The PLO and Poor George Shultz

By Richard H. Curtiss

"I think Ronald Reagan is taking the political flak and giving George Bush an opportunity to start with a clean slate in the Middle East."
—Andrew Young, Dec. 14, 1988.

Poor George Shultz. Whatever he sets out to do in the Middle East backfires. The Palestine National Council on Nov. 15 in Algiers reversed its insistence on a "democratic secular state" and accepted a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. But when the United Nations scheduled a special General Assembly session to hear about it, Shultz made an "intensely personal decision" to violate US treaty obligations to the UN and bar PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat from coming to New York.

Shultz was amazed when the entire civilized world, and even the US media, erupted. After begging the US to reconsider, 153 of the 159 members of the United Nations voted to adjourn the session to Geneva, where it's not a crime for a Palestinian to extend an olive branch.

After that, things just got more confusing for George Shultz. Friendly Arab and European leaders, and Jewish and Arab-American individuals, had been working not for months, but years, to produce the Algiers decision. All understood that until the PLO met the admittedly one-sided conditions set by the United States for a dialogue, there could be no peace.

Swedish Foreign Minister Sten Andersson had actually set up a task force within his government, involving secret contacts with peace-seeking American Jews whom he trusted, rather than George Shultz, whom he didn't.

"From the beginning, the Swedish strategy was to seek progress in the Middle East by dealing with the PLO and not directly with Israel, which seemed intransigent," according to Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times. "The goal was to instead apply pressure on Israel through the United States."

Ironically, it was almost certainly pressure from Mikhail Gorbachev that made the difference at Algiers. Soviet diplomats had warned Palestinian radicals that if Arafat had the political courage to accept a two-state solution, and the radicals then tried to pull the rug out from under him, the Soviets would pull the rug out from under the radicals. Although the vote to adopt the PNC decisions was 253 for, 46 against, and 10 abstentions, none of the 56 dissenters walked out. It meant the Palestinians had reversed more than a generation of policy, with the support of every Arab state except Syria and Libya, and the puppet Palestinian terrorist groups directed by those two spoiler regimes.

But George Shultz wouldn't give the messenger of peace a visa. When reporters asked the president if this didn't send the "wrong signal," Ronald Reagan said it showed instead that "we aren't patsies."

In fact, everyone in the world who could distinguish a kuffiya from a yarmulke realized that this was an opportunity for peace that must not be allowed to slip away. In the Arab world, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was one of many heads of state who advised Yasser Arafat to swallow his pride. It was essential that the Reagan administration start the dialogue with the PLO and take the political "hit" from Israel's American lobby, which could hardly accuse either Reagan or Shultz of being "anti-Israel."

Only George Shultz seemed oblivious. Perhaps he didn't even know that in the fall of 1979 the lame-duck Carter administration had offered to push through a reluctant Congress a long-delayed sale of AWACS to Saudi Arabia. The incoming Reaganauts naively said they could handle it without any help from the Democrats. They did, after a bruising battle in Congress that cost them political capital and made them shy away from further tangles with Israel's powerful lobby. Dialogue with the PLO, like the AWACS, sale, was a foreign policy imperative. But an outgoing administration could better absorb the political flak.

Meanwhile, the Swedes had been hard at work. In November they had secretly brought together with PLO officials three American Jews. They were Los Angeles publisher Stanley Sheinbaum, and Rita Hauser and Drora Kass of the American arm of the International Center for Peace in the Middle East, an Israeli group linked to former Foreign Minister Abba Eban. The Swedes took the resulting joint statement to Washington. George Shultz professed interest, but the next day refused Arafat a visa for New York.

Nevertheless, one week later Yasser Arafat was persuaded by Arab heads of state to swallow his pride and go to Sweden. This time Arafat, and a delegation which had increased to five American Jews, signed and released a joint statement.

Not quite enough, Shultz's aides told the Swedes. There was a flurry of phone calls in which Swedish officials literally held State Department officials on one line, and PLO officials on the other. Okay, the Swedes finally said, Arafat's going to say the "magic words" in his speech to the General Assembly in Geneva. Confidential phone calls alerted American allies and the Israeli government to the impending breakthrough which would put the US and the PLO on speaking terms. The Israelis immediately revealed the news on the radio. Instead of stomping out, as the Israelis hoped he would, Arafat made his talk anyway. Afterward his spokesman Bassam Abu Sharif's triumphant smile faded into incredulity when he was told that George Shultz had said the words still weren't right.

This time George Bush stopped pretending indifference about what he had called a "damn fool decision." Hosni Mubarak and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia were on the phone again, this time not only to Arafat, but to Washington as well.

