After Baker's Fourth Shuttle Next Move Is Up to Bush

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Mr. Baker is said to believe that with one more trip he might be able to bridge the remaining differences or make unmistakably clear which party—the Arab states, Israel or the Palestinians—is the obstacle. From the start, administration officials have insisted that their strategy was designed to make it easy for everyone to attend a peace conference or make it clear who was blocking the way and expose them to international pressure or rebuke. "

—Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, May 7, 1991

Prior to his fourth shuttle, the "peace process " initiated by James Baker III had been leak-proof. When a journalist accompanying the secretary of state quoted any unnamed "informed American source, " it was the secretary of state himself, Director for Policy Planning Dennis Ross or Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Margaret Tutwiler. If none of the above, it was an uninformed source.

To the annoyance of journalists like Thomas Friedman, for whom The New York Times paid good money to get a seat on the secretary's aircraft for four Middle East shuttle missions in two months, very little emerged from the first three missions. On the fourth, however, journalists began to get their money's worth.

Secretary Baker's tone as much as the substance of the press briefings let the media know where be saw the obstacles to a land for-peace settlement based upon UN Security Council Resolution 242. Then upon his return, it was his job to lay out the details to President George Bush. It won't be a report that Bush can file and forget. Desert Storm was a military success, but the long-term political results still hang in the balance. So does Bush's entire "new world order."

If the latter began and ended with the liberation of Kuwait, the term is just late-20th-century "newspeak" for 19th-century gunboat diplomacy. On the other hand, Bush may now begin to invest the same amounts of personal leadership and political capital in enforcing UN Security Council resolutions in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as he did in the Iraqi-Kuwaiti dispute. If so, the events of 1990 and 1991 will be a paradigm for the 21^st Century and, well, a real new world order.

"Middle East peace," which means settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute in a manner both parties can live with, is one of Bush's four announced goals for the aftermath of the Gulf war. Without it, progress is impossible on the other three. These are reduction in conventional armaments and a ban on weapons of mass destruction, reduction of the gulf between "haves" and "have-nots, " and encouraging the growth of democracy and governmental accountability.

With Israel in possession of nuclear weapons and occupying all of Jerusalem and Palestinian lands on both sides of the Green Line, obviously no Arab nation is going to agree to reduce its conventional arms. Nor will oil-rich Arab "haves," spending their money on weapons to protect their oil fields, have much to spare for "have-nots."

Nor, so long as there is an Israeli bogeyman, is there going to be much democratization or accountability in the Middle East. It was the real threat of Israeli expansion that enabled Arab strongmen like Saddam Hussain, Hafez Al-Assad and Muammar Qaddafi to seize and hold power. So long as they can maintain that power with promises to liberate Palestine rather than to improve the lives of their own people, there will be neither democracy nor accountability in states like theirs.

George Bush, therefore, has a lot riding on a real and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace. His most effective weapon in assembling and holding together Arab and Islamic members of the coalition to resist and roll back Saddam Hussain was his promise to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to turn, after Iraq was out of Kuwait, to the Palestine problem.

The US, as the world's only superpower, can, if it chooses to, impose a peace based upon Resolution 242. Or if it chooses, instead, to cajole the two sides to the peace table to trade land for peace, it can do that too. With the Soviet Union and the European Community on board, either can be done through the United Nations by economic means and without the use of military force.

Like the choice between military or economic means to force Iraq out of Kuwait, the results are preordained. The question is whether it is less politically costly to let peace be imposed through UN resolutions, or to use US aid to Israel, and Saudi aid to Syria, as leverage to get both to the peace table.

One consideration is that Saddam Hussain is still in power in Baghdad. He is doomed if President Bush decides not to allow Iraq to sell its oil until its strongman is gone. But, Bush will have to ask himself, is it prudent to tackle the Israeli-Palestinian problem immediately, before Iraq has the kind of new leadership which will allow the last of the Iraqi refugees to return home?

On the original schedule, Baker was to make one swing through the Middle East at the beginning of March, to be followed by Bush later in the same month. Saddam's refusal to vanish forced postponement of that trip and has continued to upset the schedule. Bush had planned a major Middle East policy address the first weekend in May. It, too, was postponed, even before his heartbeat irregularities on that same weekend, and postponed again a week later.

After the last Baker shuttle, however, Saddam may be the only remaining unpredictable factor. In Israel, unimaginative Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir seems likely to continue to vow that he will never trade land for peace, and continue to make procedural demands that he counts on Arabs rejecting, to postpone the holding of a conference.

