Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1998, Pages 11-12

Affairs of State

Netanyahu and Saddam: U.S. Diplomacy's Problem Children Have More in Common Than Supporters Admit

By Eugene Bird

An unlikely duo: Binyamin Netanyahu and Saddam Hussain. Yet these two now are tying American Middle East policy into knots that require extraordinary amounts of time from the secretary of state, the president and Congress.

It's hard to say which of the two is doing greater damage to the United States in the Middle East. Saddam seems to have the edge at present, running rings around American policymakers as they frantically try to catch up with his ploys to prevent a clean sweep of his nasty weapons of mass destruction. But the Israeli prime minister may be doing more long-term damage to any possible normalization of relations between the world's only superpower and all of the Arab world.

Bibi's Response: "Call Me"

What a contrast between the styles of James Baker and Madeleine Albright! Or maybe that should be between George Bush and Bill Clinton. Israeli right-wingers are having a field day pointing out that Netanyahu's supporters on the Internet are saying to Clinton "Call me, I won't call you," almost the same message used by Baker in chiding Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. But instead of putting a freeze on the loan guarantees Israel wanted back in 1991 as did Bush, Clinton seems to have settled for putting a freeze on White House coffee klatsches for Netanyahu.

The U.S. president refused to meet the Israeli prime minister when their planes were parked close to each other at Los Angeles Airport in November, and they won't be meeting again in December unless Israel offers "sizable" withdrawals, according to Netanyahu aides. But threatening to withhold White House visiting privileges and then waiting to see who blinks first does not really address the problem of direct violations by Israel of agreements made less than a year ago to carry out three withdrawals by mid-1998.

The latest now-you-see-it, now-you-don't Israeli offer will be one withdrawal, with the extent of it to be determined solely by the worst right-wingers in the Netanyahu cabinet: Ariel Sharon, Rafael Eitan and Yitzhak Mordechai.

The Israeli cabinet decision to authorize withdrawal (16 voting for it, with 2 abstentions) was completely vague. Yet the U.S. State Department spokesperson refused to comment on whether or not it met the "sufficient" and "credible" test established by Albright for speeding up final status talks.

The problem is that all through the five years since Bush's brilliant beginning at Madrid, when Syria's surprise agreement to attend after numerous shuttle trips by James Baker trapped Prime Minister Shamir into the first serious multi-party talks between Israel and its neighbors since Israel's creation, one important factor has been missing: What is the U.S. view on how to reach, as Henry Kissinger used to say, a "mutually unsatisfactory" division of Palestine!

The Clinton State Department at this point is totally unwilling to even think about proposing a real settlement (although we are told that Madeleine Albright occasionally will discuss ideas with her closest advisers). All that Ambassador Dennis Ross and his deputy, Aaron David Miller, are willing to say at this crucial juncture is that they are trying to "narrow the options" for Netanyahu.

When American secretaries of state are accomplishing little else, the press corps is reduced to measuring the mileage they can claim. Warren Christopher holds the four-year record at three-quarters of a million miles—three times to the moon and back—which is more than even James Baker. But in her first 10 months in office, by the time her African trip was completed Madeleine Albright had logged over 50 countries, and more than 150,000 miles, a first-year record. That does not count the numerous trips around the United States, which may also be a one-year record for a secretary of state.

In Kuwait, Failing a Challenge

Normally the intense exposure of personal visits to an area sharpens the official traveler's political reflexes, but this has not yet happened in Secretary Albright's case. A year ago when she was new on the job, she casually told "Sixty Minutes"' Leslie Stahl that she thought keeping the embargo on Iraq was "worth the price" of half a million dead Iraqi children.

Ten months and 150,000 miles later, however, she is equally prone to outrage Middle Eastern audiences. When she was asked in Kuwait "why the United States always pays attention to U.N. resolutions that affect Arabs, but does not pay attention to those that affect the State of Israel," her incredible response was to cite U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for a land-for-peace settlement.

While these certainly are the resolutions to which previous U.S. administrations have given the most lip service, they also are the ones the Clinton administration has permitted Binyamin Netanyahu to ignore totally. By now the basic problem for Madeleine Albright is not dual containment of Iraq and Iran, but the third, never mentioned, leg of containment. That is defining the borders, and therefore containing, the state of Israel.

Doha: A U.S. Debacle

The central focus of Albright's most recent Middle East-South Asian visits was the economic summit at Doha, which turned out to be a diplomatic disaster for the United States, and a golden opportunity for all of its Arab allies to demonstrate, either by staying away or by coming to bash Israel, their low regard for Clinton administration double standards regarding Israel and Iraq. Simultaneously, Iraq's Saddam Hussain threw out American members of the U.N. weapons inspector teams, then let them back in, and gained diplomatically in terms of sympathy from the Arab world for the plight of his people.

