Between Systems and Salami: |
 Roger Heacock |
Introduction:
In what follows, empirical weight will be lent to a hypothesis regarding US foreign policy fluctuations during the twentieth century. The hypothesis will be tested with regard to the Middle East. There is historical evidence for the proposition that sovereign states tend to range in their foreign policies between two strong alternative poles, and that this pendulum-like movement often occurs as between successive administrations. The observation applies particularly but not only in the case of democratic governments, subject to political alternation and systematic domestic opposition. External elements acting to reverse a movement include the impact of failure, which may lead to a policy shift. If the failure is serious enough, the overthrow or military defeat of the team in power may bring on a more brutal change. The United States is no exception to this apparent rule. Each new administration, whether it has emanated from the same political party as its predecessor or its rival, wishes to stamp its own distinctive imprint on foreign policy and relations, or, alternatively, is obliged by trial and error, to adjust or reverse its approach. Remarkable has been the regularity with which these pendulum-like fluctuations have occurred in the twentieth century.
Where the Middle East is concerned, we are dealing with a paradoxical region in terms of its global role. On the one hand, it is the seat of recurrent, even permanent crises, and it is a principal source of oil, one of the planet's indispensable strategic resources: in that sense, it should represent a foreign policy priority for the great powers. This has historically been the case for some countries (notably France, but less so Britain for which the Middle East was most important as a link to India). For cultural reasons, it also arouses passionate responses in every area of the world. But it is clear on the other hand that it has never in this century been the theater of the sharpest contradictions in the international system where great power relations are concerned. As compared notably to Europe and the Far East, it has not elicited the same level of confrontation, the same totality of conflict. In the same way and for related reasons, it has not yielded to the same type of comprehensive peace-making efforts as those two regions. In the Middle East there has prevailed, ever since the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and Palestine two turns of a century ago, an atmosphere of work unfinished. During the pre-World War two and even the Cold War period, the Middle East, in terms of strategic priority for leading members of the world system, has ranked closer to the peripheral areas of Africa and Latin America than to the strategically central ones of South Asia, the Far East and Europe. The US and Soviet Union for example, never got close to going to war (even during the Watergate-driven phony nuclear alert set off by Nixon and Kissinger in October 1973) over the protracted and violent conflicts of the area. Mutual strategic deterrence on the other hand (Albert Wohlstetter's 'balance of terror') played a role in Europe. A terrible proxy war took place in Korea, the US lost a major war in Vietnam (killing two to three million Vietnamese in the process), the Soviet Union inflicted and suffered a similar fate in Afghanistan.
This paradoxically makes the Middle East a choice case for the study of US foreign policy since 1945. It was never automatically sucked into the maelstrom of Cold War bipolarity, but was susceptible on the part of certain presidencies of being treated as an ad hoc case. What the present paper will attempt to show is that the pendulum in American foreign policy, at least where the Middle East (and therefore, the Arab world and the Palestinians) is concerned, moves between “systems” on the one hand and “salami” on the other. that is to say that successive US administrations treated the area (and, one would presume, others as well) either as part of a world system in which the policy-making team saw itself as operating, with evident applications to this particular region, or as a case apart, an individual slice (by analogy) of salami, which needed to be handled sui generis, and based essentially on US priorities and interests in the area itself at a given time. Because it did not have the same strategic connotation as other regions, a certain degree of maneuverability could be preserved, and, as shall be seen, there are genuine cases of the "salami" approach to be found during the period of the Cold War itself.
The Middle East Policies of Successive Administrations
Leaving aside the first half of the twentieth century (where Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson would fit into paradigm one, while Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt pertain to the second category), we are confronted with the Cold War which only ended around 1989. According to received values, this should have placed all of the American presidents of the period in category one, seeing the US as leading the Western world in its protracted struggle with the Soviet Union, and thus involved in a single global system one of whose characteristics was conflicts between its two dominant parts. In this conventional view, American (and, indeed Soviet) leaders could not have had the luxury of treating problems ad hoc, but had to decide what best served the noble anti-communist (or anti-imperialist) crusade. The fact of the matter is that this rather academic conception, while certainly applicable at a very high level of generalization, is not an operative one in seeking to understand the complexities of US policy towards the Palestinians from the nakba or disaster of 1948 to the intifada of 1987. It does not always explain US policy at the level of regions, if we take the Middle East as an example, and here we find that the two paradigms of systems and/or salami, rather the single one of system, help in better understanding the period.
President Eisenhower took refuge behind his New Look foreign policy characterized by the doctrine of nuclear “mass retaliation”, where the US would in theory escalate every supposed Soviet military incursion to the nuclear threshold and beyond. This gave him the psychological leeway, as it were, to deal with non-related regional threats individually. By imagining that the Soviet Union had been contained by the nuclear threat he could in a sense turn his back to it long enough to deal with regions individually, or at least separately from the world systems framework, on condition that a given crisis did not in fact threaten to escalate into a nuclear confrontation. He had of course to consider the potential for regional crises for involving the superpowers in direct confrontation, with its implicit nuclear danger based on the doctrine of mass retaliation. For this reason, Eisenhower could not intervene in Europe in response to the Hungarian revolution. On the other hand, he felt it urgent to force France, Britain and Israel to withdraw from Egypt after their tripartite Suez aggression. In this respect, Khrushchev, by painting a picture of rockets “raining down” on London, was quite helpful. Eisenhower had showed that he did not consider even his closest strategic allies in the conflict with the USSR as necessary partners in a given crisis: a clear example of the “salami” approach. Even the “Eisenhower doctrine of 1957”, which proclaimed the US right of intervention in the Middle East to counter communism, was directed against communist movements or parties in the area, and thus was rather an ad hoc than a systems-based policy. With this Doctrine, according to Stork (1993:131), “[t]he strategy of building a consensus of regional states to counter the Soviet Union had been replaced by a strategy of anticommunist intervention into Arab politics” - a clear example of the salami approach.
