The U.S. and the Arabs: a woeful history.

• Author: Aruri, Naseer
• Position: US Middle East policy

587769 INO United States policy in the Middle East during the past half century has been the subject of conflicting interpretations. It has been described as a "non-policy", a policy without vision, a policy by increments, sorely lacking an over-arching principle, conceptual framework or long-range strategic planning.(1) It has also been described as a policy dictated by the U.S. pro-Israel lobby and by Israel itself, hence the impressive continuity which the policy has exhibited and continues to exhibit since the beginning of the Cold War.:

The question of whether rigorous strategic planning, guided by an overarching principle, or the pro-Israel lobby, constituted the real engine behind U.S. policy is not our major concern in this study. The dichotomy, in fact, is over-simplified and rather irrelevant, in as much as the perspectives and world views of the pro-Israel lobby and those of the U.S. strategic establishment have been congruent and complementary, hence the special and strategic relationship between the U.S. and Israel.(3) By contrast, certain Arab regimes share the same world view with the United States, but that has never qualified them as strategic allies. At best, they serve as facilitators, sub-contractors and local gendarmes in charge of public order. Today, after the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, stability has remained a strategic goal for U.S. policy in the Middle East. It is now deemed as the primary guarantor of a hospitable environment for investment and trade.

There has been a wide-range of issues at stake - more than who and what dictates or influences U.S. policy in the region. There are large-scale, long-term economic interests that operate throughout the Middle East. These interests embody organized groups and socio-economic categories which influence various levels of policy-planning, including those which allocate resources and define goals. During the formative period of the Cold War, the organized groups with economic interest in the Middle East pursued policies largely conflictual with those advocated by the politically-organized constituencies associated with Israel. Today that gap no longer stands, in as much as the policy-making apparatus, which represented economic interests, presumably in conflict with Israel, has been phased out of Clinton's White House and Albright's State Department. The last of the so-called Arabists in that apparatus, under-Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, Robert Pelletreau, has just been replaced by Martin Indyk, the Australian immigrant who was sworn in as a U.S. citizen a few days before he changed jobs from executive director of a pro-Israel Washington think tank to the top Middle East advisor in Clinton's National Security Council.(4) Not only was Indyk the first pro-Israel lobbyist to occupy the key post for the Middle East in the NSC, but he was also the first lobbyist to serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel and now under-Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

No longer can it be properly claimed that the economic and political dimensions of U.S. Middle East policy are separated on two different tracks. Post-cold war Israel is being groomed for the role of regional economic hegemon in the area. Arab resources, markets and labor would become available for Israeli investors equipped with superior technology, a sophisticated network of global business, and modern organizational techniques. The vision of Shimon Peres, a principal architect of the Oslo accords, is that of a Middle East in which the Arabs would be economically exploited, politically subservient and militarily inferior to Israel.(5) Israel's role in the region would be a microcosm of the U.S. role in the global South.

Prior to the era of Oslo and globalization, however, the U.S. policy process in the Middle East was informed by economic and political interests, which ultimately established the modalities and determined the time schedule that structured policy. United States policy in the Middle East has had and continues to have two important linkages: first, the economic/strategic, which comprises petroleum resources, banking and armaments. Policy makers in the U.S., whether Democrats or Republicans, hawks or doves, have almost always defined these corporate interests as matters of "national security." Secondly, the Israeli linkage, which stems from Israel's regional strategic role and powerful domestic pressure, leading to the largest subsidy program in the history of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. military-strategic planners continue to relate to Israel as a "political contraceptive" against oppositional groups and nationalist upheavals in the region.(6)

There is an interplay between the two linkages, which has eluded many an analyst who would assert that U.S. economic interests are tied to the Arabs and not to Israel, thereby casually concluding that U.S. policy should be pro-Arab and not pro-Israel. They would then recommend that the remedy for that seeming discrepancy would consist of providing the American people with accurate information, as if the people make or even influence policy. A case in point are the public opinion polls, which reveal U.S. public support for the idea of a Palestinian state but rejection of that same idea at the governmental level.(7)

THE STRATEGIC/ECONOMIC LINKAGE: A GLOBAL STRATEGY WITH IMPRESSIVE CONTINUITY(*)

The United States military intervention in the Gulf in the wake of the Cold War is a natural extension of the policy it has pursued for four decades. Since the end of the Second World War, the Middle East has been viewed by the U.S. establishment through the prism of the conflict with the Soviet Union. The U.S. strategic doctrine underlying the course of the Cold War has been based on a distorted assessment of Soviet intentions.

