George Shultz's Foreign Policy May Be Hazardous to Your Health

By Richard Curtiss

A year ago Andrew Killgore wrote in this publication that the United States, under the influence of Israel's all-powerful American lobby, had become Israel's most dangerous enemy. At that time he had to explain why. Now many intelligent Israelis, and informed American Jewish supporters of Israel, can explain why and are doing so. You read it here first.

Our thesis today is that George Shultz is on the verge of becoming the most glaringly unsuccessful Secretary of State in recent U.S. history. Unlike most other contenders in this crowded field, however, his failure is becoming painfully obvious even while he's still in office. And, as with many of them, it's a direct result of his Middle East policy.

Let's look at his formidable competition for this claim. Mr. Shultz may prove to be more unsuccessful than Dean Rusk, that highly intelligent and personally likeable Secretary of State who acquiesced in silence as two Democratic Presidents in a row raced pell mell into the Viet Nam quagmire.

More unsuccessful than the not-so-likeable Republican, Henry Kissinger, whose claim to consistent failure is awesome. Even before Kissinger moved from National Security Adviser to Secretary of State he had undermined his predecessor's carefully crafted Rogers Plan, which might have resolved the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as early as 1970. As Secretary of State, Kissinger arranged to surrender in Vietnam and call it victory thousands of deaths after he could have pulled out on the same terms.

By constantly denigrating Anwar Sadat as not worthy of a hearing, Kissinger made the 1973 Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel inevitable. He then personally prolonged it for unnecessary weeks because Golda Meir's generals kept telling him they needed only another 48 or 24 hours to take back all the land they'd lost. They never did, of course, and thousands more died.

Kissinger's second volume of memoirs contains chapter after chapter explaining how he never stopped working, night and day, for Israel. So why, he seems to be asking, do they hate and distrust me now?

To this day Henry Kissinger still doesn't understand that, by judging every Middle East issue only on the basis of Israeli-defined Israeli interests, and by giving Israel whatever it said it needed, he caused thousands of unnecessary deaths and laid the groundwork for Israel's descent into the moral, political and economic chaos we see there today.

The next Secretary of State who didn't understand any of this was Alexander Haig who, whether knowingly or unknowingly, certainly gave the "green light" to Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon. That bloodbath was so awful that President Reagan fired Haig, whose failure was certainly the fastest on record.

Then along came George Shultz, seemingly a breath of fresh air, whose first initiative, the Reagan Plan, was so realistic and reasonable that almost all of the Middle East countries accepted it. All but Israel.

Menachem Begin's sarcastic rejection of the plan, only hours after it was announced, was accompanied by the usual theatrics and posturing. In effect, he was saying I won't make peace with my neighbors, even on this remarkably generous (to Israel) basis. You'll have to make me do it. That's what Israeli leaders of all persuasions say about any U.S. compromise solution. Make me do it.

And then we don't. And, true to form, Shultz didn't.

Instead he gave more money to Israel, much of which Begin used to "create facts" in the West Bank and Jerusalem to make a peace with the Palestinians as difficult for Israel and expensive for the U.S. as possible. Instead of reacting with justifiable outrage, Shultz instead poured all of his energy into an agreement to pay Israel, in Syrian coin, for a withdrawal from Lebanon that Israel was eager to make in any case. When the then U.S. Ambassador to Syria pointed out that the Syrians were not going to join in any withdrawal plan they had no role in formulating, Shultz was furious with his Ambassador. When the Syrians did just what Shultz had been told they would do, he was furious with them.

While expressing his outrage, he inadvertently discovered how to get along with the boss. President Reagan has long been locked into some celluloid time warp where young actors get great film roles by making impassioned pleas for Americans to keep pitiful Jewish refugees from being pushed into the sea by savage Arabs. Never mind that for the past 39 years it's been the Arabs who were the pitiful refugees. The first scenario played well in Southern California during Ronald Reagan's formative years. George Shultz apparently decided it might still play in Peoria.

