U.S. Military Involvement in the Middle East

The Middle East—defined here as the area stretching from the Persian Gulf to North Africa—has witnessed sporadic U.S. military intervention since 1801, when Thomas Jefferson dispatched a flotilla of warships to the shores of Tripoli to protect American commerce from raids by the Barbary pirates. The U.S. Navy periodically patrolled the Mediterranean during the nineteenth century from bases in Minorca and Sicily, and American troops fought their first major engagement of World War II—Operation Torch—in Algeria.

America's sustained military involvement in the Middle East, however, dates from the late 1940s, a time of growing Cold War rivalry with the Kremlin, deepening Western dependence on Persian Gulf oil, and mounting tensions between Arabs and Israelis. After an impromptu naval show of force helped reduce Soviet diplomatic pressure on Turkey in 1946, the Truman administration projected American power into the eastern Mediterranean on a permanent basis by establishing the U.S. Sixth Fleet, based in Naples. Some in Washington worried that the partition of Palestine in November 1947 and U.S. recognition of the state of Israel six months later might necessitate armed intervention to prevent Soviet meddling and to protect the Jewish state.

By early 1949, however, the Israelis had won a stunning victory, and the United States spent the next two decades seeking to preserve a fragile military balance between Israel and its Arab neighbors. To this end, the Truman administration took the lead in drafting the Tripartite Declaration of May 1950, which placed strict limits on the flow of American, British, and French arms into the Middle East. And when the Israelis, supported by British and French, attacked Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Eisenhower administration used diplomatic and economic leverage to force them to withdraw. After the Arabs began to receive large amounts of Soviet arms during the late 1950s, America moved to ensure Israeli security by providing Tel Aviv with recoilless rifles in 1958, antiaircraft missiles in 1962, battle tanks in 1965, and jet fighters in 1966.

In May 1967, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the Strait of Tiran at the mouth of the Gulf of Agaba to Israeli shipping and expelled United Nations peacekeeping forces from the Sinai Desert, moves that Israel regarded as acts of war. The Johnson administration hoped to ease tensions and prevent the outbreak of hostilities by attempting to organize a multinational naval force to patrol the disputed waters. On 5 June 1967, however, Israel in a preemptive strike attacked Egypt and Jordan, which had allied itself with the Nasser regime, and occupied the Sinai and the West Bank. Five days later, Israel invaded Syria and seized the Golan Heights. When Moscow threatened to intervene during the final hours of the Six‐Day War to prevent the defeat of its Arab clients, Washington sent the U.S. Sixth Fleet into the eastern Mediterranean to discourage Soviet adventurism.

Anwar Sadat, who had become president of Egypt after Nasser's death in September 1970, and Syria's Hafaz al Assad decided to use force to recapture the territory lost to Israel in 1967. In October 1973, they launched a surprise attack on Israel during the Yom Kippur holiday. In the first days of the fighting, Egyptian troops recaptured part of the Sinai, and Syrian tanks nearly overran Israeli positions in the Golan Heights. The tide began to turn rapidly in Israel's favor, however, as the Nixon administration agreed to airlift badly needed war material to Tel Aviv. With the Israeli troops within striking distance of Cairo and Damascus, the Soviet Union, as it had done six years earlier, threatened to intervene militarily. After deterring the Kremlin by briefly placing U.S. strategic forces at the highest level of readiness, the White House brokered a cease‐fire in late October and Henry Kissinger undertook a lengthy process of shuttle diplomacy that brought about military disengagement between Israel and Egypt in 1974 and between Israel and Syria a year later. As part of the September 1978 Camp David Accords that led to the signing of a comprehensive Egyptian‐Israeli peace treaty in March 1979, the United States agreed to station several hundred U.S. troops in the Sinai Desert, where they served as peacekeepers throughout the 1980s.

Although the United States managed for the most part to avoid becoming militarily involved in the Arab‐Israeli conflict during the half century after World War II, persistent political instability in the Muslim world triggered armed American intervention in the Middle East with increasing frequency after the late 1950s. On 15 July 1958, Dwight D. Eisenhower dispatched 15,000 American Marines to Lebanon following a bloody left‐wing coup d’état in Iraq that threatened Lebanese president Camille Chamoun and raised fears in Washington that events in Beirut were about to parallel those in Baghdad. During their four‐month tour of duty in Lebanon, U.S. troops helped restore order, enabling American diplomats to arrange a truce between warring Christian and Muslim factions. The Marines pulled out of Beirut on 25 October 1958 without having suffered any casualties.

