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Jordan River, albeit behind steeper, more imposing defensive terrain. Eilat and Aqaba, the two key ports for Israel and Jordan, on the Gulf of Aqaba, are contig- uous mutual hostages. To the north in Lebanon, the fact that Beirut is only sixty miles from Israel’s frontier rendered it highly vulnerable in 1982 to a quick ar- mored strike, supported by leapfrogging amphibious operations along the coast. Generally speaking, then, in the core Middle Eastern zone of conflict, dis- tances are very short and produce fast-moving wars with quick outcomes (the Iran-Iraq War is a partial exception). The implication for weapons of mass de- struction is stark and potentially ominous. Israel and Pakistan, and perhaps also Iraq to a lesser degree, labor under the threat that sudden and decisive conven- tional battlefield defeats could quickly raise the specter of mass destruction, par- ticularly by nuclear weapons.

If a Palestinian state is ever created in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel’s secu- rity belt in the Jordan Valley is removed, and the Golan Heights are returned to Syria (with or without demilitarized zones), Israel will be returned to the vul- nerable strategic situation of pre–June 1967. Its features will include the nine-mile corridor north of Tel Aviv between a new Palestine and the sea, and a danger in the Galilee area of a Syrian attack that quickly menaces Israeli towns. Then too, a vast buildup of Egyptian forces with U.S. weapons, like the M1A1 tank, would open the possibility of an Egyptian attack out of Sinai. Such an as- sault, threatening Israel as it would with massive and unacceptable casualties, might bring on early use of Israeli tactical nuclear weapons—likewise in the Golan and in the West Bank, if Jordanian or Iraqi forces should mount an attack out of the Jordan Valley area.

Likewise, Pakistan, its population and industrial cores menaced by a quick In- dian offensive, might be tempted to almost immediate, at least tactical, nuclear use. Here, by contrast with the Israeli case, such threats might be tempered by Indian escalation dominance up and down the “ladder.” Another scenario might be an Indian attempt to take out Pakistan’s nuclear infrastructure (also, un- avoidably, located near the border), a risky venture that would, escalation domi- nance notwithstanding, bank precariously on “rational” decision making on the part of the Pakistanis.

Despite Iraq’s quasi-victory over Iran in 1988, the facts of demography and gross national product would weigh heavily in Iran’s favor in the case of a future conflict (at present, tensions between the two countries are rather low, but bad blood long antedates the 1980–88 war). As noted, Baghdad is not far from the border. Unlike India, Iran may still have only limited capabilities for relatively long-range combined-arms offensives. But Iraq’s previous use of chemical war- fare could augur a WMD response to a conventional battlefield defeat, Iran’s own possession of such weapons notwithstanding.

Climate. The weather and seasons in the Greater Middle East, and related mat-

ters of terrain and topography, present a very mixed and varied picture. Fighting has occurred on the Sinai and Rajasthan Deserts; in the mountainous terrain of central Lebanon and the Golan Heights, the Zagros Mountains northeast of Baghdad, the Himalayan foothills in the southern Kashmir region, and the Punjab along the India-Pakistan frontier; in the Rann of Kutch and Haweizeh Marshes; and in the riverine and semijungle areas of Bangladesh. Rugged moun- tainous terrain has also been the scene of conflict in western Sinai, Yemen, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Georgia, Tadzhikistan, Algeria, Kurdish eastern Turkey, and Kurdish northern Iran, among other places. Neither terrain nor extreme en- vironmental conditions preclude military operations.

A major problem regarding the weather itself involves the unique conditions the Greater Middle East presents for high-technology weapons used by the United States and its allies. The climatic conditions in and around Kuwait and southern Iraq were remarkably suitable for the 1991 air campaign (the unusu- ally inclement weather during part of that operation notwithstanding).37Clear skies favor a side able to achieve virtually uncontested control of the air, like Israel in 1967 and (after a ten-day delay) 1973. Climate also facilitated Israel’s destruction of the Osirak reactor in Baghdad in 1981. In the 1980–88 war, the fecklessness of the Iranian and Iraqi air forces rendered such factors largely moot. On the other hand, human beings exposed to the summer desert, winter in Kashmir, or the spring haboobs over Iran quickly reach their limits.

