October 1990, Page 7, 8, 85

Special Report

Bush, Gorbachev and the "New World Order" in the Middle East

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Whether we want it or not, history dictates that a lot is going to depend on whether the two countries can work together. That's not our ambition; it's just the way that history has gone." -Mikhail Gorbachev, at joint press conference with George Bush in Helsinki, Sept. 9, 1990

It's not premature to insist that the rapid international response to the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait marks the beginning of a "new international order." It's already trite to say that because of events set in train on that day, the Middle East will "never again be the same." In fact, if those changes improve the Middle East for all of its inhabitants, the planet will never again be the same.

How does the Middle East get from the perilous present to being better and safer for everyone? By setting a course based upon the implications of the Sept. 9 joint press conference by presidents George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in Helsinki. And by avoiding the pitfalls along the way.

The U.N.: Never Again the Same

"I think the world sees clearly that if this had occurred 20 years ago, there wouldn't have been this cooperative feeling at the United Nations." -Mikhail Gorbachev, Sept. 9, 1990

Never has it been clearer than since the beginning of the Gulf crisis that everything in the world has changed. The U.S. would not have rushed its forces into the Gulf as decisively as it did, had it been worried about the Soviet Union fishing in their troubled wake. Twice, however, President Bush let his feelings outrun prudence.

When a U.S. Navy ship fired the first warning shot across an Iraqi bow, cooler heads told the president to slow down and let the Security Council turn unauthorized individual acts of war into authorized acts of collective defense. When Bush called for a total embargo on food, cooler heads inserted into the U.N. embargo loopholes for food and medicines for humanitarian purposes. The U.N., thanks to Soviet cooperation, then became a source of support for wise collective actions, and a brake on foolish ones.

Next, talk about a long Western presence on the ground should end. When Arab and Muslim troops can protect Saudi Arabia, then it's time for Americans to pull back to their ships and planes to enforce the embargo, and put some distance between themselves and the conservative citadels of the Arabian peninsula. Both sides are the better for brief initial contacts. Let it go at that.

The U.N. resolutions were in response to illegal aggression by a Soviet ally against an American ally. But, in deference to principle, the Soviet Union did not exercise its veto. If there is to be a new world order, such actions must be reciprocal, based upon one principle for all.

The U.S. failed to apply this principle last April, just prior to Saddam Hussein's aggression, when the U.N. Security Council sought to send U.N. observers into Israeli-occupied territories. The U.S. vetoed the resolution. In the future, vetoes by either side of such collective action against aggression would doom the "new world order," and leave the planet unchanged.

Jordan: The First Pitfall

"Jordan feels that Israel is looking for an excuse to turn Jordan into a battlefield and perhaps push Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank across the border." -Jerusalem Correspondent Jackson Diehl, The Washington Post, Aug. 20, 1990

"Plucky young King Hussein of Jordan," as he was known two generations ago, has rueld far longer than any other Middle Eastern chief of state. Now he's in trouble.

The Palestinians, who constitute more than half of his population and have no country of their own to lose, seem unconcerned that Jordan could lose its independence by supporting Saddam Hussein's doomed campaign. Jordan is overwhelmed by foreign refugees from Kuwait and Iraq, and is dependent financially upon continued trade with its embargoed Iraqi neighbor.

King Hussein doesn't need lectures from the West or his oil-producing former bankrollers. He needs immediate financial help to offset the grave consequences on Jordan of the embargo.

Then he needs a lot of luck to keep his tinderbox country from becoming the catalyst for a war that would undo all ofd the Bush-Gorbachev efforts to bring about historic change by peaceful rather than violent means.

Saddam Hussein: How to Back Off the Limb?

"Americans knew that Saddam Hussein was not Saint Francis of Assisi, nor did they see him as Adolf Hitler, who, after all, led a powerful and successful nation and who had a realizable blueprint for world domination. Saddam Hussein's Iraq is incapable of feeding itself, has fewer people than the state of New York, and with a population roughly the same as that of East Germany has a gross national product one-fifth the size of that beleaguered European state." -Columnist Mark Shields, The Washington Post, Aug. 28, 1990

It's the second time President Saddam Hussein has proven himself a master of mistiming. In 1980, after Iran's Islamic Revolution first decimated Iranian military officers because they had prospered under the Shah, and then devoured the westernized liberals and democrats who had worked with the fundamentalists to overthrow the Shah in 1979, Saddam judged the time was ripe. He sent Iraqi forces across the Iranian border in September 1980.

