text:
Folly?
When I was in the fourth grade, we had the horrible Mr. Johnson as our teacher.
Once he got called to the office. When he got back, he found all of us sitting absolutely still and quiet.
Shocked, he asked, "Boys and girls, I've never seen anything like this. It's wonderful. But what made you all act so well behaved and quiet?"
We all looked at each other and I finally raised my hand.
"Well," I said, "one time you said that if you ever came back and found us quiet, you'd drop dead."
Two men are sitting in a bar. One says to the other, "I think it's spelled W-H-H-O-O-O-M-B."
The other man replies, "No, wouldn't it be more like W-H-H-H-O-O-M-M-B-B?"
The waitress is walking by and says, "You guys are both idiots!
It's spelled W-O-M-B, you jerks!" and she storms off.
The one man turns to his friend and says, "How do you like that?
She's heard an elephant fart too!"
San Francisco has become the first US city to pay for civil employees' sex change operations.
The rest rooms at San Francisco's City Hall are now labeled "Men," "Women,"
and "Pending."
Education experts are worried that major world events like 9/11 and the war in Iraq are happening too quickly for college students to get a chance to study them properly.
But the major universities say there's no need for alarm, as they promise to continue hiring professors with no idea about what's going on in the real world anyway.
Remember last summer when more than 1,000 people died in France due to the heat wave? Seems French President François Hollande is apologizing for defects in his country's health service.
He says he's mostly sorry, though, because he can't find a way to blame the tragedy on the United States.
Issue of the Times;
"Ancient History": U.S. Conduct in the Middle East by Sheldon L. Richman
Since World War Il and the Folly Of Intervention
When Iranian revolutionaries entered the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and
seized 52 Americans, President Jimmy Carter dismissed reminders of America's
long intervention in Iran as "ancient history." Carter's point was not
merely that previous U.S. policy could not excuse the hostage taking. His
adjective also implied that there was nothing of value to be learned from
that history. In his view, dredging up old matters was more than unhelpful;
it was also dangerous, presumably because it could only serve the interests
of America's adversaries. Thus, to raise historical issues was at least
unpatriotic and maybe worse.(1)
As the United States finds itself in the aftermath of another crisis in the
Middle East, it is worth the risk of opprobrium to ask why there should be
hostility toward America in that region. Some insight can be gained by
surveying official U.S. conduct in the Middle East since the end of World
War II. Acknowledged herein is a fundamental, yet deplorably overlooked,
distinction between understanding and excusing. The purpose of this survey
is not to pardon acts of violence against innocent people but to understand
the reasons that drive people to violent political acts.(2) The stubborn and
often self-serving notion that the historical record is irrelevant because
political violence is inexcusable ensures that Americans will be caught in
crises in the Middle East and elsewhere for many years to come.
After 70 years of broken Western promises regarding Arab independence, it
should not be surprising that the West is viewed with suspicion and
hostility by the populations (as opposed to some of the political regimes)
of the Middle East.(3) The United States, as the heir to British imperialism
in the region, has been a frequent object of suspicion. Since the end of
World War II, the United States, like the European colonial powers before
it, has been unable to resist becoming entangled in the region's political
conflicts. Driven by a desire to keep the vast oil reserves in hands
friendly to the United States, a wish to keep out potential rivals (such as
the Soviet Union), opposition to neutrality in the cold war, and domestic
political considerations, the United States has compiled a record of tragedy
in the Middle East. The most recent part of that record, which includes U.S.
alliances with Iraq to counter Iran and then with Iran and Syria to counter
Iraq, illustrates a theme that has been played in Washington for the last 45
An examination of the details and consequences of that theme provides a
startling object lesson in the pitfalls and conceit of an interventionist
foreign policy. The two major components of the theme that are covered in
this study are U.S. policy toward Iran and the relations between Israel and
the Arabs. Events in which those components overlapped-- development of the
Carter Doctrine, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Persian Gulf War--will also be
examined.
In the aftermath of the most overt and direct U.S. attempt to manage affairs
in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf War, it is more important than ever to
understand how the United States came to be involved in the region and the
disastrous consequences of that involvement. President Bush's willingness to
sacrifice American lives to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait, to restore the
"legitimate" government of that feudal monarchy, and to create a "new world
order" proceeds logically from the premises and policies of past
administrations. Indeed, there is little new in Bush's new world order,
except the Soviet Union's assistance. That may mean the new order will be
far more dangerous than the old, because it will feature an activist U.S.
foreign policy without the inhibitions that were formerly imposed by the
superpower rivalry. That bodes ill for the people of the Middle East, as
well as for the long-suffering American citizens, who will see their taxes
continue to rise, their consumer economy increasingly distorted by military
spending, and their blood spilled--all in the name of U.S. leadership.
Background: Oil
If the chief natural resource of the Middle East were bananas, the region
would not have attracted the attention of U.S. policymakers as it has for
decades. Americans became interested in the oil riches of the region in the
1920s, and two U.S. companies, Standard Oil of California and Texaco, won
the first concession to explore for oil in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. They
discovered oil there in 1938, just after Standard Oil of California found it
in Bahrain. The same year Gulf Oil (along with its British partner
Anglo-Persian Oil) found oil in Kuwait. During and after World War II, the
region became a primary object of U.S. foreign policy. It was then that
policymakers realized that the Middle East was "a stupendous source of
strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world
history."(4)
Subsequently, as a result of cooperation between the U.S. government and
several American oil companies, the United States replaced Great Britain as
the chief Western power in the region.(5) In Iran and Saudi Arabia, American
gains were British (and French) losses.(6) Originally, the dominant American
oil interests had had limited access to Iraqi oil only (through the Iraq
Petroleum Company, under the 1928 Red Line Agreement). In 1946, however,
Standard Oil of New Jersey and Mobil Oil Corp., seeing the irresistible
opportunities in Saudi Arabia, had the agreement voided.(7) When the
awakening countries of the Middle East asserted control over their oil
resources, the United States found ways to protect its access to the oil.
Nearly everything the United States has done in the Middle East can be
understood as contributing to the protection of its long-term access to
Middle Eastern oil and, through that control, Washington's claim to world
leadership. The U.S. build-up of Israel and Iran as powerful gendarmeries
beholden to the United States, and U.S. aid given to "moderate," pro-Western
Arab regimes, such as those in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan, were
intended to keep the region in friendly hands. That was always the meaning
of the term "regional stability."(8)
What threatened American access to the region? Although much was made of the
Soviet threat, there is reason to believe that throughout the cold war
Washington did not take it seriously in the Middle East. The primary
perceived threat was indigenous--namely, Arab and Iranian nationalism, which
appears to have been the dominant concern from 1945 on. "The most serious
threats may emanate from internal changes in the gulf states," a
congressional report stated in 1977.(9) Robert W. Tucker, the foreign policy
analyst who advocated in the 1970s that the United States take over the
Middle Eastern oil fields militarily, predicted that the "more likely"
threat to U.S. access to the oil would "arise primarily from developments
indigenous to the Gulf."(10) The rise of Arab nationalism or Muslim
fundamentalism, or any other force not sufficiently obeisant to U.S.
interests, would threaten American economic and worldwide political
leadership (and the profits of state-connected corporations). As Tucker
wrote, "It is the Gulf that forms the indispen-sable key to the defense of
the American global position."(11) Thus, any challenge to U.S. hegemony had
to be prevented or at least contained.(12) As Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles said privately during the Lebanese crisis in 1958, the United States
"must regard Arab nationalism as a flood which is running strongly. We
cannot successfully oppose it, but we could put sand bags around positions
we must protect--the first group being Israel and Lebanon and the second
being the oil positions around the Persian Gulf."(13)
The government sought foreign sources of oil during World War II because it
believed U.S. reserves were running out. Loy Henderson, who in 1945 was in
charge of Near Eastern affairs for the State Department, said, "There is a
need for a stronger role for this Government in the economics and political
destinies of the Near and Middle East, especially in view of the oil
reserves."(14) During the war the U.S. government and two American oil
companies worked together to win concessions in Iran.(15) That action
brought the United States into rivalry with Great Britain and the Soviet
Union, both of which had dominated Iran in the interwar period, though Reza
Shah Pahlavi had succeeded in reducing foreign influence from its previous
level. (Great Britain had its oil concession through the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company.) With the Soviets and the British occupying Iran and both favoring
the decentralization of that country, the Tehran government sought to
involve American oil interests as a way of enlisting U.S. support for Iran's
security and stability. The U.S. government aided the companies, by
providing facilities for transportation and communication along with other
help, and dispatched advisers to the Iranian regime. In 1942 Wallace Murray,
a State Department official involved in Near Eastern affairs, said, "We
shall soon be in the position of actually 'running' Iran through an
impressive body of American advisers."(16)
The relationship between the U.S. government and large American oil
companies remained close throughout the war, despite differences over such
issues as the government's part ownership of commercial enterprises. The oil
companies and the State Department coordinated their efforts to ensure
themselves a major role in the Middle East. One indication of that
coordination was the appointment in 1941 of Max Thornburg as the State
Department's petroleum adviser. The United States was a comparative
latecomer to the region, but it intended to make up for lost time. Thornburg
had been an official with the Bahrain Petroleum Company, a Middle Eastern
subsidiary of Socal (Standard Oil of Cali-fornia) and Texaco. Throughout his
government tenure, he maintained ties with the company and even collected a
$29,000 annual salary from the oil company.(17)
While still in the department, Thornburg commissioned a study on foreign oil
policy that predicted dwindling domestic reserves and advised that those
reserves be conserved by ensuring U.S. access to foreign oil. As a result,
Secretary of State Cordell Hull created the Committee on International
Petroleum Policy, which included Thornburg. The committee recommended
creation of the Petroleum Reserves Corporation, which would be controlled by
the State Department and would buy options on Saudi Arabian oil. Once in
operation, the corporation tried to buy all the stock of the California
Arabian Standard Oil Company, created by Socal and owned by it and Texaco,
but the deal eventually fell through.(18) Government officials had great
hopes for the Petroleum Reserves Corporation. As Interior Secretary Harold
Ickes revealingly put it, "If we can really get away with it, the Petroleum
Reserves Corporation can be a big factor in world oil affairs and have a
strong influence on foreign relations generally." Ickes was thinking of the
influence that the government would have on oil prices and distribution.(19)
A similar view is found in a 1953 position paper prepared by the Departments
of State, Defense, and the Interior for the National Security Council, which
stated that "American oil operations are, for all practical purposes,
instruments of our foreign policy."(20) Such was the attitude of the U.S.
government and its partners in the oil industry after World War II.
Iran and the Soviets, 1945-47
The first U.S. intervention in the Middle East after World War II grew
directly out of U.S. participation in that conflict. During the war, U.S.
noncombatant troops were stationed in Iran to help with the transfer of
equipment and supplies to the Soviet Union. The Red Army occupied the
northern part of the country in 1941; the British were in central and
southern Iran. In the Tripartite Treaty of January 1942 (not signed by the
United States), the Soviet Union and Great Britain had said that their
presence there was not an occupation and that all troops would be withdrawn
within six months of the end of the war. At the Tehran conference in late
1943, the United States pledged, along with Great Britain and the Soviet
Union, to help rebuild and develop Iran after the war. Those countries gave
assurances of Iranian sovereignty, although that may have been a mere
courtesy to a host country that had not even been notified that a summit
would be held on its soil.(21)
The Soviet Union broke its promise about withdrawing. Soviet leader Joseph
Stalin viewed the part of Iran that bordered his country as important to
Soviet security, and he was aware of the U.S. and British designs on Iran,
which had traditionally sided with the Soviet Union's enemies. Although the
Soviet Union had much oil, Stalin was concerned about the size of its
reserves and so was interested in the northern part of Iran as a potential
source of oil. But as State Department official George Kennan sized up the
situation at the time, "The basic motive of recent Soviet action in northern
Iran is probably not the need for the oil itself, but apprehension of
potential foreign penetration in that area."(22) The Soviets meddled in
Iranian government affairs, oppressed the middle class in the north, and
helped revive the suppressed Iranian Communist (Tudeh) party. When the war
ended, the British and U.S. forces left Iran, but the Soviet troops moved
southward. They by then had established two separatist regimes headed by
Soviet-picked leaders (the Autonomous People's Republic of Azerbaijan and
the Kurdish People's Republic) and kept the Iranians from putting down
separatist uprisings. (The Azerbaijanis and Kurds, members of large ethnic
groups that live in several countries, had long hated the rulers in Tehran.)
Negotiations between the Soviets and Iran's prime minister, Qavam
as-Saltaneh, won Moscow the right to intervene on behalf of the Azerbaijani
regime, an oil concession in the north, and the appointment of three
Communists to the Iranian cabinet.(23)
That Soviet conduct irritated President Harry S Truman. He said he feared
for Turkey's security and criticized "Russia's callous disregard of the
rights of a small nation and of her own solemn promises."(24) The United
States formally protested to Stalin and then to the UN Security Council.
Those actions succeeded in getting the Soviets to leave, although Truman may
also have threatened to send forces into Iran if Stalin did not withdraw his
troops.(25) In late 1946 the Truman administration encouraged Mohammed Reza
Shah Pahlavi, who succeeded his father in 1941, to forcibly dismantle the
separatist regimes the Soviets had left behind.(26) In 1947 the
administration objected to the use of intimidation (by others) to win
commercial concessions in Iran and promised to support the Iranians on
issues related to national resources. As a result, the Iranian government
refused to ratify the agreement with the Soviets on the oil concession in
the north.
Truman's high-profile use of the United Nations and his bluster against the
Soviets were the beginning of U.S. post-war involvement in the Middle East.
In 1947 Truman issued his Truman Doctrine, pledging to "assist free people
to work out their own destinies in their own way," ostensibly to thwart the
Soviets in Greece and Turkey. In reality, it marked the formal succession of
the United States to the position of influence that Great Britain had
previously held in the Middle East.(27)
Mossadegh and the Shah, 1953
When Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953, his administration had
one overriding foreign policy objective: to keep the Soviet Union from
gaining influence and possibly drawing countries away from the U.S. orbit.
To that end, Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, crafted a
policy the primary principle of which was the impossibility of neutrality in
the cold war. In the Dulles world view, there was no such thing as an
independent course; a country was either with the United States or against
it. That principle helps explain much of the Eisenhower administration's
conduct in the Middle East, for if there was one region in which the United
States strove to prevent what it called Soviet penetration, it was the
The earliest direct U.S. involvement occurred in Iran. Even before
Eisenhower took office, political turbulence in that country was on the
rise, prompted by discontent over Iran's oil royalty arrangement with the
British-owned AngloIranian Oil Company.(28) A highly nationalist faction
(the National Front) of the Majlis, or parliament, led by Moham med
Mossadegh, nationalized the oil industry. (Nationalization was considered a
symbol of freedom from foreign influence.) Mossadegh, whom the shah
reluctantly made prime minister after the nationalization, opposed all
foreign aid, including U.S. assistance to the army. He also refused to
negotiate with the British about oil, and in late 1952 he broke off
relations with Great Britain. The turmoil associated with nationalization
stimulated activity by Iranian Communists and the outlawed Tudeh party. At a
rally attended by 30,000 people, the Communists hoisted anti-Western,
pro-Soviet signs, including ones that accused Mossadegh of being an American
puppet.(29)
In the United States, officials feared that loss of Iranian oil would harm
the European Recovery Program and concluded that the communist activity in
Iran was a bad omen, although the Soviets did not intervene beyond giving
moral support.(30) The Mossadegh government hoped that the United States
would continue to deal with Iran and prevent economic collapse, but the
Truman administration put its relations with Great Britain first and
participated in an international boycott of Iranian oil--although Washington
did give Tehran a small amount of aid. U.S.-Iranian relations deteriorated,
as did the Iranian economy. Under that pressure, Mossadegh resorted to
undemocratic methods to forestall the election of anti-government deputies
to the Majlis. When he tried to control the Ministry of Defense, he was
forced to resign, but he soon returned to power when his successor's
policies triggered virulent criticism from Mossadegh's supporters. Mossadegh
came through the crisis with increased, and in some ways authoritarian,
powers.(31) On August 10, 1953, the shah, unable to dominate Mossadegh, left
Tehran for a long "vacation" on the Caspian Sea and then in Baghdad. But he
did not leave until he knew that a U.S. operation was under way to save him.
As author James A. Bill has written: "The American intervention of August
1953 was a momentous event in the history of Iranian-American relations.
[It] left a running wound that bled for twenty-five years and contaminated
relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran following the revolution of
1978-79."(32) London had first suggested a covert operation to Washington
about a year earlier. The British were mainly concerned about their loss of
the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, but in appealing to the United States, they
emphasized the communist threat, "not wishing to be accused of trying to use
the Americans to pull British chestnuts out of the fire."(33)
The British need not have invoked the Soviet threat to win over John Foster
Dulles or his brother Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence
Agency; both were former members of the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and
Cromwell, which represented the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.(34) Besides,
there was ample evidence that Mossadegh was neither a Communist nor a
communist sympathizer. Nevertheless, Operation Ajax was hatched--the
brainchild of the CIA's Middle East chief, Kermit Roosevelt, who directed it
from Tehran.(35) Also sent there was Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, whose job
was to recruit anti-Mossadegh forces with CIA money.(36) The objective of
Operation Ajax was to help the shah get rid of Mossadegh and replace him
with the shah's choice for prime minister, Gen. Fazlollas Zahedi, who had
been jailed by the British during World War II for pro-Nazi activities.(37)
The covert operation began, appropriately enough, with assurances to
Mossadegh from the U.S. ambassador, Loy Henderson, that the United States
did not plan to intervene in Iran's internal affairs. The operation then
filled the streets of Tehran with mobs of people--many of them thugs-- who
were loyal to the shah or who had been recipients of CIA largess. In the
ensuing turmoil, which included fighting in the streets that killed 300
Iranians, Mossadegh fled and was arrested. On August 22, 12 days after he
had fled, the shah returned to Tehran. Mossadegh was sentenced to three
years in prison and then house arrest on his country estate.
Later, in his memoirs, Eisenhower claimed that Mossadegh had been moving
toward the Communists and that the Tudeh party supported him over the shah.
Yet a January 1953 State Department intelligence report said that the prime
minister was not a Communist or communist sympathizer and that the Tudeh
party sought his overthrow.(38) Indeed, Mossadegh had opposed the Soviet
occupation after the war.(39) Author Leonard Mosely has written that "the
masses were with him, even if the army, police, and landowners were
not."(40) Eight years after his overthrow, Mossadegh, about 80 years of age,
appeared before a throng of 80,000 supporters shouting his name.(41)
Once restored to power, the shah entered into an agreement with an
international consortium, 40 percent of which was held by American oil
companies, for the purchase of Iranian oil. It was symptomatic of the
postwar displacement of British by U.S. interests that the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company was not restored to its previous dominance.(42) In succeeding years
the United States regarded the shah as a key ally in the Middle East and
provided his repressive and corrupt government with billions of dollars in
aid and arms.
The restoration of the shah to the Peacock Throne engendered immense
hostility toward the United States and had cataclysmic consequences. The
revolutionary torrent that built up was ultimately too much for even the
United States to handle. By the late 1970s the shah and his poor record on
human rights had become so repugnant to the State Department under Cyrus
Vance that almost any alternative was deemed preferable to the shah's rule.
But the shah had his defenders at the Pentagon and on the National Security
Council who still thought he was important to regional stability and who
favored his taking decisive action to restore order. President Carter at
first was ambivalent. U.S. policy evolved from a suggestion that the shah
gradually relinquish power to a call for him to leave the country. On
January 16, 1979, the shah, as he had in 1953, took leave of his
country--this time for good.(43)
When the monarchy was finally overthrown in the 1978-79 revolution, which
was inspired by Islamic fundamentalism and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
Iranians held Americans hostage for over a year at the U.S. embassy in
Tehran, and the United States suffered a humiliating repudiation of its
foreign policy in the Middle East. Iran and Israel had been built up over
the years into the chief U.S. security agents in the region. Now Iran would
no longer perform that function, and more of the burden had to be shifted to
Israel.
Israel and the Arabs?
The Creation of Israel
In the aftermath of World War I, Great Britain was granted a mandate over
Palestine by the League of Nations. By 1947, however, the violence directed
at British officers by Jews and Arabs, and the financial drain on the
declining imperial power after World War II, moved Great Britain to turn to
the United Nations for help. In April 1947 the Arab nations proposed at the
United Nations that Palestine be declared an independent state, but that
measure was defeated and instead, at Washington's suggestion, a UN
commission was set up to study the problem.
The defeat of the Arab proposal is important to an understanding of
subsequent events. During World War I the British sought Arab support
against the Ottoman Turks, who ruled much of the Arab world. In return for
their support, the British promised the Arabs their long-sought
independence. The British, however, also made promises about the same
territory to the Zionists who sought to establish a Jewish state on the site
of Biblical Israel. The Balfour Declaration, issued on November 2, 1917,
stated that "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best
endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object. . . ."
Significantly, however, the sentence ended with the words, "it being clearly
understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the
rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." (The U.S.
Congress endorsed the Balfour Declaration, using similar language, in
1922.)(44) Toward the end of World War I, however, the Bolsheviks exposed a
secret Anglo-French agreement to divide the Ottoman Empire between Great
Britain and France. Arab independence had never been seriously intended.
Meanwhile, Great Britain was preparing to allow Jewish immigration into
Palestine.(45)
Violence among Jews, Arabs, and British officials in Palestine before and
after World War II led London to ask the United Nations in 1947 for a
recommendation on how to deal with the problem.(46) The murder of millions
of Jews by the Nazis and the deplorable state of the Holocaust survivors had
stimulated the international effort to establish a sovereign Jewish state in
Palestine, and American Zionists had declared in 1942 (in the Biltmore
Program) "that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated
in the structure of the new democratic world."(47)
In November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to recommend
partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. The two states were to
be joined in an economic union, and Jerusalem would be administered by the
United Nations. The Arabs would get 43 percent of the land, the Jews 57
percent. The proposed apportionment should be assessed in light of the
following facts: The Jewish portion was better land; by the end of 1947 the
percentage of Palestine purchased by Jews was less than 7 percent; Jewish
land purchases accounted for only 10 percent of the proposed Jewish state;
and Jews made up less than one-third of the population of Palestine.(48)
Moreover, the Jewish state was to include 497,000 Arabs, who would
constitute just under 50 percent of the new state's population.
The United States not only accepted the UN plan, it aggressively promoted it
among the other members of the United Nations. Truman had been personally
moved by the tragedy of the Jews and by the condition of the refugees. That
response and his earlier studies of the Bible made him open to the argument
that emigration to Palestine was the proper remedy for the surviving Jews of
Europe. Yet he acknowledged later, in his memoirs, that he was "fully aware
of the Arabs' hostility to Jewish settlement in Palestine."(49) He, like his
predecessor, had promised he would take no action without fully consulting
the Arabs, and he reneged.