What then for the future? Will geography, terrain, and climate offer advantages to modern air forces in future Greater Middle East conflicts? Will “asymmetric strate- gies” of a passive sort (underground fiber-optic communications, improved cam- ouflage and deception techniques, and traditional methods of clandestine warfare such as the mujahedin employed against Soviet forces) prove insurmountable?

Implied here is a technology race involving potential developments on both the high and low sides, advances that can alter asymmetries, as indeed did the in- troduction of newer surface-to-air missiles and radars into the Suez Canal area in 1973. How well will new reconnaissance satellites penetrate cloud cover and tree cover, and thereby allow effective interdiction in less than optimal condi- tions? There were hints in the Bosnian and Kosovo operations that such matters had come some distance; if so, air superiority in the Greater Middle East will become more vital than ever. In any event, geography itself will remain the most important strategic factor in military operations in this region.

N O T E S

1. See Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy,

Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institu-

tion, for the Carnegie Endowment for Inter- national Peace, 1997), pp. 13–5.

2. For further reading see Thomas Mackubin Owens, “In Defense of Classical Geopolitics,”

Naval War College Review, Autumn 1999, esp.

pp. 64–70.

3. A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Seapower upon

History, 1600–1783, updated ed. (Boston: Lit-

tle, Brown, 1980).

4. Oyvind Osterud, “The Uses and Abuses of Geopolitics,” Journal of Peace Research, no. 2, 1988, p. 191.

5. Ibid., pp. 191–2.

6. David Wilkinson, “Spykman and Geopoli- tics,” in On Geopolitics: Classical and Nuclear, ed. Ciro Zoppo and Charles Zorgbibe (Dordrecht, Neth.: Maartinus Nijhoff, 1985). 7. Saul Cohen, Geography and Politics in a Di-

vided World (New York: Random House,

1963), esp. pp. 83–7. He refers to a similar use of the term “crush zones” in James Fairgrieve, Geography and World Power, 8th ed. (London: Univ. of London Press, 1941). 8. Cohen, p. 233.

9. The hegemonies are those of Portugal (some scholars prefer Spain), the Netherlands, Great Britain (twice), and the United States. See, for example, George Modelski, Long Cycles in

World Politics (Seattle: Univ. of Washington

Press, 1985); and George Modelski and Wil- liam R. Thompson, Seapower in Global Poli-

tics, 1494–1993 (Seattle: Univ. of Washington

Press, 1988).

10. A pattern William R. Thompson refers to as a “system leader lineage”; see his “Passing the Torch in a Manner of Speaking: The System Leader Lineage,” paper presented at Interna- tional Studies Association annual meeting, Toronto, 1997.

11. Walter Russell Mead, “On the Road to Ruin,”

Harper’s, March 1990, pp. 59–64; Jeffrey

Garten, A Cold Peace (New York: Times Books, 1992); Edward Luttwak, The Endan-

gered American Dream (New York: Simon

and Schuster, 1993); and Lester Thurow,

Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle

among Japan, Europe, and America (New

York: William Morrow, 1993).

12. See, amidst a now massive literature, Bruce M. Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993). 13. Karl W. Deutsch, Political Community and

the North Atlantic Area (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton Univ. Press, 1957).

14. Kenichi Ohmae, “Rise of the Region State,”

Foreign Affairs, Spring 1993, pp. 78–87.

15. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Si- mon and Schuster, 1994), and “The New World Order: Back to the Future,” The Econ-

omist, 8 January 1994, pp. 21–3.

16. See Kemp and Harkavy, Strategic Geography, chap. 4.

17. Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civiliza- tions?” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, pp. 22–49. See also his The Clash of Civilizations

and the Remaking of World Order (New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1996).

18. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” p. 22. 19. Ibid., p. 29.

20. Ibid., p. 39.

21. Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real

World Order (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham

House, 1993).

22. The model clearly denies the thesis of Richard Rosecrance positing a historical alternation between periods in which the major powers compete in terms of military security, and others in which they compete on the basis of trade. See his The Rise of the Trading State (New York: Basic Books, 1986). The “zones of turmoil” idea finds echoes in some other recent work, such as that of Robert D. Kaplan, who sets out to show “how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet.” See his “The Coming Anarchy,” At-

lantic Monthly, February 1994, pp. 44–76,

and The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the

Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Vin-

tage Books, 2001).

