Brothers Reconciled, Brothers Murdered
As February 1982 arrived, the Arab, and indeed Muslim, world sat at a major crossroads. Wars in 1967 and 1973 had destabilized the Middle East, threatened superpower confrontation, and introduced the lethal, devastating possibility of oil politics that the West could not on its own control. But something strange had happened throughout all this - the region had, with the exception of Lebanon and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia, begun the process of arguably becoming
more peaceful and predictable than previously.
Though Iran had for a brief moment in 1978 looked like it was staring into the abyss, it had clawed its way back and now sat on the road to reform. Egypt and Bangladesh had seen their autocratic leaders survive assassination attempts that allowed them to consolidate their positions through purges and now rotated back to reinvigorating their foreign policy as Western-aligned redoubts in their respective regions. Israel had not only signed its historic Rose Garden Agreement with Cairo that returned the Sinai and secured their western borders for good, but also begun the process of improving relations with neighboring Jordan behind the scenes, all under the fairly right-wing Premiership of Menachim Begin, nobody's idea of a dove, and Shimon Peres had continued his work under the encouragement of his rival and Defense Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. The Gulf monarchies were increasing their production of oil, especially Kuwait, and in tandem with a massive new amount of supply turned up in Alaska, Norway, Venezuela, and the United Kingdom that started really hitting the markets in early 1981, energy prices were lower than they had been in years.
This all redounded enormously to the benefit of the United States, which had first helped broker the accord between Israel and Egypt and had now assisted in the green shoots of Iran's transition to a functional state (though still plagued by high inflation, low productivity and stochastic terrorism from both communist and Islamist forces dotted throughout its mountains). The Middle East, to varying degrees, suddenly seemed to have an axis of strongly pro-Western and Washington-friendly polities in a belt stretching from Egypt, through the Arabian Peninsula to include the various Gulf Monarchies, across the Gulf to Iran, and then included Pakistan and Bangladesh as its buttresses.
To say that this alarmed Soviet policymakers would be an understatement. As 1982 dawned, the USSR was suddenly in its weakest position geopolitically since 1968. Despite its lavish defense spending, it had been held at bay by scrappy little Sweden over the course of three days in late October 1981, humiliated for the world to see when its enemy should have simply rolled over, and this had essentially called into the question the entire security arrangement and apparatus of the Eastern Bloc, especially in Poland, where the local Communist government now wavered on declaring martial law out of concern that the Soviets would in fact not be able to, or want to, back them up in such an event. This emerging rift in the Warsaw Pact, which potentially augured the 'Yugoslavization" of much of the Communist East if the Red Bear turned out to be a paper tiger, threatened the entire Soviet project in the Cold War. On top of that, the Soviet Union's prestige in the Muslim world had declined sharply over the past years, which did not help with the numerous Muslim minorities living within Soviet borders, particularly in Azerbaijan and across the Central Asian "stans." While the USSR had sent military advisors to assist with the Parchamite matter in Afghanistan, it nonetheless was ringed by theoretically secular but religiously homogenous states in Turkey, Iran and Pakistan that were American-aligned (though less so in Pakistan's case) and stood as a firewall to check Soviet influence in the Gulf and Middle East, long regions of Russian imperial ambition now transferred to the Politburo in Moscow.
The need for a Soviet position in the Middle East not dependent on the hugely mercurial and unreliable Moammar Gaddafi with the decline of Arab socialism in the vein of Nasser thus brought forth Moscow's newest and most crucial strategic goal in the region: the reconciliation of the Ba'athist states of Iraq and Syria. While both countries were ruled by the Ba'ath Party, which was formally a secular Arab socialist party that sought to lean more on the nationalist aspects of Arabism than Nasser's utopian and naive pan-Arabist project that had collapsed in failure and tears, they were ruled very differently, and by the early 1980s there was little love lost between Damascus and Baghdad. It was as late as October 1981 a formal position of the Syrian government of Hafez al-Assad that Saddam Hussein was a "fascist" who had "betrayed socialist Arabism;" Saddam, cannier and more cautious than his historical reputation would suggest, never went quite that far but his contempt for Assad was well known.
What the Soviets could offer both countries, however, in the form of its chief Arabophile diplomat Yevgeny Primakov - the KGB's point man on all things Levantine - was support for their various projects and, in the case of Saddam, indulging his gargantuan ego and self-formed personality cult. Saddam deeply resented Iran's bullying him in 1975 into accepting a new border on the Shatt al-Arab and blamed Washington and Israel for giving them unqualified support; he also believed that Iran and Turkey, seeking to avoid the instability of their own Kurdish populations, encouraged Kurdish dissidence inside Iraq. Syria, meanwhile, had its own bevy of problems, in part because it was by 1981 deeply involved in Lebanon's six-year civil war between the Sunni and Maronite populations within the country and the conflict had become mixed with Assad's own imperialist ambitions to dominate Lebanon physically, economically and politically but also viewed it as part of a proxy struggle with Israel, which explicitly supported the Maronite Christian paramilitaries that by 1981 were winning the war.
