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PART ONE
1
The Trajectory of Tragedy
The landscape is rugged, with small villages nesded into valleys and along the slopes of the jagged mountains. A formation of helicopters swoops between the peaks, looking for small convoys and campsites of the rebel forces. Soldiers in the choppers’ cabins are outfitted for a fight; one of them surveys the terrain through the sights of a machine gun mounted in the aircraft’s hatch, ready to fire thousands of rounds per minute at the hostile encampments. The squadron leader spots a hamlet he suspects may harbor insurgents, and orders the pilot to hover over a pasture nearby. From a hundred feet above the ground, the helicopters frighten the sheep and the shepherd, then open fire on the confused animals as they scatter in panic. Incendiary explosives are hurled into an adjacent forest, setting it ablaze in an instant. Two of the rotorcraft descend into the village schoolyard. An officer steps out and with a bullhorn summons the townspeople to the school. An interrogation must take place, he screams. Rebels must be found. Collaborators must be punished.
The villagers obey. They have heard from cousins of this same horror besetting other villages not far away. They gather in the hot, sundrenched yard, standing for hours as the men are taken inside the school, one by one, to be questioned, accused, beaten, and humiliated. Are you a terrorist? Have you given bread to the terrorists? Do you stash guns for the terrorists? Isn’t your uncle in prison, a convicted terrorist? When were they last here?
Soldiers from the helicopters ransack the now-empty homes, looking for “evidence” and seizing the few valuables—a clock, a gold trinketthey may happen upon. When the interrogations are finished, the officer in the schoolyard accuses the villagers en masse of complicity with the rebels. You are aiding the terrorists! We will not tolerate enemy villages! You must leave—where you go we don’t know and don’t care. The soldiers then pour a white powder on the fifty small houses and set them on fire. Livestock are shot. A few bloodied men are roughly loaded into the helicopters.
As the black smoke of the villagers’ homes, homes to countless generations of their families, rises into the air, so too do the helicopters. A few spurts from a machine gun cut down a stray plowhorse. Then the big steel birds fly away as suddenly as they came. The village men inside the aircraft are never seen again. The villagers are bereft, dazed, angry. Nothing of their way of life remains. The village is destroyed. They will that very night begin the long trek to the city where they’ll join a million other villagers made homeless.
The notorious “special teams,” the men and their helicopters, have struck again.
The scene could be Vietnam thirty years ago or El Salvador ten years ago. But the men of the special teams are not Americans; only the helicopters are. The place is in Turkey, in the southeastern mountains of Anatolia, which Kurds inhabited long before the Turkish tribes of Central Asia swept in to dominate the region, and where America’s stout ally, the Turkish military, is waging a campaign of terror against the Kurdish people. The war with the Kurds has already lasted thirteen years. It is a war rooted in Turkey’s obsessive nationalism but supported by the United States out of a misbegotten fear of Islamic radicalism and a mistaken definition of American interests.
The story of Turkey’s Kurds is one of the world’s massive human-rights violations. Some two and a half million villagers have been displaced and thousands have been killed by Ankara’s fitful attempt to defeat a small rebel army. This war has accelerated an Islamic revival in Turkey that now threatens to usher in precisely what U.S. policy was so determined to prevent—a Muslim leadership hostile to the West. It is eerily reminiscent of the catastrophic failure of America’s fervent support of the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, and may foreshadow the collapse of pro-American regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well.
The currency of the policy is weaponry, lavish supplies of military hardware, training, intelligence, and strategy. The hardware is among America’s best: Black Hawk and Cobra helicopters, F-16 fighter jets, tanks and armored combat vehicles, missiles and land mines and guns. As America’s political will to wage war diminished with the disaster in Vietnam, Washington’s brain trust supplied allies to do the fighting for us; and as the end of the Cold War diminished America’s ability to stock its own arsenal, Washington’s brain trust supplied allies to keep our own arms factories running. The two policies seemed to fit each other so neatly: protect our interests by containing Islamic fundamentalism, protect our interests by arming the countries surrounding the fundamentalists.
