Abstract
Shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when President Bush began to develop his vision of the “New World Order,” he had no clear idea of its shape and guiding principles. Although the Cold War was over, the Soviet Union was not yet defunct and the Gulf War not yet won. Bush therefore outlined a rather vague mission of achieving “the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom and the rule of law.”2 This was reminiscent of President Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points and similar declarations made 72 years earlier, which had called for “self-determination” for all people, including the “unmolested opportunity of autonomous development” for nationalities under Turkish [Ottoman] rule in particular.3 It is instructive to compare the two declarations in terms of their vision for the Middle East and America’s standing in it. While the Wilson doctrine envisaged a drastic change from the status quo ante by allowing self-determination to the nations of the region that of Bush planned to return to the status quo ante by freeing Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.
We are a nation of rock-solid realism and clear-eyed idealism. We are Americans: we are the nation that believes in the future. We are the nation that can shape the future.
(President George Bush, State of the Union address, January 30, 1991)1
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Notes
For Wilson’s Fourteen Points, see Encyclopedia Britannica (Internet version). For his doctrine of self-determination, see James Gelvin, “The Ironic Legacy of the King-Crane Mission,” in David W. Lesch, The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 11–27.
See Haim Bresheeth and Nira Yuval-Davis (eds.), The Gulf War and the New World Order (London, New Jersey: Zed Books, 1991). See pp. 1–10, and more specifically Noam Chomsky’s essay, “The US and the Gulf Crisis,” pp. 13–26. For a different kind of critique,
see Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict 1990–1991 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. xxix; 3–19.
On this, see Lawrence Freedman, “The Gulf War and the New World Order,” Survival, Vol. XXXIII, No. 3 (May/June 1991), pp. 195–209.
Yigal Sheffy “The Military Dimension of the Gulf War,” in Ami Ayalon (ed.), Middle East Contemporary Survey (MECS) 1991 (Boulder: 1993), p. 86.
Haim Shemesh, Soviet-Iraqi Relations, 1968–1988, In the Shadow of the Iraq-Iran Conflict (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992), see pp. 249–250.
For changing American interests in the Middle East, see Burton I. Kaufman, The Arab Middle East and the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996).
See, e.g., Amatzia Baram and Barry Rubin (eds.), Iraq’s Road to War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996);
Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 1990–1991 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
Majid Khadduri, War in the Gulf, 1990–1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
Barry Rubin, Cauldron of Turmoil (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992).
For a discussion on imperialism, see Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan Schmidt, Imperialism: The Study and Significance of a Political Word (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
For the attacks on Kurds, see C.J. Edmonds, Kurds,Turks and Arabs (London: Oxford University Press, 1957). Edmonds described one such occasion thus: “I was constantly in the air… visiting Sulaimani and Halabja or accompanying bombing raids and demonstration flights,” p. 392.
See Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
For the text and an analysis of the declaration, see Daniel Dishon and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, “Inter-Arab Relations,” in Colin Legum, Haim Shaked, and Daniel Dishon (eds.), MECS 1979–80 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1981), pp. 195–196, 224–225.
For a discussion, see Barry Rubin, “The New Middle East: Opportunities and Risks,” Security and Policy Studies, No. 19 (Tel Aviv: BESA Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University, 1995), pp. 47–64.
David Menashri, Revolution at a Crossroads (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1997).
Ihsan Gürkan, “Turkish-Israeli Relations and the Middle East Peace Process,” Turkish Review of MES, No. 7 (1993), p. 102. It was also maintained that at the time, Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes suggested to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that the Arabs should be left out of the defense plan.
George Emanuel Gruen, Turkey, Israel and the Palestinian Question, 1948–1960: A Study in the Diplomacy of Ambivalence (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1970), p. 221.
Walter F. Weiker, “Turkey,” in Itamar Rabinovich and Haim Shaked (eds.), MECS 1984–85 (Tel Aviv: 1987), pp. 692–93;
William M. Hale, “Turkey,” in Ami Ayalon and Haim Shaked (eds.), MECS 1988 (Boulder: 1990), pp. 768–770.
Sabri Sayarı, “Turkey: The Changing European Security Environment and the Gulf Crisis,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter 1992), p. 11.
Necip Torumtay Orgeneral Torumtay’ın Anıları (İstanbul: Milliyet, 1993),
Peter Galbraith, Civil War in Iraq: A Staff Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, May 1991; Time, April 15, 1991.
See the remarks by Chief of Staff Necip Torumtay and Doğan Güreş’s on the issue. A. Haluk Ülman, “Turkiye’nin Yeni Güvenlik,” in Haluk Ülman (ed.), Ortadoğu Sorunları ve Türkiye (İstanbul: TÜSES, 1991), pp. 121–122.
For a detailed discussion, see Jacob Roy, “The Establishment of Relations between Israel and the Soviet Union under Gorbachev,” in Benyamin Neuberger (ed.), War and Peacemaking, Selected Issues in Israel’s Foreign Relations (H) (Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel, 1992), pp. 402–416.
Ibid., Gad Barzilai, “Israel,” in Ami Ayalon (ed.), MECS 1990 (Boulder: 1992), pp. 438–439; Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, .
For the ineffectiveness of this “protection,” see Aharon Levran, Israeli Strategy after Desert Storm (London: Frank Cass, 1997), pp. 10–16;
Efraim Inbar, “Contours of Israel’s New Strategic Thinking,” Security and Policy Studies No. 27 (Tel Aviv: BESA Center for Strategic Studies, June 1996), p. 58.
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© 2004 Ofra Bengio
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Bengio, O. (2004). After the 1991 Gulf War Earthquake. In: The Turkish-Israeli Relationship. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979452_2
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