His malignly inventive right-wing rival, Housing Minister Ariel Sharon, managed to open a new West Bank Jewish settlement with Israeli government funds each time Baker arrived for the first three shuttles. For the fourth shuttle, he outdid his previous gestures of defiance. An Israeli newspaper announced just before Baker landed that Sharon would build 36,000 new houses for Israeli Jews in East Jerusalem and adjacent West Bank land "annexed" by Israel, activities the US has said are illegal and obstacles to peace.

Unlike Shamir and Sharon, however, Israeli opinion is not so hostile to US goals as even a year ago. In an April survey by Prof. Asher Arian for the Jaffee Center for Stategic Studies, Israelis ranked peace highest among four priorities, the others being a Jewish majority in Israel, a democratic state, and an integral land of Israel.

Arian said results of the center's survey show a "crawling conciliation," as more Israelis gradually become willing to trade territory for peace. "The majority still opposes a Palestinian state, " the Haifa University professor said, "but a third now favors it, compared to a quarter when we began these studies in 1986."

American Jewish opinion seems similarly divided. In April, a delegation of prominent American Jews was invited by Israel's Council for Peace and Security, an organization of retired senior Israeli military officers who believe Israel's security needs can be satisfied without ruling over Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Theodore Mann, a member of the US delegation and a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said his group arrived with the impression that Israel was heading toward peace, but he was leaving with the feeling that peace is still a long way off.

"Maybe we are wrong; perhaps things are going on between Shamir and Baker that we don't know about, he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency [But] it is clear to me that this government is no more interested this year in withdrawal [from occupied territories] than it was last year."

He warned Israelis that the US would exert pressure on both Israel and other parties to the conflict "because without such pressure, peace would be difficult to achieve."

Jewish members of Congress showed strong, but contradictory, feelings. A Jewish Community Council breakfast for New York City members of the House of Representatives during the last week of April became a forum for Baker-bashing.

"This is the most anti-Israel administration we have had in Washington since Jimmy Carter," Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel told the audience. "An international conference would be nothing more than a stacked deck against Israel, as the United Nations has been a stacked deck against Israel."

"Shamir is in danger of alienating his best friends and emboldening his foes."

"I was enraged ... when after 10 hours of meetings in Saudi Arabia Baker made sure to criticize Israel publicly, " Democratic Rep. Nita Lowey fumed.

One Jewish Democrat was less critical, however. Said Rep. Ted Weiss: "I think the administration is right, although the style leaves something to be desired, to take advantage of this opportunity for peace in the Middle East."

Rep. Benjamin Gilman, a Jewish Republican member of the House of Representatives, was almost supportive of Baker. "I am not as cynical as some of my colleagues," Gilman said. "I think Secretary Baker, while he made comments with which we may not all agree, is trying to be a catalyst for peace. That doesn't mean imposing peace—it means negotiating peace."

Most interesting was the reaction of Douglas Bloomfield, formerly affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which predictably supports any Israeli government policy. Yet in the May 2 edition of the Washington Jewish Week, Bloomfield was almost as critical of Shamir as of Baker.

"Prime Minister Shamir appears to show total disdain for the peace process, " Bloomfield wrote. "Whenever a cabinet colleague shows signs of flexibility, Shamir promptly and publicly slaps him down. Shamir is in danger of alienating his best friends in the United States and emboldening his foes in the Bush administration and the Arab world...

"Baker's animus toward Israel is well known... Bush and Baker have mismanaged the US-Israeli relationship since the day they took office. In the past two years they have steadily eroded the good work done in the previous eight years by Ronald Reagan and George Shultz. We have gone from one of the most pro-Israel administrations in history to one of the most anti-Israel administrations."

On the Arab Side

On the Arab side, Palestine Liberation Organization officials in Tunis seemed oblivious to the significance of the Baker missions.

Not so, however, with the West Bank Palestinians with whom Baker met. They stated clearly in a memorandum to Baker that "the PLO is our sole legitimate leadership."

That said, however, they assured Baker they were "heartened by verbal commitments and statements of intent to solve the Palestinian question on the basis of the principle of land for peace and the implementation of all pertinent UN resolutions" and informed him: "Our objective remains to establish the independent Palestinian state on the national soil of Palestine, next to the state of Israel and within the framework of the two-state solution. "

President Hafez Al-Assad of Syria, generally as much a thorn in the side of peace initiatives as Yitzhak Shamir, did not give an inch on Baker's proposal to substitute a regional peace conference for one convened by the United Nations. This was seized upon by apologists for Israel in the US media as a means to spread the blame for failure equally between Israel and the Arabs. Initially they also sought to depict Saudi Arabian reluctance to participate in a conference as "pulling the rug out from under Baker." The Saudis solved the problem by agreeing to send Gulf Cooperation Council Secretary General Abdullah Bishara to represent all six GCC members.