The policies have gone awry, wastefully and tragically. The very act of militarily supplying the Shah’s repressive regime led to his downfall and the triumph of the Islamic revolution. To “contain” that disaster, the United States then shored up the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq; two wars and hundreds of thousands dead were the result. Many factors were at work in these catastrophes, of course, not just the eager conveyance of U.S. weapons. But the pattern was unmistakable. Arm our Muslim friends to confront our Muslim enemies. Keep the arms factory humming, the weaponmaker’s profits flowing, and the defense worker’s job secure. And protect American interests abroad.
These “interests” are something of an embarrassment to the Washington brain trusts. Democracy and human rights have rarely been at stake during the quarter-century that the policy has been pursued. No pretense of democracy existed in the Shah’s Iran, Saddam’s Iraq, or the oil sheikhdoms of the Arabian peninsula. Human rights are derisively ignored in Turkey and Egypt. No, the stakes are summed up in one word: oil.
Black gold was the linchpin of American involvement in the Persian Gulf for a half-century; it was the bottom line of every calculation of U.S. politicians. When the oil embargo of 1973—74 rocked the world’s economy, Americans widely agreed that such vulnerable reliance on foreign sources of oil was a dire threat to economic security. Fifty percent of those imports came from the Persian Gulf, a frightening reality confirmed again by events in 1979 (the Iranian revolution and another doubling of prices) and the two Gulf wars. But agreement on a strategy for America’s “energy independence” was subverted by ingrained habits of consumption and the influence of the oil corporations. As successive occupants of the White House encountered Americas exposure to instability in the Gulf, they reached for that most ready instrument of presidential power: the military. U.S. armed forces would be called upon only once—in Desert Storm— but other militaries could be strengthened, encouraged, and borrowed for the essential task of ensuring the flow of petroleum to America, Europe, and Japan.
Other concerns animated American policy in the Middle East—shipping lanes, stability in the eastern Mediterranean, and the sovereignty and safety of Israel. Dominating them until 1989 was the containment of the Soviet Union, whose clumsy meddling in the region was also carried out through military power—supply of Syria and Iraq, war in Afghanistan, support for insurrections in Muslim Africa. The U.S.-Soviet rivalry was the backdrop for American policy in the Islamic world, a ready justification for huge exports of weapons. When a few scattered Soviet inroads were made in the late 1970s in the Horn of Africa, when regimes in Libya and Syria and Iraq sided with Moscow, when leftists engineered vocal or violent protests in Iran or Turkey, the United States reinforced its military support for its surrogate rulers. For Muammar Qaddafi or Hafez al-Assad or Saddam Hussein, the links to the USSR were matters of convenience, born of their hatred of Israel and their pretensions of following a socialist path.
But the Soviet Union, while a constant menace and as irresponsible a military supplier as the United States, was not the principal threat to American interests in the region: that threat was Arab nationalism, which sought to eject Western dominance—and after 1979 the Islamic revival, which, more rooted than socialism could ever be, posed a mortal danger to the hegemony the West had long enjoyed.
Because the response to this Muslim challenge was backed by military power, it reverberated within the United States as well. A fresh buildup of military strength that began in the late 1970s, while largely aimed at the Soviet Union, was fueled by American anxieties over the oil crisis, the fall of the Shah, and other setbacks in the region. And this buildup, accelerated when Ronald Reagan became president, created hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the defense industry to build missiles, aircraft, and the other instruments of warfare. By the mid- to late 1980s, the Reagan rearmament was employing seven million people, directly or in related industries. As the Soviet threat began to fade with the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev, the arms industry was facing a crisis similar to that of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam: suddenly the Pentagon contracts were drying up, workers were being laid off, whole corporations dependent on the war footing were in jeopardy of bankruptcy. The pressure on U.S. politicians, especially those with constituencies enriched by the arms buildup, became enormous.
The end of the Cold War was supposed to produce a “peace dividend,” a cut in defense spending that could then be applied to other national needs. While there was much talk about beating swords into plowshares to provide jobs for the bloated defense workforce, little of that was actually in store. For defense contractors, the strategy of survival had little to do with “conversion” to commercial products. Instead, the major military manufacturers competed to gain a larger slice of the smaller defense budget, as the procurement of weapons for the U.S. military shrank by 56 percent between 1987 and 1994. Major corporations merged to stay alive: Lockheed with Martin Marietta, Grumman with Northrop. Workers were laid off in droves—two million lost their high-paying jobs in the 1990s.
