Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Arab studies, is a graduate of Yale and Oxford Universities and has taught at the Lebanese University in Beirut and the University of Chicago. In his speech, named for his eighth book, Khalidi discussed the connections between the Cold War and the current crises in the Middle East.
The lecture began with the assertion that though the Cold War ended before many college students can remember, its effects still reverberate in the world today, particularly in the Middle East.
“I’m going to try and show how this apparently antiquarian subject, the Cold War, actually relates to some of the crises we’ve been paying attention to in Lebanon, in Gaza, etc.,” Khalidi said. “Whether it’s dated from the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War ended before most university students were conscious of the world around them.”
Khalidi outlined his arguments in six points, the first of which was that all major events in the region were driven by American and Soviet policies against one another.
“The most striking example is the monstrous outcome of our government’s support for the Afghan Mujahideen. [They] were brought there by the U.S. and its allies … to fight against the Soviet Union. These two linked groups of foreign and Afghan fighters were the nuclei, the core, of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which are among the bastard offspring of the Cold War that still haunt the region and the world today. If you don’t think the Cold War affects us today, go down to New York City and stare at the hole that is there as a result.”
The superpowers’ abiding interest in the Middle East was due to the rich energy resources of the region and its strategic location, both of which became more evident in World War II, claimed Khalidi.
“The war taught people the importance of oil,” Khalidi asserted. “The decisive arm of the powers fighting World War II was the air force and [it] entirely depended on petroleum. The U.S. Air Force realized that the war would be won by denial of oil to the enemy. The Germans had hundreds of tanks and planes but they had no oil to run them.”
“Equally important: the fact that the Soviet Union could be approached from the south [was] underlined for policymakers from both sides in wartime,” Khalidi continued. “In this respect, too, we are living with the legacy of the Cold War. If you think about renewed tensions between the U.S. and Russia in recent years over pipelines, then you can see the strategic importance of the area.”
Khalidi also discussed how Soviet and American attempts to defeat each other exacerbated the major regional conflicts — the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Lebanese Civil War and the Iran-Iraq War.
“The Americans and Soviets did much more to stoke the Arab-Israeli conflict than to solve it,” Khalidi argued. “They did very little to achieve peace. They did a lot to stoke war. [Then Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger, while he was in Moscow at the end of the 1973 War, told the Soviets that he would work for an immediate ceasefire. He went to Tel Aviv, and ... told the Israelis they should feel free to continue their advance. Obviously, Kissinger felt this would bring advantage over the Soviets. He didn’t care about peace. Peace was consistently less important to either rival than was advantage over each other.”
He continued explaining that this posturing for power was also evident in the U.S.’ disregard for the promotion of democracy, a cause that it actively supported on the surface.
“What [the superpowers] were mainly interested in were regimes that supported them,” Khalidi said. “In a series of interventions intimately related to Cold War priorities, both sides acted in ways that seriously inhibited the development of democracies … The Middle East today, with one or two exceptions, is one of the most backward regions in the world in regards to democracy and freedom.”
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the makers of American foreign policies, retaining their belligerent Cold War-era attitude, searched for an ideological enemy to attack with the same fanaticism the Soviet Union had inspired, said Khalidi. They found one in terrorism.
“The U.S. lacked a global challenger,” Khalidi said. “An F-22 Raptor airplane, which cost $300 million, was designed to achieve superiority over the Soviet Air Force. The Soviet Air Force hasn’t existed in 20 years. The War on Terror providentially came along and brought along a foe that would justify the Defense Budget.”
One product of the War on Terror is what Khalidi termed “a mini-Cold War” between the United States and Iran, a rivalry that has cast its shadow over every regional conflict, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
“Tragically for the Palestinians, the alignment of Hamas with Iran has deepened the existing split in Palestinian politics and has made it impossible for the Palestinians to confront the worst conflict in 60 years,” Khalidi asserted. “The Palestinians are paralyzed by the split. I would argue … that the key issue for us here is the persistence on the part of the U.S. of Cold War policies that involve seeing the regional conflict in the Middle East as the prism of a larger struggle for influence.”
Despite these complex problems facing the U.S. and the world, Khalidi ended his lecture on a hopeful note that is perhaps best captured in College President Anthony Marx’s introduction.
“[Khalidi] has done what we in the academy aspire to do, which is to lead us to understand the most intractable problems, to see that they are not one-sided, but also not decided in the way that we imagined before,” Marx said. “And in doing so, he is a demonstration to all of us of how intellect and analytics can help us not only to understand, but we hope, we pray, to solve these problems in a more even-handed and just way.”