May/June 1991, Page 13

To Tell the Truth

Bye-Bye the "Strategic Asset": Hello the Client State

By Leon T. Hadar

In the short run, at least, Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and his Likud government said that they have emerged as winners in the Gulf war. After all, the military power of Israel's adversary, Saddam Hussain, was destroyed, and Israel's regional nuclear monopoly is no longer challenged. The PLO's diplomatic status was diminished and the Palestinian cause may also have suffered serious damage. Moreover, Israel's "amazing restraint" during the war has been quickly translated into a bold request for massively increased American financial and military aid.

However, the anti-Saddam coalition of Western and Arab forces destroyed more than the military power of the Iraqi ruler. It also demolished the myth of Israel's role as America's "strategic asset" in the Middle East. The US stationed its bombers in airfields as far away as England, and not in those available in the geographically closer Israel. While close to 40 nations, including Romania and Argentina, participated in one way or another in the American-led military operation, Israel was requested not to deploy its military might, subsidized since 1967 by the American taxpayer, to contribute to the rapid victory in the Gulf.

Actually, Israel proved to be an expensive diplomatic and military liability during the war. Not only could it not perform any effective military role in the crisis because it is a political pariah in the area, but Washington found itself using crucial military air power resources in order to defend Israel from Iraqi Scud attacks.

The Gulf war, in fact, sank the concept of Israel as America's unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Eastern Mediterranean. The US will, therefore, almost certainly return to the more disengaged approach that characterized its relationship with Israel before the Reagan administration's "strategic consensus" policy automatically promoted Israel, along with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, into an American "strategic asset."

The lessons of the Gulf war, as well as the end of the Cold War, are bound to reduce the connection between Israel and the United States to a more "normal" state of affairs. As Israel relinquishes its militarily hollow and politically harmful role of America's strategic ally in the Middle East, the Israeli-American "special relationship" will be exposed for what it really is: a relationship between a small client state and its superpower patron, in which the former is dependent on the latter, rather than the other way around.

Sources and Consequences of the "Strategic Asset" Concept

The concept of Israel as a "strategic asset" developed only after the 1967 war, when some US policymakers began to subscribe to the Israeli-inspired notion that there was perfect harmony between America's moral commitment to Israel and Washington's strategic interests in the Middle East. This, however, had an unforeseen effect. US support played into the hands of extremist Israeli political forces that contended that Israel could cling with impunity to the territories it had occupied, in exchange for serving America's anti-Soviet interests in the region.

Although the policies of both the Nixon, Kissinger and Carter eras assigned to Israel that strategic role, they were balanced somewhat by an emphasis on the US acting as a mediator between Israel and the Arabs. Only during the Reagan administration did Washington elevate the "strategic alliance" between the two states to a formal level, while relegating the Palestinian problem to the bottom of America's foreign policy agenda. Those Reagan policies helped produce such disasters for both Israel and the United States as the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Iran-Contra affair and led directly to the Palestinian uprising, the intifada.

With the end of the Cold War and with Moscow cooperating with Washington in addressing various Middle Eastern issues, Israel increasingly was unable to market itself on the eve of the Gulf crisis as America's anti-Soviet strategic asset in the region. The perception that the interests of Israel and the United States diverged on such issues as Lebanon, the West Bank and the peace process began to penetrate official Washington. As a result, Israel's bargaining power weakened and serious calls for reassessing the special relationship between the two countries were heard in the US capital. Senator Robert Dole's proposal to cut by five percent the aid package to Israel reflected that trend.

The crisis in the Gulf seemed to play for a while into the hands of the Likudists by reversing those post-Cold War trends. Indeed, even before it started, members of the Israeli lobby in Washington and "neoconservative intellectuals" were suggesting that the concept of Israel as a "strategic asset" was alive and well after all.

Israel, they argued, could serve as a new location for military equipment withdrawn from Europe that Washington could use in mid- and low-intensity conflicts in the Middle East. The Jewish state, as a memorandum from an Israeli foreign policy adviser to Shamir suggested, could help contain new regional threats such as Arab radicalism, symbolized by Saddam Hussain.

Israel proved to be an expensive diplomatic and military liability during the war.

After the Aug. 2, 1990 invasion of Kuwait, some of Israel's supporters in Washington naively assumed that America's strategy against Saddam would be based on its "alliance" with Israel. The Iraqi invasion "shores up Israel tremendously," suggested Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY21 one of Israel's backers on Capitol Hill, a day after the Iraqi invasion. A group of Republican congressmen blasted in a press conference Senator Dole's idea of reducing aid to Israel and argued that the Iraqi invasion proved the need for a militarily strong Israel to contain bullies like Saddam.

