Pushing Luck Too Far

By Richard Curtiss

The Arabs call it baraka. When Arab bedouin lived close to the margin, it was considered a vital element of leadership. The Sheikh might be just and respected, but if the rain clouds somehow passed his people by, if the full moon emerged from cloud cover just as they were trying to give their enemies the slip, or if in the summer the oasis wells went dry, the Sheikh just didn't have baraka. They sought a new leader.

Americans call it luck. Many of us would just as soon have a leader who is charming, articulate and lucky as one with a lot more brains but no luck at all. Jimmy Carter read his own mail and made his own decisions as President. But he wasn't very lucky when hard liners like the Ayatollah Khomeini and Menachem Begin came into office just as the U.S. set out to do something about Middle East peace.

Maybe that's why many Americans didn't fault Carter's successor, who let others read his mail and make his decisions for him, when things went wrong. We called him the teflon President, because no matter what brush fires his handlers inadvertently started, he never got burned himself.

Like President Reagan, we've hoped for a long time that the Libyans were looking for a new leader, perhaps assisted by the many other Arab leaders against whom Muammar Qaddafi has conspired and who knew he was bringing grief upon them all. He's stirred up trouble in many parts of the world and has driven his oil producing country into near bankruptcy. He must have baraka, however because, thanks to the U.S. Government, he almost certainly has a new lease on power. Now the Arab masses see a leader who looked at the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians and responded, not with rhetoric but with action. Even if we get him in the end, now it won't be the death of a flake, but the birth of a martyr. Dead or alive, he may be the role model for a whole new crop of Third World leaders.

As for our teflon President, we think the next time he looks in the mirror he'll find he's badly singed. As the aerial strikes on Libya were being announced in Washington by a worried looking Caspar Weinberger and a beaming George Shultz, one network commentator noted that since we'd already faced the fact that there might be bloody retaliations, only two other things could go wrong: We could lose some airmen or we could kill some civilians. By then other pilots on the strike had already seen a U.S. electronic deception plane go down, taking two young American flyers with it. By the next day we learned that the many dead civilians included Muammar Qaddafi's adopted daughter, and the even greater number of wounded civilians included two of his young sons.

It pushed the totals of Americans killed in Israel's wars, on Reagan's watch, toward 400, and of Arab civilians killed by Israel or the U.S., on Reagan's watch, closer to 30,000. The President simply didn't acknowledge what had happened. His White House chief of staff joked that the words of the Marine hymn could now be changed to "from the halls of Montezuma to what's left of Tripoli." The President got a big laugh when he said Qaddafi "might take him to court."

As more Americans die, we may all come to wish that, when we first decided he was violating international law, we had tried to take Qaddafi to court. Twice his neighbors have hailed him into the World Court. He went, and when both decisions went against him, he complied. Why, if violations of international law were the issue and we had the proof, didn't we resort to the rule of law instead of the law of the jungle? Well, how could we after Nicaragua tried to haul us into court a few months earlier and we insisted that the World Court had no jurisdiction?

Although we couldn't let Qaddafi's "line of death" challenge go unanswered in the Gulf of Sidra, the idea actually seems to have originated with Americans. A generation ago, during some forgotten crisis, U.S. oilmen appealed to the U.S. Government to protect their installations and their tankers waiting offshore to load Libyan oil. We agreed that if foreign planes or vessels crossed a line we designated in the Gulf of Sidra, our planes based at Wheelus Air Force base, in Libya, would take defensive action. We drew the line. Apparently we only decided it was illegal when Qaddafi gave it a flaky new name.

We think our President's luck began to run out when his first Secretary of State fell under the spell of the Israel lobby and closed his eyes to the subsequent abominations in Lebanon in the summer of 1982. The President wisely hired a new man, who, afraid of being labelled pro Arab by the Lobby, then surrounded himself with a coterie of hard core Zionists. These courtiers hailed George Shultz's first effort, the Lebanese withdrawal agreement, as the greatest feat of diplomacy since the Congress of Vienna. When it fell apart, they blamed Syria, the only concerned party that had not been involved in its formulation.

