Seize the Moment (26 page)

The problem of rich versus poor in the Arab world has less to do with the distribution of oil revenues than with the overall poverty of the region. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states appear rich only because of their tiny combined population of 20 million. The perception that these states have endless cash reserves is based on the image of jet-setting Arab princes, not the reality of their significant but not limitless wealth. The entire Saudi GNP—$82 billion—represents less than what the U.S. government spends on Medicare in a single year. Moreover, even if all oil revenues were redistributed
equally among all Arabs, the region's per capita income would reach only $2,300, compared with $20,000 in Western Europe. The answer to the problem of Middle East poverty lies in free-market economic development rather than Robin Hood-like money grabs or handouts that would permanently consign the poorer nations to an international welfare role.

There is no single magical solution to the security dilemmas of the Persian Gulf. Unless Saddam Hussein's lieutenants overthrow him, the military threat to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states will remain acute. Because the Persian Gulf possesses 65 percent of the world's proven oil reserves—and because it is projected to be the only source of significant exportable oil in the world for the next twenty-five years—we have no choice but to remain engaged in the area.

Since World War II, the Soviet Union has sought to stake a geopolitical claim to the Persian Gulf. It tried to carve off parts of Iran in 1946 and established close relations with Iraq after Arab radicals took power in 1958. It sought to hijack the fundamentalist revolution in Iran in 1979 by infiltrating Communists into its government, a plot that might have worked if the chief of the KGB residence in Teheran had not defected to the West. In the Persian Gulf War, the Soviets faced a dilemma. Gorbachev had to decide if supporting the principal pillar of Soviet regional influence, Iraq, was worth forfeiting any chance for large-scale economic assistance from the West. Moscow's internal crisis gave Gorbachev no viable alternative to reluctantly acquiescing to the U.S. position at least in the short run. One of our top priorities in working with the new noncommunist leaders in the former Soviet Union should be to convince them that their long-term interests will be served by supporting us unequivocally in our search for peace in the Middle East.

In the Gulf War, the U.S.-led coalition scored a knockdown but not a knockout. We won round one, but Saddam Hussein's strategy is to go the distance. Because he knows that he cannot fight us toe-to-toe, Saddam will try to win on points by staying in power, recovering gradually, retaining his weapons of mass destruction, and waiting for the United States to lose patience and throw in the towel. While we should allow Iraq to purchase some humanitarian supplies, we must keep the sanctions in place as long as he remains in power. We should insist that Iraq fully comply with the U.N. resolutions calling for the destruction of its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons facilities. If Saddam Hussein persists in playing cat and mouse with U.N. officials, we should bomb sites suspected of containing equipment and material related to producing weapons of mass destruction.

We should view with skepticism Iran's expressed interest in closer ties to the West. While a moderate Iran would help stabilize the region, the extreme fundamentalists clearly want Teheran to reclaim the throne as the dominant regional power. Those who blame the United States for the poor relations with Iran miss the mark. Iran has continued to finance international terrorist networks that target the United States, including those that bombed the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks in Lebanon in October 1983 and that downed Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in December 1988. Its extreme fundamentalist regime, which has used its embassies to coordinate anti-Western terrorist groups, has been linked to more than four hundred terrorist incidents worldwide. Moreover, Iran played a spoiler role in the Persian Gulf War, pitting each side against the other until Iraq's fate had been clearly sealed.

As President, I authored what was called the Nixon Doctrine. It stipulated that we would help train and supply the
forces of friendly developing countries combating internal threats instigated by foreign foes but that we would intervene with our own forces only when our friends were threatened by an external enemy that overwhelmed their capacity to respond. While some interpreted this doctrine as an indication that the United States was getting out of the underdeveloped world, it actually outlined the only sound basis for a sustained U.S. engagement in the third world as a whole and in the Persian Gulf in particular.

