November 1992, Page 10, 11
To the Winner Go the Requests
Two Letters to One President of the United States
Dear President Bush:
Congratulations! The media, which has been misinforming the American people about you, now will have to begin misinforming you about the problem of a second-term (they'll call it lame-duck) presidency. They have told the American people for the past year that America's sluggish economic recovery was a direct result of your intense concentration on successfully ending the Cold War and helping to create order out of the political chaos in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They have not told the American people that the economies of most other major economic powers are in worse shape, because that could not be blamed on you.
That game is over now, and although obviously there are many things to be done domestically, renewed attention to two urgent foreign policy matters is very much in order. Both are related directly to America's role in the world, how Americans feel about themselves, and therefore to the resiliency of the U.S. economy.
The Bosnian problem is ripest for solution because the American people are not divided over what needs to be done there, and there is almost worldwide backing for the course of action the international community must pursue. The political goal is to restore the authority of the legitimate government of Bosnia over all of its territory. Your administration's initial record was good. The U.S. warned about the consequences of a precipitate breakup of the Yugoslav Republic, but that warning was ignored, principally by Germany.
Now the inevitable and irreversible breakup has occurred, in a disorderly manner, and with still worse consequences to come if the bloodshed is not halted immediately. The Europeans, unfortunately, will not assume the leadership in cleaning up this mess in their own backyard.
Along with the rest of the world, however, they will follow strong U.S. leadership. This need not involve putting large U.S. ground units into peril. The Slavic Muslims and some Croats of Bosnia are doing the necessary fighting. It is only the international arms embargo that prevents them from arming themselves effectively.
The means of restoring Bosnia have been widely described, and accepted by public opinion. The U.S. already is involved in tightening the existing economic embargo on Serbia, continuing relief flights into Sarajevo, and pursuing ever more forcefully the overland transport of food, medicines and fuel to Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns and villages under siege. Unfortunately, restoring security may also involve military action in Bosnia targeted initially against any aircraft, artillery or militia units that impede relief efforts. If that is not successful, it may involve military strikes in Serbia against military aircraft, convoys or bases supporting the depredations of the Serbian militias.
Restore the authority of the legitimate government of Bosnia over all of its territory.
If this sounds like Vietnam, there are two huge differences. The Bosnians themselves are willing to fight for their independence. All they ask are arms for themselves and outside help when needed to neutralize the former Yugoslav Army's heavy artillery, tanks and aircraft provided by Serbia to the Serbian militias in Bosnia. The second factor is that the outlaw Serbian militias in Bosnia have no foreign protector, other than Serbia, which is exceedingly vulnerable to the economic and military measures discussed above.
There is no question that U.S. pilots and perhaps some U.S. and other foreign personnel supporting the U.N. relief flights or convoys will be put at risk. The military toll of the entire operation, however, is unlikely to exceed the toll of Bosnian civilians killed in an average week at the present level of one-sided Serbian aggression. In taking the recommended action you will have the support of some Serbian leaders, who oppose the illegal militias and their hard-line supporters in the Serbian government. You also will have the nearly unanimous support of Europe, the rest of the world and of informed Americans. Even the U.S. media is calling for decisive U.S. action, and faulting you for postponing the necessary action until after the U.S. elections.
The best way to deal with that accusation is to move quickly, compassionately and decisively to show the world, and particularly the increasingly suspicious Islamic one-fifth of it, that your "new world order" is real, it is just, and that it applies to all of the world's people.
The second problem crying out for a resumption of your attention is the Middle East peace process. We have supported your informed, sensitive, and determined campaign to apply U.N. Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula to all aspects of this problem, without reservations. It has brought the entire Middle East closer to a final settlement than even we optimists dared to hope at the beginning of your presidency. Clearly it has been a top priority for you from even before you assumed office. We ask you once again to put the full weight of the U.S. government behind a settlement based upon "total peace" for "total withdrawal," with no evasions. The key to success, of course, is to link all further economic or military aid to any party to the conflict to that country's performance at the peace table.
You demonstrated unmistakably in the summer of 1991 that you understood this. We believe the media opposition engendered by your firmness explains many of your campaign problems. You paid a heavy price for your clear-headed devotion to peace in the Middle East. Now is the time to finish the job and reap the rewards.
We speak not just of the Nobel Peace Prize that will deservedly be awarded to whatever American or Americans finally cut this Gordian knot. There will be other direct rewards for the entire United States both from peace with justice in Bosnia and peace with justice in Israel/Palestine. They include resumption of positive relations with the Arab and Muslim countries that once preferred the American political and economic model to any other Western system, and the American people to any other Western people. Leading such peaceful settlements is important to the world's image of us, and our own image of ourselves. It therefore will provide the greatest and most immediate shot in the arm that your administration could possibly administer to the American economy.
We know that the American people will support overwhelmingly your efforts to serve justice, equity and peace in those two troubled parts of the world. In doing so, you can count on our support and that of most of our readers.
