week to mobilize and that they would not be attacking the Golan head-on until May 20-21, a full three weeks into the war, after several days of airstrikes of mixed effectiveness. This boiled down to a deep disagreement within the Ba'ath Bloc about what exactly the strategic goal was, Syrian focus at first on arresting Israel's advance into Lebanon, and Saddam's insistence upon a simultaneous double-strike across a prepared front in both the Golan and the Bekaa Valley. Against their better judgement, the Assads granted this, consoling themselves that Israel was never not going to be prepared, so they may as well make their preparations as robust as possible themselves.

Would that have helped? Maybe. Israel did indeed spend much of the week leading up to May 21hardening the positions on the Golan, but it is hard to see how an attack on May 13th or 14th would have gone much better. The assault across the Golan began at 0440, with about 180,000 Syrian troops broken up into two corps - one from Sasa in the north, towards Damascus, and one from Nawa in the south, towards the Jordanian border. They were supported by 1,000 tanks, 500 pieces of artillery, and five squadrons of the Syrian Air Force launched from airfields in or around Damascus. The northern, right wing of the Syrian advance was aimed at the Israeli kibbutz of Merom Golan at the base of Mount Bental, while the left wing of the attack was aimed at the settlement of Keshet near Mount Peres, coincidentally sharing the name of the Israeli PM. Syrian estimates suggested that Israel would have between 100-150,000 troops or thereabouts throughout the defenses of the Goland. For Syria, which had another 20,000 or so men in Lebanon, it was the largest force they had ever put into the field, larger even than their deployment in 1973; for Israel, it was a far cry from the half-million troops they had deployed nine years earlier, and they had over a hundred thousand deployed across Lebanon, too, with reservists being quickly equipped and prepared in support operations.

Syrian commanders were heartened by reports from Masnaa, where the day before Iraqi forces had managed to make contact with PLO, Lebanese militias and Syrian troops on the Peres Line and had, in the space of a few hours, pushed Israelis back into their secondary trenches at both the Masnaa Crossing and at the Bar Elias-Deir Zenoun sector, threatening to collapse the right half of the Israeli position in upon itself. While by midnight the Israelis, equipped with superior night-vision equipment, had been able to reconstitute themselves in Masnaa proper and carry out a series of targeted night strikes that arrest the Iraqi advanced, the Syrians were bullish as the 21st dawned that this was not the IDF of nine years ago they were facing and that Israel was about to pay a serious price for their war of choice.

That was not to be; the Battle of the Golan, which began on May 21st and would last eleven days until the Syrian withdrawal on June 2nd, was one of the bloodiest engagements since the Korean War, and fighting looked more like World War One trench warfare, now with screaming jets and aerial rockets involved, than it did any kind of maneuver warfare like in the battles for the Sinai nine years earlier. Syrian forces ran headlong into a gauntlet of steel, fire and lead; artillery fire, though imprecise, rained down overhead, while the Israeli and Syrian air forces did battle in the skies above, the booms of their engines and the roar of exploding air-to-air missiles and planes being struck thundered over the Golan. While Israel had not set landmines on their side of the ceasefire zone, they had nonetheless set other more rudimentary booby-traps such as tire spikes, covered pits and other obstacles to make it easy for them to gun down Syrian soldiers who looked like they might be about to break through.

The air battle, which had been ongoing for weeks, intensified particularly in the segment May 21-24, with the sky turning red with fire and smoke. The IDF air force, having studied the dogfights of the recent Swedish-Soviet skirmish diligently, had been training and retraining their pilots for months based on the information gleaned; the Syrians were highly unprepared and their air forces suffered disproportionate losses in those days that they were truly exposed for the first time, forcing Iraqi jets to be diverted southwards from their support role over Masnaa, where they had been doing genuine, real damage to the Israeli position. It was in many ways a story of two battles - though the fighting in east-central Lebanon was no less a grueling trench warfare, the Iraqis held their own, and the IDF was forced to pair ever successful counterattack with a tactical retreat as their position became overwhelmed.

The world watched, amazed at the bloodshed being meted out across fifty kilometers at the disputed Israel-Syria border. In space of ten days, Syria suffered close to fifty thousand casualties, over a quarter of their deployed force. They lost two hundred of their thousand tanks and saw close to fifty planes shot down and an additional twenty forced to retreat with severe damage, three-fifths of their five squadrons brought forward. Israel, by contrast, took about twenty thousand casualties, hardened down in their stubborn defenses, losing only seventeen fighters and forty tanks. This stood in sharp contrast to the nearly three weeks of intense fighting in and around Masnaa, where the Iraqis actually lost fewer men, but were nonetheless unable to break all the way through after their initial successes, and both sides sat dug in by the end, not having gained an inch in either direction since the first few days of fighting.

In a war cabinet meeting, Peres agreed not to pursue the retreating Syrians towards Damascus on June 3, agreeing with the assessment that a counterattack was a vulnerability and that the defense of the Golan had been a major success; Eitan and other IDF commanders were also growing increasingly concerned about the viability of the position in Lebanon, and wanted it immediately reinforced. As such, IDF reservists were deployed northwards to the stalemate, where Iraq had not only acquitted itself gamely but, far from home in a hostile land, prevented one of the famed Israeli counterattacks and encirclements that had dogged Arab militaries for so many decades. The Golan may have been secure and the Syrians embarrassed, but Lebanon was a much more open question as the calendar turned to June...