So he set out to punish all of the Arabs. Maybe because they're all related to the Syrians. Or maybe because Libya's leader, with his funny hats and megalomanic statements, is so easy to despise. He got a lot of help from Muammar Qaddafi, who proclaimed from a tractor seat a "line of death" across the sea and from the hospital beds of wounded Libyans a "line of fire" across the land. And from his enemy, President Hafiz al-Assad of Syria, who gives any Palestinian willing to sell out Arafat free room and board in Damascus. Assad paraded rented Palestinian buccaneers like "Abu Nidal" and "Abu Musa" before television cameras to declare "war on Americans." That plays well with the mob in the Arab world and undercuts the moderates. The fact that the American press consistently calls these extremists "the PLO" when in fact they are the Syrian-created opposition to Arafat's PLO only adds to the glee.

We think that George Shultz didn't have a clue, when he decided to stop playing for Middle East peace and start playing for Peoria, that it might take years to cram the malign spirits he was unleashing back into their box. A lot of other people understand, however.

Let's start with Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones. Will they ever forget the night George Shultz was preening himself before U.S. television cameras while at that very moment in Tripoli rescue workers were picking up the severed hands of little children blown to smithereens by American "smart bombs" that had missed their military targets?

How about nearly three million Arab Americans, and additional hundreds of thousands of American Muslims? They thought they had so conscientiously vanished into the melting pot that people hardly remembered they were there. Then the Reagan Administration started treating Arabs and Muslims overseas as if they were a kind of disease. Now Arab American organizations are firebombed and American mosques are vandalized. Americans with Arab or Islamic names receive telephone threats in the middle of the night, and their kids have to learn to fight to survive at school. FBI Director William Webster said this month that of the seven terrorist acts recorded in the U.S. in 1985, four were directed against such Americans by Jewish extremists. How long will it be before some unbalanced victim starts calling Jewish families in the middle of the night?

What do the Israelis have to say about the new relationship? A Western diplomat in Jerusalem told a journalist: "Every Secretary of State has people he consults outside of the structure of government on various areas. Shultz consults one man on the Middle East—Shimon Peres."

Peres himself recently proclaimed on Israeli television: "We are no longer alone. Suddenly you wake up in the morning and you're no longer the chief fighter, certainly not the only one, against terrorism."

Americans may not know that in the new lexicon "terrorist" means "enemy of Israel," but obviously Peres knows.

In an interview with Mary Curtius, published in the May 6 Christian Science Monitor Avishai Margalit, a professor at the Hebrew University, at first seemed to be saying the same things:

There never was an American administration that supported right-wing Israeli policy to such an extent. Israeli UN Ambassador Benjamin Netanyahu is an American spokesman in the UN, just as Jeane Kirkpatrick was a spokesman for Israel. They are interchangeable. It's the same world view between the Israeli right and the Republicans in the United States."

Margalit then got to the point: "I think this is a disaster for Israel. Ideally, I want the U.S. to force both Israel and the moderate Arabs to come to an agreement. With no pressure from the U.S., there will be no initiative from Israel."

The Curtius article records "a growing belief among Peres' aides that progress will not be made without some American arm twisting—of Israel as well as the Arabs." She also quotes "a senior Israeli analyst": "Israel has unprecedented support from the American public, Congress and senior elements in the Administration—there are some drawbacks to this." The drawback, he explains, is that the U.S. is reluctant to take any diplomatic initiative in the Middle East that might anger the Israelis.

That is why Shultz is macho about punishing the Arabs but a total Milquetoast when it comes to asking the Israelis to help solve a dispute that creates problems for the U.S. all over the globe. And why Shultz never hints that instead of cutting into the $1.4 billion down payment on his $4 billion plan to fortify U.S. Embassies around the world rather than solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Congress might look instead for savings in some portion of the $5.3 billion he says we need to give Israel and Egypt next year.