Yasser Arafat led the Palestine Liberation Organization and appears twice in John Kiriakou’s account of the Middle East at moments Kiriakou treats as irreversible: the 1990 Gulf crisis, and the collapse of the peace process a decade later.[1]
Backing Saddam, 1990
After Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990, American Secretary of State James Baker went to Arafat and told him: “You have to do the right thing. You have to come down on the side of the Kuwaitis and help us push the Iraqis out of Kuwait.”[1] Kiriakou describes what followed as “this very public self-flagellation on the part of Yasser Arafat” — and in the end Arafat came down on the side of Saddam Hussein.[1]
Kiriakou sets the decision in its diplomatic context. Two members of the UN Security Council, Cuba and Yemen, were doubtful when the Bush administration sought authorisation for the use of force; both were told to vote yes, and both voted no. Arafat came out for Saddam alongside them, as did Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen.[2][3][4]
The consequence
The consequence, in Kiriakou’s telling, fell on the Palestinian professional class rather than on Arafat: the Gulf royal families resolved to expel every Palestinian, and largely did.[5] The expulsion reached beyond Kuwait to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, and it removed a whole stratum — “the engineers, the professors, the dentists and doctors and the bankers, the entire middle class.” Six million Yemeni guest workers in Saudi Arabia were expelled on the same logic, and in Kiriakou’s assessment Yemen has never recovered. Neither, he says, have the Palestinians: they “have never recovered from that stupid decision to support Saddam Hussein.”[6][7]
In Kuwait itself, Kiriakou records the argument that stopped a total expulsion: a Kuwaiti told him that within twelve months there would be no Palestinians in the country at all, and Kiriakou’s reply was that the country could not run without them — Filipino and Bangladeshi workers could not simply step into roles Palestinians had held since the 1950s. In the end the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Egypt pressured Kuwait to back off, with the argument that the Palestinians were not the ones to be angry with: “you should be angry with Yasser Arafat for throwing his endorsement to Saddam Hussein.”[8][9]
Kiriakou treats the resulting Gulf antipathy toward Palestinians as a live factor in present-day diplomacy, including the willingness of Gulf states to normalise relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords.[10] He also notes the durability of the pattern: for all the upheaval of the first Gulf War, none of the leaders changed, and when the last shot was fired “everybody just kind of went back to their palaces” — an instance of what CIA analysts called muddling through.[4][11]
Camp David, and the walk-out
The second episode Kiriakou tells about Arafat comes from his first boss at the CIA, who went on to the National Security Council as the senior official for the Middle East and sat in the face-to-face talks in the final days of the Clinton administration.[12][13]
By his boss’s account the parties had agreed on almost everything. An enormous map of Jerusalem lay on the conference-room table and they were dividing the city block by block with a marker pen. When they finished, Al Gore said: “My God, we have peace.” Arafat answered that he could never sell it to the Palestinian people, and walked out. Gore ran after him, telling him he could not leave after months and years of negotiation, and that anything he disliked could be renegotiated. Arafat repeated that he would never be able to sell any peace deal to the Palestinian people.[14][15][16][17]
Kiriakou’s tellings differ on who led the Israeli delegation — in one it is the Prime Minister of Israel, in another Shimon Peres — and on the date, given as January 2001 in one account and simply the final week of the Clinton administration in the other.[14][13]
His verdict is that this was “the death of the peace process,” and that in retrospect “anything would have been better than nothing. And what the Palestinians have today is nothing.” Asked why Arafat could not sell it, Kiriakou’s answer is that the Palestinian mantra at the time was that all of Israel must be Palestine, that every refugee had a right of return, and that the Jews would be pushed into the sea — a position he says is no longer realistic, and on which there is now no consensus at all.[15][18][19]
The cost of backing Saddam
Kiriakou watched the consequences of Arafat’s alignment from inside the Kuwaiti royal court. When Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990 he was one of only two Kuwait analysts in the building at the CIA, and one of only nine Iraq analysts; because he was an expert on the Kuwaiti royal family he was sent to Taif in Saudi Arabia to sit with them as liaison to the agency.[20][21]
Within days of the invasion Arafat came down on Saddam’s side, and Kiriakou describes the reaction as immediate and total: the Kuwaitis “wanted to kill every Palestinian that they could get their hands on.” One of the royals told him: “when we take our country back there will be no Palestinians in it.”[21][22]
It extended to the Yemenis, whose government had also backed Saddam and who numbered some two million labourers in Saudi Arabia, and it reached the Palestinian communities across the Gulf — the bankers in Bahrain, the bankers and teachers in Qatar. “I saw these Palestinians just be expelled.” Kiriakou’s judgement is that the punishment fell on the wrong people: “it wasn’t the Palestinian people who had done anything wrong, it was their idiot leadership that just came into this fight on the side of the loser.”[22][23]
The animosity lasted at least a decade, leaving the Palestinians “nobody pulling for them that had any money.” He gives two concrete casualties from the 1990s: Saudi talk of financing a port in Gaza with Israeli acquiescence, and Qatari talk of financing an airport, so that Gazans could take delivery of food and medicine. The Israelis said “not in a million years” — and the Saudis and Qataris then said they would not give “one red cent to the Palestinians. They were with Saddam Hussein against us.” It only began to ease after Arafat died.[23][24][25]