Truman's decision to support establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine
was made against the advice of most of the State Department and other
foreign policy experts, who were concerned about U.S. relations with the
Arabs and possible Soviet penetration of the region. Secretary James
Forrestal of the Defense Department and Loy Henderson, at that time the
State Department's chief of Near Eastern affairs, pressed those points most
vigorously. Henderson warned that partition would not only create
anti-Americanism but would also require U.S. troops to enforce it, and he
stated his belief that partition violated both U.S. and UN principles of
self-determination.(50)
But Truman was concerned about the domestic political implications as well
as the foreign policy implications of the partition issue. As he himself put
it during a meeting with U.S. ambassadors to the Middle East, according to
William A. Eddy, the ambassador to Saudi Arabia, "I'm sorry gentlemen, but I
have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of
Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my
constituents."(51) Later, in a 1953 article in the American Zionist,
Emmanuel Neumann, president of the Zionist Organization of America, conceded
that Truman would not have worked so hard for the creation of Israel but for
"the prospect of wholesale defections from the Democratic Party."(52)
Truman's decision to support the Zionist cause was also influenced by Samuel
I. Rosenman, David K. Niles, and Clark Clifford, all members of his staff,
and Eddie Jacobson, his close friend and former business partner. Truman
later wrote:
The White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I
ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had
in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist
leaders--actuated by political motives and engaging in political
threats--disturbed and annoyed me.(53)
Pressure on Truman also came from non-Jewish fundamentalists and
politicians.
In some cases, support for Jewish admission to and statehood in Palestine
may have had another domestic political angle. That support sidestepped the
sensitive issue of U.S. immigration quotas, which had kept European Jews out
of the United States since the 1920s and had left them at the mercy of the
Nazis. In other words, support for Zionism may have been a convenient way
for people who did not want Jews to come to the United States to avoid
appearing anti-Semitic. American classical liberals and others, including
the American Council for Judaism, opposed the quotas, and it is probable
that many of the refugees, given the option, would have preferred to come to
the United States.(54)
By mid-November 1947 the Truman administration was firmly in the Zionist
camp. When the State Department and the U.S. mission to the United Nations
agreed that the partition resolution should be changed to shift the Negev
from the Jewish to the Palestinian state, Truman sided with the Jewish
Agency, the main Zionist organization, against them.(55) The United States
also voted against a UN resolution calling on member states to accept Jewish
refugees who could not be repatriated.(56)
As the partition plan headed toward a vote in the UN General Assembly, U.S.
officials applied pressure to--and even threatened to withhold promised aid
from--countries inclined to vote against the resolution. As former
under-secretary of state Sumner Welles put it:
By direct order of the White House every form of pressure, direct and
indirect, was brought to bear by American officials upon those countries
outside of the Moslem world that were known to be either uncertain or
opposed to partition. Representatives or intermediaries were employed by the
White House to make sure that the necessary majority would at length be
secured.(57)
Eddie Jacobson recorded in his diary that Truman told him that "he [Truman]
and he alone, was responsible for swinging the vote of several
delegations."(58)
While the plan was being debated, the Arabs desperately tried to find an
alternative solution. Syria proposed that the matter be turned over to the
International Court of Justice in The Hague; the proposal was defeated. The
Arab League asked that all countries accept Jewish refugees "in proportion
to their area and economic resources and other relevant factors"; the
league's request was denied in a 16-16 tie, with 25 abstentions.(59)
On November 29 the General Assembly recommended the partition plan by a vote
of 33 to 13. The Soviet Union voted in favor of the resolution, reversing
its earlier position on Zionism; many interpreted the vote as a move to
perpetuate unrest and give Moscow opportunities for influence in the
neighboring region.
The period after the UN partition vote was critical. The Zionists accepted
the partition reluctantly, hoping to someday expand the Jewish state to the
whole of Palestine, but the Arabs did not.(60) Violence between Jews and
Arabs escalated. The obvious difficulties in carrying out the partition
created second thoughts among U.S. policymakers as early as December 1947.
The State Department's policy planning staff issued a paper in January 1948
suggesting that the United States propose that the entire matter be returned
to the General Assembly for more study. Secretary Forrestal argued that the
United States might have to enforce the partition with troops. (The United
States had an arms embargo on the region at the time, although arms were
being sent illegally by American Zionists, giving the Jews in Palestine
military superiority, at least in some respects, over the Arabs.)(61)
On February 24, 1948, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Warren
Austin, made a speech to the Security Council hinting at such second
thoughts. His proposal to have the five permanent council members discuss
what should be done was approved, but they could not agree on a new
strategy. The United States, China, and France reported to the full council
that partition would not occur peacefully. The apparent weakening of U.S.
support for partition prompted the Zionist organizations to place enormous
pressure on Truman, who said he still favored partition. However, the next
day at the United Nations, Austin called for a special session of the
General Assembly to consider a temporary UN trusteeship for Palestine.
On April 16 the United States formally proposed the temporary trusteeship.
The Arabs accepted it conditionally; the Jews rejected it. The General
Assembly was unenthusiastic. Meanwhile, the Zionists proceeded with their
plans to set up a state. Civil order in Palestine had almost totally broken
down. For example, in mid-April, the Irgun and LEHI (the Stern Gang), two
Zionist terrorist organizations, attacked the poorly armed Arab village of
Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, and killed 250 men, women, and children. The
Arabs retaliated by killing many Jews the next day.(62) Before the British
left in May, the Jews had occupied much additional land, including cities
that were to be in the Palestinian state.
Something else was working in favor of continued support for the emerging
Jewish state: U.S. domestic politics. The year 1948 was an election year
and, according to memoranda in the Harry S Truman Library and Museum,
Jacobson, Clifford, and Niles expressed fear that the Republicans were
making an issue of their support for the Jewish state and that the Democrats
risked losing Jewish support. Clifford proposed early recognition of the
Jewish state.(63)
His position had been strongly influenced by a special congres-sional
election in a heavily Jewish district in the Bronx, New York, on February
17, 1948. The regular Democratic candidate, Karl Propper, was upset by the
American Labor party candidate, Leo Isacson, who had taken a militantly
pro-Zionist position in the campaign. Even though Propper was also
pro-Zionist, former vice president Henry Wallace had campaigned for Isacson
by criticizing Truman for not supporting partition, asserting that Truman
"still talks Jewish but acts Arab."(64) The loss meant that New York's 47
electoral votes would be at risk in the November presidential election, and
the Democrats of the state appealed to Truman to propose a UN police force
to implement the partition, as Isacson and Wallace had advocated.
The administration's trusteeship idea soon became academic. On May 14 the
last British officials left Palestine, and that evening the Jewish state was
proclaimed. Eleven minutes later, to the surprise of the U.S. delegation to
the United Nations, the United States announced its de facto
recognition.(65)
The significance to the Arabs of the U.S. role in constructing what they
regard as another Western colonial obstacle to self-determination cannot be
overstated. Dean Rusk, who at the time was a State Department official and
would later become secretary of state, admitted that Washington's role
permitted the partition to be "construed as an American plan," depriving it
of moral force.(66) As Evan M. Wilson, then assistant chief of the State
Department's Division of Near Eastern Affairs, later summarized matters,
Truman, motivated largely by domestic political concerns, solved one refugee
problem by creating another. Wilson wrote:
It is no exaggeration to say that our relations with the entire Arab world
have never recovered from the events of 1947-48 when we sided with the Jews
against the Arabs and advocated a solution in Palestine which went contrary
to self-determination as far as the majority population of the country was
concerned.(67)
The Suez Crisis, 1956
On October 29, 1956, the Israeli army invaded Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and
the Gaza Strip. Soon after, the forces of Great Britain and France launched
air attacks against Egypt.
That crisis had its roots in two factors: friction at the armistice line,
established after the 1948 war between Israel and Egypt, and control over
the Suez Canal. Another factor was the withdrawal of the U.S. offer to help
finance the High Aswan Dam in upper Egypt, a prized project of the country's
new ruler and champion of Arab nationalism, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Eisenhower and Dulles did not trust Nasser because he tried to steer a
neutral course between the United States and the Soviet Union, and they were
especially displeased with his recognition of Communist China. The
administration first tried to win Nasser over, but when that failed, it
tried obsessively to undermine him and worse.(68) The wish to undermine
Nasser was important in forging a U.S.-Israeli "strategic relationship." The
offer to finance the dam and provide arms (with conditions Nasser could not
accept) were the carrots dangled before the charismatic Egyptian. When
Nasser turned to the Soviets in September 1955 to purchase arms when he
could not buy them from the United States without strings attached, his
actions were seized on as proof that he was in the Soviet camp and thus an
enemy of the United States.(69) (The events in Iran were not lost on
Nasser.)
The United States also had antagonized Nasser in 1955 when it set up the
Baghdad Pact (later called the Central Treaty Organization, or CENTO), an
alliance of northern tier nations, including Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, and
Iraq (the only Arab country in the alliance). Great Britain was also a
member. The United States was not a formal member but was clearly a guiding
force. Nasser saw the pact as an attempt to split the Arab world and
interfere with the "positive neutralism" he sought for it. Iraq at the time
was friendly to the West and not disposed to the Arab nationalism that
Nasser aspired to create and lead.(70) The Baghdad Pact was one of the
things that had the ironic effect of bringing the Arabs and Soviets closer.
In mid-1956 the United States abruptly withdrew its offer to help finance
the High Aswan Dam, just as the Egyptians had decided to accept the
administration's conditions. The American reversal brought cancellations of
aid for the dam from Great Britain and the World Bank as well. A week after
the U.S. decision, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, which since
1869 had been owned by French nationals and the British government and
operated under an Egyptian concession. The British and French governments
reacted angrily; for the French, it was not irrelevant that Nasser was
helping the Algerians, who were seeking independence. The U.S. reaction was
calmer, as Eisenhower and Dulles distinguished between ownership and freedom
of navigation. (Nevertheless, the New York Times denounced Nasser as "the
Hitler on the Nile.")(71) The U.S. administration warned Great Britain and
France against responding precipitously and pressed for negotiations. A
conference was convened, but Nasser refused to attend or accept its
pro-posals. Nevertheless, international traffic on the canal continued
normally under Egyptian administration. When Great Britain and France failed
to get satisfaction from the United Nations, they began making plans for
war.
Israel was not able to use the canal, but the Jewish state's aims regarding
Egypt went beyond that grievance. Since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war,
Palestinian refugees had often crossed into Israel seeking to regain
property and possessions expropriated by the government and to reach
relatives. Some engaged in violence. Israel began responding with massive
reprisal raids against entire villages in the Arab countries. Most
significant was the attack on the town of Gaza in February 1955, when
children as well as men were killed. That attack prompted Egypt to end
direct peace talks with Israel and to turn to the Soviet Union for arms. It
was only at that point that Egypt sponsored an anti-Israeli guerrilla
organization whose members were known as the Fedayeen. In August Israel
attacked the Gaza Strip village of Khan Yunis, killing 39 Egyptians. The
attacks in the Gaza Strip, masterminded by officials loyal to Prime Minister
David Ben-Gurion, subverted Nasser's efforts to make peace with Israel.
Ben-Gurion's successor, Moshe Sharett, re-sponded positively to Nasser's
overtures, but Gen. Moshe Dayan and others undermined Sharett.(72) During
the winter of 1955, for example, Israeli warplanes flew over Cairo
repeatedly to demonstrate Egyptian military impotence.
The Israeli government had earlier tried to prevent a warming of
U.S.-Egyptian relations by having saboteurs bomb American offices in Cairo
in 1954, an episode that became known as the Lavon Affair.(73) When Egypt
uncovered the operation, Israel accused Nasser of fabricating the plot. Two
of the 13 men arrested were hanged, and their hangings were used as a
pretext for Israel's February 1955 attack on Gaza. Six years later, the
Israeli government's complicity was confirmed.
Israel's bad relations with Egypt were also aggravated by the seizure of an
Israeli ship, which was provocatively sent into the Suez Canal in September
1954. Both sides had seized each other's ships before, and this incident
appears to have been provoked by Israel as a way to get Great Britain to
compel Egypt to permit Israeli ships to use the waterway as part of a final
agreement on the Suez Canal.(74)
Despite repeated provocations, Egypt, according to documents later captured
by Israel, had attempted to prevent infiltration by the Fedayeen because of
its fear of attack.(75) Nevertheless, in October 1956 Israel invaded Egypt,
ignoring American pleas for forbearance. The United States took the matter
to the UN Security Council, which called for a cease-fire and withdrawal. It
also passed a resolution to create a 6,000-man UN emergency force to help
restore the status quo ante.
Eisenhower's opposition to the conduct of Israel, Great Britain, and
France--an anomaly in light of later U.S. policy--is explained by his
opposition to old-style colonialism. The administration wanted to win the
friendship of the newly independent countries of Africa and Asia and to keep
them out of the Soviet orbit. That could not be accomplished if the United
States were perceived to be on the side of Great Britain and France in so
flagrant an act of imperialism as an attack on Egypt. Also important to the
administration's calculus was its wish that London not challenge
Washington's more subtle dominance in the Middle East. British and French
irritation with American anti-colonialism was a source of problems among the
leaders of the three nations.(76)
When the UN call for a cease-fire failed to contain the conflict, the Soviet
Union threatened to intervene, and Premier Nicolai Bulganin even proposed to
Eisenhower that their two countries take joint military action to end the
war. Eisenhower rejected the proposal and warned the Soviets not to get
involved.(77)
The fighting ended on November 7, when Britain and France bowed to the
United Nations and agreed to withdraw. Israel, however, refused to withdraw
from the Sinai until its conditions were met. Israel was especially adamant
that Egypt not regain the Gaza Strip, which was to have been part of the
Palestinian state under the UN partition. Eisenhower responded to Israel's
position by threatening to cut off aid, although he apparently never did
so.(78) By March 1957 Israel had withdrawn from all the occupied areas, but
not before the United States had given assurances that UN troops would be
stationed on Egyptian territory to ensure free passage of Israeli and
Israel-bound ships through the Strait of Tiran and to prevent Fedayeen
activity. The United States, in an aide-mÇmoire by John Foster Dulles, also
acknowledged that the Gulf of Aqaba was international waters and "that no
nation has the right to prevent free and innocent passage in the Gulf and
through the Straits." The key to the final settlement was a French proposal
that Israel be allowed to act in self-defense under the UN charter if its
ships were attacked in the Gulf of Aqaba.(79)
Thus, the United States again became directly involved in the Arab-Israeli
conflict and made what would later be construed as guarantees to Israel.
Although Israel chafed under the frank rhetoric and surprising (in light of
the U.S. election season) evenhandedness of Eisenhower and Dulles, it got
essentially what it wanted from the Suez campaign.(80)
The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Lebanon Invasion, 1958
The United States was determined to not let its preeminence in the Middle
East be challenged--by anyone--again. Early in 1957 Eisenhower delivered a
message to Congress in which he referred to the instability in the region
being "heightened and, at times, manipulated by International
Communism"--that is, the Soviet Union, he added obligatorily. Accordingly,
he proposed a program of economic aid, military assistance, and cooperation
and the use of U.S. troops, when requested, "against overt armed aggression
from any nation controlled by International Communism."(81) That was the
Eisenhower Doctrine, which Congress ultimately approved and for which it
authorized the spending of up to $200 million. Twelve of 15 Middle Eastern
states approached by the administration accepted the doctrine. Initially
hesitant, Israel also accepted it. However, only Lebanon formally endorsed
the Eisenhower Doctrine, in return for promises of military and economic
aid.(82)
Not everyone in the U.S. government understood the logic of the doctrine.
Wilber Crane Eveland of the CIA later recounted his reaction:
I was shocked. Who, I wondered, had reached this determination of what the
Arabs considered a danger? Israel's army had just invaded Egypt and still
occupied all of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. And, had it not been
for Russia's threat to intervene on behalf of the Egyptians, the British,
French, and Israeli forces might now be sitting in Cairo, celebrating
Nasser's ignominious fall from power.(83)
Eveland's reaction was not unusual. Many people believed that the Arabs did
not rank the Soviet Union as their number-one threat. According to Eveland,
when Eisenhower dispatched an envoy to sound out the Arab countries, Egypt,
Syria, and some North African states said they saw no danger from
international communism.(84)
In April 1957, when King Hussein of Jordan faced a Pan-Arabist challenge
from socialist-nationalists and the Communist party, the U.S. government
moved the Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean and provided $10 million
in economic aid to his country, the first installment of a regular annual
subsidy.(85) And when Syria appeared to be moving closer to Nasser and the
Soviets, the Eisenhower administration, egged on by Turkey, Iraq, and
Jordan, put area forces on alert and issued warnings against outside
interference. The crisis subsided without direct intervention. Although the
president talked much of the internal communist threat to the Arab
countries, Eisenhower's biographer Stephen Ambrose writes that "what
Eisenhower really feared was radical Arab nationalism" and its threat to the
feudal monarchies.(86)
A full-blown intervention under the Eisenhower Doctrine finally took place
in Lebanon in 1958. Rising Pan-Arabism, which worried several Arab regimes,
surged on February 1 when Egypt and Syria joined to become the United Arab
Republic. In re sponse, King Hussein entered a unity agreement of his own
with his fellow Hashemite ruler in Iraq. And King Saud of Saudi Arabia was
also so concerned that he tried to have Nasser assassinated.
In Lebanon the development was viewed as especially upsetting. The fragile
Lebanese confessional system, in which religious groups have representation
in the government in ratios fixed by the constitution, made the country
particularly susceptible to disturbances.(87) Lebanon's large Sunni Muslim
population was sympathetic to Pan-Arabism, as were its Druzes (a Muslim
sect). Camille Chamoun, the country's Maronite Catholic president, feared
Nasser and his ideology and favored a close relationship with the United
Chamoun aggravated the Pan-Arabist distrust of him by seeking a second
six-year term as president, contrary to the Lebanese constitution. To
achieve that ambition, he used dubious methods (possibly rigging the
election) to elect a parliamentary majority that would change the
constitution. The CIA funneled money to selected candidates.(88) When a
pro-Nasser newspaper editor was killed, a rebellion ignited: a coalition of
Sunni, Druze, and other opponents of Chamoun demanded his resignation and
called for radical reform. The rebels controlled parts of Beirut and rural
areas and accepted armed assistance from Syria.(89)
Chamoun appealed to Eisenhower for help on May 13. Initially, the United
States was reluctant to intervene, but on July 14 a coup d'Çtat took place
in Iraq, home of the Baghdad Pact, and the monarchy was replaced by a
government led by Gen. Abdul Karim Qassem, a reputed Nasserite.(90) When the
new Iraqi government allied itself with the United Arab Republic, fear of
spreading instability in the region led Eisenhower to send troops to
Lebanon. He warned that "this somber turn of events could, without vigorous
response on our part, well result in a complete elimination of Western
influence in the Middle East."(91) But the Eisenhower administration decided
not to intervene in Iraq when Qassem announced that the Iraq Petroleum
Company, in which American oil firms held shares, would not be disturbed; in
fact, the United States recognized the new government on July 30.(92)
On July 15 the first of 14,357 U.S. troops landed in Lebanon.(93) Meanwhile,
Eisenhower's special emissary, Robert Murphy, worked out a solution: Gen.
Fuad Chehab, a compromise Christian candidate acceptable to Eisenhower,
Nasser, and most Lebanese, would become president; Chamoun would complete
his original term; and Washington would provide $10 million in aid.(94) One
of Chamoun's opponents, Rashid Karami, became prime minister, however, and
promptly announced that recognition of the Eisenhower Doctrine would be
withdrawn and that Lebanon would shift to nonaligned status. Washington
accepted that policy shift and withdrew all of its troops by October 25.
Fortunately, no Lebanese or American was killed in the U.S. military
intervention.(95)
The U.S. government counted the operation a success, but that one and only
application of the Eisenhower Doctrine was actually a misapplication. The
doctrine was ostensibly formulated to deter armed aggression by nations
controlled by "International Communism," but neither Syria nor Egypt was
controlled by the Soviet Union; they were not even independent communist
regimes. "He [Nasser] curbed and suppressed native Communists both in Egypt
and Syria," wrote historian George Len-czowski, "and, despite heavy
dependence on Soviet arms and economic aid, jealously maintained his
country's sovereignty."(96)
Two lessons National Security Council officials learned from the Lebanon
intervention apparently were not heeded by subsequent policymakers. A
November 1958 NSC document warned that "to be cast in the role of Nasser's
opponent would be to leave the Soviets as his champion." The document also
counseled against "becoming too closely identified with individual factions
in Lebanese politics."(97) The first lesson would be ignored in 1967, the
second in 1983.
The Six-Day War, 1967
In six days during June 1967, the Israeli military devastated the air and
ground forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and occupied the Sinai, the Gaza
Strip, the Golan Heights, the West Bank (an area west of the Jordan River),
including East Jerusalem. The Six-Day War established Israel as the premier
military power in the Middle East. Israel's might was a product of American
money and French armaments, in addition to dedicated personnel. The war also
established the idea of Israel as a U.S. strategic asset in the region.
Before discussing the U.S. role in the war, it is nec essary to briefly
explain how and why the war was fought. Its start is generally treated as a
preemptive, defensive strike by Israel, necessitated by mortal threats from
its neighbors.(98) The facts show otherwise. Kennett Love, a former New York
Times correspondent and a scholar of the Suez crisis, wrote that Israel drew
up "plans for the new war . . . immediately after the old. . . . The 1956
war served as a rehearsal for 1967."(99) That is important because it bears
on the Arab reaction to the U.S. role, a reaction that has shaped subsequent
developments in the region.(100)
After the 1956 Sinai campaign, the Israeli-Egyptian border was quiet, partly
because of the presence of the UN Emergency Force. But that was not true of
the border between Israel and Syria. The specific causes of friction between
the two countries were disputes about fishing rights in Lake Tiberias,
Israeli settlement activity in the demilitarized zone established after the
1948 war, guerrilla incursions into Israel, and Israeli development of a
water project involving the Jordan River.(101)
Israel retaliated against the guerrilla activity with massive raids into
Syria and sometimes into Jordan.(102) Syria, which had left the United Arab
Republic in 1961, underwent a left-wing Ba'athist coup in 1966 and had good
relations with the Soviet Union. Syria pointed to the quiet Israeli-Egyptian
border and the lack of Egyptian response to the attacks on Syria as evidence
that Nasser was not up to leading the Arabs. Nasser was accused of hiding
behind the UN forces. Actually, Egypt was absorbed in civil wars in Yemen
and the British Crown Colony of Aden (soon to be South Yemen) at the
southern end of the Arabian peninsula. Intra- Arab rivalries were assuming
greater importance in the mid- 1960s, with Nasser frequently bearing the
brunt of Arab criticism.(103)
The Syrian-Israeli friction continued throughout early 1967. Then, in April,
Israel said it would cultivate the entire demilitarized zone between the
countries, including land that Syria contended was the property of Arab
farmers. When the Israelis moved a tractor onto the land on April 7, the
Syrians fired on them. To retaliate, 70 Israeli fighters flew over Syria and
shot down 6 Syrian war planes near Damascus. There was no response from the
United Arab Command, an essentially paper military undertaking organized by
Nasser at an Arab summit in 1964. (At the same meeting, the Palestine
Liberation Organization had been set up--ironically, as a means of reining
in Palestinian nationalism.)(104)
Over the next several weeks, Israel threatened Syria. Gen. Yitzhak Rabin
said in an Israeli radio broadcast on May 11 that "the moment is coming when
we will march on Damascus to overthrow the Syrian Government, because it
seems that only military operations can discourage the plans for a people's
war with which they threaten us."(105) The Israeli director of military
intelligence, Aharon Yariv, added that Nasser would not intervene.(106) The
Jewish state also directed massive military action against al-Fatah to stop
infiltrations. Meanwhile, Israeli leaders did all they could to have their
country appear in mortal danger.