John F. Kennedy is likely to be designated as Time magazine’s “Man of the Century” at the end of 1999. For this there are various reasons, but one of them is surely that he combined in the foreign policy field (and in the domestic area as well, it may be argued, but not in the present discussion) both of the approaches delineated above. He was an intellectual, and a seeker of global answers (Gaddis : 198-236). He surrounded himself from the beginning of his short administration with “theoreticians of the emergence from underdevelopment through putting in motion a mechanism through which economic growth, initially stimulated from the outside, would be in a position progressively to feed itself autonomously” (Valdevit 1992: 118). On this basis, and unlike Eisenhower, his team recognized that national movements in the third world, including notably Arab national movements, could well become the motors of this type of development, which needed to be anti-communist in content for sure, and, if possible, based on democratic institutions. In addition to the “Alliance for Progress” with Latin American states, Kennedy did not hesitate to improve relations with Middle Eastern leaders, notably Nasser. And this despite the fact that the latter’s cooperation with the Soviet Union tended to be on the increase rather than on the wane. This was only made possible, given the depth of ill-feeling between the parties, by “freezing” the Arab-Israeli conflict (Valdevit 1992: 137), and by simultaneously increasing military support to Israel. JFK and his enthusiastic advisors had gone one better than Ike, with their doctrine of graduated response, involving the dispatching of troops to fight counter-insurgency wars wherever they might break out, so as not to wait for them to result in a new victory for the other side (the most recent having been Fidel Castro’s in January 1959) and not to risk their approaching the fateful nuclear threshold before being brought under control. Under this banner, he began systematically improving Israel’s French- created nuclear arsenal. The enemy had many faces, not limited to that of the Soviet leadership, and needed to be stopped in various regional settings, rather than being confronted only over the thin red lines of Europe and the Far East. At the same time, Kennedy thought the enemy could in some areas be replaced and perhaps even co-opted. As a result, he opened channels to the Arab leadership, an approach which, because of his early assassination, he did not have time to test. This did not keep him from being a strident cold warrior, dispatching thousands of armed military personnel to Southeast Asia to implement his favored policy of “graduated response” (as opposed to massive retaliation) in the face of the perceived world communist threat. He thus practiced a unique combination of the ‘systems’ and the ‘salami’ approach to international politics.
Lyndon Johnson behaved very differently, conjuring up calamitous visions of tumbling dominoes to egg on his armies and his people against the Vietnamese and the Cambodians, invading the Dominican republic in 1965. By 1967, he was deeply mired in Vietnam, and Israel was considered the single reliable counter to any possible flanking movement by the Soviets and their surrogates. He therefore approved the preemptive war against the Arabs in June 1967. These decisions were systemically based, for Johnson saw the US as involved on all fronts against the two giants of world Communism (the second being the People’s Republic of China). He was a prime exponent of the ‘systems’ approach, and the contrast between Middle Eastern policy during the Kennedy and the Johnson era could not have been greater. Johnson took the Arab-Israeli conflict of out of the “freeze” and chose his side, hoping through his massive military and political support to Israel to bring the Arabs to the negotiating table (Valdevit 1992: 146; Spiegel 1985: 153-165; Badeau 1968: 180-195; Quandt 1977: 37-62), thus ending their “objective” contribution to the communist camp.
Nixon and his closest foreign policy adviser Kissinger, on the other hand, saw and exploited the gaping contradictions between the Soviet Union and China, promoting a de facto alliance with the latter. Nixon was a systems man, bent, where the Middle East was concerned, on re-establishing US hegemony, which meant, as he put it himself, expelling the Soviet Union from the area. Kissinger (1994: 740) even places such capital matters as global US-Soviet diplomacy in the context of Middle Eastern events, rather than the reverse.
“…[W]e conducted negotiations on a wide range of issues in order to give the Soviet leaders a stake they would be reluctant to jeopardize. The Berlin negotiations contributed to Soviet restraint in the Middle East until well into 1973. Afterward, the European Security Conference helped to moderate the Soviet reaction during the various diplomatic shuttles that moved the Soviet Union to the fringes of Mideast diplomacy…Détente not only calmed the international situation, it created inhibitions which caused Soviet leaders to accept what amounted to a major geopolitical retreat.”
In other words, Middle East strategy (expelling the Soviet Union from the area) and global diplomacy, were for Kissinger dialectically linked. Although surprised by the outbreak of the October 1973 war, Kissinger attempted to take advantage of it by coaxing the parties into a new relationship, based of course on Israeli regional and US global domination. “In fact, it was the American special relationship to Israel that compelled the Arabs to deal with Washington instead of Moscow when it came to diplomacy.” (Quandt 1993: 250). The Nixon administration, before collapsing in disgrace in the summer of 1974, managed to show with the Kissinger-brokered disengagement accords, that the US and not the Soviet Union was the key to obtaining results in the field, where Israel, but also Egypt and Syria, were concerned. And of course regarding the Palestinians, Kissinger “had a blind spot” (Quandt 1993: 251), which means to say that they played no role in his calculations or even his rhetoric. It is remarkable that even today, when one reads his self- congratulatory memoirs and contemporary histories, the Palestinians still do not exist. In his words, spoken it is true in 1975, “I have left the Palestinian question alone in order to work on frontier questions hoping eventually to isolate the Palestinians” (briefing of American Jewish leaders, quoted in Stork 1993:135).
