Burning oil fields in Kuwait from Jarhead (Credit: Neal Street Productions)
The 1990s were a dramatic time in the Middle East, and planted the seeds for the conflicts of today.
One of the dramatic shortcomings of being born in the 1990s is that I didn’t get the chance to experience it firsthand, but the events were still too recent to be taught in school while I was growing up. The purpose of this series is to examine the world right before the modern era and examine the origins of today’s conflicts.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, I developed an odd fascination with uncovering the world events that preceded my birth. It became more pronounced during 2021 when it was announced that the United States would be pulling out of Afghanistan, putting an end to the twenty-year war.
This is not comprehensive to cover the history of west Asia in the latter half of the twentieth century, but I recognize that many Americans are relatively in the dark like I was until I started reading up on my own. This is an attempt to synthesize a lot of information to hopefully give a light to people in the same position I was not too long ago.
Your Problems, Courtesy of Moscow and Washington
If the 1990s were a happy time for most of Europe and the former Soviet Union, the sentiment wasn’t shared in the Middle East. The state of the Middle East in the 1990s can be traced to the Cold War. With the USSR and USA unwilling to go to war against each other, playing geopolitical chess games by backing different groups in various proxy wars across the globe was their way of engaging with each other. Usually, it was to secure vital resources or keep the other side from gaining a foothold somewhere strategically important. Or both.
The things which put the Middle East at the forefront of world affairs are its fossil fuel reserves. In the 1970s, oil made the world go round. It still does, but it did back then too. The West just needed to get its fair share of liquefied dinosaurs to burn in many combustion engines. Iran just so happened to be the place to do that, until the revolution.
In the 1920s, Reza Shah Pahlavi was the Prime Minister of Persia up until he led a coup which overthrew the ruling Shah, Ahmad Shah Qajar, in December 1925. Reza Shah began serious efforts to modernize the nation as the first of the Pahlavi dynasty. During World War II, the Soviets and the British invaded Iran in a joint effort to secure the oil resources for themselves. Additionally, their invasion was a preventative measure against Nazi Germany getting the oil. This invasion resulted in Reza Shah abdicating in favor of his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, in 1941. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was decidedly more pro-west than his father, and enjoyed close ties with the United States, Britain, France, and many other nations of the first world. Iran was seen as a modern nation and a desired tourist destination. The Iranian government would host lavish parties even as its people began to starve. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi would be the last Shah of Iran.
Mohammad Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister of Iran in April 1951 and began to draw stricter boundaries in favor of constitutional monarchy. This led to him being unpopular with the Shah. Mossadegh also intended to nationalize all of the Iranian oil interests, which were granted to British companies under humiliating contracts for the Iranian people. In 1953, a coup against Mossadegh was executed. The initial spark was Iranian in nature by opposition movements but turned into an inferno thanks to the efforts of the British intelligence services. Initially, America took Iran’s side on the longstanding oil debate, but the changes of the post-war government, rabid fears of communism, and the lack of oversight on the Central Intelligence Agency changed America’s position. The British pressured the Americans by claiming Mossadegh would turn towards the communists, and it was all America needed to back the coup. Propaganda efforts by the CIA’s Tehran station fanned the flames until Mossadegh held emergency powers, Parliament was dissolved, and angry mobs all over Tehran were ready to go. Pro-monarchy military officers took the side against Mossadegh, and the Shah went along with the plot to oust Mossadegh after the Americans said they would be continuing with or without his blessing.
The Shah dismissed Mossadegh as prime minister, and more pliable prime ministers would succeed him. This allowed the Shah to take more direct control over governing Iran, which continued to deepen the chasms between the upper class and everyone else. Resentment continued building, compounded by Iran’s secret police, SAVAK, founded in 1957. In a land without dissent, without a strong economy, and a leader increasingly out of touch with his people, Iran was ripe for another storm by the end of the 1970s.
The Iranian Revolution took most of 1979 to come to completion. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Not to be confused with his eventual successor and current Supreme Leader of Iran since 1989, Ali Khamenei) was a Muslim cleric in exile in France thanks to his opposition to the Shah. While in exile, he recorded speeches which were copied onto tapes and disseminated throughout Iran by sympathetic travelers smuggling them in. Throughout 1978, protests against the Shah were everywhere in Iran, and the Shah fled by January of 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini returned to town.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 started out as a group effort to oust the Shah, with a coalition of republicans, communists, socialists, and Islamic fundamentalists. Slowly the more extreme groups in favor of an Islamic Republic won out the power struggles over the course of the year. In November 1979, a group a group of diplomats at the American embassy were taken hostage by a student group of revolutionaries as part of a protest. Initially intending on holding them for two weeks to send a message, the unstable nature of revolutionary Iran and the inability of the provisional government to exercise authority over a people much more loyal to Khomeini led to the hostages being kept longer, eventually winning the support of Ayatollah Khomeini himself. With the de facto leader of the nation supporting the students, what was meant to be a fourteen day protest turned into an international catastrophe which lasted 444 days. The incident destroyed diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States, and relations have been kept tense ever since.