Until the fall of the shah in 1979, the United States could protect its interests through Iran and Saudi Arabia, the two pillars of our Gulf policy for more than a decade. With a hostile regime in Teheran after 1979, we lacked a major regional player who could act as a surrogate and therefore had to take steps to ensure our ability to protect vital Western interests. President Carter concluded initial agreements to allow prepositioning of U.S. equipment and supplies in regional states and created the Rapid Deployment Force, which later became the U.S. Central Command. President Reagan followed up with extensive, low-profile cooperation in the Gulf to establish the infrastructure needed to support a major U.S. intervention to defend Saudi Arabia and the southern Gulf. Without these facilities, Operation Desert Shield/Storm would have become a modern-day Gallipoli.

The key to Gulf security is sturdy U.S. bilateral military ties in support of cooperative defense efforts among the moderate Arab states. While many have called for institutionalizing U.S. security relations and even for the establishment of a new Central Command headquarters in a Persian Gulf country, the same results can be achieved without a high-profile U.S. presence. We should use our influence behind the scenes to ensure that Egypt and other Muslim countries work out multilateral arrangements to bolster the defense of the
weaker Gulf states. We should also negotiate informal agreements for the prepositioning of equipment and supplies for any potential future U.S. intervention. Maintaining too high a profile would undercut our objectives. We would fatally undermine our friends and our interests if we appear to treat the Persian Gulf as our own protectorate. Our presence, rather than the threat posed by our adversaries, would become the central issue for our friends.

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Our two immediate interests in the Middle East—oil and Israel—are not always fully compatible. On the one hand, our commitment to Israel has sometimes carried a high price in terms of our access to Persian Gulf oil at free-market prices, as the 1973 Arab oil embargo demonstrated. On the other hand, our commitment to the security of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states has at times complicated relations with Israel. While the decision to sell Awacs early-warning aircraft to the Saudis in 1982 prompted a bitter fight with supporters of Israel in Congress, those arms sales—and other informal security cooperation—proved indispensable during Operation Desert Shield/Storm.

Our interests require a difficult geopolitical calculus: we must both ensure the survival of Israel and work with moderate Arab states to enhance the security of the Persian Gulf. The Arab-Israeli conflict represents a central obstacle. For forty-five years, both sides have poured endless resources into arms to destroy each other rather than investing in their economies to improve the welfare of their citizens. They have waged five wars—in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982—and engaged in countless military skirmishes. This conflict, exacerbated but not created by the cold war, has repeatedly pitted our key interests against each other. The only way we
can square the circle is to press forward actively with the Arab-Israeli peace process.

Time has never been on the side of peace in the Middle East. An Arab-Israeli war has broken out in every decade of the postwar period because a political stalemate was permitted to develop during peacetime. The peace process is not a panacea. But it is critical to the U.S. position in the Muslim world. Although many exaggerated the degree to which the U.S. led victory in the Persian Gulf would enhance our diplomatic influence in the region, President Bush's skillful leadership has opened an opportunity for progress. While still not hopeful, the situation at least is no longer hopeless.

Our commitment to the survival and security of Israel runs deep. We are not formal allies, but we are bound together by something much stronger than a piece of paper: a moral commitment. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Israel is not a strategic interest of the United States. Our cooperation in intelligence sharing and military prepositioning and exercises is helpful but not vital. While Israel's armed forces have brilliantly proven themselves on the battlefield, the Persian Gulf War—where they contributed not by participating in but by staying out of the conflict—proved their limited utility in the most important regional contingencies. Our commitment to Israel stems from the legacy of World War II and from our moral and ideological interest in ensuring the survival of embattled democracies. No American President or Congress will ever allow the destruction of the state of Israel.