During the mid‐1960s, the United States intervened briefly in Saudi Arabia, where the Pentagon had obtained rights to a small air base at Dhahran at the end of World War II. In October 1962, radical Arab nationalists staged a coup against the house of Saud's royalist neighbors next door in Yemen, prompting Nasser to send 70,000 troops to assist the Yemeni revolutionaries. Eager to reassure the jittery Saudis, who feared that Egypt would use Yemen as a springboard for further adventures in the Arabian peninsula, John F. Kennedy agreed in March 1963 to station a squadron of U.S. jet fighters in Dhahran. There they played a high‐altitude game of “cat and mouse” with Egyptians MiGs along the Saudi‐Yemeni frontier until Lyndon B. Johnson terminated “Operation Hard Surface” in early 1964.

American military involvement in the Middle East increased during the 1970s following a series of sudden shifts in the regional balance of power. In 1971, Great Britain pulled its armed forces out of the Persian Gulf. In early 1979, Islamic revolutionaries inspired by the Ayatollah Rouhallah Khomeini toppled the shah of Iran, then took fifty‐three U.S. diplomats hostage in November. One month later, Russian troops invaded Afghanistan to prop up the pro‐Soviet government in Kabul.

President Jimmy Carter responded by promulgating the Carter Doctrine in January 1980, promising to protect American interests in the Persian Gulf. He moved quickly to acquire a string of strategic bases stretching from Kenya to Diego Garcia, and announced plans for a new “rapid deployment force” of 85,000 U.S. troops. In April 1980, however, a U.S. military attempt to free the Americans held hostage in Iran failed spectacularly when two American helicopters collided at a secret desert airstrip just outside Teheran, killing eight crewmen.

Although the hostages were released at the outset of his presidency, Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, fared little better. Determined to combat state‐sponsored terrorism in the Middle East, the Reagan administration did succeed in reining in Libya's Muamar Gaddafi by staging two U.S. air raids against Libyan targets, first in August 1981 and again in April 1986. But when Reagan agreed to send 800 American troops to Beirut as part of a multinational peacekeeping force in the aftermath of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, disaster ensued. In October 1983, Iranian‐backed terrorists detonated a huge truck bomb at the Beirut airport housing the Manne ground‐force headquarters, killing 241 U.S. Marines. Four years later, there was more trouble after the Reagan administration moved to contain the Iran‐Iraq War, which had been raging since September 1980. Hoping to prevent the conflict from disrupting the flow of Middle East oil to Western consumers, Washington reflagged Kuwaiti tankers in early 1987 and then sent the U.S. Navy into the Persian Gulf to escort them through the war zone. In April, an Iraqi jet hit an American frigate, the USS Stark, with an Exocet missile, killing thirty‐seven sailors. Fifteen months later, in July 1988, an American guided missile cruiser, the USS Vincennes, accidentally downed an Iranian airbus, killing all 290 aboard.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 triggered a dramatic escalation of the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf. Fearful that Saddam Hussein might attack Saudi Arabia next, President George Bush sent 200,000 American troops to the Persian Gulf as part of Operation Desert Shield in late August. Determined to force Saddam to pull out of Kuwait, Bush increased the number of U.S. soldiers and sailors in the gulf to 541,000 by the end of the year and put together a broad anti‐Iraqi military coalition that included America's NATO allies and several Arab states, among them Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. On 16 January 1991, Bush unleashed Operation Desert Storm, which saw a monthlong U.S. aerial bombardment of Iraq followed by a swift flanking attack on Saddam's troops, who fled Kuwait in disarray in late February. American casualties during the Persian Gulf War totaled 146 dead, while estimates for Iraqi troops killed in action range from as few as 6,000 to as many as 100,000. In the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, the United States stationed 24,000 troops and 26 warships in the Persian Gulf on a long‐term basis to ensure continued access to Middle East oil and to promote regional security and stability—objectives first articulated by the Truman administration a half century earlier. In 1998–99, Saddam Hussein hampered UN weapons inspectors and challenged U.S. air surveillance. Consequently, President Bill Clinton in Operation Desert Fox increased American military presence in the Persian Gulf to 33,000 service people and American and British aircraft began sporadic air attacks on Iraqi military targets. In October 1998, President Clinton brokered the so‐called Wye Accord between the Palestinians and the Israelis in which the Palestinians received more land on the West Bank and security control over it and in turn accepted monitoring by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to ensure active efforts to control terrorists.

This entry is being updated.

[See also Cold War: Causes; Eisenhower Doctrine; Lebanon, U.S. Military Involvement in; Lebanon Crisis; Navy, U.S.: Since 1946; Terrorism and Counterterrorism.]

Bibliography

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