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The long march to peace in the Middle East--resumed after the Gulf War--still has a great distance to cover. Until late winter, movement toward the long-sought objective showed considerable promise. Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians had signed agreements and leaders who once demonized one another met in public and talked frequently. But hostility between their peoples, exacerbated by five wars in as many decades and 29 years of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian homeland, persists and often erupts violently, as it has in the recent Hamas suicide bombings and the deadly mini- war in Lebanon and northern Israel. The renewed violence has stalled the peace process and calls into question whether the progress to date is lasting and whether serious negotiations can be resumed.
While throwing peacemaking off course, the explosive climate created by the latest incidents directed against Israeli and Lebanese civilians also has damaged the essential U.S. diplomatic posture. While trying to restore order, the Clinton Administration threw its diplomatic weight behind Israel--refraining from criticism or any visible effort to persuade Israel against taking disproportionately harsh punitive measures against innocent Palestinians and Lebanese--and campaigned vigorously to shore up the political fortunes of an Israeli government without which the peace process might die. The measures appeared to work, but they may have damaged U.S. capacity to influence further progress toward peace.
Attention in the United States focuses largely on the Arab- Israeli conflict, but it is by no means the only generator of Middle East tensions. Islamic radicalism and the struggle for control of oil in the Persian Gulf area continue to produce major instability. Terrible conflicts--the revolution in Iran, the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War--have caused countless casualties, devastation, economic hardship and privation for millions of Arabs and Iranians who inhabit the eight littoral states of the Gulf. Partly as a result of the turbulence, the Middle East now rivals Africa economically as the world's slowest growing region.
The stakes for the United States in Middle East progress toward peace have grown dramatically in the last five years as the Bush and Clinton administrations have assumed responsibility for peacemaking in the Arab-Israeli arena and peacekeeping in the Gulf. Our involvement in the Middle East has never been greater. The peace process requires attention, guidance and, at times, intervention. In the Gulf, the navy's 20 or so Fifth Fleet ships and the Central Command's rapid deployment force--with some 20,000 sailors, marines, soldiers and airmen on station--patrol the area constantly. There are no precise estimates, but the annual cost is many billions of dollars for Middle East activities. Yet how long the work may take and how much more will be required of the United States cannot be measured. The investment, already huge, is likely to grow.
As long as Arab-Israeli peace is a realistic possibility and the region's leadership is committed to a sense-making process to achieve it, there can be little question about the correctness of American policy in support of efforts to achieve that outcome. In the Gulf, however, there can be little doubt that U.S. policy is flawed and badly in need of fundamental reappraisal.
In the Arab-Israeli arena, slowly, ever so slowly, peacemaking has made headway. After a round of rhetorical fanfare in 1991, two years of negotiations appeared to produce little until Israel and the P.L.O. announced the first Oslo agreement. The signing on the White House lawn in 1993 featured the famous Arafat-Rabin handshake as President Clinton smiled benignly--a dramatic signal that an end to generations of Israeli- Palestinian hostility might at last be possible.
A peace treaty between Israel and Jordan followed. Then Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed a new set of accords--Oslo II. (It was at a Tel Aviv rally to celebrate the achievements that a Jewish fundamentalist murdered Rabin.) The new accords contained details of self-rule for Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank as well as for those who had already achieved autonomy in Gaza. Israel's army withdrew from all but one major West Bank city, Hebron, and Palestinian elections in January confirmed that the peace process was producing results.
Before the Hamas terrorist bombings, there could be little doubt about the quality of the progress. Most seasoned observers of Middle East affairs regarded the achievements as of historic importance. Many considered the advances more or less permanent and some even saw a comprehensive peace as all but inevitable.
Now, diplomacy is stalled to await the results of elections in Israel and the United States. The Israeli election on May 29 will for the first time test public confidence in peacemaking and the Labor Party leadership that produced it, an election that also will provide the next government with fresh instructions. The voting here in November will confirm that U.S. undertakings in the process will not change.
To shore up his weakened political condition, Peres, using fresh financial aid from President Clinton, ordered construction of a 127-mile, high-tech fence between Israel and the West Bank to limit Palestinian entry into Israel at any point other than designated crossings. By sealing off the West Bank, Israel is formally embracing a policy of separation from non-Israeli Palestinians. Other limits were imposed on Palestinians requiring entry to Israel to work, worship or participate in everyday activities. However popular such measures are among Israelis, separation and collective punitive actions against Palestinians to shore up security against would-be terrorist bombers have chilled Israels' relations with Palestinians and Arabs once again. So, too, have the excessively brutal military measures against Lebanese to end indefensible Hezbollah guerilla rocketing of northern Israeli towns.
