"War and Alliance Decisions in the Gulf, 1971-2000"

Project Description
F. Gregory Gause, III
University of Vermont

The Issue and Its Relevance: Since the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, the Persian/Arabian Gulf, the location of over half of the world's known oil reserves, has been the scene of almost continual inter-state conflict. Understanding those conflicts, both in terms of the Iraqi decisions to initiate war in 1980 and 1990 and of the reactions to those decisions made by other regional powers, is important for two reasons. First, there has been little in-depth academic research done on security issues in the Gulf which focuses on the perceptions and actions of the regional states themselves. Although there are some important exceptions, the bulk of the published material has either been superficial and journalistic, or has focused narrowly on the specifics of military technologies and tactics, or has been exclusively interested with American policy. This project proposes to fill that gap. It will ground the examination of the war and alliance decisions in the region within the larger international relations literature on these topics, thereby offering a more systematic analysis of regional actors' motivations in conflict situations. Second, by identifying the factors which drive security decision-making regarding the Gulf, the project can contribute to our ability to anticipate future crises and avoid their escalation to armed conflict.

Organization and Methodology: The project's temporal scope is the period from 1971, when the British strategic withdrawal from the Gulf initiated the contest among the local powers for dominance of the region, to the reshuffling of regional alignments in the wake of the Gulf War. This period includes a number of regional conflicts and near conflicts and a series of important alliance decision points, allowing for fruitful comparison in which significant alternative explanations can be tested.

The question of Iraqi conflict decisions is explored through a structured, focused comparison of three episodes: 1) the Iran-Iraq crisis of 1974-75, which ended in the Algiers Accord of March 1975; 2) the Iraqi decision to invade Iran in September 1980; and 3) the Iraqi decision to invade Kuwait in 1990. The three cases provide interesting variation. In all three the Iraqi leadership perceived a foreign hand behind specific domestic problems it was experiencing. Yet in 1975 it was willing to compromise with the Shah's Iran to remove that threat, while in the other cases it resorted to military force. In 1975 Iraq backed down in the face of superior military force; in 1991 it did not. The project will investigate the Iraqi perceptions of the nature of specific threats it faced and of the opportunities alternative strategic responses presented, in an effort to explain why the 1974-75 crisis was settled peacefully while Baghdad escalated the 1980 and 1990 crises to full-scale war. At this point in my research, I am particularly interested in situating my treatment of Iraqi war decisions within the general theoretical work on prospect theory and war.

The question of alignment decisions by Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan is explored by identifying their reactions at nine important points in the chronology when shifts occurred in the regional power picture: 1) 1971 British withdrawal, 2) 1975 Algiers Accord and subsequent shift in Iraqi policy toward the Gulf states, 3) 1979 Iranian revolution, 4) 1980 Iraqi invasion of Iran, 5) 1982 Iranian decision to carry the war into Iraqi territory side of the war, 6) 1987 American naval deployments in the Gulf, 7) 1988 cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War, 8) 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and 9) 1991 defeat of Iraq. Balance of power explanations would anticipate certain kinds of alignment changes in reaction to these shifts in the power picture; emphasis on domestic political and ideological factors would anticipate others in many of these cases. The project will identify alignment choices of the three states at each of these points, yielding a total of 27 policy decisions from which to test alternative explanations for alliance behavior. At this point in the project, I intend to situate the alliance discussion in a critique and refinement of Walt's "balance of threat" theory which focuses much more attention than Walt does on domestic political and regional ideological factors.

The proposed book will have seven chapters: an introduction which sets out the questions being investigated and reviews the relevant literature on war and alliance from which hypotheses are drawn; three chapters setting out the narrative of the story (1971-78; 1979-88; the Gulf War and after); a chapter on Iraqi war decisions; a chapter on alliance choices by Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan; and a conclusion which relates the hypotheses set out at the beginning to the evidence developed in the text.

Research Program: I began this project in 1988, seeing the end of the Iran-Iraq War as a useful end point for analysis of a period of Gulf security interactions. I was, of course, wrong about the end point. But the early start on the topic means that I am well along in coverage of the secondary source literature and have begun to delve into primary source research. I have already made a number of research trips to the region, conducting interviews in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Iran and Egypt. During the Gulf War I collected a large amount of primary source data from periodical sources in English and Arabic. I wrote up an extended chapter on Gulf security issues for The Dynamics of Third World Regional Politics: Four Cases from the Indian Ocean Rim, edited by Howard Wriggins, published by Columbia University Press in 1992, that deals with some of these issues. I have also meanwhile published a book on the domestic politics of the Gulf Cooperation Council states (Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States, Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1994) that has contributed to my research on this topic. I have presented papers on both Gulf alliance patterns and Iraqi war decisions at professional conferences; they will be the basis for chapters in the book.  Meanwhile, the chapter on Iraqi war decisions was published by Middle East Journal in its Winter 2002 issue.  The chapter on Gulf alliance patterns has been accepted for publication at Security Studies, but is not out yet.