So, one day after his speech, Arafat held a press conference and this time, instead of speaking in Arabic, he carefully read a statement in English. "Renounce," his advisers whispered loudly when he had trouble with a word handwritten into the typed transcript. "Renounce," Yasser Arafat repeated. After that it didn't matter that what he "renounced" instead of "denounced" sounded, as he pronounced it in his heavily accented English, a lot more like "tourism" than "terrorism."

This time no one called the Israelis much in advance. In fact, the press conference was publicly announced only 30 minutes before a stone-faced George Shultz faced the TV cameras to state: "The Palestine Liberation Organization today issued a statement in which it accepted UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, recognized Israel's right to exist in peace and security, and renounced terrorism. As a result, the United States is prepared for a substantive dialogue with PLO representatives."

Until that moment, Shultz had been expecting to go down in history as one of the greatest friends that Israel had ever had in the US government. Right up there with Lyndon Johnson and Henry Kissinger. Shultz would be remembered as the man who had pumped life into the veins of a depleted Israeli economy with an ocean-sized transfusion of US taxpayer dollars. The man who had treated the PLO as a pariahto whom no one could speak-or even find after he closed its Washington office. The man who made it possible for Israel to hang on to the land it was supposed to give back for peace.

And now he was reluctantly authorizing a US dialogue with the PLO. How did what Yasser Arafat said on the l4th differ from what he said on the 13th, Shultz was asked. "it was clear. It was not encumbered," Shultz solemnly intoned, ignoring the Swedes, who said the basics had been in the Algiers declaration, and that all of it was in the Geneva speech.

Asked when the dialogue would begin, Shultz explained glumly: "I'm making this response on behalf of the president. I might say the president, the vice president, agree with this and I'm authorizing now the ambassador in Tunis to undertake this dialogue, But when there will be a meeting, I don't know." The meeting, in fact, was a day and a half later.

Although the press conference was such a painful experience for him, initiating the dialogue with Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate. the PLO may eventually go down in history as George Shultz's only positive accomplishment in the Middle East. It has been his nemesis since he was first passed over for the job of Reagan's secretary of state eight years ago because, as president of California's Bechtel Corporation, he was said to be too close to the Saudis.

The job went instead to retired General Alexander Haig, who blindly trusted the Israelis until he was fired for giving a "green light" to General Ariel Sharon's disastrous June 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Reagan decided he needed Shultz after all, even though Shultz said at his confirmation hearings that his only reservation about joining the Reagan administration was its Middle East policy.

Right after Shultz took over, Sharon's tanks rolled into West Beirut, in direct contravention of a promise made to Ronald Reagan's personal emissary, Philip Habib. The resulting massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila was in direct contravention of a guarantee for their safety made by Habib through the Lebanese as a condition of Yasser Arafat's evacuation. Shultz set out promptly to change all that with the "Reagan Plan" for Middle East peace.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin rejected his plan in less than 24 hours and, just to show Shultz who was boss, opened 10 new Jewish settlements in the middle of the West Bank territories that the Reagan plan would have passed back to King Hussein of Jordan.

Shultz dropped the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which is at the root of virtually every American problem throughout the Middle East. He set out instead to deal with one of its symptoms, the civil war in Lebanon.

US Marines had left Beirut after evacuating the PLO to end the fighting. After the massacre, George Shultz insisted on sending the Marines back into Lebanon, even though the civilians they were supposed to protect Were dead. To keep his troops with no mission busy, he allowed them to replace the Israelis in positions all around hostile West Beirut and its airport. Before the Marines were withdrawn 15 months later, they had clashed with Israelis, Druze, and Shi'ites. The latter had blown up the American Embassy in West Beirut, with appalling loss of life, and then killed 241 US servicemen instantly with a single truck bomb.

The Marines withdrew, under fire. Afterward, George Shultz acquiesced in the shelling by US warships of Druze villages all along the ridge line overlooking Beirut. No one knows how many innocent civilians died, but no Lebanese will ever forget who killed them.

To extricate their own forces from Lebanon, the Israelis enlisted Shultz to negotiate an agreement whereby Syrian forces, whose presence had stopped the Lebanese civil war in 1976, were to withdraw along with Israeli forces, who had re-ignited the civil war in 1982. When his own ambassador in Syria told him the Syrians would not agree to any plan in which they had no input, Shultz called a meeting on Syria to which he invited every US ambassador in the area except one—his envoy in Damascus.

When at the meeting his ambassador to Jordan gave him the same advice, Shultz started ignoring all of his own Middle East advisers and listening to the Israelis, whose supporters in the State Department consequently enjoyed an astonishing increase in influence. Shultz's personal chief of staff, M. Charles Hill, had served in the embassy in Tel Aviv and on the Israeli desk, but nowhere else in the Middle East. A word from him in Shultz's seventh-floor suite could negate a policy carefully worked out by a roomful of sixth floor Middle East specialists.