To encourage improved Arab-Israeli relations over the years, Washington has provided rewards for both sides for making peace even though peace is clearly in their own interest. In doing so, the United States has skillfully blended diplomacy and persuasion with "peace" stipends--$5 billion a year since 1979 for Egypt and Israel ($3 billion for Israel and $2 billion for Egypt in military and economic aid), aid and arms for Jordan and cash to finance the Palestinian Authority and development projects in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian needs were the main subject of the White House talks between Clinton and Arafat.
Israel and Syria had agreed to keep talking while Israelis prepared for their May 29 election, but all discussion ended after the Hamas suicide bombings. No deal was possible, in any event, before the next Israeli government takes office, and then only if the election produces a prime minister and a Knesset that are not controlled by the opponents of a deal with Syria. Odds in the first direct election for prime minister heavily favored Laborite Shimon Peres over Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu until the winter bombings. The apparent Peres advantage vanished overnight and the outcome became very much in doubt. Netanyahu and Likud, and their political allies, oppose any pact with Syria that requires Israel to leave the Golan Heights, the area taken from Syria in the 1967 war and settled by some 12,000 Israelis. Power exercised by a Likud-led government dominated by foes of ceding the Golan to Syria would end the negotiation.
U.S. elections play a role because of Secretary of State Warren Christopher's influence in persuading Syria to negotiate; he has met with Syrian President Hafez Assad 24 times, including seven in April to end the mini-war in Lebanon. Even President Clinton and former President Bush have met with Assad to exercise their persuasive powers on behalf of Israeli-Syrian peace. Agreement will require U.S. aid and policy adjustments, almost certainly including the commitment of U.S. troops to assure Syria and Israel that measures to keep the peace on the Golan are observed. There is also a question of additional subsidies for Israel to finance costs of a deal with Syria. The Israeli press last fall reported an estimated cost of $12 billion--$2 billion to relocate the Golan settlers, $3 billion for water works and $7 billion in aid for added security. Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Dov Zakheim described such suggestions as "chutzpah" and asked, "How much is enough?"
In any Israeli-Syrian treaty, Israel would require Syrian guarantees against attacks from Lebanon along its northern border. Lebanon now is a de facto province of Syria and home of a great many foes of Israel, including Hezbollah guerillas supported by Iran who are engaged in para-military operations to end Israeli occupation of a border zone in southern Lebanon and some 450,000 Palestinian refugees. One needed element of an Israeli- Syrian agreement would be Syria's pledge to guard against attacks on Israel from Lebanon in exchange for Israel's withdrawal of armed forces from Lebanon and dismantling of the mercenary Lebanese military force used by Israel to guard its border. Such concessions would go a long way toward resolving the Israeli- Lebanese-Syrian dispute.
The final round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, formally begun in early May, must now focus on so-called final status issues--Palestinian borders, the future of some 141,000 Israelis living in 150 West Bank settlements and of the settlements themselves, rights of return for Palestinian refugees, Jerusalem's future, water sharing and limits on sovereignty of a future Palestinian state. But serious talks can only begin if Peres and Labor are reelected. Arafat succeeded in fulfilling his pledge to remove all hostile references to Israel from the PLO charter--a condition Israel insisted on before the final round of negotiations could begin. Netanyahu, Likud, allies, settlers and Jewish fundamentalists are all adamant in their belief that the Palestinians now have more than they should ever have gotten and no further negotiations are necessary.
The debate over each of the outstanding issues--long, bitter and emotional--will certainly take the three years allotted in the accords to resolve and will entail more vehement arguments than any so far, especially over the future of Jerusalem and Israeli settlements.
The beginning of negotiations was possible in 1991 because the United States seized the moment after the Gulf War and the demise of the Soviet Union to force the allies in the war into a renewed effort to make peace. Soon after, Israel changed its political leadership and decided to trade most of the occupied Arab lands for peace. Meanwhile, Arafat and his P.L.O. followers in Gaza and the West Bank chose the only option open to them, negotiating for whatever they could get. Israel's growing maturity and self-confidence, and an appreciation of its status as the region's sole superpower, had a great deal to do with the decision to engage in the effort to resolve the country's outstanding security problems. A similar transformation occurred in the thinking of one of the country's greatest soldiers and statesmen, the late Yitzhak Rabin. Meanwhile, Palestinians, persuaded by their weakness after Arafat foolishly supported Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, embraced compromise to relieve the homeland of military occupation and to secure autonomy for the 2.2 million residents of the West Bank and Gaza.