The invasion did not get Iraq back the Shatt Al-Arab waterway, and did not pluck off for Iraq Arabic-speaking parts of Iran's oil fields. Instead, it united the Iranians behind the previously disintegrating government of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and turned into a bloody eight-year stalemate for both countries.

By massing his troops on the Kuwaiti border, Saddam had already achieved most of his demands on Kuwait. By sending them across the border in fulfillment of Iraq's dreams to make Kuwait "the natural port of Iraq," however, he forfeited everything. That included even Iraq's claim on the Shatt Al-Arab, ostensible cause of the war with Iran in which Iraqis suffered so much.

Now, once again, Saddam desperately needs a way to crawl back off the limb. If the Kuwaitis tell him that after he withdraws peacefully they will resume negotiations on leased facilities to improve Iraqi access to the sea, it might be the figleaf he needs, whether or not the Kuwaitis ever carry through.

Saddam could otherwise choose to go down in a fiery Gotterdammerung, the closest he'll every get to being a Middle East Hitler. He could take his country, its oil-fields, and maybe those of his neighbors with him. The way to start this disaster would be to strike at Israel, or simply send some of his forces or planes into Jordan, giving the Israelis the pretext to strike at Iraq.

Going down fighting Israelis would make an immortal Arab martyr of Saddam Hussein, pit Arab masses against Americans and their Arab allies all over the Middle East, and make a mockery of American and Soviet plans to stabilize the area.

Saddam Hussein's other chance to become an Arab hero, but this time a living one, might arise if the Bush administration listens to urgings by Israel's merchants of bad advice. They want the U.S. to repeat Henry Kissinger's mistake of the '70s by seeking to stir up another Kurdish rebellion, or to repeat Khomeini's mistake of trying to incite a revolt by the Shi'i of southern Iraq.

Either foolish action could unite Iraq's ruling Sunni Arabs behind Saddam, just as surely as he inadvertently united Iran. It might also attract significant support to Saddam by the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab world, and from neighboring Turkey, which is Sunni and has its own serious Kurdish problem.

Syria: No Choice But to Switch Sides

"Reaction here is ambiguous. Iraq is always our enemy. We have had their car bombs in Damascus. At the same time, everybody hates the Kuwaitis." -Unnamed Syrian quoted by John Kifner, The New York Times, Aug. 28, 1990

Damascus shopkeepers are said to hope Hafez Al-Assad's opening to the West will be good for business. At the same time, there are reports of harsh measures taken against rioters protesting the Syrian president's decision to send Syrian troops to help defend Saudi Arabia.

In the short run, neither matters. Syria is as much a police state as is Iraq. In fact, Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad has no choice. His country has lived on financial aid from Saudi Arabia, and spent much of it on arms from the Soviet Union. If he had taken any other decision, there would have been no more of either.

Syria's new stance opens up possibilities for the "new world order," however. It's a chance to begin easing Syrian forces out of Lebanon after all Lebanese parties finally accept the even-handed "Taif agreement" to divide power equally between Lebanese Christians and Muslims.

It's also a chance to get Syria to negotiate Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights. The Israelis don't want to do it for the same reason they don't want to withdraw from the West Bank. It has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with water. The Golan contains the headwaters of rivers the Israelis depend upon, and much of the water from them flows through aquifers under the West Bank. Getting the real issue on the table, however, is the first step in reaching a division of those waters with which all sides can live.

The Palestinians: Everyone's Cause

"The veteran Israeli politician Abba Eban is widely credited with coining and aphorism about Palestinian diplomacy that has stuck for many years: The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Now some Israelis might modify that: The Palestinians never give up a chance to hurt their chances." -Joel Brinkley, The New York Times, Sept. 2, 1990

To everyone in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and millions elsewhere, the Palestinian cause is unique. Not since the Armenians in World War I, and the Jews in World War II, has a people suffered more injustice or indignity, and neither of the aforementioned victims suffered so long.

Incredibly, after half a century of deception by the West, expulsion by the Israelis, exploitation by other Arabs, betrayal by the Soviets and massacres in Lebanon, the Palestinians are depicted by Israel's admirers in the U.S. media not as victims, but as terrorists.

In fact the Palestinians have been victimized for so long that they no longer seem capable of pursuing their own best interests. Their chosen leader, Yasser Arafat, can't lead them. His extremist rivals for Palestinian leadership are fools, traitors and worse. But Palestinians will reject any leadership encouraged or imposed from outside.

