A History of the Middle East: Fourth Edition by Peter Mansfield & Nicolas Pelham

Author:Peter Mansfield & Nicolas Pelham [Mansfield, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780698156593
Publisher: Penguin Books

12. The Years of Turbulence

With the ending of the Nasser era, the trends which had been apparent since the Arab disaster of 1967 asserted themselves more strongly. There was a further shift in power and influence towards the oil-producing states of the Middle East. At the same time, Israel, which had suffered a period of economic crisis and self-doubt before the Six-Day War, gained new confidence as the indisputably dominant military power in the region. On the other hand, the Arabs of Palestine, whose suffering and oppression had intensified, began the process of asserting their own national identity.

In the two key states of the Arab East – Syria and Iraq – younger leaders emerged in Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein, who, against powerful opposition, succeeded in dominating their country’s affairs till the end of the century. Neither could hope to don Nasser’s mantle of Arab leadership, if only because of intense rivalry between them, but they were able to make the Syrian and Iraqi nation-states become regional powers of significance. They were helped by the fact that Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor, effectively abandoned Egypt’s claim to Arab leadership by setting out on his own course which led to a separate peace with Israel. The tragic victim of the variety of conflicting religious/political and socio-economic forces in the Middle East was the tiny republic of Lebanon, which from 1975 was devastated by a 15-year civil war.

The post-Nasser era was marked by a sharp decline in the influence of the Soviet Union in the Middle East and some improvement in relations between the United States and most of the Arab regimes, although these relations were always endangered by the virtually unswerving US support for Israel. By the end of the 1960s Britain had withdrawn from the Gulf and southern Arabia, and the quasi-imperial British role in the Middle East had been finally liquidated.

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