If further deals can be negotiated, they are likely to resemble the "cold peace" that has existed between Egypt and Israel since the Camp David accords of 1979. Warm peace between Israel and the Palestinians or Israel and Syria or Lebanon anytime soon is unlikely. The temperature of peace, of course, matters less than whether deals that are struck are sufficiently sound to make war a thing of the past.
U.S. policy in the Gulf region is very different. The term used to describe it, "dual containment," means applying military force and economic sanctions to prevent Iraq and Iran from overwhelming any of their neighbors, to control their acquisition of atomic or other weapons of mass destruction and to prevent the export of terrorism. The U.S. role since the cold war ended and the Soviet Union collapsed is based on belief that U.S. "vital interests"--cheap Gulf oil--are as much at risk as when Moscow posed a threat in the Gulf, stirred up trouble and competed with the United States for power and influence in the Middle East. An onerous, costly and unseemly consequence of the policy is that the United States has become the policeman of the Gulf and sole provider of security against the would-be predators. Clearly, policing serves the security interests of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the four smaller Gulf sheikdoms. But whether it also serves "vital" U.S. interests in the absence of a Soviet threat is open to question.
The Gulf continues to be dangerous, a major source of terrorism and political turmoil throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. Religious radicals there have provided manpower, training and financial incentives for fundamentalist movements and have encouraged local Islamist efforts to topple, terrorize, discredit or provoke governments and their leaders, notably in Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. The New York Trade Center bombing was the work of Middle East Islamic radicals whose Egyptian leader had figured in the plot to murder President Anwar Sadat.
U.S. Gulf forces keep the area under tight control, almost as if it were a maximum security prison. Secret security agreements with the rulers of the lower Gulf states are in force, and arms are stored there in case they are needed for use against Iran or Iraq. Meanwhile, there's rarely even a whisper of serious diplomacy, communication, conflict resolution, or effort to draw either Iran or Iraq into constructive engagement. And there's no suggestion of an exit plan if the U.S. should ever decide to withdraw.
Regimes in the Gulf, wary of Islamic radicalism ever since revolutionaries toppled the Shah in Iran, have moved cautiously to acknowledge the progress in Arab-Israeli relations. Oman and Qatar are edging toward relations with Israel, and both have hosted a visit by Israel's Peres. But Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates keep their distance, and any serious contact between Saudi Arabia and Israel awaits settlement of the future of Jerusalem. As official custodian of Sunni Islam's holy places, the Saudi royal family will not consider relations with Israel until Muslims acquire unimpeded access to and control of their shrines in Jerusalem. Weakness, too, inhibits Saudi action. A lethal bombing in Riyadh last fall worries the ruling family; so, too, does King Fahd's poor health and the impending succession.
What is not happening is also critical in the peace process. Private capital is not flowing sufficiently to places where it is sorely needed to stimulate economic development, combat poverty and reduce severe unemployment. "Real per capita GDP (in the Middle East and Arab North Africa) fell by 2 percent a year over the past decade--the largest such decline in any developing region," according to the World Bank.
To be sure, the United States, Europe, Japan and the World Bank support some development projects. But proposals to create a Middle East development bank to make low-cost loans more readily available have not gotten far. In any case, economic development cannot be stimulated solely by governmental or quasi- governmental capital. There must also be private capital if unemployment rates ranging above 50 percent are to be reduced in places like Gaza. Where can such funds be found? A recent World Bank study observes, "There is no shortage of potential financing...There is, however, a shortage of good policies and projects to make that financing real."
Possible sources, the bank suggests, are about $350-billion in private assets held abroad by Middle East interests and a larger share of $158-billion in annual private capital flows to other developing countries. For centuries, Iran has viewed the Gulf as its domain. In recent times, the Shah and Britain, with U.S. backing, stood guard in the area and kept it relatively free of cold war tensions. But the British abandoned their dying empire east of Suez in 1970 and the Shah was deposed by Iran's Islamic clergy in 1979. The area's balance was further upset by Soviet arms sales to Iraq and Kuwait, and a rush in the '70s to nationalize oil and raise prices. The Iran-Iraq War confirmed that instability had taken hold in the Gulf, and the invasion of Kuwait proved Iran was not alone in coveting control over oil in neighboring Gulf states.