[1] At the same time that Assad was backing Sunni paramilitaries and death squads in Lebanon, however, the Sunni radical Muslim Brotherhood in Syria was carrying out one of its most aggressive campaigns against secular nationalism anywhere in the Middle East, staging bombing campaigns throughout the country for several years and very nearly assassinating Assad in July 1980.
As opposed to the Ikhwan in Saudi Arabia who had the tradition of their namesakes and whose campaign really boiled down to how the stewards of Mecca should behave culturally, Syria had never been home to a particularly conservative strain of Sunnism before the fall of the UAR, and the Muslim Brotherhood offered both pious and frustrated young Syrians alike an outlet for their dislike of the Assads and the failure of Assad to re-secure the nationalistic totem of the
irredenta in the Golan Heights, occupied under military administration by Israel since 1967.
[2] The Brotherhood, already reeling from the crackdown begun by Sadat the previous year after their failure to assassinate him over the Rose Garden Agreement, was in some ways seeing their final stand in Syria, specifically the city of Hama, where many of their organizers and paramilitaries were concentrated.
Primakov's dogged "camel diplomacy" finally had its trump card - Soviet explicit support for Syrian ambitions in Lebanon, the Golan, and a free hand with the Muslim Brotherhood, in return for burying the hatchet with Iraq and forming a pro-Soviet "Ba'ath Bloc" in the heart of the Levant. The ostensibly socialist Assad accepted; the definitively opportunist Saddam was open to it, especially as it could burnish his credentials with the Arab street ahead of his long-term goal to make Iraq the dominant power in the Middle East, now secured with Soviet weapons and finance. The world thus watched in horror as through the month of February 1982 the city of Hama was liquidated, more than three-fourths of its destroyed with tens of thousands killed or imprisoned by an army led by Assad's brother Rifaat - who was made Vice President of Syria afterwards for his troubles, an imitation of the family-run fiefdom Saddam was creating in Iraq rather than a vanguard socialist party - but also supported by Iraqi tanks and airpower, both of which were more sophisticated than Syria's weaponry. Saddam, for his part, began making much more pro-Soviet noises as the month advanced, both on economic matters and geopolitically.
In Israel, the Hama Massacre - later classified as a genocide by most scholars - horrified the Peres government as well as the opposition, now led by Yitzhak Shamir, a hardliner even more militant than Begin had been. While Syrian Sunnis were outraged - Assad and his family were Alawites, closely related to Shiism - at the purge, outlets such as the PLO were largely silent, for Arafat understood from Primakov in a meeting in Tripoli, Lebanon in mid-February that Soviet support for the PLO would require PLO acquiescence to the new Syria-Iraq axis. Hama thus brought with it another escalation in the Lebanese Civil War, as Syrian forces stepped up operations across the country and began making a push to secure more stable axes of approach into Muslim West Beirut from their territories in the north and east, with PLO fighters alongside them. Hama and Primakov's compact foretold of an anti-Israel alliance already making moves right on their doorstep.
This all came just as Israeli intelligence, furnished by reports from friendly Iran, that the Osirak nuclear site was getting closer to criticality. While ostensibly a research reactor and run by French personnel, Begin had been skeptical enough that he had drafted plans to bomb it, only for those plans to be dropped at the last second. Suddenly Peres was dusting off that operation, however, in light of the Iraq-Syria alliance, with the brothers of Ba'athism reconciled and the fear being that if Assad was willing to slaughter the Muslim Brothers wholesale he would do even worse to Israel. Saddam or Assad with a nuclear bomb would be the end of Israel, and Peres and Rabin would simply have to gamble that with Egypt's friendship secure, and a belt of Western-aligned states stretching all the way to Pakistan and Bangladesh, they could take on a Ba'athist force themselves if it meant preventing the unthinkable Armageddon option of a workable Iraqi warhead...
[1] One byproduct of the Iranian Revolution being butterflied is that the Lebanese Shia, always the third and smallest position in the country, don't have Hezbollah (or whatever version of it exists is essentially broke), which simplifies the battle lines in what was a very complicated conflict and makes it way more of a Sunni v. Maronite, and by proxy Israel v. Syria/PLO, deal.
[2] Begin losing the 1981 elections means that the 1981
de facto annexation of the Golan does not occur here.