 

[KingSweden24]

Haboob - Part IV​

The events of late May and early June in Lebanon and the Golan had opened up a question in the Middle East - what, exactly, was coming next? It seemed clear that the much-hyped "Ba'ath Bloc" was clearly not up to the task of dislodging Israel from its strongholds captured in 1967 or its new expeditionary advancements in Lebanon, but nor was it clear that Israel could or would advance much further, especially with European leaders making plain that an attack into Beirut proper would be a red line from which Tel-Aviv could not return. The Israelis had devastated the Syrian Air Force and tank divisions at the Golam, but the Iraqi Expeditionary Force had performed well to the north and Saddam made clear he would not retreat under present conditions. As May and June had advanced, Iraqi logistical tails had expanded through Syria, dozens of new air squadrons had arrived in Syrian airbases, and the tension could have been cut with a knife. The world breathed in and waited; there was no guarantee things would suddenly break, but there was nonetheless a sense that something was about to change, dramatically.

And change it did. Three events in June would dramatically reshape expectations in the Middle East and help bring about an end to the immediate Israeli-Ba'athist conflict, though the bleeding ulcer of Lebanon would bedevil Israeli administrations for years to come. The first was on June 8, 1982, when Iraq finally carried out the second-largest air and missile attack of the war. Having brought mobile Frog-7 short-range missile launchers forward to positions in Syria, Iraq expended a massive amount of ordnance in the early evening of June 8 combined with sending much of the air force they had gathered in Syria over Jordanian airspace - which King Hussein had famously declared "open" to the Ba'athists even as he assured the West that Jordanian troops would not attempt to strike into the West Bank. The result was a rain of fire over Tel-Aviv, Haifa, and other Israeli towns and cities, with Jerusalem notably spared Saddam's wrath. Thanks to the remarkable inaccuracy of the Frogs and the tightness of Israeli air defenses shooting down much of Saddam's attack, just over a hundred Israelis were killed in the worst civilian loss of life in any of the Arab-Israeli Wars, though Saddam did not exit bloodlessly; far from it, as he lost twenty-nine valuable MiGs, and having seen more than half of the rockets fired from Syrian soil intercepted by Israeli air-defense systems bought from the United States. As the dust settled, Soviet backchannels to Washington suddenly started to get noisy; Saddam, it seemed, was signalling through superpower and local intermediaries such as Sadat or Iran's Jahanbani alike that the June 8 air raids were a direct retaliation for the Osirak bombing, and that his bloodlust was now sated.

There were a number of factors in Saddam's decision to massively escalate against Israeli civilians and then pull back suddenly. One, it created a proportional attack from the air, in parallel to Israel's unprecedent preemptive bombing of his nuclear power plant; two, it signaled that he could in fact carry out such an attack; and three, he was quickly starting to realize how expensive the war was, with Soviet support being considerably more limited than he had anticipated, as Moscow's panic over its deteriorating position in Eastern Europe in spring and early summer of 1982 distracted it and the remarkable humiliation of Syria at the Golan persuaded Primakov that there was little more to be gained, and Primakov's word carried tremendous weight in Moscow. On top of that, Iraqi forces were far from home with improved but limited logistics, and oil prices, though rising sharply throughout May, had failed to spike to the point that Saddam would have liked to see in order to get some kind of windfall such as that of 1973-74 or 1978-80 out of it.

The second event came to be known as the Battle of the Camps, a series of events which came to badly damage Israel's standing in Western eyes. On June 10-15 in South Beirut, with Israeli logistical support including limited airstrikes beyond the Peres Line, the Lebanese Phalange militia launched a massive attack into PLO camps in the south of the city, killing hundreds if not thousands in the course of several days as they sought to dislodge fighters and refugees alike. News reporters from around the world on site in Lebanon photographed and recorded the terrifying scenes of women with babies clutched to their breasts running bloodied down the streets as Maronite mortars exploded around them; Bachir Gemayel's proud televised declaration on the 15th that "the camps have been liquidated" brought up uncomfortable parallels for leadership in Europe, even as it was blamed on a mistranslation. It was also a strategic failure, in that most PLO fighters were simply forced to retreat deeper into the city rather than be expelled into Lebanon's north, entirely, which the Israeli-Maronite alliance suffered an extremely poor public relations episode thereafter and the continued Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon grew increasingly unpopular globally. Gemayel would leverage his win into the Lebanese Presidency that August, which elated his staunchest followers but terrified Lebanon's Sunnis across the north and the Bekaa and further persuaded Syria that they needed to redouble their efforts in the country, as did Israel, which say Gemayel's triumph as proof its Lebanon policy was working. The small, diverse country's nightmare was far from over, even as it became clear as June wound down that further offensives from Israel, Syria or Iraq were highly unlikely and that the Fifth Arab-Israeli War was effectively over.

The third and final hingepoint for the Middle East in June 1982, however, had little to do with the war storm in the Levant, but rather the death of King Khalid in Riyadh on June 13 after seven years on the throne; with Saudi Arabia long increasingly unstable, especially in its center and west, the West and countries like Bangladesh which supplied so many of the Kingdom's remittance workers in its oil industry braced for what could - and did - come next...