The situation worsened when the Soviet Union told the Egyptians that Israel
had massed forces on the Syrian border in preparation for a mid-May attack.
The United Nations found no evidence of such preparation, but on May 14
Nasser moved troops into the Sinai. Yet U.S. and Israeli intelligence agreed
that the action was, in Foreign Minister Abba Eban's words, "no immediate
military threat," and several years later, in 1972, Gen. Ezer Weizmann
admitted that "we did move tanks to the north after the downing of the
aircraft."(107) Israel quickly and fully mobilized, prompting the Egyptians
to ask the UN Emergency Force to leave the Sinai. The request did not
mention the two most sensitive locations of the UN force, Sharm el-Sheikh
(where it protected Israeli shipping) and the Gaza Strip, but the UN
secretary general, U Thant, surprised everyone by replying that a partial
withdrawal was impossible. Faced with a choice between the status quo and a
complete UN withdrawal, Nasser chose the latter. When the United Nations
offered to station its forces on Israel's side of the border, the Jewish
state refused (as it had in the past). President Lyndon Johnson, fearing
that the Israelis would "act hastily," asked Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to
inform him in advance of any Israeli action.(108) Israel replied that a
blockade of the Strait of Tiran would be a casus belli.
Meanwhile, Nasser told the Egyptian press that he was "not in a position to
go to war."(109) Israeli military leaders believed him. General Rabin said
later, "I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent
into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive
against Israel. He knew it and we knew it."(110) Ben-Gurion himself said he
"doubt[ed] very much whether Nasser wanted to go to war."(111)
It is in that context that the following events must be inter-preted. On May
21 Nasser mobilized his reserves. On May 22, with the UN forces gone and
under the taunting of Syria and Israel, Nasser blocked--verbally not
physically-- the Strait of Tiran, which leads from the Red Sea to the Gulf
of Aqaba and the Israeli port city of Elath.(112) The strait's importance to
the Israelis was more symbolic than practical; no Israeli flag ship had used
it in nearly two years, although Iranian oil was shipped to Israel through
it.(113) Nevertheless, the closure was a worrisome precedent for the
Israelis.
Despite a blizzard of diplomatic activity in and outside the United Nations,
tensions rose over the next days, until, on June 5, Israel attacked
Egypt--thereby launching what came to be known as the Six-Day War. (The
Israeli government told the UN Truce Supervision Organization that its
planes had intercepted Egyptian planes--a patent falsehood.) In short order,
Israel destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Israel
prepared a letter to President Johnson assuring him that Israel, in the
shorthand of U.S. ambassador Walworth Barbour, "has no, repeat no, intention
[of] taking advantage of [the] situation to enlarge its territory, [and]
hopes peace can be restored within present boundaries."(114) But that soon
changed, as signaled by a request from David Brody, director of the B'nai
B'rith Anti-Defamation League, that Johnson not mention "territorial
integrity" in his public statements about the war.(115)
On June 8, Egypt, having lost the Sinai to Israel, accepted the cease-fire
called for by the United Nations. The next day Syria also accepted it, but
Israel launched additional offensive operations. By June 10 Israel
controlled the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, Sharm el-Sheikh, the West Bank, East
Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and its capital city of Quneitra.(116) With
the road to Damascus open, the Soviets threatened intervention if Israel did
not stop. The Johnson administration signaled its readiness to confront the
Soviets by turning the Sixth Fleet toward Syria. That was to be the first of
two near-confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union in
Arab-Israeli wars. Then, according to Johnson, the U.S. government began to
use "every diplomatic resource" to persuade Israel to conclude a cease-fire
with Syria, which it did on June 10.(117)
The unseen side of the Six-Day War was Israel's nuclear capability. Although
Prime Minister Eshkol promised in 1966 that Israel would not be the first
nation to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, it had been
developing a nuclear capability almost since its founding. The locus of the
program was the Dimona reactor in the Negev near Beershea.(118) Israel
apparently received help over the years from the American firm NUMEC, the
French, and the U.S. government, including the CIA.(119) It probably had
operational nuclear weapons in 1967. According to Francis Perrin, the former
French high commissioner for atomic energy who had led the team that helped
Israel to build Dimona, Israel wanted nuclear weapons so it could say to the
United States, "If you don't want to help us in a critical situation we will
require you to help us; otherwise we will use our nuclear bombs."(120)
Israel never signed the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has not
allowed inspection of its nuclear facilities since the late 1960s. According
to Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Dimona, the inspectors were
consistently deceived in the early 1960s.(121) Israel had 12 to 16 warheads
by the end of 1969, according to the Nixon administration. A CIA report
concluded that Israel also tried to keep other Middle Eastern countries from
developing nuclear weapons by assassinating their nuclear scientists.(122)
What was U.S. policy before and during the Six-Day War? In the tense days
before the outbreak of hostilities, Johnson moved the Sixth Fleet to the
eastern Mediterranean. On May 23, while declaring an embargo on arms to the
area, he secretly authorized the air shipment to Israel of important spare
parts, ammunition, bomb fuses, and armored personnel carriers.(123) After
the war started, the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution
calling for Israel to return to its prewar boundaries, and Johnson refused
to criticize Israel for starting the war.(124)
Author Stephen Green has written that the United States participated in the
conflict even more directly. Green contends that pilots of the U.S. Air
Force's 38th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron of the 26th Tactical
Reconnaissance Wing flew RF-4Cs--with white Stars of David and Israeli Air
Force tail numbers painted on them--over bombed air bases in Egypt, Syria,
and Jordan to take pictures for the Israelis. They flew 8 to 10 sorties a
day throughout the war, and the pilots carried civilian passports so they
would appear to be contract employees if caught. When the enemy air forces
were destroyed, the RF-4C mission was changed to tracing Arab troop
movements at night, which enabled the Israelis to bomb the troops the next
morning. The pilots also flew close-in reconnaissance sorties around the
Golan Heights. Apparently, none of the flights proved decisive, but they did
enable Israel to achieve its objectives quickly.(125) Ironically, the Arabs
accused the United States of providing tactical air support, which
apparently was untrue. In re- sponse to the accusations, President Johnson
said publicly that the United States provided no assistance of any kind to
the Israelis.
A critical question is whether the U.S. government gave Israel a green light
to go to war. Israeli officials frequently consulted with U.S. officials in
the days before June 5; they were looking for support, claiming that Israel
had been promised access through the Strait of Tiran in 1956. U.S. officials
often told the Israelis that "Israel will only be alone if it decides to go
alone"--a statement that was interpreted by some Israelis as a nod to go
ahead. That impression could have been confirmed by Secretary of State Dean
Rusk's reported comment to a journalist, regarding the U.S. attitude toward
Israel: "I don't think it is our business to restrain anyone."(126) Finally,
Foreign Minister Abba Eban later wrote in his autobiography that when he
visited Washington in late May, "what I found . . . was the absence of any
exhortation to us to stay our hand much longer."(127)
The Six-Day War was a diplomatic disaster for the United States. That might
have been foreseen, but President Johnson had other things on his mind. He
seems to have been motivated by a desire to win Jewish American support for
the war in Vietnam and to advance the "strategic relationship," begun by
President Kennedy, with Israel against the Soviet Union.(128)
The cost in Arab alienation was great. Johnson had assured the Arabs that
Israel would not attack and that he would oppose aggression. Yet he never
called on Israel to withdraw from the conquered territories or to resolve
the Palestinian question. Rather, the United States gave Israel substantial
help, including diplomatic support that facilitated Israel's conquest of
neighboring territories by providing critical delays.(129)
In no sense did the war bring stability to the Middle East, if indeed that
was a U.S. objective. Nasser summed up the consequences: "The problem now is
that while the United States objective is to pressure us to minimize our
dealings with the Soviet Union, it will drive us in the opposite direction
altogether. The United States leaves us no choice."(130)
Nasser's prediction was borne out by events. Within three years the Soviets
were shipping military equipment to the Egyptians, including surface-to-air
missiles to defend Egypt against Israel's U.S.-made F-4 Phantom jets.
Thousands of Soviet troops, pilots, and advisers were provided. The Soviets
also moved closer to Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The
United States responded by giving more weapons and planes to Israel.(131)
The Strategic Relationship and Aid to Israel
The idea of a strategic relationship between the United States and Israel
emerged after the Suez crisis, when the Eisenhower administration realized
that both countries had an interest in containing Nasser's influence.
Because the Eisenhower administration feared that the Soviets were gaining
clout in some Arab countries, such a relationship was seen as useful in
containing the Soviet Union as well. When John F. Kennedy became president,
he abandoned an initial preference for a balance of power between Israel and
the Arabs in favor of a strategic relation ship. He was the first to provide
Israel with sophisticated weapons and to commit the United States to a
policy of maintaining Israel's regional military superiority. In 1962
Kennedy privately told Israeli foreign minister Golda Meir that their
countries were de facto allies, and shortly before his assassination,
Kennedy reportedly guaranteed Israel's territorial integrity in a letter to
Prime Minister Eshkol.(132)
As the U.S.-Israeli strategic relationship matured, military and economic
aid increased. But that increase does not mean the earlier aid had been
insignificant. According to historian Nadav Safran: "During Israel's first
nineteen years of existence, the United States awarded it nearly $1.5
billion of aid in various forms, mostly outright grants of one kind or
another. On a per capita basis of recipient country, this was the highest
rate of American aid given to any country."(133)
According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, between 1949
and 1965 U.S. aid to Israel averaged $63 million annually, and over 95
percent of that assistance was for economic development and food aid.(134)
The first formal military lending, which was very modest, occurred in 1959.
However, from 1966 through 1970 average annual aid jumped to $102 million,
and the share of military loans climbed to 47 percent. In 1964 the U.S.
government lent no money to Israel for military purposes. In 1965 it lent
almost $13 million. In 1966, the year before the Six-Day War, it lent $90
million. In the year of the war such loans fell to $7 million, but in
succeeding years the total rose, reaching $85 million in 1969 and hitting a
high of $2.7 billion in 1979. More significant, military grants began in
1974; they ranged from $100 million in 1975 to $2.7 billion in 1979. In the
first half of the 1980s, loans and grants ranged between $500 million and
nearly $1 billion. Then, beginning in 1985, the loans stopped and all U.S.
military aid was made as grants, ranging from $1.4 billion in 1985 to $1.8
billion each year from 1987 through 1989. Economic grants hit a high of
nearly $2 billion in 1985, before falling to $1.2 billion in 1989. (See
Appendix.)
Although U.S. aid has been given to Israel with the stipulation that it not
be used in the territories occupied in 1967, the Congres-sional Research
Service reported that "because the U.S. aid is given as budgetary support
without any specific project accounting, there is no way to tell how Israel
uses U.S. aid."(135) Moreover, the service wrote that, according to the
executive branch, in 1978, 1979, and 1981, Israel "may have violated" its
agreement not to use U.S. weapons for nondefensive purposes.(136) In 1982
the United States suspended shipments of cluster bombs after Israel
allegedly violated an agreement on the use of those weapons. In 1990 Israel
accepted $400 million in loan guarantees for housing on the condition that
the money not be used in the occupied territories, but the promise was soon
repudiated.(137)
Reporter Tom Bethell has written that of $1.8 billion in annual U.S.
military aid to Israel, only about $350 million is sent by check. The rest
never leaves the United States; it is spent on U.S.-made planes and weapons.
Bethell also has reported that, according to the State Department, Israel
returns $1.1 billion of $1.2 billion in economic aid as payment of principal
and interest on old loans. It keeps the interest accrued from the time the
money is received at the beginning of the year to the time it is sent back
at the end of the year.(138)
The Yom Kippur War, 1973
The Six-Day War left the Arabs humiliated and the Israelis vauntingly
triumphant. It was the Israeli sense of invincibility that left the country
vulnerable in 1973. On October 6, as Jews were preparing for their holiest
day of the year, Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched attacks intended to
regain the territories lost in 1967. The Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal
and established positions it would not lose. Two cease-fires were arranged,
only to be violated by Israel. Finally, 18 days after the war began, a third
and final cease-fire went into effect.(139)
The war was launched to regain not only Arab territory but Arab pride as
well. That explanation, which is true as far as it goes, gives a distorted
picture. Often overlooked are the Arab leaders' efforts to make peace with
Israel before 1973. In November 1967 King Hussein offered to recognize
Israel's right to exist in peace and security in return for the lands taken
from Jordan in the Six-Day War. (Israel had de facto annexed the old city of
Jerusalem shortly after that war.) In February 1970 Nasser said, "It will be
possible to institute a durable peace between Israel and the Arab states,
not excluding economic and diplomatic relations, if Israel evacuates the
occupied territories and accepts a settlement of the problem of the
Palestinian refugees."(140) (Israel had allowed only 14,000 of 200,000
refugees from the Six-Day War to return.)
Then, in February 1971, Anwar Sadat, who had succeeded to the Egyptian
presidency on Nasser's death in 1970, proposed a full peace treaty,
including security guarantees and a return to the pre-1967 borders. That was
not all. Also in 1971 Jordan again proposed to recognize Israel if it would
return to its prewar borders. Egypt and Jordan accepted UN Resolution 242,
passed in November 1967, that called for an Israeli withdrawal from the
occupied territories in return for peace and security. Both Arab states also
accepted the land-for-peace plan of Secretary of State William Rogers and
the efforts of UN representative Gunnar Jarring to find a solution.
Israel turned a deaf ear to each proposal for peace, rejected the Rogers
plan, snubbed Jarring, and equivocated on Resolution 242.(141) At that time
Israel and Egypt were engaged in a war of attrition across the Suez Canal.
Israel flew air raids deep into Egypt and bombed civilians near Cairo.
Soviet pilots and missiles participated in the defense of Egypt.(142)
The Rogers plan represented only one side of the Middle East policy of the
Nixon administration, which came into office in 1969, and it was the weak
side at that. The strong side was represented by national security adviser
(and later secretary of state) Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was busy with the
Vietnam War and the diplomatic opening to Communist China during Nixon's
initial years in office, so the Middle East was one of the few areas left to
Rogers. Yet Kissinger could not resist getting involved. Thus, a battle
occurred between two forms of intervention: Rogers's efforts to broker a
solution and Kissinger's efforts to thwart one. The State Department
believed that the key problem was Israeli intransigence. Kissinger, who saw
the Middle East as another arena for the superpower rivalry, believed the
Israeli victory in 1967 was a glorious defeat of the Soviets, and he
actively opposed progress toward peace. Referring to 1969 he explained in
his memoirs:
The bureaucracy wanted to embark on substantive talks as rapidly as possible
because it feared that a deteriorating situation would increase Soviet
influence. I thought delay was on the whole in our interest because it
enabled us to demonstrate even to radical Arabs that we were indispensable
to any progress and that it could not be extorted from us by Soviet
pressure. . . . I wanted to frustrate the radicals-- who were hostile to us
in any event--by demonstrating that in the Middle East friendship with the
United States was the precondition to diplomatic progress. When I told
[Joseph] Sisco in mid-February that we did not want a quick success in the
Four-- Power consultations at the United Nations in New York, I was speaking
a language that ran counter to all the convictions of his Department. . . .
By the end of 1971, the divisions within our govern- ment . . . had produced
the stalemate for which I had striven by design.(143)
That policy was consistent with the Nixon Doctrine, articulated by the
president in July 1969. Under that doctrine the United States would rely on
local powers to keep internal regional order and furnish "military and
economic assistance when requested and appropriate." The United States would
continue to provide a nuclear umbrella to deter Soviet intervention. In
other words, client states such as Israel and Iran would police their
regions to prevent upheavals by forces inimical to U.S. interests.(144)
As the 1972 election approached, Kissinger assumed more control over Middle
Eastern policy. He later recalled that Nixon "was afraid that the State
Department's bent for ab- stract theories might lead it to propose plans
that would arouse opposition from all sides. My principal assignment was to
make sure that no explosion occurred to complicate the 1972 election--which
meant in effect that I was to stall."(145) Since Kissinger was able to
undermine Rogers's peace efforts, his was a "policy" the Israelis could
embrace.
Kissinger's obstructionism came at the worst possible time. The 1967 Arab
defeat and the ensuing bilateral peace offers persuaded many Palestinians
that the Arab states were willing to sacrifice the Palestinians. It was a
period of heightened violence from Yasser Arafat's nonideological alFatah, a
major element of the Palestine Liberation Organization; the Black September
faction of al-Fatah; and George Habash's radical, Marxist-oriented Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine.(146) The break between the
Palestinians and the Arab states created problems for Jordan. The PLO had
become a virtual state within a state there, and in 1970 the PFLP hijacked
several airliners to Jordan. As a result, in September 1970 King Hussein
gave the military the go-ahead to root out the guerrilla infrastructure.
Syria, in a show of support for the Palestinians, sent tanks into Jordan. At
Kissinger's urging, Israel mobilized in support of Jordan, but before it
could enter the country, the Syrian force was repulsed. The month known as
"Black September" cost the Palestinians 5,000 to 20,000 lives. Although
Israeli troops did not see action, their mobilization helped cement Israel's
image as a strategic asset of the United States in the region. Any
evenhandedness that had marked earlier Nixon administration policy was now
Less than a year later, Jordanian forces massacred Palestinians in several
incidents before expelling the PLO from Jordan. The PLO then moved to
Lebanon, having previously won that country's formal recognition of the
right to operate autonomously. Harassment of the Palestinians by the
Israeli-backed Lebanese Christians and guerrilla activity directed at Israel
from Lebanon preceded massive Israeli raids and the deaths of hundreds of
Lebanese and Palestinian civilians.(147)
U.S. military and economic aid to Israel took a major jump. Just before the
Jordanian crisis, Nixon approved a $500 million military aid package and
sped up delivery of F-4 Phantom jets to Israel. Israel had indicated that,
before it could start talks with the Arabs, it would need arms to ensure its
security. Nixon had stalled, believing that Israel was already militarily
superior. But under pressure from 78 U.S. senators, Nixon initiated a major
transfer of technology (including the sale of jet engines for an Israeli
warplane) that would enable Israel to make many of its own weapons. A second
deal was struck for 42 Phantoms and 90 A-4 Skyhawk warplanes. Soviet leader
Leonid Brezhnev countered the U.S. action by promising to supply arms and
bombers to the Arabs, although not in the quantities that the United States
supplied them to Israel.(148)
In mid-1972 Sadat, whom Kissinger did not take seriously as a political
leader, expelled the 15,000 Soviet advisers in his country. Sadat's reasons
included continued wrangling about military aid, the emigration of Soviet
Jews to Israel, Soviet opposition to another war in the region, and general
cultural differences. Although the United States was taken by surprise,
Kissinger took credit for the development and, after the election, began
secret negotiations with Egypt and the Soviets. However, his proposal for a
settlement, which included Israeli military posts in the Sinai, was rejected
by Sadat. Meanwhile, Nixon agreed to provide Israel with 84 new warplanes.
Sadat summed up his reaction in a statement quoted in Newsweek: "Every door
I have opened has been slammed in my face by Israel--with American
blessings. . . . The Americans have left us no way out."(149)
Peace proposals by Jordan, communicated to Kissinger around that same time,
were rejected by Israel, which was not interested in relinquishing the West
Bank. The Israeli rejection had at least tacit U.S. approval. On September
25, 1973, two weeks before war broke out, Kis-singer became secretary of
state and, with Nixon mired in Watergate, had complete control over foreign
During the Yom Kippur War, Kissinger ordered four ships of the Sixth Fleet
to within 500 miles of Israel and initiated a UN strategy aimed at tying up
the Soviets and delaying a cease-fire resolution. As he later put it, "We
wanted to avoid this [cease-fire] while the attacking side was gaining
territory, because it would reinforce the tendency to use the United Nations
to ratify the gains of surprise attack."(150) The Israelis asked for arms,
but Kissinger was reluctant to comply, believing that Israel was well armed
already, that the war would be short, and therefore that a resupply would
unnecessarily anger the Arabs. But Kissinger did not want to appear to
desert Israel, which he thought might harden its position, so he had arms
sent secretly, a policy publicly ratified by Nixon on October 9. While the
airlift of equipment was still covert, U.S. planes flew directly to the
Israeli troops in the occupied Sinai, a violation of Egypt's territory.(151)
Kissinger had another reason to accede to Israel's demand for an airlift.
Although no one believed that Israel's survival was at risk, the
surprisingly strong Arab showing panicked some Israelis. The Israeli
ambassador to Washington warned that if the request for the airlift was
denied, "we will have to draw very serious conclusions from all this."
According to a historian sympathetic to Israel, "Kissinger. . . had long
known that Israel possessed a very short nuclear option which it held as a
weapon of last resort. . . . Suddenly . . . the scenario of an Israel
feeling on the verge of destruction resorting in despair to nuclear weapons.
. . assumed a grim actuality." Other reasons for the change in U.S. policy
included domestic political considerations (the Israel lobby had become a
powerful force) and a modest Soviet airlift to Syria. The
multi-billion-dollar U.S. airlift was approved.(152)
Kissinger was instrumental in having three cease-fire resolutions, all
favorable to the Israeli army's position, passed in the UN Security Council.