Jimmy Carter returned to the salami approach, and in the face of heavy criticism applied it to Latin America (the Panama canal treaty) and the Arab-Israeli conflict (Camp David and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty). In addition to investing an extraordinary amount of energy in the Middle East (Quandt 1993: 329), Carter added the ingredient of human rights as a standard and a guide in the conduct of international politics and foreign policy (McCormick 1992:200-201). This approach was vindicated a quarter of a century later and is now in high vogue, but in his own time it was not understood, notably by his own people, accustomed to the approach which tended to consider foreign policy from a cold war-inspired systems perspective, with some variations based on simple reasons of state (the Gaullist approach), but with a very minimum of moral principle. His success in stitching together an Egyptian-Israeli peace did not win him excessive praise among the American public. And his entire approach to foreign policy became discredited by the fiasco of his reaction to the Islamic revolution in Iran and, most of all, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, both of which occurred in 1979, destroying his version of “salami” politics and his presidency to boot.
Nonetheless, it is with Carter that for the first time real attention begins to be paid to the Palestinians as a people, rather than as a refugee population, as potential terrorists or a fifth column inside Israel, or as Arabs in search of a (preferably Jordanian) identity, or candidates for emigration to the Americas. Carter began the intellectual process and established the diplomatic precedent (the Palestinian paragraphs of the Camp David accords) which quite a bit later, and under conditions even more unfavorable to the Palestinians themselves, would culminate in the Oslo accords, the Interim Self-Government arrangements, in short, limited autonomy for the West Bank and Gaza, as a first step towards some kind of possible sovereignty. For this he was reviled, both by the Israelis around their Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and by the Arabs and more specifically the Palestinians. After all, he had once and for all coaxed Egypt out of the ranks of the confrontation states, thanks to the vague commitments regarding necessary movement on the Palestinian front. This he had to recognize himself a decade later, in The Blood of Abraham, his otherwise subjective view of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its ‘biblical’ roots (Carter 1985:45), in a statement of considerable implied self-criticism.
From Begin’s point of view, the peace agreement with Egypt was the significant act for Israel; the references to the West Bank and Palestinians were to be finessed. With the bilateral treaty, he removed Egypt’s considerable strength from the military equation of the Middle East and thus gave the Israelis renewed freedom to pursue their goals of fortifying and settling the occupied territories and removing perceived threats by preemptive military strikes against some of their neighbors.
The former president, architect of the Camp David Accords and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, is here referring to the strike against the Iraqi nuclear reactor (1981) and the invasion of Lebanon (1982) from whose territory, nearly twenty years later, it has not yet withdrawn. As a leading American student of (and minor actor in) the conflict puts it,
Carter had been slow to recognize the depth of Begin’s attachment to the West Bank and Gaza. He had also been slow to understand the linkage issue. Once Egypt and Israel were at peace, Begin had few remaining incentives to deal constructively with the Palestinian question (Quandt 1993:331).
Jimmy Carter was therefore reviled, specifically by Palestinians, for having brought about an Egyptian-Israeli peace which deepened the divisions in Arab ranks (although it is difficult to imagine that this could have been his actual agenda, since as he admitted himself, it defeated the very purpose of the Camp David negotiations). Carter, as president, was ignorant of the depth of Palestinian national aspirations. He mistrusted the analyses of his state department experts, whom he considered one-sided in their views (Christison 1998:28). He discovered the extent of Israeli repression and Palestinian tenacity in his 1983 visit to the area as a private citizen. But it is a well-known and rather accurate adage that American presidents are favorable to Palestinian self-determination…after they have left office.
With Reagan it was back to systems. Israel became once again the unmitigated strategic ally in the conflict which opposed the Free World to the Soviet “evil empire”. As Quandt (1993: 379- 380) puts it, under Reagan the entire relationship
“was given a strategic rationale that had previously been missing, or had at least been less central…President Reagan and the Likud party seemed to feel that a strong strategic alliance against the Soviet Union and its regional allies would provide enough support for U.S.-Israeli relations even without an active peace process”. And during the Reagan era, “[m]any Israelis were delighted with the result. They basked in the afterglow of being treated as a “non-NATO ally”; American aid to the defense industry was welcomed; intelligence cooperation reached new heights”.
