The Presidency of George H.W. Bush: Four Turbulent Years in the Middle East

George H.W. Bush, the 41st President of the United States, who passed away at the age of 94 on Friday, December 9, was the only president in the last forty years to serve a single term in the White House. However, his four-year presidency witnessed significant turmoil in the Middle East that had profound effects on the fate of this region of the world. While many Iranians remember George H.W. Bush as the one who awarded a medal of courage to William Rogers, the commander of the USS Vincennes (responsible for shooting down an Iranian passenger plane), the strongest collective memory of the people of the Middle East from his era likely relates to the coalition's attack led by the United States on Iraq following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. In the course of this tumultuous history of the Middle East, Kuwaitis remember him more fondly than others; he was the savior who liberated a wealthy oil-producing country and returned it to a government allied with the West. George Herbert Walker Bush, the youngest naval aviator in the U.S. Navy during World War II and one of the most seasoned Republican diplomats, became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the early 1970s, then ambassador to China, served a term as CIA director, and finally became Vice President of the United States; this naturally led him to be the nominee for the 1988 presidential election, where he defeated Michael Dukakis, the then-Democratic nominee, to become the keyholder of the White House after Ronald Reagan's presidency, under whom Bush had loyally served for eight years. Four years later, when the young Bill Clinton from the Democratic Party challenged Bush, it was this relatively unknown Clinton who managed to limit Bush's presidency to just four years; although George W. Bush, eight years later, won the White House in a competition against Al Gore, the then-Democratic vice president, making the Bush family the first to achieve this honor after about 180 years since the Adams family had a father-son presidency in the U.S. George H.W. Bush's entire presidency was intertwined with Middle Eastern affairs. One of the most immediate crises from January 20, 1989, when he entered the White House, was the long hostage crisis in Lebanon, a crisis that had begun during Reagan's presidency and peaked with the start of George H.W. Bush's presidency. In the 1980s, dozens of foreign citizens, mainly from Western countries, were kidnapped in Lebanon, and some were killed while in captivity; Hezbollah, established in Lebanon in the early 1980s and accused of bombing the U.S. Marine barracks and later the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing approximately 300 Americans and French, was under suspicion for kidnapping. When Bush was still Reagan's vice president, the Lebanese hostage crisis led the U.S. and France to violate a policy that prohibited negotiating with kidnappers and conceding to them for the release of citizens; however, secret negotiations with Iran during Reagan's presidency aimed at delivering Israeli weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages turned into a troublesome affair. Ultimately, many hostages did not survive, and the intense fear of Westerners in Lebanon regarding being taken hostage only ended with the beginning of Bill Clinton's presidency. George H.W. Bush and his administration believed that Iran played a crucial role behind the scenes of the hostage-taking of Americans and Westerners in Lebanon, and thus, they implemented sanctions against Tehran that had been established since the days of the hostage crisis of American diplomats in their embassy in Tehran by Ronald Reagan, but on a broader scale. The U.S. and a wide range of Western and Arab countries that openly and covertly supported Saddam Hussein and his army during the Iran-Iraq War found themselves facing a Saddam who was eager to realize his dreams after the longest war of the 20th century in the Middle East had ended. He attacked Kuwait amidst the disbelief of Arab governments and Gulf monarchies that had bolstered him in the war against Iran. Just a short time after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam argued that he had effectively fought on behalf of the Arab countries against Iran and that while the benefits of this war had accrued to the Gulf monarchies, Iraq had borne the heavy costs. When Kuwait resisted, the Iraqi army, disregarding warnings and UN resolutions, invaded Kuwait in the middle of summer 1990. With Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, all matters of George H.W. Bush's presidency were affected by this situation, and he devoted all his efforts to forming an international coalition to compel Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. This coalition began Operation Desert Storm in February 1991, about seven months after Kuwait's annexation into Iraq, which is also recorded as the First Gulf War. Anticipating his defeat, Saddam sought to turn the war into a Jewish-Arab conflict to gain support from anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli Arabs; this was the first time since the 1967 war that Iraq was actively involved in a war against Israel. During the hundred hours that the Iraqi army was under heavy assault from the coalition in Kuwait, Saddam launched 39 Scud missiles at Israel. Isaac Shamir, the then Prime Minister, and Moshe Arens, the then Minister of Defense of Israel, refrained from responding to Saddam at the requests of James Baker, the Secretary of State in George H.W. Bush's administration; Israel's patience, however, proved financially beneficial; Iraq was forced to pay heavy reparations to Israel, just as it paid reparations for its aggression against Kuwait for years afterward, while Iran has yet to receive any reparations from Iraq. The George H.W. Bush administration incurred significant financial costs to defeat Saddam, but he gained unprecedented popularity in the U.S. and made the Arab countries indebted to him. Given this powerful position, he and his Secretary of State quickly sought to capitalize on their successes; just a few months after Saddam's defeat, the U.S. held the Madrid Peace Conference in the summer of 1991 with the dream of establishing Israeli-Arab-Palestinian peace, bringing representatives of Isaac Shamir on one side and the hardliner Hafez al-Assad on the other to the negotiating table; these efforts bore fruit two years later when Bill Clinton was in the White House, hosting the signing of a political agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which marked the beginning of the establishment of a Palestinian self-governing authority and subsequent changes in the region. George H.W. Bush, twenty years after the First Gulf War, stated that he was not sorry that the battle did not lead to the overthrow of Saddam's regime, as it could have inflicted heavy casualties on the U.S. and its allies; it was the Democratic Barack Obama who, on the twentieth anniversary of Operation Desert Storm, awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. honor, to George H.W. Bush. Although George H.W. Bush's presidency will be remembered for the collapse of the Soviet Union and many communist governments in Europe at the end of the Cold War, the U.S. policies during these four years regarding the Middle East are seen as the groundwork for the extensive establishment of U.S. military presence in the region, a matter that continued to deeply engage the U.S. and all its presidents, including his own son, for nearly three decades, costing the U.S. several trillion dollars.