Sergeant Foley
Well-known member
Instigating the Super Chaos inside the Middle East
Summer 1983
Summer 1983
The Middle East was and will always be a region of authoritarian regimes and military dictatorships. It always has been and forever will be. Just the way it is.
Though Iran had brief moments of total mayhem during 1978-79, things calmed down once the chaos died down; Iran seemingly and shockingly climbed its way back to seeing their potential of greatness and now sat on pathways to massive reforms under the reign of Empress Farah Pahlavi, who successfully defeated the Iraqis in the Iran/Iraq War.
Egypt and Bangladesh saw their autocratic leaders violently gunned down in shocking assassinations, which led to their successors quickly consolidating their positions respectively through violent, deadly, controversial and aggressive purges and rotated their foreign policy as Western-aligned in their respective regions. Israel had not only signed its historic Rose Garden Camp David Peace Accords with Egypt, which caused the return of the Sinai Peninsula to the Egyptians and secured the western borders for good, but at the same time, continued improving diplomatic relations with neighboring Kingdom of Jordan secretly behind the scenes under the Premiership of Menachem Begin. Even the Gulf Monarchies such as Kuwait with massive new amounts of oil supplies turned up in Norway, Alaska and the United Kingdom began aggressively hitting the markets.
All of these developments and circumstances easily benefited the United States, which helped broker the Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt that began under Rockefeller and continued under Holton, then accelerated under Reagan; Assisted Iran's transition into a functional and calm country. The Middle East was a mixture of strongly pro-Western and pro-Washington-friendly polities in the super extra-large belt stretching from Egypt through the Arabian Peninsula to including various Gulf Monarchies across the Gulf of Iran and also including Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Saudi Arabia was the scene of total chaos and mayhem in the Summer of 1980 when General Jamal Al-Fayheed successfully led a bloodless military coup d'etat against the Saudi Royal Family, which pretty much all but ended the Monarchy for good, had quickly raised alarms. Al-Fayheed managed to turn Saudi Arabia around economically and also militarily leading the country during some chaotic times, despite his authoritarian military dictatorship.
Watching these developments across the Middle East caused Soviet policymakers to become nervous for good reasons. As 1983 moved into mid-Summer, the Soviet Union saw themselves in their weakest positions ever geopolitically since the late 1960s. Despite their massive defense spending and boasting of one of the largest militaries in the world, it had gotten embarrassed by scruffy, little Sweden over the course of five months in May/October 1981, being humiliated for everyone in the entire world to see when it was assumed Sweden should've just rolled over like a good little kid and this quickly called into question the entire security arrangement and appartus of the Eastern Bloc, especially in Poland, which was facing full-scale massive protests and demonstrations over Martial Law. Emerging parts in the Warsaw Pact, which argued the Yugoslavization of much of the communist East as if the Red Bear was turning out to be an overrated paper tiger on the international stage, which threatened to put the Soviet's international superpower prestige into pasture during the height of the Cold War.
With the unstable, unreliable and bipolar Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi facing international damnation over his regime's financing of the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, the Soviets looked elsewhere in the Middle East and found two strategic partners, who could benefit politically, economically and militarily: Iraq and Syria, both run by the Ba'ath Party respectively under ruthless military dictatorships in Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad. There was obviously no love lost between Baghdad and Damascus and according to whom you've asked, it's commom knowledge Hussein and Assad openly despised each other.
Saddam deeply resented the Iranians for pressuring and bullying him back in 1975 into accepting new border on the Shatt al-Arab and blamed Washington and Jerusalem for giving them unqualified support; He also believed the Iranians and Turkish, both of whom steering to avoid instability of their own Kurdish populations, tacitly encouraged Kurdish demonstrations and instability inside Iraq. Syria, however, had their own set of heavy problems, partly because by 1981, Syria had been deeply entrenched in Lebanon's six-year Civil War between the Sunni and Maronite populations within the country and the conflict became mixed with Assad's own imperialist ambitions to dominating Lebanon physically, economically and politically.