In other words, this was once again a two-actor, zero-sum game, which in fact turned out to be the endgame. The Cold War confrontation, before dying out with the collapse of one of the protagonists, was, on the American side, returning to its Trumanesque origins. It was in this light that, following the lead of his first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, Reagan gave the green light to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon (Stork 1983:38). His purpose was to beat back two supposed Soviet proxies, Syria and the PLO, while strengthening the US’s allies in the region, especially Israel. Instead, the disastrous results of the invasion quickly took shape, and they had clearly done damage to the Western camp (McCormick 1992:222-223). As his predecessor noted, “[u]nder Reagan, the peace process has come to a screeching halt, and the debacle in Lebanon severely damaged or destroyed our influence in that area” (Carter1985:202). His secretary of state, Alexander Haig, was fired, and the attempt was made, in the form of the Reagan plan, to take a somewhat more even-handed approach. But the rejection of that plan (prepared by the new secretary of state, George Shultz) was so categorical, that any semblance of even- handedness was abandoned. The “most pro-Israeli” president of all spent the next five years following the tried and true line of unconditional support for the Jewish state, punctuated by certain hesitant glances towards Jordan or Egypt, two valued second- tier allies of the United States in the Middle East (Heacock 1994:148-149). The short-lived period of the Reagan plan was soon set aside, as was the short-lived sense of fatigue and guilt associated in the American public with the massacre of Sabra- Shatila and the death of hundreds of US marines in a Hizballah suicide bomb attack on US marine barracks in Lebanon. ‘Strategic partnership’ with Israel became the catchword for the period 1982-87. American officials saw no need to visit the region, and public opinion did not insist on their doing so.
Treatment of the Middle East and the Palestinian question, like everything else, tended to fit into this bipolar confrontation perspective. Furthermore, the region and the issue were dealt with in the context of public opinion in the United States. It had in the late nineteen forties crystallized into support for Israel and, even more, general antipathy towards the Arabs, especially the Palestinians, regarded as fundamentally terrorists (Peretz 1998:44-45). One need but to look at the book which won the 1986 Pulitzer prize and sold thousands of copies, David Shipler’s Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Troubled Land (Shipler 1986). This work was considered at the time a model of compassion and even-handedness. Yet one receives the overall impression of Israel as an embattled and highly cultured society, threatened from the outside and especially from the inside by much more backward Palestinians, who were also much more prone to violence. On the ante-penultimate page of the book we are treated to the authoritative considerations of a skilled Israeli (Jewish) MD at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital, (and this contains in a nutshell much of the message of the book):
“We’re not an oasis here,” Dr. Nisan said. “I don’t think peace is just around the corner. I don’t think what we’re doing here is for the promotion of peace; we’re not going to make them Zionists. We may spend $50,000 on a baby from Hebron, and it may sound foolish. Even though I know that in eighteen or twenty years that baby may put a bomb and kill my grandson, for us at that time that little baby is 100 percent. This is absurd. Don’t try to find any logic to it. We do it because of what we are and not because we think that by doing it we are going to bring peace. There is a tremendous gap culturally, emotionally, in mentality. I don’t see how this gap is going to be bridged in a hundred years.” (Shipler 1986:554).
Here lies the rather explicit message of this allegedly even- handed description of the predicament of Arab and Jew in Israel- Palestine: it is deeply paternalistic and fraught with cultural stereotypes regarding the Arabs, their violence and their backwardness. As such, it had in fact earned its Pulitzer prize at that time: such was then the tenor of American opinion.
Little more than a year later, it could never have won the Pulitzer, or any other prize in America. The intifada changed the perception and the understanding of conditions and events in the occupied Palestinian territories, and in Israel as well. First of all, American TV viewers were bombarded with images which showed well where the overwhelming balance of power lay. Early on the in the winter of 1988, they were treated by CBS to a long strip showing the efforts of two Israeli soldiers with their M-16 rifles to break the limbs of two immobilized and prone Palestinian youths. They saw pictures of people being buried alive by the soldiers (although they survived). They heard the Minister of Defense, Yitzhak Rabin, promise to break bones, and proceeding through the actions of his subordinates to do so, massively. And the opinion-makers began to read reports coming out of the occupied territories, written by Palestinians (Al-Haq 1989) but also and especially, by westerners, and detailing the brutality to which an entire people was being subjected through various measures. The most damning reports concerned the treatment of Palestinian children by the Israeli soldiers and settlers (Nixon 1990: research financed by the Ford Foundation). It was the cumulative effect of these pictures buttressed by solid research which moved American public opinion towards adopting a more balanced view of the causes of events regarding the Israeli-Palestinian and, indeed, the larger Arab-Israeli confrontation (“Even from within the normally pro- Israeli American Jewish community there was an outpouring of criticism and concern”, Quandt 1993:364). While Israel did not lose so much in US public support, support for the Palestinians increased by 50% after four months of the intifada, from 14 to 22 percent (Mendelsohn 1989:238). Needless to say, the base figure of 14% was so low that a great deal more effort would need to have been made by the Palestinians in wooing US public support. By most accounts, they failed in this task.
Bet that as it may, three elements brought about a decisive change in US policy towards the Middle East: 1. the intifada- induced shift in US public opinion; 2. a shift in Israel’s position Israel’s position regarding Palestinian self-government, also conditioned by the intifada (Schultz 1993: chapter 47); and 3. Fears widespread among US-aligned Arab regimes such as Egypt and Jordan, of the rise of Islamism in their countries and the region as a whole. A sense of urgency had once again returned to American foreign policy in the Middle East. There is no doubt that the decisive variable which brought about this shift was the intifada. After all, the fear of Islamism had been present among pro-Western and more or less secular Middle Eastern regimes since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, witness the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the heavily Western-, notably US-sponsored eight-year Iraqi war against Iran, 1980- 1988. In order to understand how the uprising could have moved the principal superpower to begin to work inexorably for some kind of stabilizing negotiations between the parties, one must remember the depth and breadth of the intifada, which made it, at its own modest level, a process of truly historic proportions. For nearly six years, a movement of essentially unarmed civilians, having taken its own leadership and the occupying forces by surprise at the outset, continued unabated, although with cyclical turns and twists, and despite all of the efforts to crush it on the part of the Israeli armed forces. Henry Kissinger for one understood early on its potential for changing the diplomatic ingredients, and advised Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s minister of defense, (whose “bone-breaking” policy was designed to do just that) to do all that was necessary to crush it, quickly and outside of the limelight. This was made impossible by the enormous influx of foreign media and, just as importantly, of UN personnel (despite Israel’s refusal to accredit the latter or recognize their monitoring responsibilities). Geographically, after its birth (officially, on December 9th, 1987) in Jabalya, the largest Palestinian refugee camp of the Gaza strip, the revolution of stones had rapidly spread to all of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, notably including east Jerusalem. Socially, it managed to mobilize both sexes and all of the Palestinian generations. And soon it was actively supported by the Palestinian Diaspora in the “near abroad” (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria) and worldwide (notably in the South and North America), as well as solidarity, charitable and human rights NGOs, especially European ones, but including many from America and the Far East. Socially, the intifada mobilized all classes and origins: peasants, workers, merchants and teachers, 1948 refugees and those originally from the occupied territories(Gresh and Vidal 1991:205-207).