The first was passed on October 22, after Kissinger went to Moscow. His
failure to consult them before working with the Soviets so outraged the
Israelis that Kissinger felt he had to placate them by allowing some
"slippage" in the deadline.(153) "Slippage" became a major six-day offensive
in which Israeli troops crossed the Suez Canal, blocked the roads from
Cairo, and completed the encircling of Egypt's Third Army in the Sinai. When
the offensive was over, Israel had reached the Gulf of Suez and occupied
1,600 square kilometers inside Egypt. According to Kissinger, Israel told
him, untruthfully, that Egypt had launched an attack first, but he never
publicly criticized his ally.(154)
The second cease-fire, which weakly called for a return to the first
cease-fire lines, passed the Security Council on October 24. Sadat accepted
it, but Israel refused to pull back, which left Egypt's beleaguered Third
Army at its mercy. Israel violated the cease-fire within hours and continued
closing in on that army. The Nixon administration again was silent. Sadat
appealed to the Security Council for help, asking for U.S. and Soviet troops
to intervene. The Soviets responded favorably to the idea, but Kissinger
opposed it. "We had not worked for years to reduce the Soviet military
presence in Egypt only to cooperate in reintroducing it as a result of a
United Nations Resolution," Kissinger later wrote. "Nor would we participate
in a joint force with the Soviets, which would legitimize their role in the
area and strengthen radical elements."(155)
The Soviets then said they might send troops unilaterally. In response, late
on October 24, the United States put its ground, sea, and air
forces--conventional and nuclear--on worldwide alert. That brush with
nuclear war demonstrated once again the grave danger posed by U.S.
intervention in Middle Eastern affairs.(156)
Meanwhile, Kissinger assured Israel that it would not be asked to return to
the first cease-fire lines, and the airlift continued. Sadat ended the
crisis by asking that a multinational force, without U.S. or Soviet troops,
be sent to oversee the cease-fire. On October 25 the third UN resolution was
passed, creating a peace-keeping force and again merely requesting a return
to the October 22 lines.
Israel continued attacking Egyptian forces and forbidding the passage of
food, water, or medicine to the trapped Third Army. Private pleas from
Kissinger to Israel were rejected. The crisis ended with Sadat's offer of
direct talks between the two nations' military officers about carrying out
the UN resolutions. He asked for one delivery of nonmilitary supplies to the
Third Army under UN and Red Cross supervision. Israel accepted, although it
was bitter that the United States did not allow it to capture the Third Army
and humiliate Egypt.(157)
One consequence of the mammoth U.S. arms shipments to Israel, and
particularly the U.S. deliveries in the Sinai, was the OPEC oil embargo. The
dollar price of oil had been rising since 1971, when Nixon stopped redeeming
foreign governments' dollars for gold. Even before the war, Saudi Arabia had
talked about linking oil to an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.(158)
On October 20 Saudi Arabia announced that it would sell no oil to the United
States because of U.S. support for Israel. Saudi Arabia's average provision
of oil to the United States came to 4 percent of American daily consumption.
Iraq, Abu Dhabi, Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar followed the Saudi
example. Nixon's price control program turned an inconvenience into a
crisis, with long lines at gas stations and other disruptions of the
economy. After the war, despite Kissinger's appeal, King Faisal of Saudi
Arabia stood by his demand that Israel withdraw from all the occupied
territories (including those taken in 1967) before the oil tap was turned on
again. Kissinger threatened to retaliate while also promising that the
United States would support the land-for-peace UN resolutions (Resolution
338, passed during the war, reiterated Resolution 242 of 1967). In December
OPEC, at the bidding not of Arab countries but of Iran and Venezuela,
quadrupled the price of oil to $11.65 a barrel. But shipments to Europe,
which became more critical of Israel, were increased. Finally, on March 18,
1974, after Israel, Egypt, and Syria concluded disengagement agreements, and
after prodding by Sadat, the Arab states ended the oil embargo. The Arabs
placed no conditions on their action; the last export restrictions were
removed on July 11. After the embargo, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait ended the
concession system and ostensibly nationalized their oil industries. In fact,
they entered into long-term contracts with the former concession
owners.(159)
The costs to the United States of the Yom Kippur War were significant. As
Kissinger calculated it, the war "cost us about $3 billion directly, about
$10-15 billion indirectly. It increased our unemployment and contributed to
the deepest recession we had in the postwar period."(160) The war was
another demonstration of the bankruptcy of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Total support of Israel did not create stability; on the contrary, it
further alienated the Arabs, pushed several Arab states closer to the Soviet
Union, upset the U.S.-Soviet dÇtente (indeed, came close to igniting a
nuclear confrontation), and loaded the OPEC oil weapon.
The Camp David Accords, 1978
"The Yom Kippur war," said Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, "was not fought by Egypt or
Syria to threaten the existence of Israel. It was an all-out use of their
military force to achieve a limited political goal. What Sadat wanted by
crossing the canal was to change the political reality and, thereby, to
start a political process from a point more favorable to him than the one
that existed. In that respect, he succeeded."(161)
In the aftermath of the war, there was a movement toward settling the
dispute between Israel and Egypt, at the expense of the Palestinians and an
overall settlement. That approach suited the three major parties--Israel,
Egypt, and the United States. Israel wanted to keep the West Bank, East
Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights (which it would annex in 1981), but it was
not committed to holding the Sinai. Egypt wanted to move into the U.S. camp;
Sadat was disillusioned with the Soviets' inability to guarantee the cease--
fires, and he wished the capital to modernize his country. Weary of war, he
wished to normalize relations with Israel, regardless of what other
compromises had to be made. And Kissinger continued to oppose a
comprehensive settlement.(162)
In early 1974 Yitzhak Rabin, who was then prime minister, signed a
disengagement agreement with Sadat. At the end of the year and early in
1975, Kissinger did more diplomatic shuttling in search of a further Israeli
withdrawal from the Sinai. He found Sadat highly accommodating and Israel
intransigent. In March President Gerald Ford lost his patience with Israel
and announced a "reassessment" of U.S. policy. From March to September no
new arms agreements with Israel were concluded. To protect Israel's
position, 76 senators sent a letter, drafted by the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, the chief American lobbying organization for the Jewish
state, to Ford demanding that he declare that the United States "stands
firmly with Israel" in future negotiations. The letter hardened Israel's
position on the Sinai. Finally, in September, the parties reached an
agreement on partial withdrawal, including the deployment of U.S. troops.
The cost of the agreement to the United States was a list of wide-ranging
secret commitments contained in a memorandum of understanding. It included
military aid, an end to pressure for an Israeli withdrawal from the West
Bank, a promise to defend Israel if the Soviet Union went to war against it,
and a pledge not to talk to the PLO until it recognized Israel and accepted
relevant UN resolutions. The memorandum, an executive agreement, was never
submitted to Congress. "In substance, the administration
underwrote--politically, economically, and militarily--the Israeli-Egyptian
agreement."(163) It would not be the last time.
Kissinger also worked out a disengagement agreement between Israel and
Syria. President Hafez Assad of Syria was willing to normalize relations
with Israel, but Israel was determined to hold on to the Golan Heights. The
final agreement called only for withdrawal from land captured in the latest
war. Kissinger commented that Assad's actions "bespoke a desire for
accommodation." At that time the United States voted for a Security Council
resolution condemning Israel for a big raid into Lebanon after a guerrilla
action, but Israel's anger with the vote prompted a reversal. Washington
pledged to support future raids against "terrorists," stating that it would
"not consider such actions by Israel as violations of the cease-fire and
[would] support them politically." The U.S. pledge was read at a public
session of the Knesset, or Israeli parliament.(164) The "special
relationship" apparently was the top priority as the Nixon and Ford
administrations came to an end.
The year that Jimmy Carter became president, 1977, was the same in which
Menachem Begin and his right-wing Likud coalition broke the ruling monopoly
of the Israeli Labor party. Although the Laborites were as intransigent
regarding the Palestinians,(165) the Likud, perhaps because of its overt
actions, appeared more so. The government intensified the repression of the
Palestinians on the West Bank and accelerated the building of settlements on
their land, a policy that amounted to de facto annexation. Indeed, Begin's
Herut party was committed to a Greater Israel (Eretz Israel) that stretched
across the Jordan River. The United States condemned the West Bank
settlements, calling them an obstacle to peace and illegal, but it never did
anything about them, such as end the massive military and economic aid to
Israel.(166)
The PLO, which at a 1974 Arab summit had been designated the sole
representative of the Palestinians, was turning away from guerrilla activity
and toward diplomacy. In November 1974 PLO chairman Yasser Arafat was
invited to address the UN General Assembly, a first for the head of any
nongovernment organization. (The United States and Israel voted against the
invitation.) "I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's
gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand," Arafat said at the end
of his address that called for a democratic state for Muslims, Jews, and
Christians.(167) Many European countries opened contacts with the PLO and
came to support the idea of an independent Palestinian state. Those events
demonstrated the influence of the advocates of diplomacy over the advocates
of violence within the PLO. Their continued influence would depend on the
efficacy of diplo-macy.
Well into Carter's first year in office, the United States and the Soviet
Union shifted gears from the Kissinger tenure and jointly outlined a plan
for a comprehensive resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The plan
included Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab lands, a resolution of the
Palestinian issue, normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab
states, and international guarantees provided at least in part by the United
States and the Soviet Union. The point of the proposal was to revive the
Geneva conference, which was convened but abruptly halted in late 1973, but
neither PLO participation nor a U.S.- and Soviet-sponsored state was in the
package. The Arab states welcomed the joint statement, and more significant,
the PLO agreed to a unified Arab delegation, a major compromise on its
demand for independent representation. Yet Israel rejected both a
reconvention in Geneva and PLO participation.(168)
There was other evidence of a change in tone on the part of the Carter
administration. In March 1978 Israel invaded Lebanon, ostensibly to
retaliate against guerrilla attacks. The actual purpose, however, was to
establish a "security zone" in southern Lebanon under the supervision of
Israel's client, renegade Lebanese army officer Saad Haddad. Carter formally
requested that Israel leave Lebanon, and the administration proposed a UN
Security Council resolution to that effect. Israel withdrew in July, four
months after a UN observation force arrived. But Israel continued to be
active in southern Lebanon, even after it agreed to a U.S.- arranged
cease-fire with the PLO. The PLO had observed the cease-fire for a year when
Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982.(169)
Carter was no less committed to the U.S.-Israeli relationship than his
predecessors had been, but he did something none of them had done: he
expressed concern for the Palestinians and their need for a homeland (not
necessarily a state). That action earned him criticism from Israel's
supporters and forced him to add heavy qualifications. For example, after
meeting with Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, Carter promised never to force
Israel to compromise by threatening to withhold or cut economic or military
aid. He also promised to hold steadfastly to UN Resolutions 242 and 338 (the
latter passed during the 1973 war), which do not mention the Palestinians.
In effect, Carter allowed Israel to veto the joint U.S.-Soviet initiative.
U.S. aid to Israel also continued to grow during his administration.(170)
The effort to move toward some kind of settlement received a boost on
November 9, 1977, when Sadat dramatically announced that he was prepared to
go to Jerusalem to talk peace. During his visit later that month, he
addressed the Knesset, extended recognition to Israel, and offered a peace
based on a comprehensive settlement of the Israeli-Arab- Palestinian
dispute. Because it occurred without U.S. supervision, Sadat's initiative
caught the Carter administration off balance, but soon the apprehension of
U.S. officials turned to optimism.
That optimism did not last. In December, when Begin made a return trip to
Egypt, the proposal he carried was not calculated to please Sadat. It called
for a limited Egyptian military presence in the Sinai and Israeli retention
of settlements and military airports there. Begin proposed an end to
military rule of the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria, as the Likud called
it) but continued Israeli responsibility for security. The Palestinians
would be granted control over their own education, sanitation, and the like,
and the residents would choose between Israeli and Jordanian citizenship.
Israelis would be able to buy land on the West Bank, but the issue of
sovereignty would be put off until a later date.(171)
The distance between Begin and Sadat induced Carter to involve himself in
the negotiations, starting from a position closer to Sadat's than to
Begin's. Carter was about to give up on Begin but then decided to bring him
and Sadat to the presidential retreat at Camp David and personally manage
the negotiations. Two agreements came out of the conference, a "Framework
for Peace in the Middle East" and a "Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace
Treaty between Egypt and Israel."
The first framework, premised explicitly on UN Resolutions 242 and 338,
stated that the inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip should elect
a self-governing authority that would replace the Israeli military
government. During a five-year transition period, negotiations on the final
status of the territories would begin among Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and
elected representatives from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. (Arab
Jerusalem and the West Bank Jewish settlements were not mentioned.) The
Palestinian provisions were intentionally fuzzy, according to Carter's key
adviser, William B. Quandt.(172) A peace treaty between Israel and Jordan
would also be an objective of the negotiations. Other parts of the document
dealt with pledges not to use force, each country's full recognition of the
other, economic cooperation, and settlement of financial claims.
The second framework called for an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty within
three months and full implementation within three years. Among the
principles the treaty would embody were Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai;
restoration of Egyptian sovereignty (although much of the peninsula would be
demilitarized); and freedom for Israeli vessels to pass through the Suez
Canal, the Gulf of Suez, the Strait of Tiran, and the Gulf of Aqaba (the
last two were proclaimed international waterways). UN forces would be
stationed in the Sinai and in border areas.(173)
The two frameworks were not linked; thus the peace treaty with Egypt could
be concluded before the fate of the Palestinians was settled. Sadat was so
disturbed by the compromises asked of him that he nearly left the
conference. The evening before the signing, two of his key advisers
resigned, but Sadat stayed. One may reasonably ask if Carter bought the
settlement with the taxpayers' credit card. Aid to Egypt was increased
substantially, which made that nation the recipient of the second largest
amount of U.S. foreign aid (Israel still received the largest amount). Egypt
received $1.5 billion in military credit, $200 million in economic grants,
and $100 million in economic loans. Israel got $3 billion to build new air
fields to replace the ones in the Sinai. When one adds to that total the
foreign aid promised by Carter through FY 1982, the Camp David accords cost
U.S. taxpayers $17.5 billion.(174)
Signing an agreement was one thing; carrying it out proved to be another.
While still in the United States, Begin announced that Israel retained the
right to remain on the West Bank indefinitely and that a provision freezing
West Bank settlements was only for three months. Carter said that, on the
contrary, the freeze was for five years. But the supposed agreement on the
freeze was oral; it was not put in the accords. Feeling that the Camp David
agreement was in jeopardy, Carter intervened again. In early 1979 he induced
Sadat and Begin to sign the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, which stipulated
that negotiations on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were to begin within
the month. Those talks were held, with U.S. involvement, but they came to
naught. The Carter administration did not help matters when it reversed its
UN vote against Israel's settlement policy, claiming the initial position
was an "error."(175)
The Palestinians in the occupied territories opposed the Camp David accords.
Several West Bank mayors denounced the accords as a means of perpetuating
the occupation. The accords cost Sadat much Arab support. In March 1979
Egypt was suspended from the Arab League, and even the moderate Arab states
accused Sadat of deserting them for a bilateral treaty with Israel. They
also blamed the United States for driving a wedge into the Arab world. Some
of the Arab states, including Syria and Iraq, moved closer to the Soviet
Union. The Camp David accords eventually cost Sadat his life. In October
1981 Muslim fundamentalists assassinated him. In the words of Middle East
analyst Robin Wright, "Sadat's historic trip to Jerusalem to promote
Arab-Israeli peace in 1977, followed by the U.S.-orchestrated Camp David
Treaty in 1979, was the ultimate sacrilege in the eyes of the militant
fundamentalists."(176)
Historian George Lenczowski ironically summed up the Camp David accords this
way: "If the United States' national interest demanded the strengthening of
Israel at the expense of the Arabs by isolating Egypt from the Arab
community and by leaving the issue of Palestine and related problems, such
as the Golan Heights, vague and in suspension, then the objective was
attained."(177)
The Lebanon War, 1982-83
Supporters of the Camp David accords may have thought that the
Israeli-Egyptian peace would inspire Israel to seek peace with the rest of
its adversaries. But the Begin regime viewed the matter differently:
security on its west flank freed Israel to pursue its other objectives. One
of those was the discrediting and destruction of the PLO, which, by June
1982, had observed its cease-fire with Israel for about a year and had been
pursuing a diplomatic strategy. In that month Israel's ambassador to London,
Shlomo Argov, was wounded in an assassination attempt. Israel declared that
the PLO had violated the cease-fire, and on June 6, under the direction of
Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, launched Operation Peace for Galilee--a
massive invasion of Lebanon.
Actually, the PLO was not responsible for Argov's shooting; it was committed
by a rival group of Arafat's al-Fatah led by Abu Nidal. Nevertheless, the
time was opportune for Israel to accomplish two long-held goals. (The
Falklands war between Great Britain and Argentina was distracting the world
at that time.) Those objectives were the destruction of the PLO, whose turn
to diplomacy was regarded as a threat to Israeli ends, and the establishment
in Lebanon of Maronite rule that would recognize Israel's claim to Lebanese
territory from the northern Israeli border to the Litani River.(178) Lebanon
had been in turmoil and civil war for about a decade as the result of both
internal and external problems. Lebanese fought Lebanese, the Muslims backed
by Syrians, some Christians backed by Israelis. The presence of
Palestinians, refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars as well as PLO
guerrillas, aggravated the indigenous problems, and the Israelis regularly
inflicted brutal punishment from the air.(179)
Shortly after the invasion, Begin told the Knesset that it was for the
limited purpose of clearing Palestinians from a 25-mile-deep strip along the
Israel-Lebanon border. He did not tell the Israeli people that the objective
was much more ambitious: to push the Palestinians to Beirut, then to force
Syria, which had been in Lebanon since 1976, to withdraw, leaving the
Palestinians unprotected. The plan backfired, however, because it ignited
Arab hatred that transcended the intra-Arab rivalries.
The Israeli campaign included nine weeks of brutal ground attacks in
southern Lebanon and ferocious bombing of Muslim West Beirut, with great
loss of civilian life.(180) What role did the United States play in the war?
The Reagan administration knew of the plans for an invasion as early as
October 1981, when Begin confided in Secretary of State Alexander Haig at
Sadat's funeral. Although Begin assured President Reagan in January 1982
that he would not invade, Israel's chief of military intelligence, Gen.
Yehoshua Saguy, told Haig and Pentagon officials that the invasion was being
considered. Haig got several other notices. The response Haig gave the
Israelis was, "The United States will not support such an action. . . .
[But] the United States would never tell Israel not to defend itself from
attack, but any action she took must be in response to an internationally
recognized provocation."(181)
According to two Israeli journalists, Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, Haig
went even further. At a meeting at which Sharon said, "No country has the
right to tell another how best to protect its citizens," Haig "nodded his
head." Sharon then indicated that the war might go beyond the narrow aim of
removing the PLO military in the south. "How far will you go?" asked an
American at the meeting. "As far as we have to go," Sharon said. Haig said
he expected the Israeli action to be fast and efficient, like a lobotomy. As
Schiff and Ya'ari later wrote:
Sharon was clearly pleased with the results of his meeting with Haig: the
secretary had confirmed Israel's right, in principle, to respond to acts of
terrorism as long as they were indisputable provocations on the part ofthe
PLO. . . . To Sharon's way of thinking, Haig's response added up to American
recognition that Israel would not turn the other cheek if sorely provoked
and, more important, that such recognition could be construed as tacit
agreement to a limited military operation. From Israel's standpoint, this
was sufficient. Neither in the Yom Kippur War nor the Six-Day War before it
had Israel enjoyed such heartening understanding from Washington. . . .
[Sharon] returned to Israel with the tidings that Washington was not averse
to an Israeli advance into Lebanon.(182)
When U.S. officials became concerned that Haig had been indiscreet, the
White House had him send a clarifying letter to Begin. The letter sought to
"impress upon you that absolute restraint is necessary" and noted that
Reagan would be dispatching his envoy to help deal with the guerrilla
activity. The Israeli officials, wrote Schiff and Ya'ari, "came away with
the impression that the letter represented a cautious diplomatic
maneuver--the formal expression of a reservation by which the Americans
intended to cover themselves against liability in case Israel got into
deeper trouble than it could handle."(183)
As the war raged in Lebanon, the Reagan administration's statements were
mildly negative, but, at Haig's urging, the administration vetoed a UN
Security Council resolu- tion condemning the invasion.(184) Haig was also
responsible for the scrapping of a harsh letter to Begin demanding an
unconditional Israeli withdrawal. However, Reagan did ask Begin to accept a
cease-fire. At a June 30 press conference, Reagan agreed with Israel that
the PLO should leave Lebanon, but in July he suspended shipment of cluster
bombs to Israel because it "may have violated" the Arms Export Control Act.
(The shipments were later resumed.) As the bombing of West Beirut continued,
Reagan voiced his concern, but he did not threaten to cut off aid.
With the siege of Beirut continuing, the administration worked for a
cease-fire. Finally, in mid-August the United States helped to arrange an
agreement that included a PLO evacuation to other Arab countries overseen by
a (non-UN) multinational force, including 800 U.S. Marines. The U.S. forces
left after 17 days when the PLO evacuation was completed. U.S. policy then
shifted toward restoration of the authority of Lebanon's government and
removal of Syrian and Israeli troops.(185) That shift again demonstrated the
blunt nature of U.S. foreign policy and obliviousness to subtleties. In the
Arab world the presence of Israeli and Syrian forces in Lebanon was not seen
as symmetrical because, among other reasons, Lebanon is an Arab country and
the Arab League had sanctioned the Syrian entry. Thus, the U.S. policy was
doomed from the start.
On August 23, 1982, the leader of the Lebanese Forces (the Maronite
militias, including the Phalange),(186) Bashir Gemayel, was elected
president of Lebanon. He opened discussions with Israel, seeking an alliance
that would preserve the minority Maronites' dominance and rid the country of
the Palestinians and Syrians. Begin and Sharon demanded that Israel's
Lebanese client, Major Haddad, be named minister of defense. They also made
other demands that indicated their designs on Lebanon. Before Gemayel could
conclude an agreement, he was assassi-nated, perhaps by rival Christians.
His brother Amin, who succeeded him, showed an interest in coming to terms
with Syria.
Before Amin Gemayel's election, however, Israel violated the cease-fire and
completed its occupation of West Beirut. Then, on September 16-18, the
Lebanese Forces massacred Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee
camps outside Beirut. According to the Israelis, 328 men, women, and
children were killed, and almost 1,000 people were missing. Under the
cease-fire pact, the United States had promised to protect the Palestinians.
And Israel controlled the area. Indeed, the Israeli military commander had
let the Lebanese Forces, seeking vengeance for the death of Bashir Gemayel,
into the camps. Israeli soldiers illuminated the camps, facilitating the
massacre, and readmitted Phalange forces when the Israelis knew the massacre
was in progress.(187) The world reacted with horror to the atrocity, but the
United States threatened to veto a UN resolution if it mentioned
Because of the damage to U.S. credibility, the Reagan administration--at
Lebanon's request--sent 1,800 Marines back into Lebanon on September 29 as
part of a multinational force that included troops from Britain, France, and
Italy. The force was initially to act as a peace-keeping buffer between the
Israelis and everyone else. In that environment of civil disorder, bombings,
and kidnappings, the mission of the U.S. Marines was unclear. They were
harassed by the Israeli forces and opposed by other factions. Particularly
ominous was the activity in the Bekaa Valley of Iranian guerrillas and
Lebanese Shi'ites, such as the Hezbollah group, who were sympathetic to the
Iranian regime. In April 1983 one of those groups, the Islamic Jihad,
claimed responsibility for the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in
which 46 people were killed.