In fact, at the outset of his travels, Baker had indicated that he saw no role in the initial negotiations for Saudi Arabia which, unlike the Arab "confrontation states" (Lebanon, Syria and Jordan), has no borders with Israel. Egyptian Ambassador to Washington El Sayed Abdel Raouf EI-Reedy, whose country borders Israel but already has signed a peace treaty, spoke for all the nonconfrontation states at a luncheon of the Overseas Writers Association April 29:

"If you solve the Palestinian question, I am absolutely convinced that the relations between Israel and the Arab world will be automatically and ipso facto solved and normalized." This logic, of course, also could be applied to holding a conference without Syria.

If Baker sees a green light in every Arab capital except Damascus, Bush is seeing much the same thing in the United States. His support with the general public, although ,down from its unprecedented 90 percent rating immediately after the Gulf war, is hovering around a still nearly unprecedented 80 percent. Nor is there any advance indication in public opinion polls that putting pressure for peace on the Shamir government in Israel will hurt those ratings.

In a Jan. 9 poll by The Washington Post and American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 66 percent of respondents thought the US should agree to an international conference on Arab-Israeli problems in return for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.

Even more to the point, with the air war well underway, in an early February poll by Time magazine and Cable News Network (CNN), Americans were asked: "After the war is over, do you think the US should try to pressure Israel to reach a peace settlement with the Palestinians?"

An overwhelming 63 percent of respondents said yes, and only 28 percent said no.

Bad Timing

It seemed an extraordinarily bad time, therefore, for Israeli Ambassador to the US Zalman Shoval to ask, on May 5, for $10 billion in loan guarantees from Washington to finance construction of housing for Soviet Jewish immigrants to Israel. Shoval said, in a speech to the American Jewish Committee, that Israel needed about $40 billion to supply housing, jobs and other needs for an estimated one million immigrants over the next five years. About half that amount could be supplied by Israel and Jews abroad, Shoval said, but the remainder had to come from the international community. He warned:

"We are going to ask the United States government and Congress and we're going to do that very soon, in September, for additional immigrant absorption guarantees of up to an amount of about $10 billion over the next five years—$2 billion every year."

The US government already has quietly authorized nearly double Israel's normal $1.8 billion in military and $1.2 billion in economic aid for the current 1991 fiscal year. The additional one-year-only authorizations include $1.1 billion for defense related items, $650 million to cover Israeli economic losses in the Gulf war, and $400 million in housing loan guarantees, bringing the fiscal 1991 total to $5,150,000,000.

Nor is that all. Among a myriad of additional items not included in the total above are $100 million in accelerated military deliveries, some $200 million for Israel's Arrow anti-missile missile development program, and at least $150 million for Patriot missile deliveries. Adding $2 billion, as the Israeli government is asking, to the existing total of $5.6 billion would provide a total of $7.6 billion in aid to Israel during the current fiscal year. That is a staggering $1,555 for each of Israel's claimed 4.9 million citizens.

The US government has the authority to hold back on these various aid items for a variety of reasons. Instead of hiding them in different parts of the federal budget, President Bush can go public with the totals and his reasons for holding back aid to an intransigent Israel. It would not cost him with public opinion, regardless of the reaction among Israel's congressional supporters.

The fact that Shoval brought up the $10 billion even as Baker was preparing for his fourth round of visits signaled that Israel really needs the money, or it will lose the Soviet Jews. Already the huge influx of immigrants has slowed. When the Soviet Union began granting visas, virtually all of the Soviet emigrants chose the US as their destination, with fewer than 5 percent going to Israel.

Only when the US, at the behest of US Jewish organizations acting in concert with Israel, limited the number of immigrants into the US did the massive flow to Israel begin. Now, as word filters back to the USSR that the Israeli government is unable to supply immigrants jobs, housing, or special financial allowances after the first year, the flow of immigrants has slowed dramatically. Up to one third of the Soviet immigrants already in Israel are believed to be planning to leave when their first-year allowances run out if, by then, they still have not found jobs. Israel needs massive help now, not after the first immigrants have left and those still in the Soviet Union have decided to wait there until they can get visas for Western countries.