 

[KingSweden24]

(Author's Note: So when I way back when started seeding the shit hitting the fan in Saudi Arabia, I did so in my time honored tradition of seeding an idea that I had no concrete plans on how I intended to execute it in the long run. My original idea was something similar to the Iranian Revolution going off in Saudi Arabia, but I hadn't really thought the full implications out from there. For a variety of reasons, the conditions of an Iranian Revolution analogue in SA are difficult to pull off - Sunnism has powerful imams, but nothing as legalistically dominant as the ayatollahs, and the House of Saud, while much more open/Western in the 1970s in terms of Arabian society and how they governed, were themselves much more traditional in their presentation to the public and were not even in the same universe as the Shah in terms of offending their more conservative subjects' religious and cultural sensibilities. Thus, despite having the Grand Mosque Siege go even more haywire, the analogue runs out of steam after some time. That being said, I promised some chaos in Arabia, and that's what I've written here. I hope you all enjoy it, even if I'm personally not entirely satisfied with how it turned out. - KS)

The Riyadh Crisis - Part I​

The war in Lebanon and the Golan had, by mid-June of 1982, seemed to reach a stalemate. It was clear that Israel, partially due to awareness of their limitations and partly not wanting to irritate Western allies already furious over their unprovoked and unilateral bombing of Iraq's civilian nuclear reactor, was not going to invest Beirut or advance upon it, and were going to let the Maronite militias under Bachir Gemayel do their dirty work for them. It was also clear that after the humiliation upon the Golan and Saddam's fizzle of an aerial and missile strike against Israel [1] that the Ba'athist Bloc, missing Egypt's tank divisions and air force to distract Israel on their southern and western flank, was not going to do much if anything to punish Israel for Osirak, and Iraq had more than acquitted itself and restored face with its halting of Israel's advance in the Bekaa and gallantry in battle even if the result had been a strategic draw. The only question remained to what extent the Iraqi-Syrian alliance would continue to occupy northern Lebanon, and what effect that would have on Israel's own occupation of southern Lebanon, both urgent questions for the United Nations as it scrambled to maintain the safety of its peacekeepers and debated requesting the United States intervene directly with the Marines to potentially keep the peace, a course of action which the Carey White House was extremely reluctant in a post-Vietnam, post-Panama world to even begin to entertain.

For all the fireworks in the Levant in May and June of 1982 - which had bothered but not panicked the world oil market - it was what would erupt in Saudi Arabia that really made 1982 a summer to remember and proved the energy efficiency pushes of the West in the 1970s quite prescient, while also dramatically and permanently reshaping the Middle East's physical politics. The death of King Khaled - who had ruled since 1975, when King Faisal had been murdered by a distant cousin - saw King Fahd, his half-brother, be next in line. Fahd was no babe in the woods, having been the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia for much of Khaled's reign due to the late King's fragile health, and there was little expectation that his policy program - a shift in the direction of the conservative public after the Grand Mosque Siege while continuing the crackdown on the Ikhwan terrorists and ties to the West remaining strong - would change much. Indeed, it was that experience of Fahd's that made the transition barely even a blip on the West's radar, with a man not particularly well-liked but seen as capable continuing on in Riyadh.

That all came to a screeching halt on June 17, 1982, the day of public mourning for King Khalid. Muslim funeral practices encouraged the near-immediate washing and burial of a body, but a major public show of grief for the late King was encouraged tacitly by Fahd and would, as it turned out, represent the largest gathering of the House of Saud's myriad princes and sheikhs in quite some time. All six of Fahd's younger and politically influential brothers - members of the so-called Sudairi Seven due to their mother - would be in attendance to bid farewell to their half-brother, and most of the other senior members of other "clans" of the House of Saud would be there too. [2]

June 17, 1982 remains both one of the most critical days in Middle Eastern history and one of the worst terrorist attacks ever perpetrated. As thousands gathered in central Riyadh, eight massive bombs, all of them in critically-parked trucks, went off, and forty Ikhwan commandos opened fire on the crowd, some with Gatling guns mounted in covered vehicles they had driven into place. Well over a thousand people were killed, the majority as the explosions ripped through the prone crowd and neighboring buildings alike, and thousands more injured from the bombings as well as being shot or struck by shrapnel come out in a bullet's ricochet. The siting of two of the trucks allowed the bombs to destroy the dais on which much of the Saudi royal family was sitting; the new King Fahd, his four eldest sons, as well as four of his Sudairi clan brothers and nearly thirty other prominent members of the House of Saud, all half-brothers and first or second cousins, were slain. At four days, his reign would be the shortest of the House of Saud. [3] No single day in Arabian history, it was said thereafter, made so many widows, and June 17 is still remembered in much of the Arab world as the "Day of Widows" or "the Widowmaker."

The bombing had removed of the dominant faction of the House of Saud not just Fahd but his capable brothers Sultan, Nayef, the estranged Turki, and Salman; left behind remained only Abdul Rahman and Ahmed, neither of whom were particularly well regarded by others in the family with Ahmed, the youngest of the seven, in particular being dismissed as an administrator at best. Abdul Rahman was now King of Saudi Arabia quite suddenly, reeling from the slaughter of his kinsmen that was, in part thanks to Ahmed's interventions as Minister of the Interior, quickly traced back to the Ikhwan.

This revelation was perhaps not surprising but nonetheless a sea change in Riyadh. The ulema would never publicly turn on the Sauds, it had been generally thought, but they had nonetheless become far more favorable to the Ikhwan than one would have expected in the wake of the Grand Mosque seizure of December 1979. The Riyadh bombing changed all that; the ulema was already hesitant to turn against an Islamic ruler who had not committed any sins against the faith, which the House of Saud had not credibly done, and the fanatics now trying to decapitate the royal family in one massive go with considerably greater casualties saw, to them, no reasonable sourcing in Islam. The Ikhwan's institutional support, meagre as it was, evaporated almost overnight, and several influential Saudi imams went so far as to issue fatwas against them, whereas just a year earlier many of them had begun debating whether a post-Saudi republic governed by the Ikhwan and clerics was permissible under Islamic law.

