The Politics of Miscalculation In the Middle East

By Richard B. Parker. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1993, 274pp. List $14.95; AET: $11.95 for one.

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

In The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East, Richard Parker examines political/military miscalculations that led to, or attended, three great Middle Eastern crises of the past quarter century. These are the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the 1968-1970 Egyptian-Israeli war of attrition, and the abortive U.S.-brokered May 17, 1983 withdrawal agreement that followed Israel's June 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Parker, a retired foreign service officer who is fluent in Arabic, has written two previous books on historic landmarks in Egypt and Morocco and is a former editor of the Middle East Journal. His distinguished diplomatic career includes service as U.S. political counselor in Cairo in 1967, State Department "desk officer" for Egypt from 1967 to 1970, and U.S. ambassador to Algeria, Lebanon and Morocco.

In these positions he had intimate personal knowledge of all three of the crises his book examines, each of which he sees as demonstrations of the "universality of miscalculation." The overall result is an astonishingly fine job of historiography.

Few foreign service officers the reviewer has known, and perhaps few professional historians either, could present more lucidly the results of such a comprehensive examination of the documentation and dispassionate assessments of the officials and diplomats involved in these great dramas of our times. Not everyone will agree, however, with all of the basic assumptions with which the author approached his research.

It led him from Washington to Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, London and Moscow. His visit to the Russian capital, however, proved disappointing in clarifying the catalytic Soviet role in the Arab-Israel war of June 1967.

Parker devotes half of his book and five of its 10 chapters to that war, which in six days so profoundly altered the Middle Eastern geopolitical landscape. He examines in depth the circumstances under which Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser left his air force totally unprotected on the ground from possible Israeli air attacks, while engaged in verbal threats and menacing maneuvers against Israel.

Surprise Israeli air strikes on June 5, 1967 took advantage of this foolhardiness, almost totally destroyed Egypt's air force and effectively won the war against Egypt on its first day. While supplying no definitive motivation for the charismatic Egyptian leader's puzzling moves, Parker's documentation brings the events leading up to the 1967 war, and the war itself, to life.

The author's own opinion is that Egypt initiated the crisis leading to the 1967 war, and he amasses much evidence to buttress that conclusion. A contrasting view of many Middle East specialists, including the reviewer, is that Israel instigated the crisis by fooling the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. Soviet diplomats in turn led both Syria and Egypt to believe that Israel was massing troops to attack Syria, prompting Nasser to begin preparations to come to Syria's aid.

As a good historian, Parker provides the evidence to support either point of view. The reader can make up his/her own mind.

"As far as I could tell," Parker continues, "there was, in fact, no massing of Israeli troops." If that view is correct, then President Nasser obviously overreacted in asking that the United Nations forces in the Sinai Peninsula separating Egyptian and Israeli troops be withdrawn. This suddenly put Egyptian forces back in control of the Strait of Tiran, at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, which Nasser then declared closed to Israeli shipping, a move unacceptable to Israel. It also was unacceptable to the U.S. which had secretly guaranteed, when it forced Israel to withdraw from Sinai in 1957, that the strait would remain open. But when the U.S. scheduled negotiations, the Israelis attacked.

The whole action/reaction within Egypt to the looming crisis as set out by the author will fascinate both Middle East specialists and those intrigued by the unanswerable question of whether the actors or the rush of events themselves are the primary shapers of history. The barely perceived (at the time) rivalry and distrust between President Nasser and his unrealistic military commander, Marshall Abdul Hakim Al-Amr, may have played a big role, with Amr apparently thinking that the Egyptian armed forces could defeat Israel.

Did Nasser really accept Amr's assessment? Did he believe that Israel would not strike first? Did he credit what he took as U.S. assurances that Israel would not attack before scheduled negotiations to end the crisis politically had been given a chance?

As yet, none of these questions has been answered definitively. Nevertheless, Nasser's "mindset" at the time may have influenced his actions. This was that the United States was out to "get him," a conviction that author Parker does not regard as justified. But, looking back at the events of 1965 and 1966, Nasser's conclusion is understandable.

U.S. wheat deliveries had been withheld. Re-scheduling of Egypt's debts was delayed. U.S.-promised grain silos went unbuilt, and then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk did not make a promised visit to Cairo.

Pro-Israel forces inside the Washington bureaucracy and the media collaborated in villifying the Egyptian leader. Nasser's own fiery rhetorical attacks on U.S. Middle East policies further weakened his cause in the United States.

The War of Attrition

Parker devotes two chapters to the Egyptian-Israeli war of attrition, which followed the Israeli seizure of Sinai in 1967, and is much more easily understood. When Israel showed no inclination to withdraw its military forces, which had dug in along the east bank of the Suez Canal, Egyptian forces began shelling them and sending small harassing parties across the canal. These actions began to inflict casualties on the Israelis. Israel responded with deep-penetration air raids against Egyptian population centers to pressure Nasser to stop.