Neighbor Against Neighbor
Iran wasn’t the only unstable nation leading into the 1980s. Next door, Iraq was also going through turbulent times. Iraq had been run by Saddam Hussein since he became Vice President in 1968. While he officially became President in 1979, the weak health of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr meant that Saddam Hussein called more of the shots in the years leading up to this. It turned Ba’athist Iraq from a nominally Arab Socialist nation to another authoritarian dictatorship under the control of a madman. Saddam Hussein, seeing a weak Iran in the wake of the 1979 revolution and wanting more territory for Iraq, launched an invasion in 1980. His attempt failed and lit off the Iran-Iraq war which only solidified the new Islamic Regime in Iran and led to devastating losses for both sides. Iraq gained basically nothing when the war ended in 1988.
Iraq had been an ally of the Soviet Union for a while. Most of its equipment was export versions of Soviet equipment from the 1970s, with some minor homegrown upgrades. Meanwhile, Iran had been an ally of the United States, getting access to top notch equipment such as the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. Iran under the Shah was well on its way to being a staunch American ally in the Middle East. When Khomeini took power in 1979, and the hostage crisis dragged on until mere moments before Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President (securing the release of the hostages was completely an accomplishment of the Carter administration), the United States felt much less inclined to be friendly towards Iran. As a result of Reagan’s foreign policy in the 1980s, the United States supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. That support would not last for much longer after the dust had settled.
The Iran-Iraq war would be a brutal eight years of conflict in some of the most barbaric ways. Chemical weapons, child soldiers, and trench warfare were only a few in the rolodex of nightmares the war contained. The details are important to the two nations involved, but ultimately bear little weight on world affairs. That isn’t to say that Western awareness of the conflict shouldn’t grow, but the combat itself wouldn’t set up the dominoes. Rather, what would affect the world for years to come was the aftermath.
Saddam Hussein was a brutal warmonger, but the Iranian hostage crisis, the Islamic Republic’s hostility towards the United States, and the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan dictated Iraq as the horse America backed during the Iran-Iraq war. In a conflict where America should have remained neutral, the United States chose to support the aggressor. The argument could be made that the Reagan-era of interventionism helped pave the way for much of the Middle East today. American support for the Shah soured many Iranians’ opinions of the nation, but the support for Saddam Hussein as he invaded caused most Iranians to utterly revile the United States. With good reason.
Saddam Hussein lost hard in the Iran-Iraq war, though Iran did too. The only positive for the Islamic Republic of Iran is that it solidified the cleric’s control over the nation, and people who were hesitant about supporting the regime grew to be fervent supporters in the wake of an existential threat. Recent events show that the state is losing its grip on power. Time will only tell whether the Islamic Republic of Iran has run its course. In the wake of the war with Iraq, however, it was obvious the Islamic regime was going nowhere.
Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, was going to Kuwait. And he intended to stay.
Rock the Casbah
With his nation’s oil production decimated by the war, and the economy in shambles, Saddam Hussein elected to annex the neighboring Gulf state of Kuwait for their oil resources in late summer 1990. Iraq’s presence in Kuwait meant that they were well in striking distance of Saudi Arabia, which had become a tentative western ally in the years before. Saudi Arabia invited American forces into the country as a protective measure against Iraqi encroachment. King Fahd chose the Americans over the ‘freedom fighters’ under the command of Saudi citizen and member of prominent family, Osama bin Laden, which would become a major sticking point later.
By the end of 1990, the United Nations Security Council voted overwhelmingly to support a coalition, led by the United States, to kick Iraq’s military out of Kuwait if they did not voluntarily leave by the deadline of January 15th, 1991, which set within UNSC Resolution 678. The deadline came and went, and the coalition enacted Operation Desert Storm two days after. Bombing runs over Baghdad opened the offensive, followed by a ground invasion six weeks later. The ground invasion began on February 24th, and a hundred hours later, Iraq had been chased back to its own borders. President George H.W. Bush elected not to continue the advance into Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein.
With internationally agreed upon no-fly zones set up over large portions of Iraq, it would come to the coalition members to enforce those areas, leaving American forces inside Saudi Arabia for a while afterwards. Osama bin Laden refused to accept this, seeing American presence on the Muslim holy land as a great affront to Islam and its adherents. Eventually, bin Laden caused enough of a stink to the point where the Saudi government stripped him of his citizenship, and he hid out in Sudan for a few years.
By the mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden would call Afghanistan home.
The Graveyard of Empires
No world power who ever attempted to exert control over Afghanistan ever succeeded. The British failed in the late 1800s. The Soviets would try in the 1980s and get shellacked as well. Then America tried pacifying the country after 9/11, and it didn’t exactly end with Mission Accomplished either. Afghanistan had a troubled history in the 20th century, and it didn’t get better when the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve 1999.
Afghanistan was a monarchy from the 1800s up until the early 1970s, when the King was overthrown by his cousin, who leaned towards the Soviet Union. At this time, Afghanistan bordered the Soviet Union, due to borders with Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. That meant that Afghanistan’s new President deciding to take on a more pro-American stance meant the Soviet Union could tolerate his antics no longer. In 1978, Afghanistan broke out into a full blown civil war when the President was assassinated by the communist movement supported by the USSR. In the wake of this, the Soviet Union decided direct intervention was necessary out of fear of a border state falling into either the capitalist sphere or the Islamic fundamentalism which had recently taken over Iran, which also bordered the USSR.
