The Middle East between the 1973 October War and the 1990–91 Gulf War: An Epidemically Militarised Region of Conflict?

Abstract

As we saw in the Introduction, modern European history before 1945 was a history of wars.1 Classic works by Norbert Elias and Reinhard Bendix2 deal with the important function of wars in European history as midwives of social change and order creation. Recent research has led to the conclusion that nowadays wars take place predominantly in Third World countries. Gerald Braun speaks of these countries utilising war as an instrument for the pursuit of political ends in the Clausewitzian sense, ‘up to the point where industrial societies enter the post-Clausewitzian age’.3 The war of June 1967, for example, was planned and carried out by Israel with the express strategic intention of destroying Nasser’s development model. In the October War of 1973, Egypt was pursuing the strategic aim of improving its negotiating position vis-a-vis Israel. The Camp David peace accord was the outcome of this improvement. In this regard, therefore, both wars may be classified as strategic wars. The question nevertheless suggests itself whether the state of affairs left in the wake of the two major regional wars — the minor ongoing wars that occurred between 1973 and 1990 — might better be described as ‘epidemic’ in the sense meant by Rapoport.4 If the wars of 1967 and 1973 were, in the Clausewitzian sense, carried out to achieve strategic aims, and were short-lived, the interminable subsequent wars (including the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War and the Lebanon War among others) might be assessed in the sense meant by Tolstoy as ‘cataclysmic’, that is destructive and futile. These latter wars are not strategically thought-out acts based on a political concept.