I could have made this post one in my "Parallel History" series, but I'll try to keep to the "5 years ago today" theme for that, so that we can look at how the US invasion of Iraq came to pass.
For this post, I simply want to comment on the soon-to-be-concluded Bush Middle East tour, especially the place where he spent the lion's share of his week: the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia. My only contact with that part of the world was two years spent in Oman - one of the places where the President did not go. So I defer to those who track Gulf matters, notably these comments from Lebanon's "The Daily Star," quoted in "Snuffysmith's Blog," which show that Gulf commentators were less than enthralled by Bush's call to arms (or at least vigilance) against Iran:
US President George W. Bush used his speech in Abu Dhabi on Sunday to reiterate many of the same accusations about Iran that we have heard him throw around since his first weeks in office seven years ago. Back then, Iran's president was Mohammad Khatami, a reform-minded leader whose efforts to promote inter-cultural understanding earned him the recognition of international institutions such as the United Nations, which acted on his suggestion to proclaim 2001 the Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations. The ensuing election of Khatami's hard-line successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made Bush's talk of the Iranian "threat" an easier sell, but Arab audiences still seem less worried today about the possibly nefarious aims of the Islamic Republic than they are about the US president's proven track record of stirring up chaos and instability in the region.
Our own favorite Bush-watcher, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, has caught the spirit of the Bush swing through the land of "Louis Farouk" gilt and "Saudi Gaudy" bling in her op-ed today:
In Abu Dhabi, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan gave the president — dubbed “the Wolf of the Desert” by a Kuwaiti poet — a gigantic necklace made of gold, diamonds, rubies and emeralds, so gaudy and cumbersome that even the Secret Service agent carrying it seemed nonplussed. Here in Saudi Arabia, the king draped W. with an emerald-and-ruby necklace that could have come from Ali Baba’s cave.
Time’s Massimo Calabresi described the Kuwaiti emir’s residence where W. dined Friday as “crass class”: “Loud paintings of harems and the ruling Sabah clan hang near Louis XVI enameled clocks and candlesticks in the long hallways.”
Now you know where "Louis Farouk" was invented.
But consider this little historic gem, thanks to the January 16, 1979 item from BBC's "On This Day"
1979: Shah of Iran flees into exile
The Shah of Iran has fled the country following months of increasingly violent protests against his regime.
There have been calls for the Ayatollah's return - and news of the Shah's departure was greeted with mass celebrations across Iran.
British and United States' ex-patriates living in Iran - regarded as symbols of westernization - have been the frequent target of attacks. Thousands have left the country.
In the Seventies, I remember the precursor to today's British Airways - the British Overseas Airways Corporation or BOAC - going to the expense of printing identical English-language brochures for their Arab and Iranian clients. Identical in all respects but one - the map. For the Iranian market, the body of water that separates the Arabian Peninsula from the rest of Asia was marked "Persian Gulf" (the nomenclature used by most of the world). You guessed it: for the Arab market, the brochures showed the "Arabian Gulf."
In those days, when the Shah was still on his gilded throne, no expense was too much for the American administrations who for decades hailed him as a bulwark of stability, a solid advance post against the encroachments of the then boogie man, Soviet Communism. No weapons system was too sophisticated, no expense too great for the "Shah of Shahs" (read Ryszard Kapuscinski's 1982 classic study of the same title, a must-read on the sources of the Iranian Revolution).
But decades of multi-billion dollar arms deals, in the end, did the Shah of Iran absolutely no good whatsoever in the face of righteous wrath from his oppressed population. Fast forward to 2008: in our wisdom, what makes the West (remember, the UK and France have been arming the Saudis with multi-billion pound and euro weapons systems too) so sure that the Saudi monarchy will last longer than the Shah's Pahlavi dynasty?
And should it not survive, what will become of all those weapons that the West is happily selling to the Saudis? Ask the Iranian Army - they're used to maintaining American equipment.