George H.W. Bush Administration, 1989-1993.
After benefiting from a decade of support from the United States and receiving conflicting signals immediately before the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein invaded the small country to his southeast on Aug. 2, 1990. President Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, immediately deploying U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to defend against a possible invasion by Iraq.
Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm when Bush shifted strategy – from defending Saudi Arabia to repelling Iraq from Kuwait, ostensibly because Hussein might, Bush claimed, be developing nuclear weapons. A coalition of 30 nations joined American forces in a military operation that numbered more than half a million troops. An additional 18 countries supplied economic and humanitarian aid.
After a 38-day air campaign and a 100-hour ground war, Kuwait was liberated. Bush stopped the assault short of an invasion of Iraq, fearing what Dick Cheney, his defense secretary, would call a “quagmire.” Bush established instead “no-fly zones” in the south and north of the country, but those didn’t keep Hussein from massacring Shiites following an attempted revolt in the south -- which Bush had encouraged -- and Kurds in the north.
In Israel and the Palestinian territories, Bush was largely ineffective and uninvolved as the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, roiled on for four years.
In the last year of his presidency, Bush launched a military operation in Somalia in conjunction with a humanitarian operation by the United Nations. Operation Restore Hope, involving 25,000 U.S. troops, was designed to help stem the spread of famine caused by the Somali civil war.
The operation had limited success. A 1993 attempt to catch Mohamed Farah Aidid, leader of a brutal Somali militia, ended in disaster, with 18 American soldiers and up to 1,500 Somali militias and civilians killed. Aidid wasn’t caught.
Among the architects of the attacks on Americans in Somalia: a Saudi exile then living in the Sudan, largely unknown in the United States: Osama bin Laden.
Clinton Administration, 1993-2001.
Besides mediating the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, Bill Clinton’s involvement in the Middle East was bracketed by the short-lived success of the Oslo Accords in August 1993 and the collapse of the Camp David summit in December 2000.
The accords ended the first intifada and established Palestinians’ right to self-determination in Gaza and the West Bank and established the Palestinian Authority. The accords also called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
But Oslo left unsettled such fundamental questions as the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, the fate of East Jerusalem, which is claimed by Palestinians, and continuing expansion of Israeli settlements in the territories.
Those issues, still unresolved by 2000, led Clinton to convene a summit with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli leader Ehud Barak at Camp David in December 2000, the waning days of his presidency. The summit failed. The second intifada exploded.
Throughout the Clinton administration, terrorist attacks orchestrated by the increasingly public bin Laden punctured the 1990s’ post-cold war air of quietude, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the bombing of the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer, in Yemen in 2000.
George W. Bush Administration, 2001-.
After deriding operations involving the U.S. military in what he called “nation-building,” President Bush turned, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, into the most ambitious nation-builder since the days of Secretary of State George Marshall and the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. Bush’s efforts, focused on the Middle East, have not been as successful.
Bush had the world’s backing when he led an attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 to topple the Taliban regime there, which had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda. Bush’s expansion of the “war on terror” to Iraq in March 2003, however, had less backing. Bush saw the toppling of Saddam Hussein as the first step in a domino-like birth of democracy in the Middle East.
But while Bush talked democracy regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, he continued to support repressive, undemocratic regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and North Africa. The credibility of his democracy campaign was short-lived. By 2006, with Iraq plunging into civil war, Hamas winning elections in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah winning immense popularity following its summer war with Israel, Bush’s democracy campaign was dead.