What happened in the U.S.-led Gulf War--and what did not happen to Saddam Hussein--is familiar. Less apparent is that the Gulf, while relatively calm, failed to achieve stability. Oil flows, the price is right, Iraq is in solitary confinement and Iran is contained. But appearances of tranquility exist only because the United States has filled the vacuum left by the Gulf states, which, on their own, are unable to strike a balance that assures their security.
Even under the U.S. umbrella, conditions in the Gulf are at best unhealthy. Iraq is treated as a pariah to punish Saddam for the transgressions against Kuwait and some two-thirds of his own people--Kurds and Shia, among others. But Iraq's population of 20 million is widely reported to be having such a terrible time that the United Nations is trying to make limited Iraqi imports of food and medical supplies possible. Kurdish Iraqis enjoy relative safety because the United States protects them and Saddam is prevented from using aircraft against Iraq's Shia in the south, where the United States has closed Iraqi air space and flies daily fighter sorties. Even so, reports throughout the Gulf say that most Iraqis, whatever their view of Saddam, blame their misery and deprivation on the United States. Sympathy with their view exists throughout the Gulf.
Iran, too, is cut off. The flow of capital for economic development is sharply restricted. Washington is relentless in policing plans to invest in Iran and preventing deals from being made. Japanese, German and other European interests are under heavy U.S. pressure to refrain from sending aid or assisting in Iranian projects. A Conoco deal with Iran to develop oil was killed by the White House. The United States holds Iran accountable for many things, including the export of terrorism. It is considered a principal source of religious radicalism throughout the Middle East which, until recently, was thought to have peaked. Obviously, many of the accusations are true. Even so, there is considerable criticism of the punitive U.S. diplomacy and increasing argument for a more constructive policy. Arabs in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and some in Saudi Arabia reason that Iran will be a neighbor forever and relations with 66 million (non-Arab) Iranians can't remain hostile.
There is, too, some concern that U.S. policy fails to take the people rather than their regimes into account and risks becoming part of the Gulf problem. U.S. allies are rulers whose regimes are hardly democratic. Judith Miller of the New York Times correctly describes the Gulf as an area in which the United States is silent on democracy and human values and where it supports autocratic rule over any alternatives. The policy dilemma, of course, is that alternative governments might be anti-American, militant Islamic regimes.
Reevaluation of U.S. Gulf policy is overdue. Soon after Clinton took office, he ordered a post-cold war Pentagon review to estimate future global military requirements. No similar effort was made, however, to reassess foreign policy. The administration chose simply to contain Iraq and Iran, slightly adjusting the Bush administration's Pentagon-dominated strategy and giving it a name--dual containment. The failure to reconsider the policy has consigned the United States to a future in which military forces costing billions annually are, for all practical purposes, permanently assigned to Gulf police duty.
Today's role in the Gulf exposes the United States to erratic political winds in a remote, unstable part of the world unrelated to the United States in any significant historical, cultural, political, social or religious terms. Performing functions not unlike those of Europe's lost empires violates American values and purposes even if the aim is to obtain cheap oil. Americans are bound to run out of patience with such activities, especially if they adopt the view of some energy economists that cheap oil would flow without U.S. assistance and be readily available for purchase in world markets, and they see that Europe and Japan, without such burdens, benefit more from the U.S. presence than does the United States.
There can be little doubt that Gulf policy is flawed and in need of reappraisal. A reasonable Gulf strategy should begin with reconsidering the value, if any, of dual containment, and continue with a review of the benefits of military and economic confrontation of Iran and Iraq. It should address the question of whether permanent U.S. police duty in the Gulf really makes sense.
Without relaxing today's security watch, the United States should become more active in seeking and considering possible policy alternatives and opportunities to influence future decisions made by Iran and Iraq. Ways should be sought without further delay to end starvation among needy Iraqis and to get adequate medical supplies flowing to them and their children. It might prove worthwhile to pay closer attention to European allies and to Japan on the subject of constructive engagement with Iran that encourages greater moderation in the Iranian regime. With the will to change course by adopting a more sensible and, in the long run, sounder strategy, the U.S. should be able to develop new policies more in keeping with this country's traditional objectives abroad.
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