As a result, Lebanon, which was once the centerpiece of US influence and the showcase of free enterprise in the Middle East has, after 14 years of warfare, seen its government replaced by two competing juntas and has ceased to function as a country.

A Locus of Israeli Influence

Traditionally, the check on Israeli influence in Washington is the State Department. Under George Shultz it became a locus of Israeli influence instead. When Col. Robert (Bud) MacFarlane moved from the State Department to the White House he took the virus with him. There what had started as an Israeli plan for "an opening to moderates" in the government of Israel's traditional ally, Iran, soon blossomed into arms to the ayatollah and became the era of Oliver North and John Poindexter. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger vigorously opposed it and was cut "out of the loop." George Shultz opposed it too, but apparently very quietly. Few in the White House even noticed when Shultz took himself voluntarily "out of the loop."

Instead of resigning or digging in to oppose in Washington a disastrous foreign policy initiative, Shultz honed his stern "anti-terrorist" oratory. He roamed the world inveighing abroad against the kind of arms sales to the Ayatollah Khomeini's "terrorist regime" in Iran he knew the US was carrying out at home.

History will ask what went wrong with a man who, at the beginning, had seemed so right for the job. His apologists tell many stories, centering on his deep personal antipathy for Syrian President Hafez al Assad, whom he blamed for the failure of his withdrawal plan. Why this antipathy to an Arab spoiler should be transferred to the many friendly states in the Arab camp remains a mystery. So is his antipathy for Yasser Arafat. It is Assad whose Palestinian hirelings have tried to kill the most moderate officials of Yasser Arafat's PLO. It is Assad, not Arafat, who shelters the real Palestinian terrorists, many of whom are funded by Muammar Qaddafi, the other great Arab spoiler, and also the enemy of Yasser Arafat. Why is it that Shultz could never understand that his policies gave political sustenance to the Arab radicals and America haters, and jeopardized the rulers of 18 Arab states with which the US has friendly relations.

Shultz didn't understand because he took his Middle East advice from the Israeli government and its supporters on his own staff. It may all have begun with two incidents, not in Damascus but in Washington, DC. The first was during the worst of the Israeli siege of Beirut, after the normally disengaged Ronald Reagan had fired Haig and personally intervened to stop the carnage with the help of Saudi Arabia and NATO allies. While they labored to undo the effects of Begin's dishonesty and Sharon's savagery, the president's aides were astonished to hear him remark, wistfully, that he wanted to get things cleared up over there quickly "so that we can get back to working with the Israelis again." George Shultz may have realized right then that in Reagan's celluloid world it would always be American and Israeli good guys against the bad guys of the whole Third World.

The second incident is murkier, but it's said that a few months after he had become secretary of state, a worried George Shultz confided to an aide that he seemed to be getting no media support for anything he undertook. Maybe you should spend less time on Middle East matters, the aide ventured, and see if that improves your press. Shultz took the advice and his problems with the press vanished even as American problems in the Middle East proliferated.

Forging Unbreakable Bonds With Israel

Shultz made his priorities vividly clear at a members only national convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). After hearing himself praised as the economic savior of Israel, Shultz reached for the brass ring. During his incumbency, he boasted, he would fashion such strong bonds between Israel and the United States that it would take any successor more than an eight-year term to dismantle them.

His successor, James Baker III, is not yet aboard, but the first restrictive tie was snipped on Dec. 16 in Tunis. On the same day, in Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, speaking confidently, as usual, for both Israel and the United States, announced that the first time a Palestinian threw a firebomb at an Israeli, Yasser Arafat's pledge on terrorism would be considered broken. A few hours later the Department of State said the US realized it could not hold Yasser Arafat accountable for acts committed by groups or individuals not under his control. Snip again.

Peres must have been non-plussed, He's not used to hearing the US make its own Middle East policy.

George Shultz is not quite gone but his inability to foresee the consequences of his Middle East actions, like his denial of a visa to Arafat, is already legendary.

"I've finally figured him out," a grinning former US Senator James Abourezk told an Arab-American audience in Virginia. "He's been a secret agent of Yasser Arafat all along." At a Washington, DC, rally marking the first anniversary of the Palestinian uprising, a smiling Ambassador Clovis Maksoud, Arab League representative to the United Nations, led a laughing crowd of Palestinians and their supporters in "a grateful round of applause for George Shultz."

When it comes to the Middle East, George Shultz has been skillful in only two respects: keeping the support of Israel and its friends in Congress and the media, and generally being away when there were tough or unpopular decisions to be made in the State Department. For the latter, if nothing else, the world should perhaps be thankful.

Richard H. Curtiss, a retired Foreign Service information officer, is chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute.