11. The Cumulative Impact of Middle Eastern Wars

Roger Owen

Wars of one kind or another have been a regular feature of twentieth-century Middle Eastern life. They have included not only the century’s two world wars but also the briefer periods of intense fighting among Israel, the Palestinians, and their Arab neighbors; a variety of civil wars with outside participation like those in Yemen, Sudan, Oman and Lebanon; and the long, drawn-out war between Iraq and Iran during the 1980s. All this was enough, as these chapters amply demonstrate, to create a situation in which not just the wars themselves but also the cumulative effects of the memory of past wars and the ever present threat of new ones became important factors in their own right, influencing policy and the distribution of national resources in ways that had profound effects on political institutions, economic and social arrangements, and the general exercise of power.

Whether this central impact of repeated wars can be taken either as a defining feature of Middle Eastern political life or as something that distinguishes the Middle East from the other regions of the non-European world remains to be explored. But certainly the chapters in this book make a good case for the argument that this impact was sufficiently important to be treated as a basic part of any serious account of modern Middle Eastern history, just as it is in modern European history. The question then becomes: how should this be done? And how can such a process of factoring in be accomplished so as to make use of insights developed in the European context without being dominated by them?

The organizers of this project, Professors Steven Heydemann and Joel Migdal, set limits on what might otherwise have been an open-ended inquiry by asking contributors to concentrate on the impact of war on Middle Eastern institutions and social change. This was a good idea in principal but, like most such exercises in boundary setting, it created a number of problems of its own. For one thing, it confined the discussion within the compass of state making and national development while allowing less attention to significant aspects of the larger subject such as the regional context or the cumulative impact of repeated conflict. The discussion raised, but could not provide a definitive answer to, the question of whether when we focus on war per se we are dealing with a single, unified object of analysis.

The general approach yields best results when focused on the local impact of the twentieth century’s two world wars. Fought largely by outside powers—with the exception of the Ottomans in the first—these wars subordinated local polities and economies to the dictates of forces largely beyond local Middle Eastern control. In the Middle East, the world wars lasted more or less the same length of time as in Europe itself: that is, four to six years for World War I, depending on the region in question, and nearly six years for World War II. They involved many of the same techniques of mobilization and demobilization, although with certain local adjustments. And they followed somewhat the same trajectory, from a slow start as far as their impact on the noncombatants was concerned, through increasing hardship and privation to a short postwar period marked by inflation fueled by pent-up consumer spending, as well as by boundary changes, enforced movements of population, and the emergence of often radically new political forces. All this allows useful comparisons to be made between the Middle Eastern and European experience, with students of the former being able to draw on, and benefit from, some of the vast literature generated apropos of the latter.

One useful by-product of this same perspective is that it calls into question the usual systems of periodization imposed on Middle Eastern history, which, by using the world wars themselves as dividing lines, tends to ignore or to minimize their impact. Many of these systems make a break in 1914 before beginning again in 1918 or, in the case of Anatolia, 1923. Studies of Arab history often seem to jump from 1939 to the creation of the Arab League in 1944–45, as though, for example, the Wafdist government in Egypt simply acted as Britain’s loyal wartime agent from 1942 to 1944, or, more generally, as though political life simply closed down for the duration. And yet wars have their own powerful dynamic that often has little to do with what caused them in the first place while creating powerful new forces that continue to affect individual national polities and economies for many years after.

To begin with World War I, fighting itself took place over many parts of the Fertile Crescent during the four years of the war itself and then continued, on and off, in the form of armed resistance to foreign intrusion both in the former Arab provinces and in Anatolia and parts of Iran for several years more. This in turn involved large parts of the civilian population, many of whom were subject to various forms of mobilization—either of their husbands and sons or of their labor, crops, and animals—and most of whom suffered from one form of deprivation or another, including, in the case of the Anatolian Armenians, Assyrians, and later, Greeks, forced removal accompanied by massacre and disease. And while World War II involved less actual fighting inside the region itself, it affected just as many, perhaps more, members of the local populations, given the fact that attempts to allocate scarce resources and mobilize new ones was carried out by administrations that had developed since 1918 a much greater capacity for intervention.