Next they seem to have convinced the Secretary of State that the way to fight terrorism was not to go for its obvious major cause the cancer called the Palestinian problem but to strike at the symptoms. Totally aside from the morality of the strike on Tripoli, how could a Secretary of State be so tactically stupid?

Here's how. In an earlier crisis during a State Department seventh floor emergency meeting one of his aides was asked whether the Middle East experts who work on the sixth floor had submitted some requested opinions. Yes, the seventh floor flunky responded, but it's just what you'd expect to hear from them. Everyone laughed. The record doesn't show whether anyone bothered to read the opinions.

Perhaps this managerial technique now applies world wide. Presidential Spokesman Larry Speakes said with a straight face that the White House hadn't expected the Soviets to suspend advance summit talks over the Libya strike. Imagine, if Jody Powell had made that kind of statement, how the press would have erupted in disparaging remarks about pointy headed presidents who can't park their bicycles straight.

After that, its certainly no big deal that the Administration also seems taken aback by the anti American demonstrations in Western European capitals.

Probably the Secretary of State was too busy fighting terrorism to tell the President that the problem is that the Europeans believe the U.S. is pulling them, along with us, into Israel's wars. They don't want to go.

Anyway, if he'd asked his European experts, he'd only have gotten the answers you might expect from them. The President's still got a loyal friend in Margaret Thatcher. She, along with the leaders of two other countries in the world, Israel and Canada, supported him in the crunch. We wonder if Secretary Shultz has told the President that, in the first BBC poll taken after the event, 60 percent of her people didn't support her for abetting our Libyan adventure. We think our President may lose a friend over there, or the friend may lose her job.

How about the Middle East? There's jubilation among hardliners in Israel, a country with only two friends in the world: the U.S. and South Africa. The cardinal goal of Israeli foreign policy has been to isolate the U.S. in the Middle East so that we feel as dependent upon Israel as it is upon us. Now, with one strike, we've isolated ourselves in Europe too. That's baraka for Israel.

In the Arab camp, do you think President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt feels more secure in office today because we've struck at the "head of terrorism?" Qaddafi has tried to kill him in the past, but this week Egyptians are publicly mourning the loss of Qaddafi's daughter, and Egypt's President is prudently offering Libya medical aid.

For that matter, will you feel more secure the next time you fly than you did the last time? Are you more likely to bring your family to Washington to visit our national monuments and federal buildings this summer than you were last? If you have a relative in the armed forces do you think he or she is safer today because we've killed Qaddafi's daughter and wounded his sons? Were Libyan servicemen safer after 11 year old Natasha Simpson's death at the Rome airport than they were before?

The stock market is soaring. If it worries you that the companies involved are what we used to call the merchants of death, call them "high tech" instead. Maybe that will make you feel as good as the U.S. travel industry, which knows prudent Americans won't be going abroad for their vacations any more.

Maybe we're wrong about the President being not quite so lucky anymore. Maybe the American people are just a bunch of yahoos who really believe the whole world is out of step but us. Maybe international law, human rights, justice for the weak and afflicted and human compassion are just echoes from our past with no meaning for contemporary Americans. In that case, the President's teflon is still intact, no matter how many more of us kill and are killed fighting Israel's war against the world.

But maybe this round of disaster, or the next one, or the one after that will finally wake up the fundamentally decent American majority to the nature of the deeds being done in our name. Or, even better, maybe now that the President and the Secretary of State have demonstrated their machismo, they'll heed the advice of Senator Mathias of Maryland who appealed to them to follow up the Libyan strike by trying harder on the Middle East peace process. Doing so might still give meaning to the sacrifices by our own honored dead.

Maybe, one way or another, the American people will still get lucky and see clearly what lies ahead on the journey we've already begun to join Israel in its cruel and needless wars.