America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History Read Online Free Page B

in the form of arms—that the United States had poured into the CENTCOM AOR in 1983. That figure had increased to $9.1 billion in 1984 and was scheduled to hit $11 billion the year following.
    When the RDJTF had formed just four years earlier, critics had “scoffed that it was not rapid, had little to deploy, and was not much of a force.” Although work remained to be done, Halloran noted that such critics “have been less vocal recently, as the Central Command has started to make progress.” The title of his essay made the point explicitly: CENTCOM now stood “Poised for the Persian Gulf.”
    Halloran’s upbeat interpretation was broadly representative of mainstream opinion. 18 To the extent that U.S. military commitments pursuant to the Carter Doctrine generated debate, that debate centered on whether or not Central Command could move sufficient combat forces fast enough and far enough to make a difference. 19 In effect, it was a dispute over timetables and scheduling rather than policy.
    So as Halloran assessed CENTCOM’s progress and prospects, he confined himself to narrowly military considerations. History prior to the Shah’s overthrow possessed little relevance. The upheavals that had done so much to shape the region—the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the creation of Israel in 1948, the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1967 and 1973—escaped notice. References to countries like Oman and Somalia implied that they were more or less interchangeable with Norway or the Netherlands. Religion went unmentioned. How might a very hot and very dry climate affect the operations of combat forces? Need to think about that. The cleavage between Sunni and Shia? Someone else’s problem.

    Even when U.S. officials acknowledged local sensitivities, they did so in order to dismiss them. In an interview recorded subsequent to his retirement, for example, Kingston recalled that his military counterparts within the CENTCOM AOR had been “very chary of getting too close to us.” He thought he knew why: They resented powerful outsiders treating them like “second class citizens” even on their own turf, as, for example, the British had done for decades. Even so, Kingston expressed confidence that events would obviate any such reservations about welcoming a U.S. presence. “There will come a point,” he remarked, “where they’ll say, ‘we see the threat as much as you do and we invite you in.’ ” 20 Kingston took it for granted that “they” and “we” would share a common understanding of threats and, by extension, of actions needed to deflect those threats.
    Fulfilling these expectations required de facto Soviet collaboration. U.S. military planners were counting on Kremlin leaders to play their assigned role as bogeymen. Quite unexpectedly, the Soviets refused to cooperate. In so doing they induced a radical change in CENTCOM’s orientation.
    By the time General George Crist, a Marine, replaced Kingston to become CENTCOM’s second commander on November 27, 1985, a considerably more important succession in leadership had already occurred in Moscow. Earlier that year, Mikhail Gorbachev had become general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and soon thereafter embarked upon a doomed effort to reform and thereby save the USSR. Doing so, he believed, required first calling off the Cold War.
    Initially, the United States military responded to this disconcerting news by attempting to downplay or deny it. Abetted by the more militant members of the Reagan administration and of the American political elite, the Pentagon strove mightily to ignore or discredit Gorbachev’s attempt to ease Soviet-American tensions. As late as 1987, in releasing the Pentagon’s annual assessment of Soviet military power, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was still warning about what he called “a dynamic, and an expanding, Soviet threat.” Weinberger refused to be taken in by