The attack was a hugely destabilizing incident, too. It proved the Sauds were mere mortals and had crippled the family, with many junior princes having to rise in place as Riyadh reeled. Riots erupted in Qatif, a Shia-dominated city, and people began turning on one another, accusing each other of being Ikhwan fighters. The anger and shock over the slaughter of the Saudi royal family's upper echelon would not seem to be a revolutionary environment or one conducive to an overthrow of the house, but that is nonetheless what came next.

The Saudis had, very nearly, been deposed in 1969 by a cadre of military officers inspired by Nasser and the ideals of Arab socialist nationalism; it had not been longer before, either, that Moammar Gaddafi had come to power in Libya or the Iraqi monarchy had fallen, so a successful coup against the House of Saud would seem to have been well within the traditions of the recent Middle East. The coup failed, however, for a variety of reasons - Najdi loyalty to the royal family when most of the coup plotters were Hejazi, as well as Saudi Arabia being exactly the wrong country to try to introduce secularist socialism. There had not been a serious effort to topple the family again until the Ikhwan's emergence in 1979, and the successful escalation of their attacks proved that the base of Saudi authority, especially outside of Najd, was indeed quite brittle. Fertile ground, then, for ambition, and such ambition found its protagonist in Mohammed Sabri Suleiman, generally referred to in the West as Mohammed Sabri. [4]

Sabri was, quite critically for the (partial) success of what he was about to execute, neither an Arab socialist, nor an Arab nationalist. He was a devout Muslim, trusted by the establishment enough to be appointed the commanding officer of the Royal Saudi Air Force, and had up until the Day of Widows been considered a reliable cog in the Saudi machine, having even personally directed air strikes he had approved against Ikhwan camps in the desert, a remarkable escalation of an internal conflict. Sabri was also, crucially, well-respected by military commanders not of the House of Saud, and was one of the few men in the small and fairly unimpressive Saudi military with any credibility with the Saudi street. As such, on June 28, 1982, he made his move - coordinating with three Army commanders to move two thousand troops and twenty tanks into Riyadh. The Riyadh Crisis was thus now into its next, more volatile phase.

Sabri himself had taken a small group of elite men to the main television broadcaster in Riyadh, seized it (and executed several pro-Saudi journalists and managers within) and then started a broadcast declaring a coup had occurred, that his men were seizing control of the capital, and that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was, hereby, abolished and that an Islamic Republic of Arabia had replaced it. He denounced the Ikhwan and any clergy who explicitly supported them, vowed to purge the country of this "and other subversive elements" but also stated that the Day of Widows had proven that the House of Saud no longer could credibly govern the Kingdom, with this declaration couched carefully and with no hint of irony behind the flimsy excuse of "in that they could not safely defend the Grand Mosque nor themselves in their capital at Riyadh."

This immediately triggered a whole host of knock-on crises. Minor and middle-ranking princes of the House of Saud had already been quietly fleeing the country for days after June 17, commandeering private jets or C-130s sold by the United States and jetting off to Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar or the United Arab Emirates in worry for their safety and that of their families. The Sabri coup only further spurred dozens more princes to flee abroad, on or after June 28, with the putschists quietly encouraging this and making it clear that they would not arrest those trying to flee, and then turning around and publicizing these escapes to a stunned public, attempting to portray the Sauds as cowardly leeches now fleeing the country as their hegemony collapsed. American analysts jokingly called the sudden frequent one-way flights out of Riyadh as the "Fall of Dry-gon" or "Air Sheikh," but there was a fair deal of alarm in Washington, London and Brussels, to say nothing of neighboring states. Had the ancient House of Saud actually fallen in the course of just two weeks?

This was, naturally, getting quite ahead of itself. The bureaucracy and much of the military was heavily Najdi (especially after the near-miss of 1969), and clan and tribal loyalties flared even in this modern world. The Saudi Arabian National Guard - referred to frequently as SANG or, in Riyadh, as the White Guard - had been formed specifically to protect the inner royal family against an attempted coup and mobilized quickly to put down Sabri's putsch. The air force commander had thought ahead, however, and in the days before his coup and immediately after had all air force frames evacuated from not only central Saudi Arabia but from air bases in the Hejaz as well to the East, and had most brigade commanders loyal to him moved East as well. On June 31, as the television studio in Riyadh was retaken by the SANG and he was denounced by King Abdul Rahman, Sabri escaped Riyadh in a Toyota driven by his aide-de-camp to an airfield where he was evacuated by helicopter to Dammam, where he had concentrated his forces and, in doing so, effectively taken control of Saudi Arabia's most valuable and sprawling oilfields, in particular the Ghadar field. For the Saudi government to attack him now would mean doing so with almost no air force and only half their army plus the SANG, and doing so directly into the Kingdom's most valuable - indeed, only valuable - economic resource. The West, spooked forever after the oil crises of 1973-74 and 1978-79, would never again allow something as such to happen, and Sabri could at least anticipate some kind of support, even if it was just diplomatic, if just to keep the precious oilfields from being attacked and damaged and nipping the world's nascent economic recovery in the bud.

Arabia - and indeed the global economy - dangled on the precipice thanks to the Arabian Revolution..."

[1] Formal retcon with @Thoresby's feedback
[2] Abdulaziz alone had forty five sons. The family can be embedded in every office there because there's so many of them.
[3] Irony - Fahd was the longest-ruling Saudi monarch IRL, from 1982 to 2005.
[4] Who is this man, you may ask? No idea. I got his name off a Wikipedia artilce on the Saudi Royal Air Force and all his biographical data is purely my invention.