23. This in light of predictions that China’s gross national product will equal that of the United States in another twenty or thirty years if its high growth rates are maintained. Richard

Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming

Conflict with China (New York: Knopf, 1997).

24. See Robert J. Lieber, “The United States as a Reluctant Hegemon,” paper presented at conference on Global Leadership, Stability, and Order: Hegemony and the Provision of International Collective Goods, University of Hohenheim, Germany, June 2000.

25. Fairgrieve.

26. See Kemp and Harkavy, Strategic Geography, chap. 10.

27. Fouad Ajami, for instance, believes Hunting- ton underestimates the tenacity of modernity and secularism in the Greater Middle East and elsewhere in the developing world, and he downplays the threat to the West repre- sented by traditionalist movements in Egypt, Algeria, Iran, Turkey, and India, among oth- ers. Ajami sees Western culture and values as having been totally and irreversibly internal- ized in these places, and Huntington as hav- ing understated the continuing role of the nation-state. Fouad Ajami, “The Sum- moning,” Foreign Affairs, September–October 1993, pp. 2–9. John Esposito, one of those who oppose this new form of “orientalism,” insists that most Islamic movements are not necessarily anti-Western, anti-American, or antidemocratic and that westerners are mis- taken in interpreting Islam as a monolith rather than a complex and diverse realm. John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or

Reality? (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press,

1992), esp. pp. 168–212.

28. See Kemp and Harkavy, Strategic Geography, chap. 4, p. 140, regarding a possible pipeline from Tengiz through China to transport Cen- tral Asian oil and gas to markets on the Pa- cific rim. This is still highly conjectural. 29. A more detailed analysis is in ibid., chap. 7. 30. See Robert E. Harkavy, “Escalation Ladders and Escalation Dominance: From the Central Nuclear Balance to New Regional Conflicts,” in Strategy and International Politics, ed.

Robert L. Pfaltzgraff and William R. Van Cleave (Frankfurt, Ger.: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 241–58.

31. See Robert E. Harkavy, “Triangular or Indi- rect Deterrence/Compellence,” Comparative

Strategy, January–March 1998, pp. 63–81.

32. An Iran or Iraq threatened by the United States could in turn threaten Israel, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey (also Germany or Italy). North Korea could threaten Japan if it were threatened by a U.S. strategic campaign. Such a scenario was outlined in Caspar Weinberger and Peter Schweizer, The Next War (Lanham, Md.: Regnery, 1996).

33. See Kemp and Harkavy, Strategic Geography, pp. 291–4, “The Geography of Illicit Nuclear Transfers.”

34. A fuller discussion of these aspects appears in ibid., chap. 5.

35. Discussed in Shirin Tahir-Kheli, “Defense Planning in Pakistan,” in Defense Planning in

Less-Industrialized States, ed. Stephanie

Neuman (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1984), chap. 7. According to a Pakistani officer whom she quotes (page 212), “Pakistan feels exposed because its line of communication and the highly developed canal system that ir- rigates the fertile areas of Pakistan that are critical to its economic survival run close to the Indo-Pakistani border.” The Pakistani of- ficer further stated that India’s capture of the Pakistani territory within just twenty-five miles of the border would effectively destroy the nation, because its communications, irri- gation, industry, and population are “all to- gether within that depth.”

36. See, among others, Chaim Herzog, The War

of Atonement, October 1973 (Boston: Little,

Brown, 1975), esp. chaps. 1 and 18. 37. U.S. Dept. of Defense, Conduct of the Persian

Gulf War: Final Report to Congress, pursuant

to Title V of the Persian Gulf Conflict Sup- plemental Authorization and Personnel Ben- efits Act of 1991 (Public Law 102-25), Washington, D.C., April 1992.

Piers M. Wood (Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army Reserve [Ret.]), a Vietnam combat veteran, was an artillery officer. He is a graduate of, and a former history instructor at, the U.S. Military Academy and has been a Washington-based defense analyst for the last thirteen years. Dr. Charles D. Ferguson, a physicist, former submarine officer, and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, collaborated on this article as a defense analyst with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C., before his current employ- ment at the U.S. Department of State. The views expressed here are the authors’ own.

© 2001 by Piers M. Wood and Charles D. Ferguson Naval War College Review, Autumn 2001, Vol. LIV, No. 4