Introduction

Although it may seem that the profound changes that have transformed the Middle East occurred in response to the attacks of 9/11/2001, we can, with the aid of hindsight, discern the beginnings of a global and regional transformation in the coincidence of the eruption of the Kuwait War in 1990 and the winding down of the cold war. During the cold war, regional politics were dominated and equilibrated, if not frozen, by the coordination of American and Soviet policies. Major political transformations, such as the rise and fall of bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes (or Nasserist regimes), even when they occasioned economic crises, were not permitted to upset the status quo. Even the transformation of the petroleum industry, despite the sudden enrichment of some countries, was not permitted to alter the regional balance of power. There was a similar bilateral-bipolar coordination to prevent the frequent episodic recurrences of the Arab-Israeli War (1956, 1967, 1969, 1973, 1982, plus the 1987 Intifada) from spreading in space or extending in time. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 reaffirmed the defects of the Kemalist-Nasserist model and at the same time offered a premonitory indication of the political weaknesses of rentierism, but the full ideological and geopolitical consequences of that revolution were contained throughout the prolonged Iran-Iraq War. Both the prolongation of that war and its failure to produce any immediate change in the regional balance of power were products of the influence of the cold war.