 

[KingSweden24]

The Riyadh Crisis - Part II​

The Day of Widows and subsequent collapse of the Saudi establishment seemingly overnight caught the world entirely by surprise, and on its own did as much as heavy pressure from the United States on Tel-Aviv to end the Fifth Arab-Israeli War. With Syria having been defeated decisively on the Golan but it being clear Israel had neither the international support nor the domestic will to besiege and take Beirut on their own, the conflict in Lebanon began to wind down rapidly over the course of July and August and quickly devolved into a proxy war between Israel's preferred Maronite faction under the Gemayels and their uneasy Shia allies, against the Sunnis and a minority faction of Maronites backed by Damascus. Gemayel would be elected President of Lebanon just months later, and his six years in power would only deepen and exacerbate the country's bloodshed and sectarian hatreds, but gave Israel their "man" in Beirut, or what was left of it, and in many ways this accomplished the Peres Cabinet's strategic goals, at least for the time being.

The Riyadh Crisis presented the Carey administration, NATO, and the Politburo with their second major international crisis of the past eight months. While Saudi Arabia's share of global oil production had more than halved with the exponential growth of North Sea fields and the ability of the United States to transport via Alaska, and Antonov's rationalizations had improved Soviet export facilities and capacity, it was still a hugely important swing producer and was the symbolic leader of OPEC. Combined with a dropoff in Kuwaiti production that was exacerbated by a major stock market crash in that country in May 1982 that helped push much of the region into recession, oil production from OPEC was suddenly not a given, and global prices jumped 15% in the course of a few days and would peak at 26% above crisis prices in late July (and 34% above pre-Osirak prices), before gradually declining back to their previous January low by the end of the year. This was not the oil shock of 1973 or 1979, but it rattled economies around the world, with developing countries slipping into or deeper into recessions and the United States seeing a sharp drop in output for the third quarter of 1982 after two quarters of otherwise strong economic growth unseen for years.

It was not just the heightened price of oil, which improved and diversified production in 1982 was better able to absorb and offset, that made what was going on in Saudi Arabia a potentially devastating crisis, however. Saudi Arabia's legitimacy was founded in its "custodianship" of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the Hejaz region, and though the clerics were now turning on the Ikhwan after the Day of Widows, the blow to Saudi "invincibility" could not be undone. As Sabri's Arabian Republic was founded in the East under the air cover of the air force and army, it was an open question what, exactly, would come next, and a massive civil war in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world gave everyone a great deal of fear.

Of everyone in Carey's orbit, Askew surprised him by giving the most hawkish advice. He proposed immediately recognizing the Sabri government, parking an aircraft carrier or two in the Persian Gulf, and in tandem with the substantive Iranian Air Force essentially declaring to the world that the Hormuz would stay open and the Saudi oil continuing to flow. Jackson was open to the idea but cautioned against doing so unilaterally, instead proposing that the United States assemble a coalition "aimed at the securing of peace in Arabia" and which would have at the tip of its spear actual Arab powers. Katzenbach, on the other hand, leaned the other way - the further the United States could be from such a coalition the better, what with its support of Israel already alienating many Arab powers (Saddam in particular, to say nothing of the erratic Gaddafi) and that a US-led intervention in "the holy lands of Islam" would be perceived enormously poorly. Carey's concerns were more general than that, though he would admit later he saw what the generally pro-Israeli Katzenbach was getting at. He was skeptical that the American public was open to an open-ended intervention far away in the aftermath of Vietnam and Panama, and more broadly, he did not want to make it a core American policy that they would unilaterally intervene in oil producing states to "support the flow." The United States Navy did, indeed, serve an important purpose in keeping global trade lanes open, but that did not mean that its purpose was to support a particular oil price and volume, and the potential after-effects of this becoming a "Carey Doctrine" was enough to dissuade Carey from the action of passing through the Hormuz. Nonetheless, the USS Nimitz was moved off the coast of Oman, and the Eisenhower into the Red Sea, ostensibly to help evacuate American Aramco workers if need be.

Carey's hesitation to jump in with an all-out intervention was not shared across the board; European leaders, in particular Denis Healey, had their own ideas. Lacking the United States' ample natural resources - Texas' oilfields, for instance - the idea of Saudi oilfields getting seized by a radical Ikhwani regime or heavily damaged in a long-lasting civil war terrified European capitals. Healey was a fairly interventionist, old-fashioned Cold War social democrat in his approach and during the spring and summer of 1982 had become convinced that one could draw a direct line between the collapse of British influence in the Persian Gulf in 1971 and the chaos that had unfolded across the Arab World since then, starting with the Yom Kippur War and continuing on with the oil embargo. While British defense spending in the early 1980s was low and there were concerns about the ability of the Royal Navy to project power overseas [1], he was nonetheless determined to see Britain retake part of her mantle of European leadership - and global relevance alongside the United States within the Western powers - and in the Arabian Revolution saw the perfect opportunity. Unlike the United States, the British would head for the Hormuz, and he quickly persuaded France's Giscard and Italy's Spadolini to follow close behind as part of a task force to "preserve the stability of the Arabian Peninsula and prevent a terrible war."

