Reviving the "Strategic Consensus": This Time Against Islam

By Leon T. Hadar

One of the few contributions of President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, to American diplomacy was the coining of the term " strategic consensus." Haig argued that instead of continuing to implement President Carter's Middle East agenda by focusing on a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, Washington should place that problem on the back burner and try to devise a strategic consensus (SC) between pro-American Middle Eastern states, including Israel aimed at containing the then-existing Soviet threat in the Middle East.

Faulty Assumptions

The underlying assumption was that Arab and Israeli fears of Soviet destabilization and expansionism in the Middle East were so great—especially after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the revolution in Iran—that they would outweigh the problems dividing Jews and Arabs. In Haig's fantasy, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Middle Eastern countries would be brought together under American leadership to deal with the external Soviet danger after agreeing to put aside the more "local" issues. (The supposed model for the Arab-Israel SC was the Greek-Turkish willingness to cooperate, despite their historical disputes, under the umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.)

The SC eventually became a major component of Reagan's Middle Eastern policies. Indeed, this writer recalls standing with other reporters on a sunny day in 1983 in the White House Rose Garden and listening to President Reagan explaining to visiting King Fahd of Saudi Arabia how the Muslim "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan and the "imprisoned" Jews in the Soviet Union faced the same long-term threat from international communism, implying that they were united in some sort of anti-Soviet global alliance.

Subsequent developments, ranging from Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the Palestinian intifada beginning in late 1987, demonstrated that the SC concept was nothing more than a diplomatic pipe dream. The unsolved Arab-Israeli conflict, not Soviet expansionism, remained the major cause of instability in the Middle East. Without a solution to that problem, Washington found it impossible to create the pro-American Arab-Israeli alliance.

Rather, by ceasing to emphasize the Palestinian problem, the U.S. permitted Israel's Likud government to move ahead with its annexationist policies and the invasion of Lebanon. At the same time, the simmering Arab-Israeli conflict provided opportunities for Moscow to exploit the resulting anti-American attitudes in the region.

The Emerging Muslim Bogeyman

There are signs that some foreign-policy thinkers in Washington are trying to revive the now moribund SC by suggesting that Iran-sponsored Islamic radicalism should force Israelis and Arabs to unite under an American umbrella against this common threat.

Although the Likud government initiated the campaign against the "Islamic Menace," the successor Labor government has taken it to new heights. In numerous public statements and interviews, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has suggested, for example, that Iran is on a "megamaniacal" quest to dominate the Middle East empire and is on the verge of developing an "Islamic Bomb."

In an address to the Knesset last year, Rabin set the tone for the campaign, saying that Israel's "struggle against murderous Islamic terror" is "meant to awaken the world, which is lying in slumber." The "great danger inherent in Islamic fundamentalism...threatens the peace of the world in the forthcoming years," he warned. "The danger of death is at our doorstep."

Such statements were followed by leaks to the press attributed to Israeli "military" and "intelligence" sources describing the threat Iran, through its support to the Islamists, poses to various Arab regimes. Other Israeli- inspired reports detailed Iranian ties through Sudan and the Islamic Hamas to Muslim groups in the West, including the United States.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and some other U. S. Jewish organizations have been disseminating this Israeli "line of the day" quite effectively, and syndicated columnists, "terrorism experts" and members of Congress have recycled the Islam/Iran threat sufficiently to lend it more legitimacy.

The irony, of course, is that Israel has for years seen Iran, even after the Islamic radicals seized power, as an ally against the Arab world, and that it was Israel's Likud government that helped to build the power of the Islamic groups in Israeli-occupied territories as a counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The current Israeli campaign, however, has several goals: justifying the continuing repression in the occupied territories, and, in particular, the expulsion of the more than 400 Muslim Palestinians to Lebanon; diverting attention from Israel's own nuclear military program; and playing up Israel's strategic significance to the West vis-a-vis the new global "threat," now that Communism is dead.

Intertwined with all of these objectives is the desire to place the Palestinian issue on the back burner. The thesis that an Iran led Islamist campaign poses the major threat to the West and its Arab allies makes the solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict seem less urgent. Moreover, Israel can claim in that context to be providing security to moderate Arab regimes.

Arab and American Responses

Interestingly enough, such arguments are producing interest in Egypt. In the Egyptian publication As-Siyassi Al-Dawla (International Affairs), Nabil Abdel-Fatah, the head of Al Ahram's Institute of Strategic Studies, discusses the possibility of Israel being integrated into a "new Middle East" where the "energies that have been channeled into dealing with the [Arab-Israeli] conflict will be directed against the new enemy."

Such thinking reflects growing concern in Egypt over the threat to the government of Islamic radicalism. Taking advantage of public perceptions of governmental indifference and corruption, the Islamist groups have launched a violent campaign against the government.

Instead of dealing effectively with the economic and social problems of the country, the Egyptian government instead seems intent on portraying Tehran as responsible for the political instability. (Many analysts believe that, even without Iranian financing, some of the Islamic groups would have been active and enjoyed public support.)

Egypt, like Israel, also is concerned that the end of the Cold War, combined with the economic problems in the United States, is producing a mood in the American public and Congress that will not support the huge U.S. Treasury subsidy program to the two Camp David Agreement signatories. Like Israel, therefore, Cairo is interested in reviving its strategic significance to Washington in the post-Cold War era.

Indeed, during their recent and separate visits to Washington, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Israel's Rabin, using the bombing of New York's World Trade Center as a backdrop, seemed to be reading from the same radical-Islam-threat script. As they conferred with President Clinton, met with congressional leaders and took part in media appearances, both portrayed the terrorist act in New York as part of a global, Iranian-financed conspiracy that not only threatens Israel and Egypt, but also is being directed against the United States.

Echoing those sentiments, Israel's new Likud leader and "terrorism expert, " Benjamin Netanyahu, suggested that the World Trade center bombing " is not the work of a solitary madman'' but was "done by deliberate and systematic organizations of murder, and here you're talking about the spread of terror, organized Islamic terror, right into the heart of the United States, to the heart of New York City.

"Not Nearly" Israel's Interest

"I've seen in the past that it takes a concerted effort on the part of Israel to explain to the American public," Netanyahu said, "that it is their interest, their security, their well-being that is at stake and not merely ours. "

Such crude propaganda, reinforced by alien images of Muslim clerics like Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, is beginning to filter into the policymaking processes of the Clinton administration. Such a threat also is a convenient tool for mobilizing public support for maintaining current national security and intelligence community budgets.

However, a new anti-Islamist "strategic consensus" like the old anti-Soviet one suffers from the same intellectual disability. Both have reversed the cause and effect of the problems they address. The Iranians, like the Soviets in their time, are not the cause but the exploiters of the region's problems.

Diverting attention from the real problems in the region only plays into the hands of the Iranian regime and the radical Islamic groups. Perpetuating a perception of a coming West-vs.-Islam war has the power of self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, an Arab-Israeli peace agreement followed by the economic reconstruction of the Middle East would in the long run be the best, and perhaps only, defense against both Islamic and Jewish radicalism.