In August Israel partially withdrew to the south, leaving the Marines in the
crossfire between Lebanese factions and removing their reason for being
there in the first place. The Marines suffered casualties from Druze
artillery--although it is not clear that the shelling was intentional--and
the U.S. Sixth Fleet off the coast countered by firing shells the weight of
Volkswagens at Druze positions. U.S. aircraft flew bombing missions as well.
The United States had clearly taken sides in the Lebanese civil war.
The consequences of U.S. intervention became all too apparent on October 23
when a truck filled with explosives entered the Marine headquarters at
Beirut airport. The resulting blast killed 241 Marines. By February 1984
Reagan had abandoned the intervention in Lebanon and withdrawn the surviving
Marines.(189)
Five months earlier, Secretary of State George Shultz (who had succeeded
Haig in mid-1982) had pushed Amin Gemayel into a peace agreement with Israel
under which Israel and Syria would withdraw simultaneously from Lebanon.
Syria rejected the agreement, giving Israel grounds for remaining, and after
the U.S. evacuation, Gemayel scrapped the agreement. Israel has remained in
its self-proclaimed "security zone" in the south of Lebanon ever since. The
Syrians also remained, finally consolidating their hold in 1990.
The United States came out of that tragedy with a firmer reputation as a
partisan of the country that had inflicted so much suffering on Lebanon. In
the aftermath, American citizens in Lebanon were taken hostage by
Iranian-backed groups. Several of those hostages remain in captivity. The
hostage taking, in turn, gave rise to the Iran-Contra affair. President
Reagan defended his pro-Israel policy on the grounds that the United States
had a vital interest in keeping Lebanon out of the Soviet bloc.(190) Thus,
he followed in the dubious footsteps of his predecessors.
The Expanding U.S.-Israeli Security Relationship
The invasion of Lebanon was not the only occasion the Reagan administration
had for giving aid and comfort to Israel. As Prime Minister Shamir put it,
"This is the most friendly administration we have ever worked with."(191)
Reagan himself had said that "the security of Israel is a principal
objective of this Administration," and he wrote to Begin that "I am
determined to see that Israel's qualitative edge is maintained."(192)
Military and economic aid to Israel grew, and loans were occasionally
forgiven.
The occasional difference between the Reagan administration's public and
private positions regarding Israel was demonstrated in June 1981, when
Israel destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad. In carrying out
the attack, Israel used U.S.-made F-16 and F-15 fighters. Secretary Haig
reported to Congress that the attack "may" have been a violation of the 1952
U.S.-Israel Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement. The United States
officially condemned the strike, and Reagan suspended a scheduled delivery
of four F-16 fighters to Israel. But a few days later he sounded more
sympathetic to Israel's position. What was not known publicly at the time
was that Israel had used satellite photographs provided by the CIA to plan
the strike. Israel had almost unlimited access to such information under an
intelligence-sharing agreement set up with the approval of CIA chief William
Casey. Cooperation between U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies was
nothing new, but it had rarely reached such levels.(193)
Also in 1981 the Reagan administration offered Israel a strategic
cooperation agreement. Among other things, it set up a committee to arrange
joint U.S.-Israeli military exercises, gave the U.S. Sixth Fleet use of
Israeli ports, alowed the United States to store military supplies in Israel
for the Central Command, provided for resumption of the shipment of cluster
bombs to Israel, and called for a U.S.- Israeli free-trade agreement. The
strategic agreement, which did not have to be submitted to the U.S. Senate,
also promised increased military aid.(194) When Israel annexed the Golan
Heights a few weeks later, Reagan re-sponded by putting the strategic
agreement into "abeyance." In November 1983 it was reinstated.
The Reagan administration also gave sanction to Israel's policy on
settlements in the West Bank. Despite the policy's illegality under the
Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and contrary to the position of previous
presidents, Reagan pronounced the policy "not illegal" shortly after he took
office. That policy had resulted in the Israeli government's taking over
more than half of the West Bank (not including East Jerusalem).
Although Secretary of State Shultz formulated a peace plan that, among other
things, called for a freeze on settlements, the Reagan administration was
also increasing aid that could free Israeli funds to build them. The plan
proposed autonomy for the Palestinians after five years, in association with
Jordan, but no independent state. The plan was vague about borders, but it
reiterated support for UN Resolution 242's land-for-peace principle. The
Reagan (Shultz) peace plan was issued nearly simultaneously with the Arab
League's Fez plan of September 9, 1982, which called for a Palestinian state
and implicitly recognized the existence of Israel. (A similar plan, the Fahd
plan, had been previously proposed by Saudi Arabia.) Israel rejected the
Reagan peace plan and announced that it would proceed to build 42 new
settlements.
U.S. Response to the Intifada
Shultz tried to bring the Reagan peace plan back to life in January 1988,
after the outbreak of the intifada, after the uprising against the Israeli
occupation by rockthrowing Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza
Strip, and after the nightly television news clips of Israeli soldiers
breaking the bones of Arab youths. Shultz sought a comprehensive solution,
beginning with Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian negotiations later in the year.
Again, UN Resolutions 242 and 338 would provide the basis for the
negotiations on a transition and then a final settlement. A conference of
the five permanent members of the UN Security Council would also be part of
the process, albeit mostly ceremonial.
In March 1988 Prime Minister Shamir all but said no to the Shultz plan.
Shamir opposed the international conference and said that Israel had
discharged its Resolution 242 obligations when it returned the Sinai.(195)
The PLO also turned down the proposal, objecting to the absence of
Palestinian self-determination as a goal of the negotiations. Reagan
nonetheless warmly greeted Shamir in Washington, and even before the visit
Reagan had accelerated delivery of a shipment of 75 F-16 fighters. Reagan
also reconfirmed the Strategic Cooperation Agreement of 1981. Moreover, his
administration moved to close PLO offices in Washington and New York, the
latter of which was the PLO's UN observer mission, on the grounds that the
PLO was a terrorist organization. A federal court ruled that closing the UN
mission violated the 1947 UN headquarters agreement.
But there were also currents running in the opposite direction. To Israel's
dismay, Shultz met in late March with two Palestinian-Americans (Professors
Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu Lughod) who were members of the Palestine
National Council (a parliament in exile). Shamir said the meeting violated
the U.S pledge to have no contact with the PLO. A few months later, Bassam
Abu Sharif, a close aide to PLO chairman Arafat, published an article
endorsing a two-- state solution; accepting the UN resolutions; and most
significant, calling for negotiations with Israel. Attention was further
shifted to the PLO when King Hussein of Jordan relinquished responsibility
for the West Bank. Arafat him- self then spoke. "I am ready to meet at the
United Nations with any Israeli representative. We set no preconditions for
a meeting. . . . I extend to the Israelis the hand for peace negotiations,"
he told the European Parliament.(196) (He also broached the idea, anathema
to Israel, of an Israeli withdrawal to the 1947 borders.) Shultz continued
to oppose a separate Palestinian state.(197)
In November 1988 the Palestine National Council, meeting in Algiers, voted
to accept UN Resolutions 242 and 338 and thus implicitly acknowledged
Israel's existence and right to security. The council then declared an
independent Palestinian state. Speaking at the December 1988 UN General
Assembly session in Geneva, Arafat said the PLO wanted a comprehensive
settlement that would respect every state's "right to exist in peace and
security." He also noted that the Palestine National Council had "reaffirmed
its rejection of terrorism in all its forms." Shultz said Arafat's statement
did not meet U.S. conditions for official recognition as representative of
the Palestinians. At a press conference the following day, Arafat
essentially repeated what he had said the day before. The second time it was
good enough for Shultz, who announced that the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia
(where the PLO had been based since leaving Lebanon) would begin discussions
with Arafat's organization.(198)
The low-level discussions over 18 months between the United States and the
PLO signified no real change in U.S. policy. It was never clear what the
discussions were to achieve. Nor did they represent an effort to get the
Israeli government to meet with the PLO, despite the growing sentiment in
Israel that that was necessary.(199) The matter became academic in 1990 when
President Bush suspended rela tions with the PLO because he was dissatisfied
with Arafat's response to an attempted attack on Israel by the Palestinian
Liberation Front, which is represented in the PLO.(200)
The year before, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, as had come to be
expected, had formulated yet another peace plan. But as he made clear before
formally introducing his plan, the Bush administration's "goal all along has
been to try to assist in the implementation of the Shamir initiative."(201)
The Shamir plan of May 1989 calls for elections in the occupied territories
to choose a Palestinian delegation to negotiations. The process is to
produce a settlement on borders with Jordan. But Shamir's "basic premises"
are essential to his initiative: no Palestinian state, no negotiations with
the PLO or Palestinians affiliated with it, and no change in the status of
the territories except according to the Israeli government's guidelines. The
Palestinians will not go along with a plan that does not have PLO approval,
which Shamir's does not. Baker stands behind Israel's insistence that it
have a veto over its negotiation partners. "The United States understands
that Israel will attend the dialogue only after a satisfactory list of
Palestinians has been worked out," declared a State Department press
release.(202) That policy was continued by the 1991 Baker initiative for a
U.S.-Soviet Middle East conference. The Bush policy is consistent with past
policy and bodes ill for resolution of the Palestinian question.
Interventions Involving Iran and Arab-Israeli Issues
The Carter Doctrine
The Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 led to an
upsurge of U.S. intervention in the Middle East. Washington increasingly
became a direct participant as the strategy of relying on regional
surrogates became less viable after the Iranian revolution.
The Soviet invasion came a year and a half after the Afghani Communist party
overthrew the republican government of Prime Minister Daoud Khan. Daoud had
come to power in 1973 in a coup against his cousin, King Amanullah. Daoud
destroyed the king's rigorous neutrality between the United States and the
Soviet Union by moving closer to traditional adversaries (and U.S. allies)
Pakistan and Iran. The shah of Iran provided massive aid and promised to
build a railroad to the Iranian border that would reduce Afghanistan's
reliance on the Soviet Union.
The indigenous communist takeover occurred after Daoud removed Communists
from his cabinet and convened a meeting of religious and political leaders
who approved a new constitution and elected him president for six years. The
Soviet invasion was prompted by widespread discontent with the communist
leader Hafizulla Amin, whose regime harshly violated tribal rights and
customs.(203)
Although the invasion represented the Soviets' first direct use of force
near the Middle East since World War II, some American observers saw it as
the inauguration of a new communist aggressiveness. They regarded it not
only as a way of saving the Communists in Afghanistan but also as a means of
achieving the long-held Soviet objective of gaining a warm-water port. The
Soviets' move into a country so close to the Persian Gulf was viewed as a
violation of the U.S. sphere of influence. Thus, in his January 1980 State
of the Union message, President Carter issued what came to be known as the
Carter Doctrine, pledging to defend the gulf even if it meant going to war.
"An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf
region," Carter said, "will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests
of the United States. It will be repelled by use of any means necessary,
including military force." Privately, the president said it was "the most
serious international development that has occurred since I have been
President."(204)
Carter's presidential doctrine had a new name, but that did not mean the
contents were new. It had long been the U.S. position that war would be
justified to protect U.S. interests in the gulf area. Three years earlier, a
U.S. Senate committee chaired by Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) had declared,
"Threats to the continuous flow of oil through the Gulf would so endanger
the Western and Japanese economies as to be grounds for general war."(205)
In fact, U.S. efforts to strengthen the nation's defensive alliances and
military capabilities in the region were begun before the Soviet invasion,
because of the revolution in Iran. As Cyrus Vance, Carter's secretary of
state, wrote, "The [Iranian] hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan simply accelerated measures already under way."(206)
To carry out the Carter Doctrine, the administration imposed sanctions
against the Soviet Union, including a grain embargo and U.S. withdrawal from
the 1980 Olympic games held in Moscow. It also established the Rapid
Deployment Force (later joined with other forces to become the Central
Command) and asked Congress to authorize registration for a military draft.
Finally, it furnished military equipment to the Afghani resistance, a policy
continued by the Reagan administration and formalized in the Reagan
Doctrine. Carter's policies had the effect of drawing the United States
closer to the authoritarian regime of President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq of
Thus, Carter followed in the footsteps of his predecessors in his
determination to let nothing loosen the American grip on the Middle East. As
had those of previous administrations, the measures he initiated enabled the
U.S. government to gain new powers and military facilities.
The Iran-Iraq War
Iran and Iraq have been adversaries since at least the seventh century A.D.
Their latest clash erupted when the Shi'ite Muslim leader the Ayatollah
Khomeini came to power in Iran in 1979 and encouraged Iraq's majority
Shi'ites to revolt against the secular Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein.
Iraq responded by trying to incite the Arabs in Iran's Khuzistan province,
an area long disputed by the two countries. At first border clashes grew out
of mutual antagonism, and then, in September 1980, Iraq's army invaded Iran.
Saddam hoped to establish himself as the Arab leader who put down the
Persians and regained control of the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway and
islands held by Iran. Iraq made early gains in the war and then called for a
cease-fire in December 1981. It was not until July 1988 that Iran finally
agreed to a cease-fire; by that time Iran had partially reversed its
fortunes and even threatened Basra, Iraq's second largest city.
When the war broke out, the United States declared its neutrality. But that
did not stop the U.S. government from aiding Iraq's war effort to keep Iran,
which had humiliated the United States in the hostage crisis, from
prevailing. In fact, the American "tilt" toward Iraq began before the
invasion. The Carter administration furnished Iraq, through Saudi Arabia,
exaggerated reports of Iran's military weakness as a way of encouraging
Saddam to invade. Author Dilip Hiro has written that according to then
Iranian president Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, secret documents purchased by his
government described "conversations in France between several deposed
Iranian generals and politicians, Iraqi representatives and American and
Israeli military experts."(207) President Carter's hope was that Iran's dire
need for spare parts would force it to deal with the United States and free
the 52 American hostages it still held. When the war began, the Carter
administration criticized the invasion to "soften up" the Iranians. But the
plan did not work because Iran turned to Vietnam for parts, which the U.S.
military had left behind. The Reagan administration furnished the Iraqis
with intelligence on Iranian troop concentrations and damage assessments of
Iraqi attacks on Iran. After removing Iraq from the list of countries
supporting terrorism, the administration began providing $500 million in
annual commodity credits, which enabled the nearly bankrupt nation to obtain
wheat and other food. The United States provided another $500 million in
Export-Import Bank guarantees for an oil pipeline. Those measures gave Iraq
critical support in the eyes of other potential lenders. With U.S. approval,
American allies, such as France, armed Iraq with, among other things, Super
Etendard fighters equipped with Exocet missiles. The Reagan administration
also encouraged Arab financial assistance to Iraq and urged American allies
to stop selling weapons to Iran.(208) In 1984 Reagan resumed diplomatic
relations with Iraq.
Finally, in 1987, in response to attacks on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf
during the war, the United States escalated its involvement by agreeing to
reflag 11 Kuwaiti oil tankers and to deploy a major force of warships in the
gulf. President Reagan had turned down an earlier invitation to provide U.S.
escort services for Kuwait's tankers but changed his mind when the Soviets
offered their services. Reagan justified his policy as ensuring freedom of
navigation, but the prime beneficiary was Iraq, which was bankrolled
throughout the war by Kuwait, whose oil tankers the United States was
pledging to protect. The United States also tilted toward Iraq
diplomatically by supporting UN resolutions condemning Iran and demanding
that it accept a cease-fire.(209)
Of course, U.S. involvement in the gulf was dangerous. Shortly after the
reflagging, an Iraqi warplane attacked the USS Stark, killing 28 men. The
Reagan administration accepted Iraq's claim that the attack was an error and
its apology, but the president then blamed Iran for the tragedy. There were
also clashes with Iran. A U.S. Navy helicopter damaged an Iranian warship in
the fall of 1987, and when Iran struck a U.S.-flagged Kuwaiti tanker with a
Silkworm missile, U.S. naval forces destroyed two Iranian offshore drilling
platforms. Several months later a U.S. frigate hit an Iranian mine and
almost sank. In retaliation, the U.S. Navy destroyed two more oil platforms
and sank six Iranian warships. The restrained nature of the U.S. response
drew criticism of the Reagan administration from people, including former
national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who thought Iran was being
treated too leniently. Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), for example, called for the
mining of Iran's waters.(210) The tragedy of U.S. intervention reached a
peak in July 1988, when the U.S. cruiser Vincennes downed a Ira nian
commercial airliner, killing 290 civilians. (The crew said it had mistaken
the airliner for a fighter plane during a battle with Iranian speedboats.)
Two weeks later, Iran formally accepted a cease-fire with Iraq.
The importance of the de facto alliance between the United States and Iraq,
which continued until shortly before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990,
cannot be overstated. By siding with Iraq against Iran, the United States
granted legitimacy to Saddam Hussein as the world's guardian against Muslim
fanaticism. His use of chemical weapons against Iran brought the mildest
criticism because of who his victims were.(211) Moreover, the various forms
of aid had a direct effect on Iraq's ability to hold out against Iran's long
onslaught. At the end of the war, Saddam had a huge military establishment
and believed that he was the savior of the Arab world. When Kuwait refused
to forgive the large debt Saddam owed, he concluded that the Kuwaitis were
ungrateful free riders who had taken him for granted. That conclusion
explains, in part, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait.(212)
It is sobering to realize that some foreign policy experts urged Washington
to support Saddam Hussein during the war against Iran on the grounds that an
Iraqi victory was preferable to an Iranian one. Daniel Pipes and Laurie
Mylroie, for example, wrote that "the fall of the existing regime in Iraq
would enormously enhance Iranian influence, endanger the supply of oil,
threaten pro-American regimes throughout the area, and upset the
Arab-Israeli balance." They favored "other economic steps" to help Iraq in
addition to the commodity and Ex-Im Bank credits. "Such measures," they
wrote, "would assert U.S. confidence in Iraq's political viability and its
ability to repay its debts after the war's end, and would encourage other
countries--especially Iraq's Arab allies and European creditors--to continue
financing Iraqi war efforts."(213)
Pipes and Mylroie anticipated the argument that a triumphant Saddam Hussein
would be bad for American interests and responded:
But the Iranian revolution and seven years of bloody and inconclusive
warfare have changed Iraq's view of its Arab neighbors, the United States,
and even Israel. . . . Its leaders no longer consider the Palestinian issue
their problem. [Its] allies have forced a degree of moderation on Iraq. . .
. Iraq is now the de facto protector of the regional status quo.(214)
The consequences that Pipes and Mylroie feared from an Iranian victory have
come as a result of Washington's backing Iraq. That typical backfire is not
simply a hazard of foreign policymaking. It is inherent in the nature of war
and lesser state conflict, in which the law of unintended consequences
rules. Sheer hubris alone permits so-called experts to make pronouncements
about how distant peoples' affairs should be managed and with exactly how
much force.(215)
Unfortunately, the fresh example of the Iran-Iraq War has not deterred
either the policymakers or their expert allies in the private sector. As if
their support for Iraq had been a resounding success, they embraced Syria's
Hafez Assad and Iran in the conflict with Iraq, blind to what effects that
may have in coming years.
The New Gulf War
Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, underscored more than
one irony of prior U.S. policy. U.S. aid to Saddam during his eight-year war
with Iran is only one of those ironies.(216) Another is that although
President Bush emphatically rejected Saddam's attempt to link the invasion
to the plight of the Palestinians, Bush may yet face enormous Arab pressure
to address that problem.
Bush offered several reasons for his response to Saddam's actions, a
response that included the cobbling of an international coalition of
nations. The initial military deployment was to deter an Iraqi attack on
Saudi Arabia. Then, ostensibly to drive Iraq from Kuwait, Bush went to the
United Nations to have an economic blockade, an act of war, imposed,
although American ships were already in place. Vowing to usher in a "new
world order," Bush declared that, in the first test of the post-cold-war
world, unprovoked aggression and the toppling of a "legitimate" government
(read: quasi-feudal monarchy) by a tyrant comparable to Hitler could not be
tolerated. The Munich analogy was rolled out more than once. Although
American intervention was lightly shrouded in the mantle of the United
Nations and collective security, Bush made it clear that no country but the
United States could have spearheaded the effort. Bush and other public
officials, including Secretary Baker and Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole,
raised the less lofty issue of oil and the purported danger to the U.S.
economy ("our way of life"), although that argument had been discredited
early in the crisis.(217) When the specter of Iraq's controlling 40 percent
of the proven oil reserves did not spook the American public, President Bush
insisted that the intervention was not about oil but about aggression. He
also defended his policy in terms of protecting the Americans held hostage
by Saddam Hussein, although they were not taken hostage until after the
policy was launched, and of the economic damage being inflicted on the
fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe, although the rise in oil prices
resulted from Bush's own embargo.
Two days after the November election, the president announced a doubling of
the military deployment to provide an "offensive option." Faith in the
blockade was abandoned. On Thanksgiving Day 1990 Bush added a new
justification of the possible need for war: Saddam's apparent effort to
develop nuclear weapons, which, Bush implied, would endanger the American
people. The speech followed by days the publication of a New York Times
opinion poll in which a majority of respondents had said that a nuclear
threat was the one reason they would be willing to support military action
against Iraq. Thus, in faithful Orwellian 1984 fashion, the official U.S.
attitude toward a recent ally turned 180 degrees.
The hollowness of the Bush administration's reasons, particularly the highly
selective stand against aggression, indicates that the president sees the
Middle East as his predecessors saw it, as a U.S. sphere of influence in
which rival interests may not compete. Saddam's offense did not lie in
occupying a neighbor (partners Turkey, Syria, China, and the Soviet Union,
as well as Israel, had done that), or in murdering "his own people" (China's
leaders and Syria's Hafez Assad had done that), or in having nuclear weapons
(several unsavory states have them and more are in the process of acquiring
arsenals). Rather, his offense lay in upsetting the status quo in an area
where the United States had vowed repeatedly to go to war, if necessary, to
prevent adverse change. Bush's policy was a reaffirmation of U.S. claims in
the Middle East, in case anyone thought that the end of the cold war made
them obsolete. As he put it, the lesson of the war against Iraq is that
"what we say goes."(218) Related reasons for the policy include the need for
a new mission for a defense establishment threatened by the public's demands
for a peace dividend; the desire to test new weapons; and the need to
distract the public from troubling domestic issues, such as the exploding
budget deficit and higher taxes.