These are large subjects that cannot possibly be given their full due in a work this size. Nevertheless, the three chapters devoted to them here (by Tell, Thompson, and Heydemann and Vitalis) are full of significant and, in many cases, novel suggestions about how the subject of the impact of the two world wars on the Middle East can most usefully be treated. I will highlight four: the choice of period, the contrasts drawn between the experience of the two world wars in the Middle East and between the Middle East and Europe, the particular importance of methods of wartime mobilization, and finally, the way in which the wars themselves gave rise to particular modes of action, as well as developed new resources that played a significant role once the wars had come to an end.

The choice of period is a simple but often neglected matter. Clearly, any discussion of the impact of wars has to be placed in its proper historical context. This usually means beginning the analysis some years before the event itself and then going on for some years after. Only then is it possible to sort what was truly new about wartime experience from those processes that were already in place and which simply received encouragement from a war in such a way as to accelerate their further development. Tell does this particularly well in his study of the impact of World War I on the power and positioning of the various elements of what was to become Transjordanian society.

As to the question of useful comparison, Thompson and Heydemann and Vitalis make use of the differences in the intensity between wartime mobilization in the two world wars, as well as address the significant question of why the British and French used methods for managing the Middle Eastern economies that were different from those they employed at home. This at once provided space for the entry of Middle Eastern society, which these three authors see as having been not only an object to be managed and, if possible, kept docile while the war was at its most dangerous but also as an actor in its own right, one that made use of prewar patterns of mobilization, resistance, and dissent to press its own demands upon the Allied administrators. The consequent relationship was, as Heydemann and Vitalis nicely demonstrate, one of trial and error in which, once the main priorities were established, the means to achieve them were left very much to circumstance and to what did or did not prove effective. The use of gold sales to mop up surplus purchasing power in the interest of controlling inflation was one very good example of this. Against this, efforts to introduce an effective income tax were much less successful, as was the use of anything but the most selective form of food rationing. In addition, Thompson has analyzed particularly well the different contexts in which Syria’s wartime regulation took place: first that of the Vichy French, then that of the British and Free French, and finally that of the local nationalists.

Central to successful wartime management was the control of both local resources and those transported in from outside. Here, in World War I, the British and French benefited greatly from their control over the sea-lanes that connected the region with the outside world, as well as from their ability to blockade the coastal ports in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, thus reducing Ottoman access to the cereals and other foodstuffs it needed to maintain the loyalties of the local Arab populations. In Tell’s account, this becomes a powerful factor in explaining why some tribes joined the Anglo-Hashemite revolt against the Turks and some did not. Much the same situation obtained during World War II, with the British and the French, now joined by the Americans, engaged in a largely successful battle to ensure that food shortages, as well as falling real wages, did not turn the Arab peoples against them in such a way as to hamper the general war effort.

Lastly, both world wars served as incubators for ideas, practices, and new forms of legitimation that proved important at war’s end. When it comes to the impact of ideas, previous historians have generally contented themselves with questions associated with the weakening of British and French imperial power, combined with the fillip that such wartime declarations as Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Balfour Declaration, and the North Atlantic Charter provided to various Middle Eastern nationalisms. But, as Tell ably demonstrates, local factors such as the legitimation derived from the successful wartime leadership of someone like the Amir Faisal are also an important part of the equation. Thompson makes a different point with her argument about the way the French ingratiated themselves with parts of the Syrian population, as well as the international community represented by the League of Nations, by being so obviously involved in the postwar relief effort after 1918. The continuing impact of some of the policies and practices initiated by the Anglo-American Middle East Supply Centre is somewhat better known. Nevertheless, Heydemann and Vitalis take the general argument many steps further by demonstrating the Supply Centre’s precise links with both increasing state interventionism in Egypt and Syria and the consolidation of a state-sponsored import-substituting industrialization regime.