Pro-Likud columnists pushed Washington to go to war against Iraq and to add Israel to the anti-Saddam coalition. Neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer suggested that the US should not stop the bombing of Iraq until "the air war is doing nothing more than making the rubble bounce. " Another pro-Likud writer, Norman Podhoretz, wrote in The New York Times that "by holding the Israelis back we are squandering a precious strategic asset.... Surely it is time ... to start unleashing them."

However, the Gulf war proved otherwise. If anything, in addition to exposing the "strategic asset" fallacy, the war demonstrated the dangers of the militant Likud policies supported by Washington. Shamir's negative response to Egypt's efforts to reactivate the Israeli-Palestinian talks discredited President Mubarak's moderate foreign policy. That development, in turn, accelerated the radicalization of the Palestinian community that manifested itself in forcing Jordan's King Hussein to support Iraq during the war, and which had created a regional environment conducive to Saddam Hussain's aggression.

"We are not a strategic asset, " announced Israel's largest circulation daily Yedot Ahronot, in an editorial referring to the cold shoulder Israel was receiving from Washington. "The war in the Gulf threatens to destroy the legend of Israel's existence as a front-line base for the United States against half-crazy oil pirates, " wrote commentator Akiva Eldar in the newspaper Haaretz. "On the face of this, the American taxpayer has the right to ask his representatives why they are shelling out $3 billion to a country that, in the moment of truth, turns out to be nothing but an empty vessel."

More and More Questions

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the diplomatic and strategic fallout of the Gulf war have therefore helped to undermine the axiom that Israel's positioning itself as America's military surrogate in the Middle East has benefited the interests of both countries. While the power of AIPAC may neutralize in the near future any pressure to cut aid to Israel seriously, the diminishing strategic role of Israel evident during the war will lead eventually to more and more questions about the current level of financial and military support for the Jewish state.

Moreover, at a time when former Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and statist systems in Latin America are moving toward the adoption of free-market economies, more Americans are bound to ask why the US should continue the entitlement program for Israel, which tends to perpetuate a bankrupt socialist economy. Those questions will become more acute as diminishing economic resources at home and growing trade competition with Europe and Japan lead to a general reduction in the level of foreign aid.

The only way Israel will be able to maintain its friendship with the American political elite and public is by returning to the sources of its ties with this country, that is, their moral dimensions. It is true that Israeli propaganda tended to paint too rosy a picture of Israel's democratic system, especially with regard to the treatment of non-Jewish minorities in that country. But there is little doubt that the basic support for the Jewish state in this country until 1967 stemmed from a perception of Israel as a refuge for the Holocaust survivors and from a recognition of shared democratic values.

However, the continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the suppression of their Arab population is going to continue to erode that moral dimension of the relationship between Israel and the US. Only by disengaging itself from the occupied territories and by reforming its political and economic system can Israel reactivate American sympathy.

Helping the Client State Help Itself

The Shamir government does not seem to be moving in that direction. It is continuing its aggressive settlement policies and seems to continue to be rewarded with increasing aid from Washington. In order to confront American efforts to revive the peace process, the Likud leaders will attempt to stall and buy time until the 1992 presidential election, when, they hope, the window of opportunity for peace in the region will close down and allow the Israeli government to continue to pursue its annexationist policies.

The members of the Likud government also hope that the Gulf war will ignite growing anti-American feelings in the Arab world, leading to the fall or the weakening of the moderate regimes in the area and, hence, leaving Washington no option other than to put all of its Middle Eastern eggs back in the Israeli basket.

"Our goal now is to market Israel to Washington as America's only reliable ally in the Middle East, " wrote one of the Likud leaders, Uzi Landau, in Maariv recently. "With the end of the Cold War, Israel can emerge as a force containing the growing tides of anti-American Islamic radicalism, he explained.

"Israel will eventually have to adapt itself to the realities of the' new international system that will emerge after the Gulf war," argued columnist Haim Hanegbi in Haaretz recently. "The war pointed to the 'bad Arab,' Saddam Hussain, but it also gave birth to the new 'good Arab' that is attracting public attention in the West, that of the Saudi Military Commander Khalid Bin Sultan, who was fighting side by side with the United States in the Gulf."

At a time when Washington is basing its Middle East policy on cooperation with a moderate Arab bloc, it would be an exercise in futility for Israel to continue to try to sell its strategic services to the West, suggested Hanegbi. Instead, it would be in its long-term national interest to come to terms and make peace with these now emerging moderate forces in the Arab world. And it would be in America's interest to use its power to create the necessary incentives for its client state Israel to move in that direction.

Leon T. Hadar, former Jerusalem Post correspondent at the United Nations, is a Washington-based journalist and university lecturer. He is completing a book on US policy in the Middle East.