One outcome of U.S. intervention has been immense Arab pressure on the
United States to settle the Palestinian question, something that worries
Israel. Bush's Arab coalition partners have a strong case when they argue
that the United States cannot justify its double standard for Iraq and
Israel. Unfortunately, few in the region will argue that Bush should
disengage and let the parties solve the problem themselves. At best, Arab
pressure may prompt him to change the nuances of U.S. intervention, but it
is doubtful Bush will be willing or able to try to change the Shamir
government's position on the occupied territories. Israel, for one thing,
managed to rehabilitate its public image in the United States by its
decision to stay out of the war.
The war against Iraq, though executed quickly and with light American
casualties (let's not forget the death and destruction inflicted on Iraq),
will have continuing unfortunate consequences, besides the massacre of Kurds
and Shi'ites at Saddam's hands. It was a grotesquely logical denouement to
45 years of U.S. policy in the Middle East.(219)
It is easy to miss the forest for the trees. The forest in this case is a
vast system set up to enable some Americans to manage events--the lives of
others, that is--in the Middle East. Each of the U.S. policies and actions,
in Iran and in the Arab-Israeli dispute, has been aimed at bringing about
certain results, desired by U.S. policymakers, by regulating the behavior of
others, sometimes through the application of force (directly or by proxy)
and at other times through the application of money. The question never
asked is, quo warranto? Who anointed the United States? The Truman,
Eisenhower, Nixon, and Carter doctrines command all the awe that
presidential names and upper-case letters can evoke, but did those
presidents have the consent of the people at whom those doctrines were
directed? At best, they satisfied themselves with the proxy consent of
autocratic rulers. That is a peculiar attitude for leaders of a democratic
U.S. policy by its very nature is never ending. Those whom the policy seeks
to mold resist it, and change always upsets expectations. As John Bright
asserted in assessing similar 19th-century British policies, "The balance of
power is like perpetual motion, or any of those impossible things which some
men are always racking their brains and spending their time and money to
accomplish."(220)
Whether the United States was trying to keep the shah of Iran in power or
trying to prevent the rise of Arab nationalism and nonalignment, its policy
was a blunt instrument applied presumptuously to subtle and complicated prob
lems. One journalist has likened it to playing pool with a 20-foot cue
stick. It would have been a miracle had the result not been chronic turmoil.
The impracticality of the policy would have been a stumbling block even if
the United States had not been on the side of injustice. Unfortunately,
critics of U.S. policy usually believe that U.S. power, influence, and money
have merely been put to the wrong use. Critics of the pro-Israel policy, for
example, often think that U.S. diplomacy should have been more evenhanded or
should have tilted toward the Palestinians. Such critics fall short in their
analyses. The real question is, what business do American elected officials
have determining the fate of people in the Middle East? Those people do not
exist for our convenience or for our energy security. The oil is not ours.
Nor is it America's place to ensure justice in the region. Government in the
United States was to be strictly limited by the Constitution. Its purpose
was to guard the peace and security of the American people at home, not to
extend American power hither and yon for grandiose schemes. John Quincy
Adams expressed that distinction in his address of July 4, 1821: "America
goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to
the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only
of her own."
Reshaping the world was to be achieved only by example. As Sen. Robert A.
Taft put it in 1951:
If we confine our activities to the field of moral leadership we shall be
successful if our philosophy is sound and appeals to the people of the
world. The trouble with those who advocate this [interventionist] policy is
that they really do not confine themselves to moral leadership. They are
inspired with the same kind of New Deal planned-control ideas abroad as
recent Administrations have desired to endorse at home. In their hearts they
want to force on these foreign peoples through the use of American money and
even, perhaps, American arms the policies which moral leadership is able to
advance only through the sound strength of its principles and the force of
its persuasion. I do not think this moral leadership ideal justifies our
engaging in any preventive war, or going to the defense of one country
against another, or getting ourselves into a vulnerable fiscal and economic
position at home which may invite war. I do not believe any policy which has
behind it the threat of military force is justified as part of the basic
foreign policy of the United States except to defend the liberty of our own
people.(221)
A Conflict of Interest
Economist Ludwig von Mises identified three features of government
intervention in the domestic economy: (1) unintended consequences, (2)
negative consequences from the policymakers' standpoint, and (3)
proliferation of new interventions as correctives for past interventions.
The same applies in foreign policy. All foreign policies bring results not
intended by those who author the policies. And some of those results are
regretted by the policymakers. Further, the undesirable consequences are
frequently grounds for further intervention.
The primary source of unintended consequences in foreign policy is the
irresponsibility that attends the subsidization of client states. Elementary
economics would teach that a subsidized agent will probably behave
differently than one who must bear all the costs of his actions. Throughout
the postwar period, Israel has been reasonably sure that it will be kept
militarily superior to its Arab opponents, and that its treasury will be
replenished, almost regardless of what it does. Even its "miscalculation" in
the 1956 Suez intervention did not bring about a cutoff of U.S. aid. Such an
arrangement makes irresponsibility inevitable. Conversely, the Palestinian
conclusion that no compromise can possibly change the official U.S. attitude
also is conducive to irresponsibility--and indiscriminate violence. A policy
that helps to create, repress, and demoralize hundreds of thousands of
refugees and second-class citizens will inevitably breed demagogues and
their attendant horrors. Thus, U.S. policy in the Middle East has been
complicitous in fostering recklessness and atrocities on all sides.
However, it is important to avoid naivetÇ. Not all consequences are
unintended, and not all unintended consequences are regretted by the
policymakers. Unexpected crises can serve their interests because they
"necessitate" further intervention, confirm the warnings used to justify the
policies to the people, and thus strengthen the consensus for the overall
policy. For example, the appearance of growing Soviet influence in the
Middle East, the result of policies followed by the U.S. government, need
not have really upset the policymakers.(222) Egypt's turning to the Soviets
for arms and financing of the High Aswan Dam in the 1950s was a convenient
pretext for the intensification of policies that John Foster Dulles was
already pursuing. Similarly, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan provided an
occasion for the United States to flex its rhetorical muscles (the Carter
Doctrine) and to establish the Central Command and draft registration. It
has been noted that Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait saved the U.S.
military budget from deep cuts by Congress. Thomas Paine recognized long ago
that "taxes were not raised to carry on wars, . . . wars were raised to
carry on taxes."(223)
On the other hand, apparent victories for U.S. policy can reasonably be
reinterpreted as, in reality, setbacks for the policymakers because the
victories might undermine the consensus. When Sadat expelled the Soviets
from Egypt, it must have crossed the policymakers' minds that a few more
"victories" like that could put them out of business. How long would the
taxpayers put up with annual military budgets of hundreds of billions of
dollars if they stopped believing in a Soviet threat? That is not to deny
the existence of disagreements within the policymaking elite, or of hawkish
and dovish wings in the establishment. Yet the essence of U.S.-Soviet
rivalry in the Middle East (and elsewhere) may best be captured in the title
of a book by the late Walter Karp on the relationship between Republicans
and Democrats, Indispensable Enemies.(224)
Thus, much of the critical literature on U.S. foreign policy--the literature
that says the policy has been self-defeating--is flawed. It implies that the
policymakers have persisted irrationally in a course that is contrary to
their interests. That is implausible. They undoubtedly followed the best
course they could, given their objectives and contraints. A policy
calculated to be truly pro-Palestinian or equitable to both the Arabs and
the Israelis would have been inconsistent with the requirements of U.S.
hegemony. In other words, if one accepts that U.S. political leaders should
maintain a particular world order, then one is logically drawn to the sort
of policy that has been pursued since World War II. A thorough rejection of
those policies requires a rejection of the objectives they were designed to
achieve.
The error too often committed in judging foreign policy is to identify the
interests of the political and specially connected corporate leaders with
the "national interest," or better, the interests of the people who
constitute the United States. In fact, there is a conflict of interest
between the politicized elite and the great bulk of the people. The
Manchester school of Cobden and Bright recognized that clash between the
"tax-payers" and the "tax-eaters." As Cobden, in calling for strict
noninterventionism and complete free trade, put it:
Warlike governments can find resources [for war] only in the savings of
merchants, manufacturers, farmers, and renters, and we appeal to them, in
the name of humanity and their own interest, to refuse to lend their aid to
a barbarous system which paralyzes trade, ruins industry, destroys capital,
stops work, and waxes fat through the blood and the arms of their
brothers.(225)
His contemporary, French economist FrÇdÇric Bastiat, added, "Political
economy shows that, even if we consider only the victorious people, wars are
always waged in the interest of the few at the expense of the many."(226)
The American people have not been well served by U.S. foreign policy in the
Middle East. They have been forced to pay billions of dollars to foreign
governments, and that has cost them untold opportunities for better lives
afforded by an undistorted consumer economy. Even when the foreign "aid" was
used to buy American-made products, it was merely a politically contrived
transfer from the taxpayers to politically connected corporate interests.
U.S. policy has put the American people at risk of war several times,
including the risk of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. American lives have
been lost--in Israel's attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 war, in
Beirut, and through desperate acts of terrorism. The people have even gotten
a bad deal on oil. The true cost of oil includes not only the per barrel or
per gallon price but also the cost of the overgrown military establishment
and foreign aid budget. That cost is hidden, because it is not overtly added
to the price at the pump, but it is real all the same. That fact was
recognized in a 1953 statement by the Texas Independent Producers and
Royalty Owners Association, which said:
Although Middle East oil is so abundant that it can be developed at a
fraction of the cost of our own, it is far from "cheap." On the contrary,
Middle East oil may already be the most expensive in the world market today
when consideration is given to the fact that vast amounts of public funds
are spent on the defense mechanism which is intended largely to protect
American interests in the Middle Eastern oil fields.(227)
The statement goes on to note that the real price would multiply
immeasurably if the policy began costing American lives--a point that is
even more relevant today.
How, in the absence of hegemonic U.S. policy, could Americans and their
large capitalist economy have achieved energy security and prosperity? The
answer is the free market, in which entrepreneurs earn profit by correctly
anticipating consumer demand, as well as the uncertain future, and make
provisions for both. The belief that government planning is necessary to
provide for the people's energy needs is a species of what economist F. A.
Hayek calls "the fatal conceit" and a failure to understand the nature of
the market's self-regulating, spontaneous order. In other words, political
and military noninterventionism in the Middle East would have cost the
policy and corporate elites the chance to serve their special interests, but
it would have left the people free to pursue their private complementary
interests in the market's cooperative and competitive environment.(228)
To put it bluntly, a power- and privilege-seeking elite has profited at the
expense of the people. Classical liberals have long warned that that was the
danger inherent in foreign policy. In that area, above all others, the
government can insist on the unquestioning faith of the people and dull
their natural suspicion of government. In domestic affairs a leader who
proposed massive spending or risky policies on the grounds that the rest of
us do not have all the facts would be ridiculed. Yet that approach is
standard in foreign policy. The result, as the classical liberals warned,
has been government run amok.
In 1796 George Washington, in his farewell address, offered advice that now
seems aimed directly at those who constructed the foreign policy we have
suffered with for the past 45 years:
Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and exces sive dislike of
another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and
serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real
Patriots, who may resist the intriegues [sic] of the favorite, are liable to
become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause
and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.(229)
By any standard, the relationship between the United States and Israel has
been extraordinary. Criticism of any other American ally does not cost a
person an elective or appointed position in government. Criticism of any
other American ally does not bring accusations of being a hater of the
dominant religious group in the allied nation. Both of those things happen,
almost routinely, to anyone who criticizes Israel. Elected U.S. officials
who have cast a single vote against an Israeli position have seen major
opposition mounted by Israel's American supporters. The rare journalist who
points out unattractive facts about Israeli conduct is likely to be smeared
as an anti-Semite. The chilling effect that has had on public debate is too
obvious to need elaboration.(230)
As for the standard rejoinder that Israel has been the staunchest U.S. ally
in the Middle East, one is reminded of the one-liner about lawyers: if we
didn't have them, we wouldn't need them. The U.S. relationship with Israel
produces the very adversaries that are pointed to as justifying the close
relationship.
We have allowed our leaders to violate George Washington's sage advice, and
it has cost us dearly. For Washington, "the Great rule of conduct for us, in
regard to foreign Nations is in extending our commercial relations to have
with them as little political connection as possible."(231) We must
rediscover the wisdom of our first president.
After the first full-blown U.S. imperialist adventure, the Spanish-American
War, classical liberal William Graham Sumner, surveying the results,
concluded that, despite its military victory, the United States in fact had
been conquered by Spain. By that he meant that the traditions of the
American republic were being undermined by the imperial values of the
Spanish Empire.
The question of imperialism is the question of whether we are going to give
the lie to the origin of our own national existence by establishing a
colonial system of the old Spanish type, even if we have to sacrifice our
existing civil and political system to do it. I submit that it is a strange
incongruity to utter grand platitudes about the blessings of liberty, etc.,
. . . and to begin by . . . throwing the Constitution into the gutter here
at home. If you take away the Constitution, what is American liberty and all
the rest? Nothing but a lot of phrases.(232)
Sumner feared for the future, as we all must.
Now what will hasten the day when our present advantages will wear out and
when we shall come down to the conditions of the older and densely populated
nations? The answer is: war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental
system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditure, political
jobbery--in a word, imperialism. In the old days the democratic masses of
this country, who knew little about our modern doctrines of social
philosophy, had a sound instinct on these matters, and it is no small ground
of political disquietude to see it decline. They resisted every appeal to
their vanity in the way of pomp and glory which they knew must be paid for.
They dreaded a public debt and a standing army.(233)
As we witness the jingoistic celebrations of the U.S. military's victory
over Iraq, it is clear that great energy must now be directed to the revival
of that "sound instinct." It is a matter of life and death--literally.
I wish to acknowledge my immeasurable intellectual debt to Leonard P.
Liggio, Noam Chomsky, Rabbi Elmer Berger, and my grandfather, the late
Samuel Richman.
1. President Bush had a similar reaction in 1989 when the United States
invaded Panama. He dismissed previous U.S. support for Gen. Manuel Noriega
as "just history."
2. The word "terrorism" is used here with a certain reluctance because of
its invidious ideological taint. Terrorism, to judge by standard usage, is
something only the adversaries of the United States and its allies can
engage in. The conduct of American or allied personnel, no matter how
violent, by definition cannot qualify as terrorism. For the sake of
perspective, it is worth noting that the number of victims of what is
usually thought of as Arab terrorism is minuscule compared with the number
of civilian victims of the chief U.S. ally in the Middle East. Israel, whose
conduct is never described as terrorism.
3. For a discussion of Western betrayal of the Arabs after World War I, see
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and
the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon Books, 1989); and
George Lenczowski, The Middle East in World Affairs, 3d ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1962), pp. 67-98. Regarding Franklin Roosevelt's
promises to the Arabs, see Richard H. Curtiss, A Changing Image: American
Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute Washi- ngton: American Educational
Trust, 1986). Roosevelt's record on Pales- tine was curious; one might even
say cynical. Seven years before his meeting with Saudi king Ibn Saud in
1945, he said, regarding Britain's limits on Jewish immigration into
Palestine: "I was at Versailles and I know that the British made no secret
of the fact they promised Palestine to the Jews. Why are they now reneging
on their promise?" Quoted in Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (New
York: Knopf, 1983), p. 134. But in 1945 Roosevelt assured the king that
nothing would be done to Palestine without his being consulted. In the late
1930s, Roosevelt also came up with the idea of having the United States,
Great Britain, France, and wealthy Western Jews finance the transfer of all
the Pales- tinian Arabs to Iraq. The British responded that no amount of
money would induce the Palestinians to move. Roosevelt raised the idea with
Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, who said things were not so simple,
although neither man dismissed the idea. Grose, pp. 138-39.
4. Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1945), vol. 8, p. 45.
5. For details on how that occurred, see Harvey O'Connor, World Crisis in
Oil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962), pp. 271-365. The American
concession in Saudi Arabia started with a grant by King Saud to Standard Oil
of California, which took on Texaco as a partner to form Caltex Oil.
O'Connor, p. 326. After World War II, Aramco (Arab-American Oil Co.) was
owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey, Mobil, Socal (all Rockefeller
companies), and Texaco. The cooperation between the U.S. government and the
oil industry was often covert. In the 1950s the CIA agreed to subsidize, at
taxpayers' expense of course, American oil firms so they could be assured of
underbidding the Soviet Union on a Syrian oil refinery. Wilbur Crane
Eveland, Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle East (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1980), p. 195.
6. The United States started moving in on French and British interests in
Saudi Arabia during the war. Direct lend-lease aid to King Saud was Franklin
Roosevelt's way of keeping American concessions from falling into British
7. Michael B. Stoff, Oil War, and American Securitv: The Search for a
National Policy on Foreign Oil, 1941-1947 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1980), p. 197ff.; Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil
Companies and the World They Shaped (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 101ff.
8. The U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, chaired in
1977 by Sen. Henry Jackson, spelled that out in Access to Oil--The United
States Relationship with Saudi Arabia and Iran (Washington: Government
Printing Office, 1977). The report pointed out that "threats to the
continuous flow of oil through the Gulf would so endanger the Western and
Japanese economies as to be grounds for general war" (p. 83).
9. Ibid., p. 84.
10. Robert W. Tucker, "The Purposes of American Power," Foreiqn Affairs 59,
no. 2 (Winter 1980-81): 253.
11. Ibid., p. 256. Years earlier, in 1944, Secretary of the Navy James
Forrestal had said:
The prestige and hence the influence of the United States is in part related
to the wealth of the government and its nation in terms of oil resources,
foreign as well as domestic. It is assumed, therefore, that the bargaining
power of the United States in international conferences involving vital
materials like oil and such problems as aviation, shipping, island bases,
and international security agreements relating to the disposition of armed
forces and facilities, will depend in some degree upon the retention by the
United States of such oil resources.
Quoted in Leonard P. Liggio, "Oil and American Foreign Policy," Libertarian
Review (July-August 1979): 65.
12. That was part of a global strategy that saw the Third World as a source
of raw materials and a market for finished goods, but only under the
direction of pro-American, even if brutal, rulers. The analysis of the
cynical motives of the political leaders was first formulated by classical
liberals--that is, advocates of free-market (as opposed to state) capitalism
such as Thomas Paine, Charles Dunoyer, Charles Comte, Augustin Thierry,
Richard Cobden, John Bright, Lysander Spooner, and Herbert Spencer. See E.
K. Bramsted and K. J. Melhuish, eds., Western Liberalism: A History in
Documents from Locke to Croce (London: Lonaman, 1978); Edmund Silberner, The
Problem of War in Nineteenth Centurv Economic Thouaht (1947; New York:
Garland Publishing, 1972). As Bright put it in 1859:
The more you examine this matter the more you will come to the conclusion
which I have arrived at, that this foreign policy [of Britain's], . . . this
excessive love for the "balance of power," is neither more nor less than a
gigantic system of out-door relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain. . .
. What are we to say of a nation which lives under a perpetual delusion that
it is about to be attacked?
Quoted in Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock, eds., The Liberal Tradition
(Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1967), pp. 88-89.
For details on classical liberalism's class analysis, see Leonard P. Liggio,
"Charles Dunoyer and French Classical Liberalism," and Ralph Raico,
"Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory: A Comment on Professor Liggio's
Paper, n Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 153-78,
That class analysis was carried forward in 20th-century America by the
critics of state power known as the Old Right, especially by such publicists
as Albert Jay Nock, Felix Morley, John T. Flynn, and Frank Chodorov. For a
sampling of that group's skeptical views on U.S. intervention, see Ronald
Radosh, Prophets on the Right (New York: Free Life Editions, 1975).
Especially significant is John T. Flynn, As We Go Marchina (1944; New York:
Free Life Editions, 1973), wherein Flynn sounds much like Bright: "Thus
militarism is the one great glamorous public-works project upon which a
variety of elements in the community can be brought into agreement" (p.
207). See also Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy. the State (1935; New York: Free
Life Editions, 1977); Garet Garrett, "The Rise of Empire," in The People's
Pottage (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1965), pp. 171-74. For an
extension of the liberal class analysis, see Walter E. Grinder and John
Hagel III, "Toward a Theory of State Capitalism: Ultimate Decision-Making
and Class Structure," Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 1 (Winter 1977):
In addition to oil, U.S. interests in the Middle East have included the
large export markets and the market for construction services and arms. The
repatriation of petrodollars has had much to do with the U.S. government's
attitude toward rises in the price of oil. In 1976 Forbes published an
article that pointed out that, regarding OPEC, American policymakers "were
quite prepared to have U.S. motorists and businessmen--and those of the rest
of the world--pay a bit more for oil in order to help the shah of Iran and
the Saudis. . . . The State Department realized full well that they could
not persuade Congress to tax Americans for that purpose. So they did it by
the back door." "Don't Blame the Oil Companies; Blame the State Department:
How the West Was Won," Forbes, April 15, 1976; quoted in Jonathan Kwitny,
Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendlv World (New York: Congdon &
Weed, 1984), p. 194. Kwitny reported that the higher oil prices of the 1970s
enabled America's gulf allies to increase military spending from $800
million a year to $4 billion a year by 1975 (p. 195).
13. Quoted in Michael B. Bishku, "The 1958 American Intervention in Lebanon:
A Historical Assessment," American-Arab Affairs 31 (Winter 1989-90): 116-17.
14. Quoted in Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Oriqins of the Cold War
and the National Securitv State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 180.
15. The government's earliest interest in Middle Eastern oil began after
World War I, when it pressured Great Britain to include American oil
companies and urged the unenthusiastic American companies to, in the words
of a Gulf Oil representative, "go out and get it." Sampson, p. 66. See
generally, Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Ouest for Oil. Monev and Power
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). On the Iranian concession, see Yergin,
Shattered Peace, p. 181. The companies were Standard Vacuum Oil (Stanvac),
an independent subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Socony-Vacuum.
Standard Oil of New Jersey had been denied an Iranian concession in 1940.
Sinclair Oil later joined the effort. See Stoff, pp. 101, 103.
16. Quoted in Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 181.
17. Stoff, p. 62ff. The degree of Thornburg's continuing intimacy with Socal
and Texaco was apparently not known at first; when it came to light in 1943,
though, he was asked to resign. Nevertheless, the government and the oil
companies continued to work closely together. Thornburg was not the only
Socal official in the government. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes's
assistant was Ralph Davies, a former Socal senior vice president. Ickes
refused Davies's offer to cut all ties with Socal, believing that oil
company men should not be penalized for going into the government. A third
Socal executive, James Terry Duce, served with the Petroleum Administration
for War. Stoff, p. 18ff. The presence of Standard Oil or Rockefeller family
associates in the State Department over the years is worth noting. They have
included four former secretaries of state, Charles Evans Hughes, John Foster
Dulles (both Standard Oil attorneys), Dean Rusk (president of the
Rockefeller Foundation), and Henry Kissinger. Nelson Rockefeller held a
State Department post during the war. See Peter Collier and David Horowitz,
The Rockefellers: An American Dvnastv (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
18. Stoff, p. 76ff. The sale was favored by Secretary of the Interior Ickes
but frowned on by his frequent rival, Secretary of State Hull. Socal and
Texaco did not like the idea either, believing it injected the government
too deeply into "private enterprise." During the negotiations, Ickes
suspended consideration of the companies' request for government financing
of an Arabian oil refinery in an effort to put pressure on them. The
companies' devotion to private enterprise had its limits. The Petroleum
Reserves Corporation tried to get into the oil pipeline business, but
broad-based opposition forced it to retreat. The corporation faded away
after the war.