Of course, all of these moves were dependent on one factor above all, and that was Iranian cooperation, which came handily and was coordinated largely through London's relationship with Nader Jahanbani, the close advisor to the young Shah Reza and a British-trained fighter pilot now head of the Iranian Air Force. Jahanbani, a political moderate who had neither interfered in the SAVAK's crackdown of 1979-80 nor the liberalizing hour of 1981, was mostly responsible for making the Iranian Air Force among the best in the world, both in terms of equipment and of the skill of her pilots, and Tehran quickly announced an operation that would be nicknamed "Sky Shield" - that Iran would support Sabri and his Arabian Republic from the air, creating a "shield" of planes when combined with the HMS Ark Royal and her Anglo-Franco-Italian task force off the east coast of Qatar as well as Sabri's majority of the small Saudi Air Force.

As July advanced, then, it was clear that the West had totally and utterly abandoned the House of Saud, either explicitly (in the case of Europe and their Iranian allies) or implicitly through their silence (the United States). This left a gaping power vacuum in the center of the country, as the Saudi Arabian National Guard and King Ahmed Rahman angrily started looking for allies to retake their oil-rich east that now, out of nowhere, enjoyed Western protection as a dissident republic provided the oil kept flowing. There were pragmatic reasons for Riyadh, still suffering street battles and bombings almost daily, to want to take out Sabri quickly even with the "Sky Shield" in place - if the Arabian Republic could survive, then the whole territorial integrity of the Saudi state was in question, and there were more than a few parties on her perimeter who might have ideas about what could come next if the whole thing collapsed.

On July 27, Abdul Rahman elected to roll the dice, just as Western diplomats were ironing out the details in Arab capitals over what was to come next to "stabilize" the situation. The SANG and units of the Royal Saudi Army still loyal to him set out from Riyadh eastwards to capture or sabotage the oilfields, and show the West the price of betrayal...

[1] This being the Falklands-era RN, after all

 

[KingSweden24]

El Dedazo​

Mexico was both an atypical Latin American country but, in other ways, fairly typical. Since the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution - a devastating war from 1913 to 1920 that broke her demographically and economically for years to come - it had not fallen victim to military coups or countercoups, and its government since 1929 had been ostensibly "revolutionary," rooted in socialist developmentalism. In practice, however, the veneer of democracy and principled, socialist-coded progressivism was just that, a veneer. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had ruled without interruption or even any particularly organized opposition since 1929, a farce of a managed democracy in which aging party hacks - known colloquially as the dinosaurios, or dinosaurs - picked candidates for their loyalty and coziness with various factions. The PRI balanced genuine economic nationalism like the formation of the state oil entity of Pemex in 1937 with generally hewing to the American line in the Cold War's "Dirty War," and built their legitimacy with the Mexican public on a massive rise in the standard of living and some of the fastest economic growth in the world from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s while still retreating into a thuggish illiberalism, most typified by the brutal violence of the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 that badly damaged the regime's reputation domestically and internationally. The PRI was referred to one time as a "perfect dictatorship," and that was perhaps true - it was a dictatorship not of a man nor a junta of military officials, but rather a dictatorship of a party, in which term limits and separation of powers were honored, but every election and transition of power was a foregone conclusion and the decisions and influence of the party superstructure sluiced through every component of society. [1]

Mexican officials of the PRI took great pride in the fact that officials served single, non-renewable six-year terms after which they were expected to retire quietly, and indeed held this up as evidence of the regime's non-authoritarianism; in December of 1982, it would be Jose Lopez Portillo whose term was coming to an end, and his successor needed to be chosen. Whatever merits there may have been to the six-year term in promoting a lack of personalism (even if it tangentially helped keep power in the hands of the dinosaurios of the party machinery and state bureaucracy), there was nothing democratic in the tradition of the incumbent President personally designating his successor, a process known as el dedazo, roughly translated as "pointing the finger." Upon taking office in 1976, Mexico had been mired in an economic crisis stemming from the quadrupling of the national external debt under his predecessor (and childhood friend) Luis Echeverria, under whom Lopez Portillo had served as finance minister. To his credit, Lopez Portillo had made attempts to significantly invest in the discovery of new oilfields across Mexico to better manage the country's economy and build out infrastructure, and had also built on small measures under Echeverria to open up the system and liberalize political opposition; however, his administration was also one of extreme corruption and the appointment of family members and friends to various crucial roles. The steady decline in oil prices beginning in August 1980 had badly damaged the country's finances as it had become even more dependent on revenues from Pemex, and by late 1981, when it was time to nominate a successor, Mexico's economy was suffering severe capital flight, brain drain, and rapid hyperinflation from the devaluation of the peso and a partial sovereign default at the start of the year.

The expected successor of Lopez Portillo for many years had been Jorge Diaz Serrano, the chief of Pemex and a long time PRI functionary who had been responsible for many of the investments in oil development and was generally regarded as one of the government's most competent administrators. However, the response to the decline in oil prices had been mismanaged, and he was quietly shunted off as ambassador to the Soviet Union in late 1981, to his deathbed in 2011 resentful at his scapegoating. Considering Lopez Portillo's deep, unyielding unpopularity and questions of corruption around his selections, that left in the fall of 1981 two viable options for him: his economic director, Miguel de la Madrid, and the Chairman of the PRI, Javier Garcia Paniagua. They were men of sharp contrasts; de la Madrid was a Harvard-educated economist, part of a young group of rising PRI reformists who were committed wholly to the system but saw severe flaws in it and viewed economic reforms first as the key to solving the spiraling crisis that had first begun in 1976 and accelerated in 1980-81. Garcia Paniagua, on the other hand, was a dinosaurio's dream, a decently accomplished former agricultural minister handed the party Presidency earlier in the year and widely viewed as being more in line with traditionally populist and distributionist PRI economic thinking, similar to Lopez Portillo himself. Though only forty-seven, he was a thorough party hack and apparatchik, exactly the kind of figure that the dinosaurios were bound to love.

