1979 and 2020

Eduardo del Buey
Foto: Ap
La Jornada Maya

Miércoles 20 de mayo, 2020

1979 was a watershed year, although many today are not aware of how the events of that year shaped where we are today. Will 2020 also have a similar effect?

Four major and unrelated events took place in 1979: the Iranian Revolution; the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty.

In February of 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran and, after a popular revolution, deposed the Shah’s regime.

This sent shock waves to other Middle East states. It lit the flames for the militant Sunni-Shiite rivalry that has led to so much blood being shed in the region, including the civil wars in Syria and Yemen. The also led to the holding of U.S. diplomatic hostages which soured forever the relationship between both countries.

Today, with the shiite majority in Iraq, Iran and its sphere of influence are an even more significant threat to Sunni Arabs and to the U.S.

The second development of note was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

It turned out to be a debacle for both the Soviet Union and for the United States. It dragged the Soviets into a long war from which no victory was possible.

The anti-Soviet insurgency, armed and trained by the United States, formed the nucleus of what would become Al Qaeda and, eventually, ISIS.

The third event was the attack on the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Islamic fundamentalists. This was violently put down. However, instead of serving as an opportunity to crush fundamentalist Islam in the Arabian peninsula, the Saudi regime embraced a stricter form of Wahhabism that only recently is beginning to show signs of abating despite the Saudi objective of keeping fundamentalist Islamic terrorism away from the country by funding its activities abroad.

The fourth event was the signing of the peace treaty by Egypt and Israel by Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. This was the first treaty ever in which an Arab country recognized Israel diplomatically and settled its territorial dispute peacefully.

While this divided the Egypt from the Arab world for over a decade, it also set the stage for an eventual rapprochement between Israel with Jordan in 1994 as well as the Palestinian-Israeli dialogue that began after the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991. Today, Israel has informal relations with many Arab and Islamic states given their combined perception that Iran is their major common enemy.

Today, we continue to be affected by these four major events that took place in 1979.

The situation in the Middle East has evolved from an Arab-Israeli conflict to the Sunni-Shiite rivalry. Both sides remain involved in proxy wars in Syria and Yemen with no signs of abating.

The recently announced Trump Peace Plan has thrown the possibility of a two-state solution into serious doubt.

Both Saudi Arabia and Iran are suffering from the collapse of the oil market – seriously affecting their economies and risking social instability. Reduced demand is expected to continue for the foreseeable given alternate supply sources and the impact of COVID 19 on the world economy. The region will likely emerge from the pandemic in far worse shape than before.

Sometimes, history is created by individual events; other times, it is a confluence of simultaneous events that create a synergy unique to the times.

1979 was indeed one of those watershed moments.

Is 2020?

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