Many supporters of Israel argue that the United States should back to the hilt the hard-line positions of the current Likud government. They insist that Israel cannot return to the Arabs any of the occupied territories—the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights—without endangering its security. Others even endorse the Likud leaders' biblically
based claim that the West Bank—which they call Judea and Samaria—belongs historically to Israel. All advocate support for Israel's adamant refusal to talk with Palestinians linked with the PLO, to enter negotiations about the final status of the occupied lands, and even to contemplate any settlement that would reverse the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

While we are right to support Israel's survival and security, we would be wrong to back the current Israeli government's extreme demands. Without engaging in “moral equivalency” between offensive and defensive states, we should understand how the occupied territories came into Israel's possession through the 1967 war. Aggressive military moves by Arab states created the crisis—perhaps even made the war inevitable—but Israel launched the first attacks. Former prime minister Menachem Begin said in August 1982, “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” Because the war resulted from actions by both sides, the subsequent U.N. Security Council resolutions—242 and 338—demanded not unilateral concessions, but bilateral trade-offs of land for peace.

There are three reasons why we must press forward with the peace process based on the land-for-peace formula. First, the Arab-Israeli conflict totally distorts our foreign aid budget. In 1991, the 60 million people of Israel and Egypt received more than 40 percent of the almost $15 billion the United States allocated to foreign aid, while the over 4 billion people in the rest of the underdeveloped world competed for the leftovers. Since the mid-1970s, the United States has given Israel $49 billion in direct and indirect foreign aid. In addition, Israel received $16.4 billion in loans between 1974
and 1989 that were subsequently converted into grants. To balance the Middle East equation, the United States has provided Egypt with $28 billion in foreign aid between 1980 and 1991. Besides having underwritten large portions of the Israeli and Egyptian defense budgets, we also canceled $6.8 billion of debt that Cairo could never hope to repay. By channeling such a disproportionate amount of assistance into coping with the Arab-Israeli conflict, we lack sufficient money to help the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe, the struggling economies in Latin America, and the destitute peoples of Africa and South Asia.

Second, the Arab-Israeli conflict poisons our relations with the Muslim world and undercuts our ability to cooperate with countries with modernist, pro-Western leaders. Israel's occupation of Arab lands—and particularly its increasingly harsh treatment of the Palestinians—polarizes and radicalizes the Muslim world. It undermines the moderates, such as President Mubarak of Egypt. All Muslim leaders support the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people and view the harassment of Israeli occupation forces in the so-called
intifada
as legitimate armed resistance, not terrorism. While many may criticize the leadership of the PLO, especially after its shameless support for Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, they have not backed away from the Palestinian cause and will never drop it from the agenda. President Sadat could not have signed the Camp David accords without Israel's commitment to establish “transitional arrangements for the West Bank and Gaza for a period not to exceed five years.” Under the agreement, Palestinians were to receive local autonomy as soon as arrangements could be worked out, with negotiations over the final status of the territories to start within three years. With that timetable, the entire process should have been concluded in 1984. Nothing has happened.
To put it bluntly, Israel stonewalled the United States and Egypt.

Third, more than any other flash point, the Arab-Israeli conflict poses the danger of dragging the United States into a war involving the use of nuclear weapons. While any future conflict between India and Pakistan could cross the nuclear threshold, the likelihood of direct U.S. involvement remains low. But we would almost certainly become engaged in a future Middle East conflict. I vividly recall a meeting with legislative leaders during the 1973 Middle East war. In the opening rounds of the conflict, the tide of battle had run against Israel. Meanwhile, the Soviets had initiated a massive airlift to Egypt and Syria. When a congressman asked whether the United States would take measures to counter Moscow's actions, I flatly answered, “No American President will ever let Israel go down the tube.” I subsequently ordered a massive airlift to prevent Israel's defeat and later put U.S. nuclear forces on alert to forestall a threatened unilateral Soviet intervention in the region. If war comes, the U.S. commitment to Israel will inevitably mean our direct or indirect involvement. Particularly since Israel has built nuclear weapons and its Arab adversaries possess chemical and biological arms, the United States cannot afford to let the peace process languish.