A number of factors coalesced to influence Lopez Portillo's selection of Garcia Paniagua. [2] The first was that de la Madrid's "outsider-insider" status as a technocrat rather than a party figure worked against him and made him the clear second-runner of the two from the start. The second was that, post-Panama, the tide of anti-Americanism that had risen across Latin America cut against the "Hijo de Harvard" and his Amerophile economic and diplomatic philosophy, whereas Garcia Paniagua, though no Russophile, was more amenable to the trend of the Echeverria and Lopez Portillo years to continue to position Mexico as a leader of the Third World and Non-Aligned Movement. Miguel de la Madrid took his snub well, having not been expected to be chosen anyways, and his service in government ended not long thereafter.

Garcia Paniagua was forced to confront in the June 1982 Mexican elections, however, a much more fractious society than the one Lopez Portillo had faced in 1976. The economic crisis had passed its peak by that point but inflation stood at over 40%, protests and demonstrations were common, and tens of thousands of doctors, lawyers, accountants, bankers, and other professionals had decamped for greener pastures in the United States over the previous six years, a remarkable migration of brain drain. Farmers, one of the main pillars of PRI support, were demanding further land reforms; employees of the state threatened a general strike a week before the polls if they did not receive wage hikes to keep pace with skyrocketing inflation, mostly just to prove that they could. It seemed, for the first time, that the PRI needed Mexico more than Mexico needed the PRI.

The 1982 elections also featured what was, by Mexican standards, a genuinely competitive landscape. Pablo Emilio Madero, the candidate of the conservative National Action Party, once a controlled opposition that existed at the grace and pleasure of El Pri, would win thirty percent of the vote, an unprecedented performance by an opposition candidate, especially six years after the now-politically radioactive Lopez Portillo had been elected unopposed. The reforms of 1977 allowed left-wing partisans to organize, and the United Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM), a communist-inspired outfit, held a massive rally on the Zocalo a few days before voting that was attended by as many as eighty thousand people in the heart of the capital. As oil prices rose and plateaued in the second half of 1982, the Mexican economy temporarily stabilized despite its chronic structural problems, offering Garcia Paniagua some relief ahead of his inauguration on December 1, but the forces that were bubbling up across Latin America - of frustrated middle and working class people rejecting the paternalist authoritarianism of the past, of economic crises, and of political violence - were coming for the Ditadura Perfecta, and 1982 had revealed the PRI creakier than ever, and in failing to earn 70% of the vote, Garcia Paniagua was immediately considered one of the politically weakest Presidents in Mexican history...

[1] Readers of Cinco de Mayo know that I find PRI-era Mexico endlessly fascinating; it's a really interesting blend of revolutionary nationalism and a vanguard one-party state, mixed in with the type of more banal corruption that unfortunately plagues a number of countries in Latin America and Asia. That is was a bunch of saggy old hacks running the show and not a junta is what I find so interesting and what sets its apart from military regimes elsewhere, and also draws some interesting parallels to the pre-1965 American South if you squint hard enough
[2] If you're not familiar with Mexican history, we've just rewritten the last forty years of Mexican political history here. No Miguel de la Madrid means the cientificos don't burrow their way into the PRI machinery, which means Carlos Salinas and Manuel Bartlett aren't running his campaign and administration, which means no disputed election of 1988, no NAFTA and thus no Chiapas Uprising or "tequila crisis" and that Luis Donaldo Colosio isn't shot in Tijuana in March 1994. This is not necessarily a good change; de la Madrid sucked as a President and Salinas, IMO, was a ruthless snake, but they did identify a number of problems in Mexico that were already coming to a head in the 1980-82 range and, whatever your thoughts on it, NAFTA has genuinely helped increase Mexico's standard of living and manufacturing prowess significantly in the years since. (And in a world where the PRC doesn't pursue Dengism and collapses instead of the USSR, as in this one, you're unlikely to see as much offshoring to Asia and so Latin America eventually is likely to benefit from that, too).

 

[KingSweden24]

The Arabian Revolution​

By July 30, 1982, the situation in the Middle East had changed dramatically from just a few days earlier. The Islamist, pro-Western President of Bangladesh, Ziaur Rahman, had ordered an expeditionary force of his country's soldiers to be formed and deployed to the Arabian Republic, ostensibly to defend the small number of Bangladeshi oilfield remittance workers but in practice to flex his country's muscles as a South Asian and Near Eastern power alike. The Indian subcontinent and the Persian Gulf had, since the age of antiquity, seen their economies greatly intertwined, especially during the age of British colonial rule, and now was no different. While the Bangladeshi expeditionary brigade would arrive far too late to have any impact on the Battle of Al Hofuf, which had already occurred before the announcement was made, it was taken as a clear example of what would become readily apparent throughout August 1982 - the Arabian Revolution to overthrow the House of Saud had begun, was irreversible, and the race for the rest of the Muslim world to scramble to pick at the scraps and prevent an Ikhwani state from forming in the Arabian Peninsula was wholly on.