All this is nicely suggestive of many new avenues for further research. As far as World War I is concerned, there are still many important links to be made between the suffering endured by the civilian populations and their reactions to the choices they faced in the highly charged months just after its end. Are the wartime deprivations endured by the Egyptian peasants, with their crops forcibly purchased and their menfolk and cattle forcibly conscripted, enough to explain the nationwide outburst in response to the travel ban imposed on the members of the Wafd trying to make their way to the Paris Peace Conference? Or did this also call up a mode of thought and of political action that had been in the making for some years before 1914? By the same token, what role did the increasingly anti-Ottoman feelings of the suffering Syrian population play in their attempts to define new identities for themselves in 1919–20? We also know little of the spur given to the growth of wartime industry, and of the industry’s sudden collapse when trade began again in conditions of rapid inflation and a huge consumer spending boom in Egypt just after 1918. Conditions for the Jewish settlers in what was to become Palestine are also not well understood. How many stayed? How many moved temporarily, or permanently, to safer spots such as Alexandria? And then what forces impelled some of them to create or defend positions on the ground in the somewhat anarchic conditions in the months after the war when boundaries were still to be defined?

As for World War II, there are just as many areas where the historical record seems either wholly inadequate or simply nonexistent. Even as far as the two countries Syria and Egypt are concerned, we still know very little about the war’s impact on the civilian population. And what we do know tends to be biased in terms of their suffering from shortages or, in the case of the Egyptian malaria epidemic of 1942, actual illness and disease, as against the opportunities that the wars provided for some groups to earn higher wages or become one of the war profiteers (ghani al-harb), as described in Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Midaq Alley. There are also useful contrasts to be drawn between the various regions under Anglo-French and American control. On the basis of present evidence, it would seem that in Palestine the British administrators attempted to replicate most closely the type of institutionalized controls and systems of wartime mobilization and redistribution in place in London but found that these could work effectively only with a population that was as committed to the war effort as the British themselves. This then necessitated various shifts and compromises in the direction of more flexible rationing (using a points system rather than fixed allocations of particular foodstuffs) and more creative attempts to mop up excess purchasing power, including the introduction of a government lottery. Finally, as is well-known, the encouragement given to the Jewish sector of the economy by government contracts created a firm material base for the Zionist drive for statehood as the world war came to an end. The situation in Transjordan, Iraq, and the Gulf was different again, as it most certainly was different in southern Iran and areas beyond Allied control, like Turkey.

The role of war, once the majority of Middle Eastern states had gained their independence after 1945, was wholly different and is much more difficult to pin down. In the first place, war began to involve sovereign states with their own ability to prepare for and initiate, and perhaps hope to benefit from, armed conflict with their neighbors. In the second place, war affected one part of the region, the area consisting of the new state of Israel and its immediate neighbors, much more in the first decades after independence than in either the Gulf or North Africa. There is also a question of the great disparity between the short duration of the fighting itself—less than a week in June 1967 and not much longer than two weeks in 1956 and 1973—and the huge consequences for regime authority, interstate relations, and the day-to-day lives of large sections of the civilian populations. By contrast, the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, and the long periods of civil war in Yemen, Lebanon, and Sudan, were bound to have quite different effects simply by virtue of the time they allowed for basic changes to take place.