By virtue of its all-encompassing nature, the intifada formalized the existence of the Palestinian people and defined the borders of their phantom homeland (precisely those areas occupied in June 1967: attempts to spread the uprising into Israel proper failed). Of this fact, notice was finally taken by King Hussein of Jordan, who officially renounced all claims to the West Bank (which his grandfather had annexed in 1949) on July 31st, 1988. Driven on by its own people, the PLO, through the voice of its Chairman, declared the independence of the State of Palestine (November 15th, 1988), accepted UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, and renounced terrorism (Christison 1998:32). Although Israeli opinion (contrary to what would happen in the wake of the traumatizing second Gulf war, when it finally understood its vulnerability) at first by and large rejected moves towards a compromise, as shown by Shamir’s renewed and reinforced mandate in the general elections of November 1988, the American (not to speak of European) public and government had gotten the message. In stark contrast to the preceding five years, secretary of state Schultz and his retinue of White House and State Department staffers trooped over to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. They would happily have met with Palestinians in the territories, only they were rebuffed by the latter, in an ironic reversal of roles. Schultz came forward with his March 1988 plan, in an attempt to get negotiations off the ground. This attempt was clearly driven by the fear of US public opinion, which had shifted, and also, most probably, by the fact that prudence could, towards the end of Reagan’s second term, be thrown to the winds, no electoral sanction being feared any more. Conscience, opinion and opportunity together thus gave some energy to the late efforts of the US administration.
The Schultz proposals, now largely forgotten, bear examining, because, although rejected at the time by the Palestinians and even more vehemently by the Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir, they formed the essence of the formula which was implemented three and a half years later with the opening of the Madrid conference under the aegis of Schultz’s successor, James Baker. There was, in the Schultz initiative, to be a purely symbolic international conference to inaugurate the process, following which the parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict would engage in a series of bilateral negotiations. Palestinian issues would be dealt with between Israel and a joint Jordanian- Palestinian delegation. Negotiations would be based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. There would be an agreement on a transitional period in the occupied territories, followed by negotiations for a final status (Moughrabi 1990:252); Schultz 1993: Chapter 47). From the point of view of the Reagan administration, the collapse of Soviet power then well underway, combined with the damage the Israeli strategic ally was doing to its position within American opinion, justified such a shift from towards the attempt to manage what was essentially a very complicated regional issue outside of the constraints of a global systems approach.
In the effort to find the appropriate formula, Schultz thus came up with the one which would serve as the basis for the Madrid conference and subsequent first set of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in Washington (1991-1993). Schultz’s plan did not at that particular time have a real chance of succeeding. Although Yitzhak Shamir, as prime minister, paid conditional lip- service to it, it was opposed by the Israeli government (a Likud- Labor government led by Shamir), and by the Palestinians, who needed PLO backing to enter into discussions. That backing was not to be forthcoming unless on the American side there was some kind of acknowledgment of the organization and its representative nature. The last half of 1988 witnessed a series of significant events: King Hussein disengaged Jordan from the West Bank in July. The Jordanian option was dead, and the US, perhaps by default, had to find a way forward which involved the PLO which, it was no secret, had fully taken over the leadership of an intifada whose breakout had caught it by surprise. By the end of 1988, the US dialogue with the PLO (terminated by Kissinger in 1975) had resumed, based on Arafat’s ‘renunciation’ of terror and acceptance of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. Arafat, prodded by Palestinian public opinion within the occupied territories which was demanding concrete results from their ongoing sacrifices, declared an independent (and phantom) Palestinian State (November 15, 1998) during the 19th Palestine National Congress (PNC) held in Algiers. In the meantime, however, Shamir had been reelected in a new coalition with Labor which the Likud dominated even more than before. Reagan’s vice president, George Bush, had easily won election to the White House; the Soviet Union was in steep, though not yet visibly terminal, decline. The new Shamir government was quick to repudiate Schultz’s initiative, although it had previously been accepted by Shamir himself. Clearly, the American shift regarding the Palestinian question was as yet deemed ephemeral in Israel, where it had become standard practice to reject American proposals (Rogers, Reagan) seen as going too far. Israeli public opinion, by giving Shamir a reinforced mandate, showed itself as yet unconvinced of the wisdom of dealing with the implications of the intifada other than by crushing it. The combination of his March 1988 plan and the renewed dialogue with the PLO (which would be interrupted again before it finally became institutionalized) was his not inconsiderable legacy to the new administration. It would have been inconceivable without the riveting effect of the intifada on US public opinion.
