No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
THE AMERICAN WAR FOR THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST: FROM DIPLOMACY TO MILITARY INTERVENTION
Review products
RoahmAlvandi, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)
Andrew J.Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016)
Javier GilGuerrero, The Carter Administration and the Fall of Iran's Pahlavi Dynasty: US–Iran Relations on the Brink of the 1979 Revolution (New York: Palgrave-Macmillian, 2016)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2017
Extract
Emblazoned across the front page of The New York Times on Sunday, 15 November 1981 was a large photograph of hundreds of US soldiers from the army's 82nd Airborne Division parachuting into the vast western desert of the Sinai Peninsula. The photo was eerily reminiscent of the images from October 1956 when Israeli soldiers dropped into the same desert as part of their effort, along with British and French forces, to topple the government of Egyptian President Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir. But the American soldiers were on a much different mission. Rather than attempting to bring down Egypt's government, they were there to participate, alongside Egyptian forces, in “Operation Bright Star,” the largest American military exercise in the Middle East since World War II. During the next ten days, more than 6,000 US soldiers participated in the “war games,” which stretched from Egypt to Sudan, Somalia, and Oman, at an estimated cost of more than 50 million dollars (157 million dollars in current figures). On 25 November, the penultimate day of the operation, a half dozen American B-52s flying from North Dakota dropped a cluster of bombs over the Egyptian desert and then returned home on a thirty-two-hour journey without stopping, demonstrating the vast reach of the American military.
- Type
- Review Article
- Information
- International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Forced Displacement and Refugees , November 2017 , pp. 757 - 765
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017
References
NOTES
1 Njolstad, Olav, “Shifting Priorities: The Persian Gulf in US Strategic Planning in the Carter Years,” Cold War History 4 (2004): 21–55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Daigle, Craig, The Limits of Détente: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1969–1973 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), 24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 For the full text of the Egyptian–Israeli Disengagement Agreement, see Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), vol. 26, 1969–1976, document 226.
4 Carter, Jimmy, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 421.Google Scholar
5 In March 2013, Bacevich wrote a scathing attack on Wolfowitz for Harper's Magazine. He accused Wolfowitz of using his high-level position in the Defense Department after 9/11 to fulfill his ambition to “demonstrate the efficacy of preventative war” and for being the visionary behind the Bush Doctrine. See Bacevich, “A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz: Occasioned by the Tenth Anniversary of the Iraq War,” Harper's Magazine, March 2013, 48–50.
6 Brzezinski to Carter, “Secretary Vance's Middle East Strategy Paper,” 1 February 1979, Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 9, 1977–1980, document 165.