Respectfully,
The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
Dear President Clinton:
Congratulations! We were pleased and gratified that, during the Democratic National Convention and afterward, you showed a refreshing willingness to remove the troubling Bosnian problem from election-year politics. By supporting in advance whatever the president chose to do there, and in fact encouraging him to move more decisively to end the slaughter of innocent civilians, break the siege by Serbian militias of a multicultural city, and restore the Bosnian government's authority over all the lands inside its borders, you removed an urgent international humanitarian problem from the domestic political arena.
We hope that in the interim before inauguration day you will reiterate your support for urgent action by the incumbent administration, and your willingness to continue what it starts in Bosnia. With that kind of assurance, we have little doubt that the European nations, and the rest of the world, will support American leadership there, and thereby set a precedent that will counter attempts by other aggressive ethnic or sectarian groups to alter national borders by force or seize power over others.
Such a U.S. assumption of responsibility will be interpreted, particularly in the Islamic world, as an assurance that the "new world order," as envisioned by your incoming administration, means in fact support of justice, equality and human rights for all. Establishing this concept clearly at the beginning of your administration can obviate much future grief not only for you, but for the United States, which badly needs to restore good relations in parts of the world where they have languished.
The other area which requires immediate action is the Israeli-Palestinian problem. President Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker have made a superb start in bringing about a solution to this problem based upon a strict application of the land-for-peace formula of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. The dispute, which has led to so much bloodshed over the past half century, is the underlying irritant in U.S. relations with the entire Islamic world, and a catalyst for extremism.
The partisanship of some previous U.S. administrations in disputes involving Israel also has been disquieting for our industrialized European and Far Eastern allies, whose economies depend upon Middle Eastern stability. It is even more disquieting for Third World countries on the economic margins, for whom sudden fluctuations in the prices of energy and petroleum-based fertilizers literally are a matter of life or death.
At the peace talks, the Arab participants have offered "total peace" in exchange for "total withdrawal" from all lands seized by Israel in 1967 and thereafter. Whether the present government of Israel, which we believe also wants peace, can meet the Arab challenge depends entirely upon the United States. No Israeli prime minister, not even the relatively popular Yitzhak Rabin, can take the domestic political risks entailed in such withdrawals unless his constituency can see clearly that he has no choice but to make such territorial concessions in order to retain U.S. economic assistance.
It was this perception that motivated Israeli voters to elect Rabin to replace the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir, who was ideologically committed to no withdrawals from what his hard-line supporters called "Greater Israel."
Make it clear that you plan to continue the Middle East peace process.
Your campaign criticism of the Bush administration for linking U.S. loan guarantees, and by implication future U.S. aid to Israel, to Israeli performance at the peace table profoundly worries not only the Arabs and the peace parties in Israel, but Yitzhak Rabin himself. It explains Rabin's estrangement from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel's principal U.S. lobby, which he fears will persuade you to reverse the U.S. pressure that brought him to power.
These concerns are fueled by the presence at the highest levels of your campaign of persons closely affiliated with or sympathetic to AIPAC. An example is your early supporter, David Ifshin, who has served as general counsel to your campaign committee while simultaneously serving as general counsel to AIPAC. We think it is unprecedented for someone still holding such a key position in an organization whose sole purpose is to lobby for a foreign country to hold, at the same time, an identical position in a presidential campaign.
It casts a shadow over your perceived ability, as president, to be objective in Middle East matters which have a critical impact in the United States on exports, energy prices and job creation.
There is a public perception that your campaign, from the beginning, has been very close to special interests and, in particular, the Israel lobby. One reason this perception did not sink your campaign was lingering doubt about extreme positions endorsed by President Bush while serving as vice president. His unwillingness to adopt political positions more compatible with his personal convictions and a changed political climate came back to haunt him when he had to campaign effectively in his own right in 1992.
We believe you can do your own and the nation's future a great service by taking initial actions and making initial appointments to demonstrate clearly that domestic political considerations will not govern your foreign policy. In the case of Bosnia, you need only follow your initial instincts. That is the easy decision because, now that they understand the issue and the urgency more clearly, the American people seem united behind actions you already have endorsed.
More difficult is to make it clear that you plan to continue without interruption the Middle East peace process so successfully initiated by President Bush. Important steps will be to appoint a secretary of state and an ambassador to the United Nations who are not identified with a special agenda anywhere in the world, and who enjoy your full, personal backing.
Equally important, in our view, is to appoint a special negotiator who has nor personal or ideological axe to grind to oversee and participate personally in the continuing Middle East peace negotiations. The obvious choice is former President Jimmy Carter, who has been personally involved in this complex and long-standing problem. He has followed his extraordinary achievement at Camp David, which brought about the land-for-peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, with successful service at the head of election-observation teams, and in conflict resolution activities in several parts of the world.
Announcement of his appointment as your personal representative at the Middle East peace talks would be, in our opinion, the single most effective thing you could do, immediately after the election, to assure no loss of momentum in the promising peace process, and to create international trust and confidence in your own administration as an agent of peace with justice throughout the world. If you choose such a course, you can be assured of our strong support, and that of most of our readers.
Respectfully,
The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