George Bush had now been elected to the presidency. In this new international context, with the Cold War coming to an end, he swerved decisively toward a salami approach, especially since neither he, nor anyone in his administration, nor anyone else as a matter of fact (witness the terrible blunders and miscalculations committed by Saddam Hussein and Michael Gorbachev) had the slightest idea what the realignment of international forces was to bring about:the “new world order’ they were touting was to look like:
Princes have always sought out soothsayers of one kind or another for the purpose of learning what the future holds. These hired visionaries have found portents in the configurations of stars, the entrails of animals, and most indicators in between. The results, on the whole, have been disappointing. Surprise remains one of the few things one can count on…
Surprise is still very much with us. The abrupt end of the Cold War, an unanticipated hot war in the Persian gulf, and the sudden disintegration of the Soviet Union astonished almost everyone, whether in government, the academy, the media, or the think tanks. Although there was nothing inherently implausible about these events – the Cold War did have to end sometime, war has always been a possibility in the Middle East, and communism’s failures had been obvious for years – the fact that they arose so unexpectedly suggests that deficiencies persist in the means by which contemporary princes and the soothsayers they employ seek to discern the future course of world affairs. (Gaddis 1994:323)
A systems approach was thus virtually by definition ruled out, even though “the top echelons of the administration were filled with figures friendly to Israel, including the secretary of defense, Richard Cheney; the deputy secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger; and the entire Middle East team of Ross, Haass, Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron Miller” (Quandt 1993:388). This was why the Bush administration soon found itself at odds with Israel on matters regarding the peace process. Unlike all of his predecessors except Reagan during his final year, he had to choose, or rather to maneuver, between the contradictory pressures of public opinion, which had shifted on the Palestinian question and the powerful pro-Israel lobbies, led by AIPAC, which continued to push for unmitigated support of a Jewish State still bent on crushing the intifada. Around half the US public supported the establishment of a Palestinian homeland in July 1990, shortly before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2nd (according to a New York Times-CBS poll, cited in Aruri 1993:115). While this represented a rise in comparison with previous figures, it was not a spectacular one. The significant shift in public opinion had occurred at the time of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (Moughrabi 1990: 242-247, where American public had reacted with shocked disbelief to the pictures of Israeli planes leveling Palestinian refugee camps (‘Ain el Helwa and Rashidiye for example) and razing apartment buildings in Beirut full of civilians, causing 20 000 deaths, mainly from the air. After all, this was less than a decade after Americans had breathed a collective sigh of relief when carpet bombing of Vietnam had finally ended. The administration, as we have seen, found itself for a short while on a discordant note with respect to its constituency. But it had rather quickly closed the dissonance gap. During the onset and for the first two years of the intifada, the dissonance was once again present as between public opinion and public policy:
The intifada has solidified a trend among the American public that has been evolving since the late 1970s and in particular since the summer of 1982… As the levels of information and of education increase, so does support for the Palestinians. This is not seen by the majority as necessarily anti-Israel. In other words, there is increasing support for both sides in the conflict and, more important, support for a peaceful settlement. The striking shift in the opinion of key well-informed segments of the American public means that the debate in the United States about the Palestine-Israel conflict will be much less one-sided than in the past, when a pro-Israel consensus prevailed. The shift in the opinion of the well- informed is likely to be durable. Policy-makers still lag behind the informed public on this crucial issue (Moughrabi 1990:255).
In their initial diplomacy, Bush and Baker had been content to watch the Soviet Union pursue its inexorable decline and Eastern Europe open up to the West. With regard to the Middle East, they had followed the guidelines set out by their advisers, notably Dennis Ross and Richard Haass, who, as they stated in their policy pamphlet Building for Peace, believed that the United States should not precipitate events, but allow them to mature and only then take them in hand. This approach could only be pleasing to the Israelis, busy as they were with repressing the intifada and settling hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Soviet Union, many of them in the occupied territories. But it could only anger the Palestinians, who felt scorned and abandoned (as their erstwhile allies in the Soviet bloc withered away), even as it increased the gap between US public opinion and official policy towards the Middle East. And most of all, indifference or at least ambiguity towards Middle Eastern issues on the part of the Bush administration gave Saddam Hussein the idea that the time, and the space, was ripe for his troops to move on August 2nd 1990. After all that has been written and stated in this regard, it would seem that Saddam had in fact been offered a little leeway by the United States to ‘adjust’ the Kuwaiti border to his advantage (Gresh and Vidal 1991). This would be the reward for his eight-year war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Of course nobody knew the adjustment was to consist of all of Kuwait. Indeed, the Bush policy of “constructive engagement” with Iraq lasted to the very day Iraq invaded Kuwait (Bin et al 1991: 21). This is not the place to evaluate the causes and effects of that miscalculation. I wish simply to point out that it was itself the result at least partly of the initial miscalculation of Bush’s approach to the Middle East, which mistook passivity for policy.