They have been betrayed by everyone, and everyone feels the guilt. The unresolved Palestinian problem is, indisputably, the major cause of instability in the Middle East. Anyone who denies the Palestinians have a grievance is a scoundrel. Anyone who seeks to stabilize the Middle East without addressing it is a fool. The U.S., with a larger share of both than the Europeans, should pass the problem to the United Nations Security Council, and then follow the no veto rule. It can be solved there in a manner with which both Arab and Israeli moderates can live.

In August, Democratic Senator Daniel Moynihan of New York, long a member of Israel's American cheering section, but also author of a new book on international law, noted:

"We've had some pretty egregious violations of international law in the past, but the great powers had different interests and in those conditions this U.N. system cannot work. Now the major powers have convergent interests and the mechanism of the U.N. is there waiting to be used."

Israel: Two Reasons for Wanting War

"While talking to Israeli right-wing politicians, it is easy to detect their fervent hope that the present crisis in the Gulf will not be solved by peaceful means. They hope that if an Iraqi aggression drives us to a war, all options will be open including the establishment of a Palestinian state of sorts in Jordan and the settling of all the Land of Israel's Arabs there after expelling them from here." -Israeli political correspondent Shalom Yerushalmi writing in Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha'ir, Aug. 31, 1990

The Israeli press is full of worried speculation that the moment long-awaited by Likud hardliners like Ariel Sharon, racist demagogues like Meir Kahane, and religious fanatics like Moshe Levinger has arrived. They seek war as a pretext to push all of Israel's Arabs into Jordan. Their slogan is, "Palestine exists, but in Jordan," and they plan to remove any potential for its existence in the West Bank and Gaza.

To the right-wing warmongers now can be added "moderate" Israelis who fear that if the Middle East stabilizes and the U.S. shifts its affections to traditional Arab allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, there will be no more U.S. aid to Israel. A war, any war, in which Americans killed Arabs and vice versa would postpone that wrenching experience.

For these two reasons, some Israelis are trying to make a U.S. war with Iraq, or an Israeli war with Iraq, happen. Either will involve Jordan. Left to their own devices, these Israeli hawks will succeed.

The United States: Reining in Israel

"As for the housing loan guarantee, which has already been approved by congressmen, Mr. Baker and Mr. Levy discussed the assurances that Israel would give Washington that none of this money would be spent in the occupied territories. While both men said they made progress on these assurances, they did not resolve all of the outstanding issues and until they do, the guarantee will not be issued. On the stalled peace negotiations, the Administration. . . said Mr. Baker's message to Mr. Levy was that one of the best ways for Israel to counter Saddam Hussein politically, and to prove that he is not the wave of the future in the Middle East, is by demonstrating to Arabs and Palestinians that there are credible alternatives to his confrontational approach to dealing with the Arab-Israel issue." -Correspondent Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, Sept. 6, 1990

George Bush is the first U.S. president since Jimmy Carter to come into office knowing what must be done to bring about an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. The account above indicates that his smart and tough Secretary of State is doing it. Israel must be told, morning, noon and night, that the U.S. will not tolerate any actions, or reactions, that get Americans killed fighting Israel's battles.

And the Israelis must know that we mean it. Israel must settle with the Palestinians to lower the danger to Americans in the Gulf. Bush and Baker must go before Congress and explain that the U.S. must no longer subsidize an Israel that insists upon being a strategic liability to America.

Some Israelis are trying to make a U.S. war with Iraq happen.

If Bush and Baker can keep the governments of Saddam Hussein and Yitzhak Shamir from starting the fight for which each is spoiling, the embargo eventually will settle the problem of military aggression and occupation in the Gulf.

It will stay solved, however, only if the U.S. leaders apply the same standards, just as zealously, to aggression and occupation in the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and Lebanon.

in answer to a question by a representative of the Palestine News Agency at their joint press conference, Bush refused to link the Kuwait problem with the Palestine problem, although he said of the latter:

"I couldn't agree more that it is important, it is very important that that question eventually, and hopefully sooner than later, be solved."

Gorbachev, on the other hand, was forthcoming: "Even more than in the case of the Persian Gulf, we need to act more energetically in order to resolve the complex of problems in the Middle East. . . It seems to me that there is a link here."

That sounds like applying the new world order in the Middle East. If Bush and Gorbachev do it successfully, peace, justice and security could break out anywhere.