That policy was based on the proposition that there existed a legitimate world order, for which the U.S. assumed the major responsibility, and that the Soviet Union, together with disaffected Third World nations, including Arab nationalist forces, were intent on challenging that order. A succession of U.S. doctrines and strategies which expressed a resolve to contain that challenge included the Truman Doctrine (1948), the Eisenhower Doctrine (1957), Kennedy's flexible response, the corollaries of limited nuclear war, counterinsurgency, the Johnson Doctrine (1865), the Nixon-Kissinger Doctrine (1969), and finally the Carter Doctrine (1980) and Reagan's codicil (1981). These doctrines were predicated on the assumption that the United States had a title to the Arab World's petroleum resources, a privileged access to its markets and waterways, and an undisputed right to define, contain and rollback the region's enemies, be they internal dissidents (Eisenhower Doctrine and Reagan Codicil), ambitious regional leaders, such as Saddam Hussein (Bush Doctrine), or Arab states which would assume responsibility for strategic deterrence vis-avis Israel, such as Egypt in 1967 and Iraq in 1991. Syria, however, was able to prevent the knock-out blow delivered to Egypt and later to Iraq by restructuring its alignments.

While the U.S. seemed to be operating from a position of relative weakness vis-a-vis the Soviet Union in Southeast Asia and in Angola during the early Seventies, it enjoyed a decisive edge over the U.S.S.R. in the Middle East. It presented the U.S.S.R. with several threats in the region forcing the erosion of Soviet influence and a corresponding ascendancy of American power. In his State of the World message in February 1970, President Nixon declared, "The U.S. would view any effort by the Soviet Union to seek predominance in the Middle East as a matter of grave concern."(8) Henry Kissinger called for and secured the expulsion of Soviet personnel from Egypt in 1972.

An important difference between Vietnam and the Middle East for U.S. foreign policy concerns the economic linkage between the U.S. and the Middle East. The status quo in the Gulf, which succeeding doctrines pledged to uphold, has provided the United States with an exceedingly favorable economic climate, one in which the levels of economic penetration are maintained and enhanced. Here, much more than in Vietnam and Central America, the economic stakes are very high, and the U.S. was bound to project its military power. Hence, when President Bush claimed in 1991 that his goal was to protect our jobs and our way of life, he really meant, first and foremost, corporate interest defined as a matter of national security. Such interests frequently condition military and political decisions.

Middle East trade had more than doubled its share of total U.S. trade between 1960 and 1980, almost tripled its share of Japanese trade, and increased by 50% its share of European Community (EC) trade. By 1980, Middle East oil provided 20% of U.S. supplies, 70% of EC supplies and over 75% of Japanese supplies. The region has the largest concentration of oil and natural gas reserves in the world. The countries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Abu Dhabi each contain greater oil reserves than those found in the United States. In fact, Saudi Arabia alone has reserves six times greater than the U.S. possesses. Middle East oil is not only plentiful, but cheap as well. The cost of producing a barrel of oil in the Gulf has been estimated at $2, compared to between $15 and $18 in Alaska.

U.S. economic gains are further enhanced by the exceedingly high rate of return on investments in the oil industry. While Middle East oil accounts for less than 2% of U.S. investments, its share of total U.S. foreign earnings is about 33%. Moreover, U.S. and British financial institutions claim the lion's share of Middle East oil surplus, which they recycle as loans to impoverished Third World nations. Throughout the post-World War II period a lucrative arms trade has claimed a sizable portion of the Middle East market, by far the largest arms-importing...