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait first confounded and then resurrected US policy. Bush decided to reverse the occupation militarily and thus inaugurate a “new world order”. That decision was a strategic one. There was, however, the additional matter of Saddam’s challenge of August 12th 1990, which the US needed more than ever to respond to (although it was unwilling to do so before having driven Iraqi troops out of Kuwait). On that date, just ten days after his occupation of Kuwait, the Iraqi president issued a call, which strongly impacted on the Arab world (Heacock 1991:67). He stated that his troops would evacuate Kuwait if in exchange Israel were to leave the territories occupied in 1967 and, for good measure, if Syria were to evacuate Lebanon (Gresh and Vidal 1991:263-264). The Arab world was enthusiastic. The Palestinians were ecstatic. Failure on the part of the international community to address their grievances, and the failure of Israel to respond with anything but force to the demands expressed daily since the outbreak of the intifada, had driven them to the kind of despair in which they were waiting for some kind of promise of salvation, with the demagogic Saddam Hussein did not hesitate to provide. The US leadership fully understood the implications of Saddam’s ‘linkage’ of issues in the Arab world, which had resulted in the mobilization on his side of millions of people in the Middle East, from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Baker capitalized on Palestinian (and Jordanian) weakness in the wake of the defeat of the camp they had supported, Iraq. He counted most of all on the traumatic state in which Israel and its leaders found themselves at the end of a conflict of which Israeli civilians had been victims even as their leaders and military had to look on. Perhaps just as frightening was the fact that the Jordanian and especially Palestinian publics had danced on the roofs in their thousands while Iraqi scuds landed in the outskirts of Tel Aviv. And they had also noticed the increasing frequency in Egypt of demonstrations against the anti-Iraq coalition as the war proceed. The American secretary of state thus managed to bring together all of the parties to the conflict in the Madrid conference (October 1991). The Arab-Israeli endgame had thus begun on its various tracks, which would lead to the Oslo accords and their applications, as well as peace between Israel and Jordan, and serious negotiations with Syria. During his last year and a half in office George Bush thus made strenuous and successful efforts to bring about change on the Middle Eastern front, driven by the fear of further destabilization. He was bent on ending the intifada after the Gulf crisis. But as usual, the intransigent Israeli government stood in the way of actual moves on the ground. Baker and Bush did everything they could to see that it was replaced.
By the time the trick had been turned, i.e. by the time Shamir had been voted out of office and the “pro-peace” government of Yitzkhak Rabin had been elected, it was fast becoming too late for the Bush-Baker team to do much more. The intifada was continuing as were Israeli repressive measures. One of them was the deportation to Lebanon of 400 hamas and pro-hamas people to Lebanon, at a time when, although the Islamists opposed the peace process on which the PLO was embarked, there was no talk and certainly no action, regarding suicide bombs (Baker managed to get the number and the period of their banishment reduced by half). And Bush, despite his wish to score a new foreign policy success, was embarked on a fatal downward spiral in the opinion polls, as he battled to obtain a second term against the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. In that context, he must do nothing further to alienate the Jewish vote and Israel lobby in the United States. From the Palestinian perspective, this was particularly clear, as noted by Hanan Ashrawi:
Baker came in August on his first visit after the formation of the new Israeli government to inject the process with momentum and invite us for a new round toward the end of the month. The Republicans were in trouble with their own presidential election and needed all the help they could get. With Israel as a domestic issue in the United States, it was standard election policy to court the American Jewish community through Tel Aviv and to try and win congressional favor by promising Israel unlimited support and a large chunk of the American taxpayer’s money. Bush and Baker were no exceptions. Having waited (and not very passively) for Rabin’s election, they were bending over backward trying to please him. Baker was full of praise for Rabin’s “new policies” and was trying to sell them to us wholesale as the answer to our prayers, turning a deaf ear to our misgivings and concerns, particularly on the issues of settlements and human rights. Bush invited Rabin to the United States and immediately approved the $10 billion loan guarantees These did not translate into votes; Clinton had made Israel a better offer: Jerusalem. (Ashrawi 1995:213).
When Clinton entered the White House, the time had come to reap the harvest which Schultz and Baker had sown. The dialogue with the PLO had given way to a full-fledged Israeli deal with Arafat, the Oslo accords (in which the United States had only a minor role). In succeeding years, these accords yielded a series of agreements for implementation of the Declaration of Principles, most recently the “Wye River” accords, whose implementation began in earnest in September 1999.
Clinton adopted a salami strategy towards foreign policy matters in general and the Middle East in particular, based on his view of the primacy of domestic economic and social policy, but with additional variables made up of his fluctuating domestic political fortunes and the men in power in Israel. His unrestricted sympathies, and those of the majority of his Middle Eastern team, went with the Labor Party, whether it was led by Rabin, Peres or Barak. And like his predecessor, he did everything he could to bring about the electoral defeat of the Netanyahu-led Likud during its period in office (1996 CHECK-1999). This could be accounted for by the greater reluctance of Netanyahu to move down the road to a full peace with the Arabs and in particular the Palestinians, and also by the great personal dislike that Clinton took to the Likud prime minister (Heacock 1998:87). But as time went along, Clinton seems to have gained a greater understanding and even sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. The intifada had largely run out of steam when he came to office, and he had no real prior knowledge of the situation when he entered the White House in January 1993. Indeed, his sympathies were known to lie with the Israelis, and an unprecedented percentage of American Jews voted for him. But the realities on the ground, the leeway afforded him as a leader enjoying the trust of Jewish voters (unlike his predecessor, whom they had come to detest), as well as close relations with the leadership of Israeli Labor, provided him with the firm political base for pursuing the policy on which he had embarked, of seeing the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations through to a successful conclusion which had in the collective mind of the parties come to signify the birth of a Palestinian State. The reason this had now become quasi-overt US policy is to be found in the evident strictures placed on Palestinian sovereignty once and for all, by the Oslo and post-Oslo process. The State in the making will inevitably be small, geographically divided, disarmed and economically dependent, most significantly on Israel and the West (Beck 1997). This creeping resolution of the Palestine problem brings together US public opinion, favorable to a Palestinian State, and the powerful pro-Israeli lobbies in the United States which are willing to follow what has become a shared Likud-Labor view in Israel: that the inevitable Palestinian State is acceptable so long as it is militarily insignificant and politically dependent. Such has been the outcome of the period initiated with the outbreak of the intifada: a gradual convergence of official as well as public views in the US, Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Whether, in the longer term, the Middle East (notably the Arab world, including Palestine, Jordan and Syria) will easily fit into the mold agreed upon by regional and world leaders, cannot yet be foreseen, and goes beyond the scope of the present work.