When the USSR started sending soldiers and military equipment en masse to Afghanistan, the United States government saw an opportunity to give Moscow a black eye. So, the United States supplied various militia factions with weapons and supplies. They would be known as the mujahideen. After the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, some mujahideen fighters would join the movement which rule Afghanistan by the end of the civil war in 1996 known as the Taliban. Others would resist against the Taliban until they were killed, like the Northern Alliance led by the Lion of Panjshir, Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Seeing the struggle against the Soviets as a religious struggle, several Muslim Arab factions would give their support as well, either by traveling to Afghanistan, sending money, or both.1 Osama bin Laden was a devout Muslim, who saw his religious zealotry as a way to fight against the great enemies of Islam. As Afghanistan was almost entirely a Muslim nation, the Soviets were a cause worth fighting against. Bin Laden’s faction was never directly supplied by the United States. The mujahideen were not a unified faction either, simply different groups with the common goal of ejecting the USSR from Afghanistan. Many of them wanted to be top dog once the fighting was done, and not all were as noble as Ahmad Shah Massoud in their vision for a post-war Afghanistan. They were, however, happy to use American equipment to get there.
The Soviet Union eventually lost so many troops to the mujahideen, so many helicopters to American FIM-92 Stinger missiles in the hands of the mujahideen, and so much money prosecuting a war the Soviet people didn’t care to support, the Soviet Union left Afghanistan in 1989. Victory for the brave mujahideen fighters was won.
Once the Soviets were no longer a threat, those fancy new weapons would be turned on other Afghans.
After the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, the country descended into a civil war to decide who would rule the rubble next. Religious extremists who had fled over the border with Pakistan during the Soviet invasion returned to Afghanistan. Ethnically Pashtun2 , The Taliban offered power untouched by the civil war, and gave security to people weary of the war. The world ‘Taliban’ directly translates to ‘students’ in Pashto, and they were students of Islam. A very strict interpretation of Islam. The Taliban adopted many other Pashtun fighters, and other Islamic extremists on their way to taking control of most of Afghanistan. By 1996, they took Kabul and most of the rest of the nation allowed them to call the shots. Only Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance based out of the Panjshir Valley provided any semblance of effective resistance against Taliban rule. Massoud would have been the natural choice to lead a reunited Afghanistan, as he was well respected in the West, in his own nation, and was a progressive leader who believed in the rule of law while also being a devout Muslim himself. These natural leadership qualities made him a threat to the Taliban if he got major support from the great powers of the world, which is why he was assassinated by Al Qaeda at the behest of the Taliban on September 9th, 2001.
Over There
After the Gulf War, the American reputation was riding high for effectiveness in warfare and fighting for moral causes. Even though it probably shouldn’t have. After the pointless quagmire of the Vietnam War, America had seemingly redeemed itself and enjoyed the celebrated reputation it had gained after World War II and the Korean War in terms of fighting for freedom and democracy.
It was in the wake of this measure of success that America felt it could do no wrong, and everything would be easy for it with little loss of American life. The United States demonstrated its superiority against the fourth largest army in the world, despite Bill Hicks pointing out there’s a steep drop off between the third and fourth nations on that list.
In 1993, Somalia was in the middle of a civil war, and the UN had a peacekeeping presence in the region. After attacks on UN troops continued mounting by forces under the command of Mohamed Farrah Aidid became too costly, the United States took it upon themselves to launch Operation Gothic Serpent in August of 1993 to capture Aidid. On October 3rd, during an operation in service of this goal, a US Army Blackhawk went down in Mogadishu. What followed was a harrowing attempt to rescue the crew with an Army element severely outnumbered and outgunned in a hostile urban environment with lots of civilians nearby. It resulted in 18 dead Americans with another 84 wounded. It would be known as the infamous Black Hawk Down incident, especially after the eponymous movie was released in January 2002. Such a public failure called to mind other American failures in the military sphere, and broke American public interest in boots on the ground overseas. Large scale intervention with American troops on the ground would not occur again until after September 11th.
This hesitancy, along with a cavalcade of intelligence failures, complacency, and arrogance would allow the September 11th attacks to strike America and bring the 21st century off to a grim start.
Afghanistan and Iraq would both become crucial battlegrounds in the Global War on Terror prosecuted after the attacks of September 11th. All that happened in the 1990s was merely prologue to the horrors which would be unleashed on Western Asia in the name of security and freedom from terrorism courtesy of the United States and its allies.
Up until 2001, however, all these nasty things were happening over there.
- Important to note that Arabs and Persians are ethnically distinct. Afghanistan was previously part of the Persian empire in its history, and it’s most spoken language, Dari, is a dialect of the Persian language which also includes the Farsi spoken in Iran. ↩︎
- An ethnic group who traditionally made their home in the region which is now the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. ↩︎
Ark of the Lost Angels 
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