As far as the history of the eastern end of the Mediterranean was concerned, it began with a bang: the intermittent fighting between Israel and its Arab neighbors from May 1948 to the Rhodes Armistice agreements of the spring and early summer of 1949. This, as many have pointed out, was one of the defining events of the postcolonial era: the fighting lasted long enough to allow the expansion of Israel’s borders to the north and south, the flight of three-quarters of a million Palestinian refugees, the establishment of Jordanian control over the West Bank, the development of pressure on the Jewish communities in the Arab east and North Africa to migrate to Israel, and the beginning of seismic shifts in power in a number of Arab states, starting with Zaim’s military coup in Syria in March 1949 and continuing through to the Free Officers’ coup in Egypt in July 1952, which, as Nasser and his colleagues were quick to point out, had its origins in their defeat in Palestine. This in turn began a process of escalating hostility involving cross-border raids, an arms race fueled after a while by the two superpowers, and four more wars, until tensions gradually began to wind down again as a result of the Camp David Peace Agreement between Israel and Egypt, followed nearly fifteen years later by the Oslo Agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Paradoxically, although most of the later wars were of relatively short duration, they are the ones that remain fixed in every local person’s memory, and which had a cumulative impact on policy, the conduct of interstate relations, and the creation of new political actors, like the PLO, so large as to still defy proper historical accounting. Indeed, for the time being, one gets a better sense of all this from personal testimony in novels, anthropological fieldwork, and films than from the scholarly literature itself. Reem Saad’s chapter provides a very good example, with its emphasis on the central role of war “as a feature of contemporary Egyptian history” burned into the memories of the peasants she studied. What is also important in her account is the fact that wars, and the immediate impact of wars, are seen as part of the common national experience of all the people of Egypt, to be remembered and shared as part of a process of communal recollection. Another way of making the same point is to note the fact that the Egyptian novelist Rhada Ashour, who as a girl heard the air force planes flying overhead toward the Israeli border in 1948, says that her work is a prolonged attempt to cope with what she calls “defeat.”

Consequences of this central role played by war, the expectation of war, and its use in support of a variety of powerful Middle Eastern political agendas comprise the subject of the chapters by Perthes, Migdal, and Sayigh on Syria, Israel, and the Palestinians. Each author comes at the subject from a somewhat different direction. For Perthes, the subject is not war itself, although that is lodged firmly in Syrian historical memory, but the use of preparation for war to manage society—to justify the existence of a large security establishment and to obtain a high level of strategic rent from the oil states of the Gulf in support of Syria’s self-proclaimed role as the defender of the Arab heartland against Israeli aggression. For Migdal, however, the subject is the consequences of war, notably the expansion of Israel’s boundaries following its victories against the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians in 1967, and the impact this had on the unraveling of the system of leadership and national consensus built up by the Labor Party over the previous two decades. For Sayigh the focus is on the systematic employment of Palestinian defeat and forced dispersal to create statelike institutions, which allowed a fractured community to rally behind a single political leadership with access, like the Syrian government, to another form of strategic rent.

There were, however, two types of situations in which war itself played a much more permanent role in national life. One was where states of roughly commensurate military strength fought themselves to a standstill over many years, as in the case of Iraq and Iran. The other was a long-lasting civil war in which the local combatants were encouraged, and then thwarted, by a variety of outside powers. In both cases the conflict itself went on for sufficient time to allow the creation of new structures and the emergence of new forces with significant consequences for the political, economic, and social order. As noted in Isam al-Khafaji’s account of Iraq in the 1980s, this took the form of the deliberate militarization of much of Iraqi society, which in turn led to regime-sanctioned violence, as well as the marginalization of the two communities branded as disloyal or said not to be proper Iraqis, that is, the Shi’is and the Kurds. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, the militias and their business allies adopted methods of maximizing the resources under their control, which undermined what was left of state authority and state regulation while paving the way for the creation of new economic centers of power after the war’s end.

The chapters dealing with the second half of the twentieth century are also enormously suggestive of further lines of research. But rather than make a list of such topics on a country-by-country basis, it would be useful to step back and pose the larger question of how this same material might be employed to define our subject, “war, institutions, and social change,” in such a way as to emphasize the coherence that the essays in this volume, implicitly or explicitly, suggest. I will begin by examining the transnational context before moving on to comments on the state and certain comparative issues, and then will return to the question of cumulative impact.