Conclusion:
Of successive US administrations since World War Two, Truman, Johnson, Nixon and Reagan were more systems- oriented, while Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter, Bush and Clinton followed more of a salami approach. In seeking the reason for this, it is remarkable to read in one of Richard Nixon’s post- presidential publications (as with other leaders, the owl of Minerva seems to have spread its wings over Nixon during the post-power dusk of his years) that successive US administrations were misguided in seeking a comprehensive Middle Eastern security framework (i.e., in integrating the area into the pro-American system). As failed examples of this type of attempt, he lists (Nixon 1992:210-211) the 1950 Franco- British-US Tripartite Declaration guaranteeing Middle East borders; the 1951 US-British Middle East Command; the 1951 US-Western European launching of the Middle East Defense Organization intended to limit arms sales to the region; the 1955 Baghdad Pact (which included Britain, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and the US); the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine ; the 1980 Carter Doctrine regarding the US willingness to repel any outside aggression against the Gulf region; and the 1981 Reagan quest for an anti-Soviet ‘strategic consensus’ on the Middle East. It matters little that he does not include any of his own (or rather, his and Kissinger’s, for this allows one to prolong our judgment to the end of Nixon’s second term, which was filled by his vice president, Gerald Ford) systemically inspired maneuvers designed primarily to ‘expel’ the Soviet Union from the area. Perhaps in his view the difference lies in his having acted unilaterally, while his predecessors and successors sought to involve Western allies. We can only agree with this judgment, and note that the ad hoc, or salami approach, was more likely to calm regional tensions and the systems approach to exacerbate them. The major Arab-Israeli wars took place during the systems regimes (Eisenhower moved decisively to reverse the results of the 1956 tripartite aggression on Egypt).
It is not easy, particularly in a short piece such as this one, to link the broad outlines of foreign policy with their specific efforts, and to spin the two together in an attempt at detecting patterns which would suggest one aspect of a possible theory of foreign policy behavior. Nonetheless, that is what has been attempted here, and I can only call for further research into the matter.
Our own research has indicated that those US administrations which adopted an ad hoc approach were more successful than those who attempted to deal with the Middle East from a systems perspective. But this has no bearing on the scholarly debate concerning the validity of systemic approaches to international relations in the region, on condition that these are cognitively and not policy-oriented. Furthermore, the weakness of US policymaking over the decades has tended to be that it tended to be made from a world-systems perspective, with little regard for the extent to which regions themselves functioned as relatively autonomous sub-systems. Analysis, and policy, seem since the end of the Cold War, to have gone some way towards adjusting their perspective towards regions (Fawcett and Hurrell 1995; Lake and Morgan 1997). This even applies to analyses of Middle Eastern international politics, which can now be viewed independently of the apparently ever-present variables of the former bipolar magnetic field (Barnett 1998). And an effort is beginning to be made, incorporating previous and current work published in the Middle East itself (Hilal 1983; Mursi 1995). Noteworthy in this regard is F. Gregory Gause’s effort (1999), because it represents the start of what is clearly still a long road towards defining the nature and functioning of the Middle Eastern system in relation to the rest of the world in an era in which the old unifying myths have been largely abandoned and the strictures of superpower rivalry have vanished. True, the one remaining superpower looms even larger on the horizon of the Middle East, but assuming that the systems approach adopted by so many US administrations is progressively being replaced by a salami approach (and assuming the purpose of the game is not simply to devour the salami, be it in the form of oil or of political and military resources!), it is not perhaps too much to hope that, within the confines of their interests, the United States of America will apply greater wisdom and balance to its Middle Eastern policies in the quest for a truly regional solution to regional problems.
George Bush began with the thought that the crusade against Saddam Hussein would, once the latter had been driven out of Kuwait, lead to a “New International Order” of which the Gulf and the Middle East would be a part. The sobering events which followed, beginning with his electoral defeat one year later and the protracted agonies through which the region continued to go for several years thereafter, seem to have informed his successor in the latter’s gradual adoption of a more balanced and regional approach. Although Clinton can be faulted for pursuing a rudderless policy in the face of the multiplication of political and humanitarian disasters and mass crimes in various parts of the world, he has to a certain extent internalized the debates, and synthesized the efforts of his predecessors in the Middle East. There is no reason to believe that his successors will lose the public support he was able to garner for his regional policies if they do not veer once again towards unconditional support for their special ally, Israel and the dyad’s currently privileged partner, Turkey. Should they do so, it is at any rate reasonable to predict that local conditions will once again become explosive, and that an American public, somewhat more conscious of the diversity of the region and of the national interest, and freed from the paranoid fears of the Cold War era, will limit the ability of the government to do so.
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