And the weapons so central to the Cold War were exported with a fervor not seen since the salad days of the mid-1970s, when the oil monarchies of the Middle East eagerly traded petrodollars for American arms. The United States soon dominated the worlds commerce in weaponry, accounting for as much as 70 percent of the trade to the Third World in the mid-1990s, and will export more than $200 billion worth of weapons by the end of the 1990s. This astonishing surge seemed to run counter to the recent historic settlements of longstanding conflicts; not only had the Soviet Union collapsed, but bitter conflicts were ending in southern Africa, in Central America and, most remarkably, between Arabs and Israelis. Yes, wars still festered in places like Bosnia and Rwanda; confrontations with rickety communist regimes in North Korea and Cuba were sustained. But the potential for exports for those beleaguered venues was small.
Where, then, could America’s technological wizardry be sold? The answer lay in that cauldron of unrest, the Persian Gulf. The noxious regimes of Iran and Iraq, against all odds, remained in power. New policies of “containment” were fashioned, “requiring” vast quantities of arms to bolster our friends in this rough neighborhood. The arms industry in the defense communities of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Texas, and California would, it seemed, be given a new lease on death.
The fresh emphasis on arms exports to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel in the 1990s was engineered virtually without public comment. Dissent was expressed in intellectual circles, in editorial comment in newspapers, in the liberal advocacy groups. But that outcry rarely registered on the scale of the nation’s major political concerns.
The stakes, however, remained exceptionally high. Imports of oil from the region were as high as ever. The costs in U.S. military deployments in Turkey (to protect Kurds in northern Iraq from Saddam) and Saudi Arabia (to protect its monarchy from Iran and Iraq), the aid dollars soaked up by Israel and Egypt, the political and economic capital squandered in attempting to isolate Iran, Iraq, and Libya, all signaled the primary importance and extraordinary price of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Without their arms exports into the region, several American arms makers would collapse, with tens of thousands losing their jobs. And the order in the region remained crucial to the prospects for peace, stability, and economic growth of the nations on its periphery, especially the newly independent states of the former USSR, many of which were Muslim. Nowhere in the world, not in Russia, not in China, is there more attention from American government and business than in the Middle East, and nowhere has American engagement been more consistent, and more consistently a disaster.
The following chapters unfold the tale of this calamity. The story is told in three interwoven threads: in the world of Washington policy making; in the Middle East, particularly Turkey; and in a key venue of American arms manufacturing, Connecticut. The three places have combined uncannily to produce one of the world’s great human-rights catastrophes, the village-by-village destruction of “Kurdistan,” the unsovereign homeland of perhaps 20 million people.
The story begins in different historical eras. To grasp the evolution of the Middle East and its relations with the West, we reach back more than a thousand years; to understand the politics of American intentions, we reach back to Richard Nixon’s presidency; to see how Connecticut’s prosperity became so dependent on the military, we reach back to the American Revolution. By the 1970s, the three are interacting forcefully: Washington is exporting weapons to Iran, Turkey, and elsewhere in the region—weapons often made in Connecticut—with uncommonly mortal consequences.
The interwoven stories demonstrate, among other lessons, the sheer complexity of the American-Islam confrontation in the late twentieth century; they also show the utterly destructive role that U.S. military largesse has played. The story encompasses not only folly and miscalculation, but the authentic “Hobson’s choice” of how to gracefully wind down the military-industrial complex from its Cold War excesses. The story is told not simply to blame the avaricious or amoral posturings of American leaders but, more significantly, to lay out how their embrace of specious ideas about the Muslim world and American power has led to one failure after another in the region, with staggering human costs at home and abroad.
Our story argues for a new modus vivendi with Islam and a reorienting of America’s 30-year habit of projecting military power through the conveyance of high-tech weaponry. The transfer of military goods to Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey has brought no net benefit to the United States. At home, it merely puts off harder choices about economic growth and industrial jobs. It can confidently be said that no such shipments would be needed, either there or here at home, if more sensible and readily available policies of diplomacy and economics were embraced.
That theoretical assertion, however, is less compelling than the tale that follows.
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