Of all the perspectives involved in the study of the impact of Middle Eastern war, it is the transnational that has so far received the least attention. This is odd, given the huge amount of literature devoted to general questions of war and peace and to the peculiar character of the regional subsystem. Nevertheless, it is rare to find more than passing reference to the notion of a Middle Eastern arms race or to the relationship between local military expansion and outside suppliers of either aid or equipment. And yet, clearly, in the state of no-peace between Israel and its neighbors—which existed in one form until the Camp David Agreement and continues, in another, until the present day—rival notions of the size and composition of the forces needed either to deter or overcome one or more potential enemies were crucial to the military buildup on all sides. In the light of such calculations, force levels and general strength were constantly ratcheted up through the 1970s before beginning to level off and then decline from the 1980s on. This much can be said in general, even though much about the exact nature of the process itself remains unexplored.

The felt need to maintain an increasingly large and competitive military establishment in Israel, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt necessitated, in turn, access to outside aid and arms. And while in general terms this was greatly affected by the changing relationship between each government or regime and the United States, the Soviet Union, the European arms exporting states and, in the case of the Arabs, the rulers of the oil-rich Gulf sheikdoms, the full range of consequences has, again, never been adequately explored. These consequences include the influence of suppliers over the size and deployment of the military equipment in question, the impact of imported weapons systems on local systems of command and control, the strategies needed to influence foreign suppliers, and the creation of ever-increasing opportunities for self-enrichment by middle men, entrepreneurs, and freelance suppliers. To give just one of the most obvious examples, there is a very close correlation between the major supplier of battle tanks to the Arab armies—which was first the Soviets and now, for the Egyptians at least, the Americans—and the supplier’s influence on the organization of local command structures designed to deploy them to best effect.

It can also be argued that the question of the size and nature of Middle Eastern armies had, in turn, a significant impact on the nature of the state. While state structures were different enough to make comparison difficult, it remains obvious that their sheer size alone made the militaries influential actors whose demand for local resources and a share in some of the most important decision-making processes concerning matters of security had to be fitted into the larger system of political management and control. To begin with the question of size: the expansion of a typical Arab army from a few thousand men at independence to several hundred thousand after the series of Arab-Israeli wars moved the military from a position of being too weak to control the whole state apparatus to one in which it could create and support powerful regimes; it grew so large that coups by disaffected colonels—or even generals—became a thing of the past. Another important trajectory was one that took armies into certain key sectors of the civilian economy, first in connection with military equipment itself, then into a host of peripheral activities as well. This in turn had the most important consequences for the relationship between the public and private sectors and was, in the case of the Israeli economy, partly responsible for the change in structure that took place after the 1967 war, which many economists blame for the marked slowdown in economic growth that continued for most of the next twenty years. By the same token, the present reduction in military size and spending, as the threat of another all-out Arab-Israeli war declines, will also have its own impact on the allocation of domestic resources and on the relationship between the military and other powerful economic actors.

Ideally, the situation as it developed at the center of the Middle East should be compared from the point of view of the salience of war and of preparations for war with that in North Africa and the Gulf, where, for different reasons, cross-border fighting was less important and armies remained much smaller. This is more like the Third World norm, where armies were kept mainly for internal security purposes and where few military organizations had much ability to project power outside their own territory or could do much damage to a neighboring army. By and large, wars had fewer long-lasting effects, arms races were less significant, and the nature of civil-military relations was likely to be different too. Indeed, it might be possible to imagine the situation in North Africa as constituting a useful example counterfactual to conditions in the Levant, and which allows us to at least speculate on what might have happened if Israel and its neighbors had managed to make peace shortly after 1948.

This brings me back to the central question of the cumulative impact of Middle Eastern wars and of the best way to gauge their impact on states, state making, and the development of the economy and society. The impact of one war, large or small, is clearly one thing; the impact of repeated wars, and so of an atmosphere in which new wars are both feared and expected, is quite another. Analysis of the latter represents a challenge, which the editor and contributors to this volume have begun to address. They are to be congratulated for posing so many new questions and for opening up so many new channels for research and debate. I am also confident that they have succeeded in one of the most important aims of this project, which was to transcend the limits of the Middle East itself and show the general blurring of the boundaries between war and peace, the study of which will have relevance for many other parts of the non-European world as well.