October 1990, Page 21

A View From the Hill

The Failure of 40 Years of One-Sided U.S. Middle East Policy

By George Moses

The failure of more than 40 years of American Middle East policy became official on the August 1990 day the first American ground troops stepped off airplanes into the blast-furnace summer heat of Saudi Arabia, in response to the invasion of Kuwait and the threat that the invaders would not stop there.

Unless aggression is the goal, effective national policies are those which reach national objectives without recourse to armed force. That is the standard we use in America, and by that standard we have failed miserably.

It was, unfortunately, a predictable and avoidable disaster. By inserting a huge pro-Israel blind spot where a self-serving American policy toward the Arab world should have been, we helped to create the conditions which tempted Saddam Hussein to make his so far successful land grab. Those conditions are a bitter legacy of years of misguided effort.

A Bitter Legacy

Part of that legacy is anti-American feelings in the Arab world so deep that it prevents some governments (most notably Jordan, but there are others) from acting in their own interests. Can anyone really believe that Jordanian sovereignty can be guaranteed if the Iraqi gambit in Kuwait succeeds? Interestingly, there is more than one immediate threat to Jordan. If the Likudist Israeli government decides that the threat of an imminent or likely Iraqi takeover of Jordan can be sold to the Congress, Israel might just go ahead and take Jordan for itself. Defensively, of course.

Another part of the legacy is the pervasive political instability caused by our failure to create a just solution to the Palestinian problem. For years, despite our obvious ability to do so, we failed to exert sufficient effort to resolve this problem out of our reflexive deference to Israeli objectives over American ones. Now American soldiers stand to pay with their lives for this failure rooted in domestic rather than international political concerns.

Most galling of all, however, has been the apparent success of the claque of pro-Israel hawks in the United States in persuading policymakers that these American failures were actually successes. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has dedicated itself to presenting Israeli national objectives as American ones. Since its inception, for example, it has stated that the Shamir elections ploy was a genuine opportunity for peace; that the Palestinians needed to build Israeli confidence before they could be considered for even limited autonomy; and that there was no real reason to worry about oil prices.

It was, unfortunately, a predictable and avoidable disaster.

Writing in the summer issue of Foreign Affairs, Institute Fellow Barry Rubin had this to say about U.S. Middle East policy:

"There must be recognition that U.S. Middle East policy has enjoyed a remarkable degree of success in the long run. . . U.S. influence has been maintained, a Soviet bid for hegemony has been turned back, U.S. commitments to Israel and other allies have been kept, wars and instability have been circumscribed and oil supplies have been preserved. . . The lessons of these accomplishments should be fully appreciated."

The ink was barely dry on this erroneous pronouncement when we faced the second oil price shock in as many decades; the spectacle of American influence with some Arab governments so diminished that our very presence was enough to prevent their acting with us to combat naked aggression; an unprecedented series of U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at averting the threat of a Middle East war; and the emergency deployment of large numbers of American troops into an environment particularly unsuited to its capabilities. Perhaps from an Israeli perspective these could be called successes, but American "appreciation" of these accomplishments is likely to be mixed, at best.

Not Just Errors of Intellect

Sadly, these mistakes are not just errors of intellect. For some, Arab-bashing is a substitute for sober analysis of American interests. Rubin's article begins by listing in its second paragraph Arab "radicals." Included is Syria, presently cooperating with the United States in Saudi Arabia. Missing is Iraq, the cause of the most immediate threat to regional stability. He could have assembled an almost enviably useful list of "Arab radicals" with a dart board. And, as is often the case with Arab bashers, non-Semitic Iran is lumped in with the Arabs, perhaps to demonstrate a sort of congenital instability.

As long as the biases represented by this kind of thinking hold sway, the United States will never succeed in the Middle East. Instead, we will be condemned to a sort of "muddling through" from crisis to ever-worsening crisis.

It is possible, however, that a fundamental change is about to overtake the policy debate on the region. A major felicitous fallout of the deployment has been a crash course in Arab history, culture and politics for American officials, media and the public. Congressman and reporters who previously relied on Israel, AIPAC and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy for their information about the region are now being exposed first hand to the Arab world. If one listens closely, it is possible to hear the occasional sound of an anti-Arab myth exploding.

If this consciousness increases sufficiently, the next objective could be an honest pursuit of U.S. interests by putting an end to the Israeli policy of occupation outside of its borders. As more and more Americans see the basic similarity between Iraqi and Israeli occupations, the question of why we fight the one and fund the other is going to become more difficult for apologists to avoid. If major bloodshed over Kuwait can be averted, the solution to the underlying problems lies at hand.

That will be an achievement to be "fully appreciated."

George Moses, a former president of the National Association of Arab Americans, is a legislative consultant based in Washington, DC.