In fact, Saddam and Netanyahu both appear to be winning important concessions from the United States. The U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq has been renewed for six more months, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan soon may recommend that it be increased from $2 billion to $3 billion in petroleum sales every six months.

Similarly, the U.S. position on land-for-peace was further eroded through the four points suggested by Albright in September: a time-out on settlements, renewed Palestinian emphasis on security for Israel, a further redeployment, and acceleration of final status talks (before Israel has completed the three withdrawals specified in the Oslo accords).

Hawks of a Feather

Saddam and Netanyahu are remarkably alike in their philosophic origins: Both are products of Israel's 1967 "pre-emptive" war that ended with Jewish control of the largest area in history, temporarily spreading from the Suez Canal to the Jordan River, and including a large part of Syria.

One of these leaders, "Bibi" Netanyahu, found his life's work in devising ways to hold as much of that territory as possible for future generations of Jews. In doing so he was mindful of the injunction of his father, a long-time associate of Menachem Begin in the Jewish nationalist underground, that the 1967 war "was a great triumph, but within 25 years some Israeli leader will try to give all of this land back for peace." Since Bibi is driven not to be that leader, so much for a serious attempt at land-for-peace.

In the wake of the humiliating 1967 war, Saddam Hussain, a hardened young Arab nationalist, was engineering a coup against his own Ba'athist party and taking over Baghdad, where the Americans had just lost their brand-new embassy (now Iraq's foreign ministry) because of what Israel had done.

In the 30 years since the Israeli attack against Egypt and Syria, the U.S. has had normal relations with Iraq for only a brief period in the 1980s, when Iraq was engaged in war with America's other Middle Eastern bogeyman, the Islamic revolutionary government of Iran.

Same Philosophy, Same Tactics

Both Saddam and Netanyahu are driven by the same nationalist visceral experience, and both rose to the top in milieux where terrorism and assassination are accepted means for achieving policy ends. In fact, Netanyahu's father was one of the top Jewish terrorists, competing for that honor with Yitzhak Shamir, who beat him out as leader of the extremist Jewish revisionists when their founder, Vladimir Jabotinsky, died in 1940.

Saddam exploited the Iraqi reaction to the 1967 debacle for the Arabs. Netanyahu rode the Israeli reaction to terrorist bombings to victory first in the Likud party and later in Israel's national election of May 1996.

A Baghdad-Tel Aviv Axis?

Saddam has survived and now has the possibility of breaking out of the containment noose, using bargaining tactics that the Israelis understand. A major Israeli intelligence personality, General Aharon Yariv, said in 1993 that Saddam had to be admired for his ability at leading the Iraqi people and building a formidable military machine. He predicted even then, only two years after the Gulf war, that it would be possible for Israel to make a deal with Saddam.

Would Netanyahu ever say such a thing? Not likely now, for he knows he needs enemies like Saddam to keep the American aid flowing.

The Department of State faces both Saddam and Netanyahu with awkward helplessness. With Iraq, it allowed Russia to act on its behalf, granting Iraq an extension of its oil-for-food while growling mightily and threatening B-2 raids.

With Israel, the administration seems to believe that merely denying Netanyahu a visit to the White House will pressure him to withdraw from a significant part of the West Bank, an area upon whose retention Netanyahu has based his entire political career.

The rapid erosion of the 400-page Oslo accords is matched by the equally rapid erosion of credibility for U.S. containment policy toward Iraq and Iran.

During the recent Iraqi crisis, not once did the administration admit that it was the failing peace process, due almost entirely to Binyamin Netanyahu, that ended U.S. ability to keep together the alliance against Iraq. Complete separation of America's problems with Israel and in the Gulf remained the Clinton administration mantra, despite European and Arab voices pointing out the clear linkage.

It was Ariel Sharon, the great Israeli hawk, who destroyed that illusion by asking King Hussein of Jordan to warn Iraq of dire consequences if it aimed any missiles at Israel as part of an Iraqi response to possible American bombing.

No connection? One would hope the U.S. had learned a lesson from the Gulf war.

But speeding up the peace process by bringing common sense to the Israeli negotiating table is a non-starter with America's domestic politics-driven policymakers. The largest Israeli newspaper thanked God, almost literally, for the Israeli influence on Congress which prevents real U.S. presidential pressure on Israel.

More Erosion = Blowback

Another year of political erosion on both the Palestine-Israel and the Iraq-Iran fronts may create uncontrollable chaos in U.S. relations with both Jews and Arabs. Diplomats have a name adopted from the intelligence community for what might happen: It is called "blowback," or the law of unintended consequences.

Meanwhile Saddam and Netanyahu are only seizing what they perceive as a chance in each of their spheres to fill a vacuum. Politics abhors such vacuums.