19. Stoff, p. 86. Ickes, a Bull Moose Progressive in the Theodore Roosevelt
mold and an advocate of centralization, regarded oil as his domain, having
administered the Oil Code early in the New Deal and served as petroleum
coordinator for national defense beginning in May 1941. He became known as
the Oil Czar.
20. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon,
1982), p. 311.
21. George Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East (Durham,
N.C.: Duke Universitv Press, 1990), p. 8.
22. Quoted in Gabriel Rolko, The Politics of War: The World and United
States Foreian Policv, 1943-1945 (1968; New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), p.
23. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 10; Lenczowski,
The Middle East in World Affairs, p. 195.
24. Harry S Truman, Memoirs of Harrv S Truman, vol. 2: Years of Trial and
Hope (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956), p. 95.
25. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 13. Lenczowski
wrote that, after Truman's memoirs were published, Truman said he had made
the threat. But some scholars are doubtful. See Lenczowski, American
Presidents and the Middle East, p. 298, n. 10. See also George Lenczowski,
Russia and the West in Iran 1918-1948 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968).
26. He had been installed on the Peacock Throne by the British in 1941 when
his father, who was neutral and on good terms with Germany during the war,
had been forced to abdicate.
27. Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Rolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United
States Foreian Policv 1945-1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); for a
revisionist view of the Truman Doctrine, see Stephen E. Ambrose, The Rise to
Globalism: American Foreiqn Policv, 1938-1980 (New York: Penguin Books,
1980); and Yergin, Shattered Peace. For the text of the doctrine see Ralph
H. Magnus, ed., Documents on the Middle East (Washington: American
Enterprise Institute, 1969), pp. 66-67.
28. A 60-year concession was granted to British interests in 1901 by a
previous ruler, Mozaffar ed-Din Shah; it excluded the northern provinces of
Iran, traditionally under Russian influence. A new concession was granted by
Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1933. Lenczowski, Russia and the West in Iran, pp. 77,
80. Anglo-Iranian Oil feared the entry of independent oil companies. See
Kwitny, p. 162.
29. Lenczowski, The Middle East in World Affairs, p. 205ff.
30. Actually, the cutoff of Iranian oil, caused by Iran's inability to
produce it without Great Britain, was quickly made up by increased
production from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. For details on how the Marshall
Plan benefited the U.S. oil industry, see Tyler Cowen, "The Marshal Plan:
Myths and Realities, n in Doug Bandow, ed., U.S. Aid to the Developing
World: A Free Market Aaenda (Washington: Heritage Foundation, 1985), p. 72.
On Soviet nonintervention, see Lenczowski, The Middle East in World Affairs,
31. James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian
Relations (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 72. Also see
Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience in Iran
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 76ff. Rubin pointed out that
the left wing of the National Front rejected an alliance with the Tudeh
party. The CIA was concerned about increasing Soviet influence over the
Tudeh and Mossadegh. That could have been expected once the United States
joined the boycott. For a first-hand account, see Xermit Roosevelt,
Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1979), p. 119. It should be noted that Stalin died in March 1953.
32. Bill, p. 86.
33. C. M. "Monty" Woodhouse, primary British operative, quoted in Bill, p.
34. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was later renamed British Petroleum;
holders of its stock, besides the British government, included Shell Oil. It
had exclusive marketing agreements with Standard Oil of New Jersey and
Mobil. Kwitny, p. 162.
35. Kermit Roosevelt was a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt.
36. Schwarzkopf had organized the Iranian national police in 1941-48 and
"was kept busy protecting the government against its enemies." Andrew Tully,
The CIA (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1962), p. 94. During the Mossadegh
crisis, Schwarzkopf reportedly arrived in Tehran with a bag containing
"millions of dollars." Roosevelt, p. 147. He "took over as unofficial
paymaster for the Mossadegh-Must-Go clique . . . and the word later was that
in a period of a few days Schwarzkopf supervised the careful spending of
more than ten million of CIA dollars. Mossadegh suddenly lost a great many
supporters." Tully, p. 95. The United States also provided weapons.
Schwarzkopf's son commanded the U.S. forces in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
37. Kwitny, p. 171. See Kwitny, pp. 152-77, for the text of a secret report
written for the CIA detailing U.S. involvement in Mossadegh's overthrow. The
report stresses that Mossadegh was an anti-communist who, instead of being
opposed to the shah, simply wanted him to be a constitutional monarch.
38. Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Mandate for Chanae,
1953-1956 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1963), p. 163; Bill, P- 93.
39. Kwitny, p. 161.
40. Quoted in Roosevelt, p. 148.
41. Tully, p. 98. Tully put Mossadegh's age at 79, but Mossadegh reportedly
was born in 1880, making him 81 in 1961. Kwitny, p. 168.
42. The United States sought, as the State Department put it in 1944, "the
preservation of the absolute position presently obtaining, and therefore
vigilant protection of existing concessions in United States hands coupled
with insistence upon the Open Door principle of equal opportunity for United
States companies in new areas." Quoted in Kolko, p. 303.
43. Shortly before the beginning of the shah's downfall, President Carter
visited Tehran and praised Iran as "an island of stability in one of the
more troubled areas of the world." See Lenczowski, American Presidents and
the Middle East, pp. 184-203.
44. Magnus, pp. 27, 40.
45. Jewish immigration had long been worrisome to Arabs because Zionist
leaders had displayed a callous and presumptuous attitude toward the
indigenous population. Theodore Herzl had written in his diary of "gently"
expropriating Arab property and "try[ing] to spirit the penniless population
across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries,
while denying it any employment in our own country. . . . Both the process
of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly
and circumspectly." The Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl (New York: Herzl
Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), vol. 1, p. 88; quoted in David Hirst, The
Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (London:
Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 18. A contemporary of Herzl's had spoken of a
"land without a people, waiting for a people without a land." Israel
Zangwill, "The Return to Palestine," New Liberal Review II, December 1901,
p. 627; quoted in Hirst, p. 19. When a disciple of Herzl's, Max Nordau, went
to Palestine and found Arabs there, he told Herzl, "I didn't know that--but
then we are committing an injustice." Quoted in Hirst, p. 19. Although Chaim
Weizmann, a leading Zionist, could tell the Arabs that their "legitimate
rights" would not be violated, he could also tell a non-Arab audience in
We said we desired to create in Palestine such conditions, political,
economic and administrative, that as the country is developed, we can pour
in considerable numbers of immigrants, and finally establish such a society
in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or
America is American. . . . I hope that the Jewish frontiers of Palestine
will be as great as Jewish energy for getting Palestine.
Chaim Weizmann: Excerpts from His Historic Statements Writings and Addresses
(New York: Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1952), p. 48; quoted in Hirst, p.
46. See Nadav Safran, Israel: The Embattled Allv (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press, 1981), p. 23ff.; Hirst, p. 37ff. Paul Johnson called the Zionist
(Irgun) attack on the Xing David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 "the prototype
terrorist outrage for the decades to come. The first to imitate the new
techniques were, naturally, the Arab terrorists: the future Palestine
Liberation Organization was an illegitimate child of the Irgun." Paul
Johnson, Modern Times (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 483.
47. Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, eds., The Israel-Arab Reader: A
Documentary HistorY of the Middle East Conflict (New York: Penguin Books,
1984), p. 79. Until the Biltmore Program, the precise objective of the
Zionist movement was vague. The "national home for the Jewish people"
specified in the Balfour Declaration was not necessarily to be a state. It
is apparently not what the British had in mind, and some Zionists did not
favor a Jewish state but rather a binational democracy. For example, in
opposing the Biltmore Program, Judah Magnes, the first president of the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said, "The slogan Jewish state or
commonwealth is equivalent, in effect, to a declaration of war by the Jews
on the Arabs." Quoted in Arthur A. Goren, ed., Dissenter in Zion (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 46. Some Jews opposed Zionism in
all forms. See Thomas A. Kolsky, Jews against Zionism: The American Council
for Judaism. 1942-1948 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
Theodore Herzl's book The Jewish State (1896) called for "restoration of the
Jewish State," although not necessarily in Palestine. See Evan M. Wilson,
Decision on Palestine: How the U.S. Came to Recoanize Israel (Stanford,
Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1979), p. 171. A former Israeli chief of
military intelligence, Yehoshofat Harkabi, said in 1973 that "the Jews
always considered that the land belonged to them, but in fact it belonged to
the Arabs. I would go further: I would say the original source of this
conflict lies with Israel, with the Jews--and you can quote me. The big
problem, then, is not to start at the beginning, but [to] find out 'Where do
we go from here?' n Quoted in Irene L. Gendzier's foreword to Noam Chomsky,
Peace in the Middle East? (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. xvi.
48. Most of the land was bought by the Jewish National Fund to be held in
"trust for the Jewish people," which included the Diaspora. Arabs were
barred from using the land. See Edward W. Said, The Ouestion of Palestine
(New York: Vintage, 1980), pp. 97-98. See also Abraham Granott, The Land
System in Palestine (London: Eyre and Spottiswodde, 1952), p. 277; cited in
Stephen P. Halbrook, "The Alienation of a Homeland: How Palestine Became
Israel," Journal of Libertarian Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 1981): 365. See also
Hirst, p. 132. Many of the purchases were from absentee feudual landlords
and thus are questionable by classical liberal standards for homesteading.
49. Truman, p. 133. Elsewhere, he wrote that "one of our main problems was
that Palestine was not ours to dispose of" (p. 144).
50. Kolsky, p. 168.
51. Quoted in Wilson, p. 58. Actually, there were 500,000 Arab-Americans at
52. Emmanuel Neumann, "Abba Hillel Silver, History Maker," American Zionist,
February 5, 1953; quoted in Wilson, p. 58.
53. Truman, p. 158.
54. See Kolsky, p. 152. On January 1, 1939, on the eve of World War II, H.
L. Mencken, for example, devoted his Baltimore Sun column to the plight of
the Jews and the hypocrisy of those who expressed sympathy but never did
anything. He stated his support for bringing the German Jews to the United
States "by the first available ships." See Sheldon L. Richman, "Mr. Mencken
and the Jews," American Scholar (Summer 1990): 407-11.
55. Wilson, p. 124. A small strip of the Negev was assigned to the Arabs .
56. Wilson, p. 125.
57. Sumner Welles, We Need Not Fail (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p. 63;
quoted in Bernard Reich, Ouest for Peace: United States-Israel Relations and
the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1977), p.
51. Among the UN members pressured were Haiti, the Philippines, Liberia,
France, Ethiopia, Paraguay, and Luxembourg. Only Greece withstood U.S.
pressure and voted no on the partition resolution.
58. Wilson, p. 126. Truman in his memoirs denied there was official
pressure.
59. Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Mvths and Realities (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 123.
60. The Zionist leaders were overjoyed with the official recognition of
their aspirations, although they were not happy with the allocation of land.
They declined to specify the borders of the new state. Menachem Begin's
minority party refused to accept the partition. See Wilson, pp. 115, 116;
Hirst, p. 132ff; Flapan, p. 31ff. The Arabs favored a single state in which
Jews would enjoy civil guarantees and municipal and cultural autonomy. See
Safran, p. 40.
61. Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant
Israel (Brattleboro, Vt.: Amana Books, 1988), pp. 56-57.
62. Hirst, p. 124ff. The attack on Deir Yassin (which occurred even though
the village had a peace treaty with its Jewish neighbors) was only the worst
such action by Zionist forces including the mainstream Haganah and Palmach.
Reports of the massacre panicked many Palestinian Arabs into fleeing from
their homes. David Ben-Gurion was reported to have said that "without Deir
Yassin there would be no Israel." Wilson, p. 140. The violence continued
after Israel's declaration of independence. In September 1948 the Stern
Gang, headed by the current Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir,
assassinated UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in a Jewish-occupied part of
Jerusalem. The Israeli government arrested members of the Stern Gang, but
all were either released or granted amnesty. The U.S. government believed
that the Israeli government had had a role in the assassination. Green,
Takinq Sides, pp. 38-41.
64. Quoted in John Snetsinger, Truman, the Jewish Vote and the Creation of
Israel (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1974), pp. 78-81.
65. Evan Wilson pointed out that though Israel cited the partition
resolution as authority, in reality it required a 60-day period between the
end of the mandate and the birth of the state. Wilson, p. 143. After the
declaration, forces of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon
reluctantly entered the Arab part of Palestine. When the fighting ended in
1949, and armistices were signed, Israel had enlarged its territory by 40
percent, including half of Jerusalem. Palestinian refugees numbering some
726,000 had fled their homes. The Israeli government expropriated the land
and belongings of the Palestinians, who were arbitrarily defined as
"absentees." For details on the deep divisions among the Arab countries and
the Palestinians and their reluctance to make war on Israel, Transjordan's
designs on the Arab part of Palestine, and the secret talks between Israeli
and Arab leaders, see Flapan, pp. 121-52; and Avi Shlaim, Collusion across
the Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). On the refugees, see
Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 68-91;
and Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refuaee Problem, 1947-1949
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). In the succeeding years,
Israel pressed forward on all fronts, attacking Arab villages, encroaching
on demilitarized zones, making plans to divert precious water resources, and
building settlements in disputed territory. Various laws were passed to deny
so-called absentee Arab landowners their property. The old British emergency
regulations, once denounced by Jews as Nazi-style laws, were enforced.
Collective punishment was inflicted. Arab homes were blown up as punishment
for the suspected acts of individuals. Arab residents of Israel were under
military rule until 1966, and even after that they remained (and are today)
second-class citizens in the Jewish state. See Said, particularly chap. 2,
"Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims, n pp. 56-114. Any Jew,
regardless of other citizenship, may emigrate to Israel and become a
citizen. Arabs, however, are virtually barred from 92 percent of the land of
Israel, which is held for the Jewish people (including those in the
Diaspora) in perpetuity. For other details on that apartheid-type system,
see Sheldon L. Richman, "Who is a 'Jew' Matters in Israel," Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1990, p. 10.
66. Quoted in Alfred M. Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (Chicago: Henry
Regnery, 1953), p. 67.
67. Wilson, pp. 148, 154.
68. Eisenhower "frequently discussed with the CIA and others possible ways
of getting rid of the Egyptian leader." Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The
President (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1984), vol. 2, p. 462.
Kermit Roosevelt was assigned by John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles to
"work with the British to bring down Nasser." Eveland, p. 248.
69. The United States sold arms to Israel, and U.S. financial aid had also
facilitated Israeli purchases from France and other countries. Cheryl A.
Rubenberg, Israel and the American National Interest: A Critical Examination
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 61-62. Because arms sales
are controlled by the government, they have long been a factor in foreign
relations. One can only speculate what U.S. foreign policy might have been
like had the government allowed the principle of free trade to govern those
sales.
70. Rubenberg, p. 53. Israel also did not like the pact because it
strengthened Iraq. As compensation, Israel asked for membership in NATO and
a defensive arrangement with the United States, both of which were denied.
71. Quoted in Eveland, p. 214.
72. Rubenberg, pp. 48-59. For the story of one such peace effort initiated
by Nasser, see Elmore Jackson, Middle East Mission: The Storv of a Maior Bid
for Peace in the Time of Nasser and Ben-Gurion (New York: W. W. Norton,
1983). Sharett continued his efforts to reach an accommodation with Egypt as
foreign minister when Ben-Gurion returned as prime minister. Ben-Gurion was
so opposed to peace with Egypt that in June 1956 he replaced Sharett with
Golda Meir. When the Suez War began, Sharett wrote in his diary, "We are the
aggressors!" Eveland, p. 239n, also pp. 155-61. Eveland, a CIA operative who
long worked in the Middle East, commented, "No comparable opportunity to
bring peace to the Middle East has since occurred" (p. 161). For details on
Sharett's time in the government, see Livia Rokach, Israel's Sacred
Terrorism: A Studv Based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary and Other
Documents (Belmont, Mass.: Association of Arab-American University
Graduates, 1986).
73. See Green, Takina Sides, pp. 107-14. Shimon Peres, the former prime
minister who today leads the Labor party, was a principal in the affair. See
also Safran, p. 351; Eveland, pp. 135-36.
74. Rubenberg, pp. 59-60.
75. Egypt's attempt was revealed by Israeli Arabist Ehud Ya'ari in Egypt and
Fedaveen (Israel: Givat Haviva, 1975).
76. The United States and Britain had different and, in some respects,
diametrically opposed objectives in the Middle East. See Eveland; Donald
Neff, Warriors at Suez: Eisenhower Takes America into the Middle East in
1956 (Brattleboro, Vt.: Amana Books, 1988), passim.
77. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 44.
78. Rubenberg, p. 73. Eisenhower's threat, coming before an election, was
extraordinary. The only time aid was certainly cut off was in 1953, when
Israel refused to suspend a hydroelectric project on the Jordan River in the
demilitarized zone between Israel and Syria. Rubenberg, p. 64.
79. Rubenberg, pp. 79, 82.
80. See, generally, Neff, Warriors at Suez. Early in 1956, Israel tried,
unsuccessfully, to stop an American sale of 18 light tanks to Saudi Arabia.
Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 49. That was not the
only U.S. activity in the region at the time; the CIA was financing an
attempted coup in Syria. See Eveland, passim. The coup failed, and Syria
turned to the Soviets for arms. For a first-hand sense of the hectic
activity of U.S. operatives in the Middle East, see Miles Copeland, The Game
of Nations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969).
81. Quoted in Magnus, pp. 87, 91.
82. Bishku, p. 108; Eveland, p. 250.
83. Eveland, p. 240.
85. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 54. The king was
a recipient of CIA money from 1957 to 1977. Donald Neff, Warriors for
Jerusalem: The Six Days That Changed the Middle East in 1967 (Brattleboro,
Vt.: Amana Books, 1988), p. 43.
86. Ambrose, Eisenhower, p. 463. Pan-Arabism refers to the Arab nationalist
movement that transcended national borders.
87. For details on the confessional system, see Sheldon L. Richman, "The
United States in Lebanon: A Case for Disengagement," Cato Institute Policy
Analysis no. 35, April 3, 1984.
88. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 59; Bishku, p.
107; Eveland, p. 247ff.
89. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 59. Chamoun also
had enemies among his fellow Maronites. Bishku, p. 100.
90. In 1961 Qassem claimed the entire territory of Kuwait. It had been a
British protectorate until that year and had granted oil concessions to both
British Petroleum and Gulf Oil.
91. Quoted in Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 60.
92. O'Connor, p. 312; Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East,
p. 63. The Iraq Petroleum Company was owned by Standard of New Jersey,
Socony, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch/Shell, Compagnie Francaise des
Petroles, and the C. S. Gulbenkian estate.
93. Meanwhile, Great Britain was dispatching paratroopers to Jordan.
94. Eisenhower wrote that Nasser's conditions for a settlement, offered
before the troops arrived, "were not wholly unreasonable." They included
completion of Chamoun's term and amnesty for the rebels. Chamoun turned down
that chance for a settlement. Eisenhower, White House Years, vol. 2: Waaina
Peace 1956-1961 (New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 268.
95. Eveland, p. 304; Bishku, p. 106. Chamoun loyalists, led by the
right-wing Maronite Phalange, objected to the Karami cabinet, and the
conflict was not defused until a new cabinet was formed on October 14. It
included Pierre Gemayel, leader of the Phalange. That change helped protect
an important aspect of the status quo and sowed the seeds of a later crisis.
and others nevertheless have defended the intervention on the grounds that
Nasser's policies "often ran parallel to Soviet policies in the Middle East"
(p. 63).
97. NSC 5820/1; quoted in Bishku, p. 119.
98. For that interpretation, see Safran, pp. 224-39, wherein he refers to
"the radical nature of its [Israel's] enemies, their vastly superior
resources, and its extremely vulnerable geostrategic position" (p. 226).
99. Kennett Love, Suez: The Twice-Fouqht War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969),
p. 677. Quoted in Hirst, p. 206.
100. When Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait was compared with Israel's
continued occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan
Heights, the standard response was that Israel obtained the territories in a
defensive war. See John Law, "A New Improved War Myth, n Middle East
International, July 12, 1991, pp. 19-20.
101. Rubenberg, p. 98; much of this discussion of the prelude to the 1967
war is based on her account. Guerrilla operations from Syria were conducted
by al-Fatah, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement organized in
1957-58 and led by Yasser Arafat. (Al-Fatah later joined the Palestine
Liberation Organization.) Like Egypt, Syria wished to have influence over
the Palestinians. For details on how the Israelis encroached on the
demilitarized zone, expelling Palestinians and destroying villages, see
Hirst, p. 212. He has pointed out that UN observers believed the Syrians
would not have shelled the Israelis from the Golan Heights had it not been
for those provocations. As it was, between January and June 1967, no one was
killed by the shelling. Only one Israeli was killed by al-Fatah. Hirst, pp.
102. In October 1966 Israelis were killed in two guerrilla raids across the
Syrian border. Israel appealed to the UN Security Council, but when the
Soviet Union vetoed a resolution condemning the raids, Israel launched
military operations against three West Bank towns. Because those towns were
in Jordan, the operations were clearly unprovoked. Eighteen Jordanians were
killed, 54 were wounded, and 140 homes and other structures, including a
mosque, were destroyed. (The Security Council voted unanimously to condemn
the Israeli raids.)
103. Nasser supported the Republicans in Yemen's civil war. President
Johnson, fearing a threat to Saudi Arabia, aided the Royalists, a further
source of friction between Egypt and the United States.
104. Alan Hart, Arafat: A Political Bioaraphv (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989), p. 160ff.
105. Quoted in Hirst, p. 216.
106. Ibid.
107. Quoted in Ot (Israeli weekly), June 1, 1972; quoted in Hirst, p. 215.
On the lack of a threat to Israel, see Rubenberg, p. 106; Neff, Warriors for
Jerusalem, p. 63.
108. Rubenberg, p. 108-9.
109. Quoted in Rubenberg, p. 109.
110. Quoted in Le Monde, February 29, 1968; quoted in Hirst, p. 211.
111. Quoted in Yitzhak Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs (Boston: Little, Brown Co.,
1979), p. 75; quoted in Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East,
p. 291, n. 32.
112. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 107. Hirst has
written that Field Marshal Abdul Hakim Amer "apparently instructed his
troops not to interfere with any Israeli ships, or any naval vessels or
ships escorted by naval vessels" (p. 208).
113. Nasser was willing to submit the dispute to arbitration, but the
atmosphere militated against a peaceful solution. Nasser took his action
knowing that Israel had already indicated that it would be grounds for war.
Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, p. 87. Nasser accepted UN Secretary General U
Thant's May 25 proposals regarding the waterway. Rubenberg, p. 110.
114. Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, p. 205. Barbour is quoted in Green,
Taking Sides, p. 219.
115. The request was made by Brody to Johnson staff members Larry Levinson
and Ben Wattenberg. Green, Takina Sides, p. 219.
116. Rubenberg, pp. 121, 123. For the second time in 19 years, Palestinians,
this time numbering 200,000 (one-fifth the population of the West Bank),
were turned into refugees moving to Jordan. Even before the war ended, the
Israelis began clearing Arab land on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.
The Moghrabi Quarter, Beit Nuba, Imwas, and Yalu were among the
neighborhoods and villages razed by Israeli bulldozers. Hirst, p. 225.
117. Green, Takinq Sides, pp. 148-79.
118. At various times the Israeli government said that the Dimona facility
was a textile or desalination plant. The nuclear program was launched
without the knowledge of the Israeli Knesset, and the existence of the
reactor was not acknowledged until 1960. Mark Gaffney, Dimona: The Third
Temple? The Story behind the Vanunu Revelation (Brattleboro, Vt.: Amana
Books, 1989), p. 53.
119. Eveland, p. 325; Green, Takinq Sides, pp. 148-79. In general, see
Gaffney's story of Mordechai Vanunu, the Dimona technician who told a
British newspaper of Israel's nuclear capability. He later was abducted in
Rome by Israeli agents, tried, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. See also
Anthony Pearson, Conspiracy of Silence (London: Quartet Books, 1978).
Pearson wrote that
elements in the CIA led by James Angleton had given the Israelis technicians
and probably even material to set up their own nuclear plants and projects.
This had been done . . . to facilitate a very necessary liaison between the
rapidly developing Israeli intelligence service and the CIA. The liaison was
based on an agreement . . . that Mossad would handle all CIA operations in
the Middle East. (p. 27)
Green pointed out that the U.S. Defense Department, beginning in the late
1940s, provided money for defense projects to the Weizmann Institute, where
research related to nuclear weapons was performed. He also spelled out the
intimate relationship between NUMEC and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
Although he wrote that a conclusive case demonstrating NUMEC's diversion of
enriched uranium to Israel had not been made,"the circumstantial evidence"
that the AEC played a direct role in the diversion "already is flat and
overwhelming" (p. 179).
120. Quoted in London Sundav Times, October 12, 1986; quoted in Gaffney, p.
121. Gaffney, p. 69.
122. Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinaer in the Nixon White
House (New York: Summit Books, 1983), p. 214n. Israel is said today to have
100 to 200 nuclear warheads. In general, see Hisham H. Ahmed, "Israel's
Nuclear Option: Domestic, Regional and Global Implications," American-Arab
Affairs 31 (Winter 1989-90): 70-86.
123. Rubenberg, p. 113. The first major U.S. arms agreement with Israel
occurred in 1966. It involved A-4 Skyhawk planes and Sherman tanks, and it
cost more than all other U.S. arms supplied since 1948. Green, Taking Sides,
124. Rubenberg, p. 123. The United States argued that, if Israeli forces had
to leave the Sinai, all forces, including the Egyptian, should have to
leave. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 109.
125. Green, Takinq Sides, pp. 204-11. Green's principal source claims to
have participated in the operation.
126. Quoted in William B. Quandt, Decades of Decision: American PolicY
toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1967-1976 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1977), pp. 56-57.
127. Abba Eban, An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 385.
Quoted in Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 291, n.
128. On the connections among American Jews, Israel, and South Vietnam, see
Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, pp. 80, 85. In Neff's words:
As the Vietnam war heated up and Johnson's popularity cooled, the Jewish
American-Israeli connection became increasingly important to him.
Administration officials spent considerable amounts of time trying to enlist
Jewish American support for the war--which many Jews violently opposed-- by
extending support to Israel. (p. 80)
129. There was a cost in American lives too from Israel's prolonged and
brutal air and sea assault on June 8 on the USS Liberty, a virtually unarmed
intelligence ship in the Mediterranean. Despite the ship's having clear
markings and a flag flying, the Israelis claimed they did not know it was an
American ship. Thirty-four crewmen were killed and more than 100 were
injured. Even life rafts were shot up as sailors tried to leave the ship.
The best explanation for the attack is that the ship would have picked up
plans for an Israeli attack on Syria after the cease-fire and that the
United States might pressure Israel to abandon the plans for fear of a
Soviet response. Eveland has written that the Liberty had intercepted
messages that "made it clear that Israel had never intended to limit its
attack to Egypt" (p. 325). The United States, though, minimized the episode.
And Israel warned the United States not to press the issue or it would
expose details of CIA-Israeli cooperation. See James M. Ennes, Jr., Assault
on the Libertv (New York: Random House, 1979); James Bamford, The Puzzle
Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Aqencv (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1982), pp. 217-29; Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, passim; Green, Takinq
Sides, pp. 212-42. According to Green, the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew of the
attack before it occurred but delayed sending the Libertv an order to move.
For an explanation of the episode sympathetic to the Israelis, see Hirsh
Goodman and Ze'ev Schiff, "The Attack on Liberty," Atlantic, September 1984,
pp. 78-84. Also see letters to the editor by Ennes, Green, and others in the
December 1984 issue of the Atlantic. Three authors have written that the
LibertY was attacked because it had learned that Israel was "cooking"
Egyptian transmissions to Jordan, changing them from reports of Israeli
successes to Israeli losses and thereby encouraging King Hussein to get into
the war. See Eveland, p. 325; Pearson, pp. 13-53; Richard Deacon, The
Israeli Secret Service (New York: Taplinger, 1978), pp. 166-85.
131. Thomas G. Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 228.
132. Safran, p. 372; Rubenberg, pp. 91-92.
133. Safran, p. 576 (emphasis added).
134. Clyde R. Mark, "Israel-U.S. Foreign Assistance Facts," reprinted in the
Conqressional Record, May 1, 1990, pp. 5420-5423; Israel: U.S. Foreian
Assistance Facts, Congressional Research Service Issue Brief, undated.
135. Mark, p. 55422.
137. "Israel Retracts Pledge to U.S. on East Jerusalem Housing," New York
Times, October 19, 1990.
138. Tom Bethell, "Getting Off the Dole," American Spectator, July 1990, pp.
9, 11.
139. For a detailed picture of the war and its prelude, see Donald Neff,
Warriors aqainst Israel: How Israel Won the Battle to Become America's Allv
(1973; Brattleboro, Vt.: Amana Books, 1988).
140. Quoted in Rubenberg, p. 134. As noted above, that position was not a
new one for Nasser.
141. Rubenberg, pp. 133-34. The PLO at that time rejected Resolution 242
because it did not acknowledge Palestinian self-determination and referred
only to "refugees." Rubenberg, p. 146.
142. Rubenberg, p. 148; Neff, Warriors aqainst Israel, p. 59.
143. Henry A. Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979),
pp. 354, 1289 (emphasis in original). Kissinger also said that he was
reluctant to press Israel because "brutally" demonstrating its dependence on
the United States would have broken "Israel's back psychologically and
destroy[ed] the essence of state." Quoted in Neff, Warriors against Israel,
p. 307. Kissinger also felt constrained by the pro-Israeli lobby, or, as he
put it, "the prevailing domestic situation." Quoted in Rubenberg, p. 174.
Nixon at times was more perceptive than Kissinger. In a memorandum to
Kissinger, Nixon said that, because of the 1967 war, the Soviets "became the
Arabs' friend and the U.S. their enemy. Long range this is what serves their
[the Soviets'] interest." Quoted in Neff, Warriors aqainst Israel, p. 31.
Joseph Sisco, undersecretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, was involved
in discussions with the Soviets about achieving a separate Israeli-Egyptian
144. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, pp. 116-19. See
also Earl C. Ravenal, Large-Scale Foreiqn Policv Change: The Nixon Doctrine
as Historv and Portent (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of International
Studies, 1989).
145. Henry A. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), p.
146. Neff, Warriors against Israel, p. 73ff.
147. Ibid., p. 35ff.; Rubenberg, pp. 136-37. Contrary to what Nixon and
Kissinger seemed to believe, the Soviets were urging restraint on Syria and
others. Hersh, p. 241.
148. Rubenberg, p. 155; Neff, Warriors aqainst Israel, pp. 69-70, 72.
149. Quoted in Rubenberg, . 157.
150. Rissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 471.
151. Stephen Green, Living by the Sword: America and Israel in the Middle
East (Brattleboro, Vt.: Amana Books, 1988), p. 97.
152. Safran, p. 483. See also Rubenberg, pp. 163-65. Journalist Jack
Anderson reported in 1980 that a Pentagon document confirmed that Israel
discussed using nuclear weapons with the United States when it was within
hours of running out of conventional arms and the United States furnished
the weapons to prevent that. Washinqton Post, March 10, 1980. The subject is
also discussed in Robert E. Harkavy, The Spectre of a Middle East Holocaust:
The Strategic and Diplomatic Implications of the Israeli Nuclear Weapons
Program, Monograph Series in World Affairs, vol. 14, book 4 (University of
Denver, 1977).
153. "In Israel, to gain their support, I had indicated that I would
understand if there was a few hours of 'slippage' in the cease-fire
deadline," Kissinger wrote in Years of UPheaval (p. 569). Safran has written
that "the secretary's remarks in their [the Israeli military leaders']
presence and in that context could only be taken by them as an invitation to
disregard the cease-fire and go on to try to destroy the Egyptian forces."
Safran, p. 492. Israeli officials were angry at the cease-fire agreement
with the Soviets also because it reaffirmed UN Resolution 242, passed after
the 1967 war, which Israel opposed. Safran, p. 491.
154. Rubenberg, p. 170.
155. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 579.
156. Kissinger and other administration officials made the decision about
the worldwide alert without the knowledge of Nixon, who was distraught from
the impending impeachment and asleep. Neff, Warriors aqainst Israel, p. 284.
"We had just run the risk of war with the Soviet Union," Kissinger wrote.
Kissinger, Years of UPheaval, p. 602; quoted in Rubenberg, p. 172. The
consequences for detente were obvious. See Neff, Warriors against Israel,
pp. 282-89.
157. Rubenberg, pp. 172-73.
159. Sampson, p. 302, and Yergin, The Prize, passim.
161. Quoted in Neff, Warriors against Israel, p. 306.
162. Arafat, perhaps seeing the handwriting on the wall, communicated This
willingness to enter the peace process but was barred by Kissinger. It was
at that time that some Palestinians in al-Fatah began talking of a two-state
solution, with a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
They were rebuffed by Israel and the United States and then denounced by the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine for capitulating. The move
toward adoption of a two-state solution began at the Palestine National
Council meeting in June 1974 and was formalized into a program in 1977. In
1976 the UN Security Council considered a resolution, supported by the Arabs
and formulated by the PLO, that called for a two-state solution based on the
pre-June 1967 borders. It included international guarantees for the
"territorial integrity" of all states in the region. Israel opposed the
resolution, and the United States vetoed it. The exclusion of the
Palestinians and al-Fatah's turn to diplomacy stimulated renewed guerrilla
activity against Israel by radical groups. Israel retaliated with attacks in
Lebanon. It is important to note that Jordan also was willing to sacrifice
the Palestinians. In discussing his desire for settlement, King Hussein told
Kissinger that he feared a Palestinian state on the West Bank. Rubenberg,
pp. 183-84. On December 21, 1973, after great difficulty, the United States
and the Soviet Union convened a conference in Geneva, under UN auspices,
with Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. Syria refused to attend, and the
Palestinians, at Israel's insistence, were not permitted to attend. After
opening statements, the conference was recessed indefinitely. Rubenberg, pp.
163. Rubenberg, pp. 182, 206-9; Lenczowski, American Presidents and the
Middle East, pp. 148-52.
165. In 1969 Laborite prime minister Golda Meir said there was no such thing
as the Palestinian people, and her successor, Yitzhak Rabin, said Israel
would not negotiate "with any Palestinian element." Quoted in Rubenberg, p.
166. Lenczowski has written that Carter did threaten to cut off military aid
when Israel entered Lebanon in September 1977; Begin then withdrew Israeli
forces. Lenczowski, American Presidents in the Middle East, p. 168.
167. Hirst, p. 335.
168. Rubenberg, pp. 201-2, 212. American supporters of Israel severely
criticized the joint proposal as, in the words of one Jewish organization,
"an abandonment of America's historic commitment to the security and
survival of Israel." Rubenberg, p. 212. Jewish Democrats boycotted a
fund-raising dinner featuring the president.
169. Rubenberg, p. 204. On PLO observance of the cease-fire, see Shulamit
Har Even, "A War Based on Lies," Ha'aretz, June 30, 1982; reprinted in
Palestine/Israel Bulletin, September 1982.
170. Rubenberg, pp. 211-13. See also Lenczowski, American Presidents and the
171. Ibid., pp. 165-66.
173. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, pp. 176-77.
174. Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace?
(Brunswick, N.J.: North American, 1982), pp. 714-15. In general, see William
B. Quandt, Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics tWashington: Brookings
Institution, 1986).
176. Robin Wright, Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Fundamentalism (New
York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 180.
177. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 183.
178. Sandra Mackey, Lebanon: Death of a Nation (New York: Congdon & Weed,
1989), p. 174ff.; Jonathan C. Randal, Goinq All the Way: Christian Warlords.
Israeli Adventurers and the War in Lebanon (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).
Israel remains in southern Lebanon to this day. See "Israel to Retain
'Security Zone' in Lebanon," New York Times, November 9, 1990.
179. See Sheldon L. Richman, "The United States in Lebanon."
180. The air strikes made use of building-penetrating bombs and phosphorus
bombs, which caused horrible burns. By late June the Lebanese police
estimated that 10,000 people had been killed; the Lebanese daily An-Nahar
said the toll was almost 18,000, 90 percent of whom were civilians. But the
worst bombing was yet to come. Neither hospitals nor orphanages were spared.
Food, water, and fuel were denied the half-million city residents. By August
31, over 19,000 people were believed killed, over 30,000 wounded--mostly
civilians--although those figures are almost certainly underestimates.
Israel said it lost 446 soldiers. See Lenczowski, American Presidents and
the Middle East, p. 218.
181. Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Caveat: Realism Reaaan, and Foreian Policy (New
York: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 326, 327.
182. Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, Israel's Lebanon War (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1984), pp. 73-74.
183. Ibid., pp. 74-76.
184. The United States has usually voted with Israel in the United Nations
and has used its veto many times, even against resolutions regarding
Israel's handling of the intifada. The vote in October 1990 to condemn
Israel for the massacre of Palestinians at the Temple Mount was the first
U.S. vote against Israel in nine years.
186. The Phalange party is a paramilitary organization founded in thep
1930s, with some fascist inspiration, by Bashir and Amin Gemayel's father,
Pierre. It is a defender of established Christian power in Lebanon.
187. Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 222. The
Israelis had brutally bombed the camps before this episode. Lenczowski, pp.
222-23. Those facts came out of Israel's Kahan Commission report, although
the commission, despite strong evidence, did not accept the view that
Israelis at a high level had planned and helped commit the massacre .
189. A former agent of the Israeli Mossad (intelligence agency) has written
that the agency withheld important information from the United States that
might have prevented the attack. See Victor Ostrovsky, Bv Wav of Deception:
The Makina and Unmakina of a Mossad Officer (New York: St. Martin' 5 Press ,
1990 ) .
191. Quoted in Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, pp.
193. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA. 1981-1987 (New York:
Simon & Schuster), pp. 160-61. Joseph E. Persico, in Casev: From the OSS to
the CIA (New York: Viking, 1990), has reported that the United States traded
the intelligence about Osirak in return for Israeli acquiescence in the sale
of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia. The cooperation between Israel and the
United States was not close enough for Jonathan Jay Polland, who was
convicted for giving Israel classified infomation. See Wolf Blitzer,
Territorv of Lies (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). For details on Israeli
cooperation in the Iran-Contra operation, see Jonathan Marshall et al., The
Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reaaan Era
(Boston: South End Press, 1987), pp. 167-86.
195. In November 1990 Shamir reiterated that Israel would not give up the
occupied territories because they were needed for Jewish immigrants. See
"Shamir Wants Immigrants to Fill Occupied Territories," Washinqton Times,
November 19, 1990. Most of those immigrants are coming from the Soviet
Union, thanks to a deal between Israel and the United States that severely
restricted the number of Soviet Jews who could emigrate to the United
198. Contrary to the standard view, Arafat did not acquiesce to Shultz's
dictional demands regarding terrorism and Israel's "right to exist."
Regarding Arafat's supposed "overnight conversion" between the UN meeting
and the press conference, see Nabeel Abraham, "The Conversion of Chairman
Arafat," American-Arab Affairs 32 (Winter 1989-90): 53-69.
199. See Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel's Fateful Hour (New York: Harper & Row,
1988), in which the former chief of Israeli military intelligence makes a
case for negotiations leading to an independent Palestinian state.
200. President Bush acknowledged that "the PLO has disassociated itself from
the attack, and issued a statement condemning attacks against civilians in
principle." But, Bush said, the PLO response was not suffi- cient because of
Arafat's failure to provide "a credible accounting" of the incident or to
discipline Palestine Liberation Front leader Abu Abbas. See "Text of Remarks
on PLO by President George Bush," AmericanArab Affairs 33 (Summer 1990):
201. Quoted in Thomas Friedman, "Shamir Faulted on Mideast Remarks," New
York Times, October 19, 1989, p. A3.
202. Reprinted in American-Arab Affairs 31 (Winter 1989-90): 133. Egypt has
proposed that the Palestinaian delegation include deportees from the
territories, but Shamir has rejected the proposal on the grounds that it
would give the PLO a back-door role.
203. Edward R. Giradet, Afghanistan: The Soviet War (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1985), pp. 100-2, 111.
204. Quoted in Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East, p. 206.
205. Quoted in U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Access
to Oil--The United States Relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1977).
206. Cyrus Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in American Foreiqn Policy
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 370.
207. Dilip Hiro, The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Militarv Conflict (New York:
Routledge, 1991), p. 71.
208. Crisis in the Gulf: Reprints from Middle East Report (Washington:
Middle East Research & Information Project, undated), p. 38. As noted, the
United States also traded arms to Iran in hopes of recovering hos- tages
held in Lebanon. The arms included TOW anti-tank missiles and Hawk
surface-to-air missiles.
209. Sheldon L. Richman, "Where Angels Fear to Tread: The United States and
the Persian Gulf Conflict," Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 90, September
211. The alleged later use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds has been
questioned by analysts at the U.S. Army War College. See Stephen C.
Pelletier et al., Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the Middle East (Carlisle
Barracks, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1990).
212. Joe Stork and Ann M. Lesch, "Why War? Background to the Crisis," Middle
East Report (November-December 1990): 15.
213. Daniel Pipes and Laurie Mylroie, "Back Iraq," New Republic, April 27,
1987, p. 14.
214. Ibid., pp. 14-15 (emphasis added).
215. See Daniel Pipes, "U.S. War Aims," Washinqton Post, Outlook section,
January 13, 1990, in which he advised that the United States use just enough
force to win the war against Iraq, but not so much that the United States
loses the peace.
216. For a revealing look at U.S. policymakers' realpolitik in the gulf,
including the selling out of the Kurds, see Christopher Hitchens, "Why We
Are Stuck in the Sand, n Harper's, January 1991, pp. 70-75, 78. For evidence
that the United States may have had a hand in provocative Kuwaiti policies
before the Iraqi invasion and that President Bush worked to prevent an Arab
solution to the crisis once the invasion had occurred, see Michael Emery,
"How the U.S. Avoided Peace," Village Voice, March 5, 1991, pp. 22-27.
217. David R. Henderson, "Sorry Saddam, Oil Embargoes Don't Hurt the U.S.,"
Wall Street Journal, August 29, 1990. Henderson argued that, even under the
worst assumptions, Saddam's control of Kuwaiti and Saudi oil could do the
U.S. economy only slight damage. See also David R. Henderson, "Do We Need to
Go to War for Oil?" Cato Institute Foreign Policy Briefing no. 4, October
218. "Bush: Iraq Won't Decide Time of Ground War," Washinqton Post, February
2, 1991, p. Al.
219. See Christopher Layne and Ted Galen Carpenter, "Arabian Nightmares:
Washington's Persian Gulf Entanglement," Cato Institute Policy Analysis no.
142, November 9, 1990; and Christopher Layne, "Why the Gulf War Was Not in
the National Interest," Atlantic, July 1991, pp. 55-81.
220. Quoted in Bullock and Shock, p. 88.
221. Robert A. Taft, A Foreiqn Policv for Americans (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1951), pp. 17-18.
222. I say "appearance" because it is doubtful that the Soviets ever had the
kind of influence in the Middle East that the ideological cold warriors
believed. Aspirations aside, the natural barriers to such influence--Islam
for one--were always formidable. The Afghanistan debacle is empirical
evidence of that fact. There is evidence that the Soviet "threat" was always
more a rationalization than a rationale. See Eveland, passim; Jonathan
Steele, Soviet Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983). PP. 180-81.
223. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791; N w York: Penguin Books, 1985),
224. Walter Karp, Indispensable Enemies (New York: Saturday Review Press,
225. Quoted in Silberner, p. 62.
226. Quoted in Silberner, p. 94. In Silberner's words:
Opposition to bellicism is an integral part of [classical] liberal theory.
The liberals are not satisfied with denouncing war of aggression as a crime
against economic laws properly understood. They do not limit themselves to
pointing out the economic senselessness of war. . . . They also assert that
they have found in free trade the best possible solution to the problem of
war: some assume, implicitly or explicitly, that freedom of commerce will
eliminate all or nearly all wars . . .; others, more moderate, that it will
substantially reduce the risk of war. (p. 282)
227. Quoted in Liggio, p. 69. Earl C. Ravenal has estimated that, today,
U.S. military preparations for the Middle East are costing $180 to $280 a
barrel. See Earl C. Ravenal, "The Case for Adjustment," Foreian Policv 81
(Winter 1990-91): 9.
228. For a discussion of how the market can provide energy security even
during times of turmoil in the Middle East, see Richman, "Where Angels Fear
to Tread," pp. 7-15.
229. Quoted in Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Earlv
American Foreiqn Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961),
230. On the problems associated with criticizing Israel, see Paul Findley,
They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby
(Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1985); Edward Tivnan, The Lobbv: Jewish
Political Power and American Foreiqn Policv (New York: Touchstone/Simon &
Schuster, 1987).
231. Quoted in Gilbert, p. 145 (emphasis in Gilbert's text).
232. William Graham Sumner, The Conquest of the United States by Spain and
Other Essays (1899; Chicago: Gateway/Regnery, undated), p. 155.
233. Ibid., pp. 164-65
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