Here Parker's second miscalculation theme begins. Nasser turned to Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin. Kosygin warned President Richard Nixon, in effect, that he would provide Egypt with the wherewithal to rebuff Israeli attacks. Kosygin's "bluff' was rejected by Nixon under the influence of National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Meanwhile, according to Parker, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs Joseph Sisco used "body language," and perhaps more specific language as well, to signal Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel's ambassador to Washington, that the deep penetration raids inside Egypt were okay. Or so Rabin seems to have believed.

Thus personally pro-Israel Kissinger and Sisco reinforced Israeli hawks who wanted to continue the raids. When Soviet SAM ground-to-air missiles began appearing in Egyptian defenses, and Soviet pilots started patrolling Egyptian skies, the American and Israeli officials (whose de facto Middle East policies are often the same) realized they had miscalculated. Israel was forced to seek a cease-fire or face the prospect of fighting the Russians.

Parker's theory of miscalculation is an intriguing one. But it can be exaggerated. Nasser obviously could not have accepted indefinitely Israel's continued occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, which is sovereign Egyptian territory. He, or any Egyptian president, eventually would have been forced to go to war to oust the Israelis, regardless of the consequences, exactly as his successor, Anwar Sadat, did in 1973.

"Unintended consequences" might be a more appropriate term for what followed. Israel ended the war of attrition by halting its deep penetration raids. Three years later, however, when Sadat launched his attack on Israeli forces in Sinai, the effectiveness of Egyptian SAMs first demonstrated in 1970 came back to haunt Israel. With the aid of his SAMs, President Sadat was able, temporarily, to deny Israel control of the air over the Suez Canal battlefield, and inflicted devastating losses on the Israeli army. Israel could hardly have calculated that its excessive boldness in the skies of Egypt in 1970 would have such bloody consequences for its troops on the ground in 1973.

The Israel-Lebanon Peace Agreement

In his final three chapters, on the abortive Israeli withdrawal agreement with Lebanon, Parker's accounts of conversations between Secretary of State George Shultz, his special Middle East negotiators, Ambassadors Philip Habib and Morris Draper, and the American ambassadors to Israel, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are a crackling drama.

Should the United States force through the agreement ultimately signed by Israel and Lebanon on May 17, 1983? Many thought it would not work, but said little or nothing to dissuade a determined Shultz. Ambassador to Syria Robert Paganelli, however, was a notable exception. Shultz was said to have been red with anger when Paganelli gave his honest opinion, apparently in unvarnished language, on the prospects of any agreement that ignored Syrian interests in a region under its de facto control.

The sticking point was the water of Lebanon's Litani River, in which the World Zionist Organization had expressed an interest long before the formal establishment of Israel. This covert interest, which only intensified after Israel's creation in 1948, far outweighed Israel's "primary" interest in "quiet along the [Lebanon-Israel] border" as described by Parker on page 180 of his book.

The author provides background on those Israelis and Lebanese who thought in terms of cooperation to their mutual benefit. The 1982 Israeli aggression against Lebanon can be understood as an attempt to implement that cooperation and gain access to the Litani.

The military and political consequences, however, were disastrous for all concerned, including Israel. The May 17 agreement can best be seen as a forlorn attempt to salvage something diplomatically from the mess that Israel had created militarily.

Secretary Shultz's "miscalculation" in seeking to force through an agreement unacceptable to Syria and to most Lebanese, if miscalculation it was, is an abiding mystery. Parker describes old labor negotiator Shultz as deciding "to give the Israelis everything they wanted [from Lebanon] in order to put them in a positive frame of mind." The question that arises is, "a positive frame of mind" for what purpose?

Ambassador Parker portrays Shultz as determined to get the agreement signed, whether or not it could be put into practice. If that is the explanation, it does not throw light on Shultz's giant, protracted sulk concerning the Arabs in general and Syria in particular for his remaining five and a half years as Ronald Reagan's secretary of state.

Shultz's anti-Arab mindset remains a mystery to this day. One former U.S. diplomat speculates that only Israeli blackmail could have motivated the secretary's seemingly irrational pursuit of impossible Middle East goals. But on what could that threat have been based? Others believe that to soften the pro-Arab image engendered by his service as president of the Bechtel Corporation, and gain favorable U.S. media treatment for his initiatives throughout the world, Shultz decided to deliver something Israel wanted badly, or at least be seen as giving it his best try.

Parker's book should be widely read. It sheds much light on the history of U.S. relations with the Middle East, an area with which, for better or worse, the U.S. will remain deeply involved. The author's dispassionate documentation will help readers decide for themselves whether the U.S. is helping to solve the area's problems, or whether it is in fact the cause of some of them.

Andrew L Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report.