The Saudi Loyalist force that left Riyadh on July 27 was intended to set out for the Eastern Province to seize or sabotage the oil infrastructure in an effort to punish the West for its failure to protect the House of Saud; rather than drive straight at Dammam, however, it instead deployed towards Al Hofuf, slightly south and inland. Al Hofuf was an old oasis town, critically sitting on a major road intersection that controlled routes from the Empty Quarter northwards, and from Qatar and the UAE westwards. Holding Al Hofuf would severely limit the ability of the small, poorly trained militaries of the Qataris and Emiratis from reinforcing the Sabrists by land, and would allow the SANG the ability to aggressively counterattack either north or south at their leisure. Most crucially, it was only three hundred kilometers east of Riyadh, less than a few hours' drive; it was important to both sides to hold it due to its proximity to both of their bases of power.

The Battle of Al Hofuf on July 28 was an infamous disaster for the Loyalists that essentially on that day ended the House of Saud's ability to project power. The "Sky Shield" was not named so for no reason, and as the SANG trucks and cars approached the city, the sound of sonic booms rumbled across the sky high above. The Royal Saudi Air Force was not large, but it was large enough to quickly rip through the enemy with air strikes, pounding the convoy mercilessly for ninety minutes of quick sorties as Iranian planes screened Al Jubail on their behalf and the European task force sat off the coast of Bahrain as a deterrent, a modern fleet in being. Three hundred men were killed in the initial air strikes and thousands wounded; Abdul Rahman, who was in an armored vehicle near the rear of the convoy, ordered a halt five kilometers from Al Hofuf and to dig in with mobile anti-aircraft equipment. That was when the second sortie arrived, this time including considerably more sophisticated Iranian aircraft. As many as five thousand of the elite SANG and other Loyalists were killed, and Abdul Rahman was wounded, presumed dead for several days until he reemerged in Abu Dhabi, having fled in an armored car along with several retainers. The Saudi Loyalists had, in the course of one day, been scattered and nearly totally defeated and proven the value of Sky Shield. Early in the evening of July 29, as the Loyalists retreated haphazardly back towards Riyadh or cities to its north - or fled towards the Qatari border - Sabri took to a television station in Al Jubail which was still broadcasting and announced, "God is great! By the Grace of Allah, the House of Saud has been deposed, and this Republic of Arabia is declared in all the holy lands of the Prophet!" This announcement was important for several reasons - rather than portray the Arabian Republic as secessionist it now laid claim to the whole of the Saudi territory, denounced the Sauds as completely overthrown, and in sharp contrast to the kind of Nasserist Arab socialism or its bastard cousin, Ba'athism, that was typically associated with republicanism in the Middle East, foregrounded Islam. This was meant to relieve the ulema and dissuade them from declaring a fatwa against Sabri and his co-conspirators for their role in deposing the House of Saud, but it did just as much to relieve Western powers who were quick to recognize that Sabri was no Nasser or Saddam, rather a figure not unlike Ziaur Rahman - the same Rahman who was quickly getting Bangladeshi forces deployed to Arabia as a peacekeeping force.

What unfolded over the first weeks of August, then, was nothing short of utter chaos. Western diplomats had been busy trying to hash out what a "post-Saudi Arabian peninsula" might look like. The Gulf monarchies - sparsely populated, poorly equipped - were seen as unreliable allies. In the space of a few days in July, Iranian planes had landed in Bahrain, a country with which it had close historical relations (and shared a Shia Muslim faith with) as a staging ground for operations in Sky Shield, and now it was an open question if the Iranians would ever leave the island. The biggest concern in Washington was the flow of oil from Eastern Province and how exactly Sabri would be able to control the Nejd; due to the relative lack of Arabophiles or Middle East policy experts at CIA or the State Department [1], the question of who would wind up in control of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina was less of a live concern.

That was not the case in the Levant. On August 1, 1982, a small force crossed the Jordan-Saudi Arabian border and took the city of Tabuk bloodlessly; the Jordanian Army had begun her invasion of the Hejaz, a land which its Hashemite royal family had once controlled and still regarded as having been seized from them by the House of Saud. On August 2, King Hussein of Jordan took to Jordanian television to announce a "humanitarian mission" to "preserve the Holy Cities" and prevent them falling into the hands of the Ikhwan, which was still highly active in western Saudi Arabia, especially with the collapse of state capacity over the previous six weeks. In a surprise, he further announced that Egypt would take part in this peacekeeping operation, in large part to keep "unholy" elements from socialist Yemen from threatening Mecca and Medina. On August 3, Egyptian paratroopers landed across the Saudi-Yemeni border, and Egyptian tanks joined Jordanian ones as they rolled south from Tabuk. The sign-off on this joint Jordanian-Egyptian "Mecca Mission," as it came to be known semi-officially, had come from the Carey White House directly as the live threat of the Ikhwan actually taking control of the Grand Mosque and declaring a caliphate from the ashes of the House of Saud became a live threat.

On both sides of Saudi Arabia, then, the House of Saud had seen her coasts cloven off, on one end by Sabri's new Republic and its Iranian and European aerial support, on the other a Jordanian invasion of the Hejaz that very quickly became an obvious expedition to restore Hashemite control over the Holy Cities that had been in their custody for centuries. The collapse of Saudi authority, and indeed the entire Saudi state, was accelerating as the month of August advanced, but there was yet one more factor that would provide a final death blow - Saddam Hussein, drawing down his expeditionary forces from Lebanon and Syria, who decided that the redrawing of maps in Arabia needed one more variable and on August 8 launched an invasion in the direction of Sakaka...

[1] You'd be surprised how little the US understood about this part of the world pre-1979 or even deep into the 1990s OTL, with so much focus aimed exclusively at the near abroad of LatAm or at Eastern Europe