A Mideast Policy that Worked: The Only One Made in the USA

By Richard H. Curtiss

"The only US interest in the Persian Gulf is peace, and this tragedy reinforces the need to achieve that goal with all possible speed." —President Ronald Reagan, July 3, 1988.

Sunday, July 3, was the first day in more than a year that the New York Times did not carry a single report from or about the Middle East. But even as suburban subscribers were wiping the early morning dew off the newspaper's wrapping, they were hearing two ominously juxtaposed news bulletins on their radios.

If the gulf war is really over, it's time to apply made-in-America solutions rather than made-in-America solutions to the Middle East's other problems

The US Navy reported that, in the 12 minutes between 10:42 and 10:54 a.m. in the gulf, it had sunk two Iranian Boghammer patrol boats which had fired on a Danish merchantman and a US Navy helicopter, and then shot down an Iranian F-14 fighter plane bearing down on the helicopter's mother ship, the USS Vincennes. The Iranian government, however, said the Aegis-class guided missile cruiser, whose radar reach covers much of the length and breadth of the gulf, had shot down Iran Airways flight 655 carrying 290 people from Bandar Abbas in Iran to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

In the early afternoon a sober President Reagan announced that the Iranian version was correct. The downed plane was a European-made A-300 Airbus, not an American-made F-14. "We deeply regret any loss of life," the US president said. The news, and the subsequent horrifying photos of bodies floating in the gulf and of grief-stricken families at Dubai airport and at services in Iran, cast a pall the following day over American Independence Day observances across the nation.

Reactions abroad were predictable. Outraged Iranians declared a day of national mourning and called for a UN Security Council meeting. Gulf Arab states said little, other than to call for an end to the Iran-Iraq war. The Soviets criticized the attack, but pointedly made it clear they did not intend to react as dramatically as had the US after the Soviets downed Korean Airlines flight 007 over their territory in 1983.

Comparing the Iranian Airline Tragedy to Korean Flight 007

An otherwise restrained President Reagan reacted angrily to the comparison, noting that when the Vincennes, in combat at the time, was unable to elicit a voice or electronic identification, it assumed the Iranian aircraft was about to launch a deadly missile attack like the one that disabled the frigate USS Stark with the loss of 37 lives in May of 1987. The president also expressed willingness to pay compensation to families of the victims. He made it clear that this did not constitute acknowledgement of responsibility, that recipients would be expected to waive further legal action against the US government, and that payments would be to individuals, not their government.

The subsequent UN hearing only highlighted the persistent Iranian refusal up to that point to accept a cease-fire, and Iran's self-imposed political and diplomatic isolation. Instead of culminating in a resolution condemning the United States, the UN session ended with an Iraqi declaration that it was withdrawing from all Iranian territory occupied by its armed forces, and an Iranian announcement that it was accepting the UN cease-fire resolution.

Prior to that announcement, as journalists filled in details, not only of the July 3 engagement but of other mistaken attacks in the frustrating gulf war, the dominant question had been how the tragedy, with its shocking toll of civilians, would affect an American gulf policy that has elicited little public understanding and much congressional criticism from its inception.

Limited Short-Range Political Effects

Two factors limited short-range political effects. First, the US gulf policy, however badly articulated by the Reagan administration, was working. This was acknowledged even by those who originally opposed it.

Second, the USS Stark disaster, which almost derailed that policy in its second month, taught Americans a lot about naval electronic warfare.

They learned that the Stark was struck, set on fire, and nearly sunk by a French-built Exocet missile because its captain did not fire his own missiles, believing that the Iraqi plane 10 to 12 miles away and closing fast on his radarscope would identify his ship correctly and go on in search of an Iranian target. Thus the dilemma of the commander of the Vincennes, desperately asking the intruder to identify itself or veer away while it drew rapidly into missile-firing range, was widely understood. First press reports indicated, in fact, that had the intruder actually been an Iranian F-14 stationed at Bandar Abbas, the Vincennes commander's order to fire when the plane was only nine miles away might have been too late to save his ship, unless it had been able to knock the incoming missiles out of the air.

There were two other factors, however, seeking to exploit the gulf tragedy to effect US policy modifications. One was the ever-present Israel lobby, which seizes upon every Middle East development as a possible means of getting the US and Israel back into the dose relationship with Iran that existed in the era of the shah. Its purpose is to use the Iran relationship to intimidate the Arabs, and to steer the US toward perpetually hostile relationships with all 21 Arab states.

An Israeli Wrench in US-Arab Relations

This involves throwing a monkey wrench into any US-Arab collaboration. For example, Israel and its American supporters don't care whether Saudi Arabia buys its military aircraft from British, European, or even Soviet suppliers, so long as every sale of American weapons to Saudi Arabia is blocked. It's not the weapons themselves that Israel fears so much as the political effects of cooperative long-term US-Saudi relationships. To keep vitally needed US economic and military aid flowing to Israel, its American lobby is determined that Israel must always be portrayed as America's "only reliable ally" in the Middle East.

It seemed, for a time, an almost incredible feat of this permanent Israeli outpost in the US that, despite the Ayatollah Khomeini's fulminations against the American "Great Satan," Marine Col. Oliver North was supplying Khomeini's government with arms and intelligence, from the White House and through Israel, to help the Iranian war effort against Iraq.

When that well-laid Israeli plan blew up only because of infighting within the Khomeini government, a contrite Reagan administration belatedly moved to offset the effects of its own wrong-headed actions, which had pushed Iraq to the brink of defeat.

The resulting policy, which the US seemed almost to have blundered into as a means of countering growing Soviet influence in the gulf, survived initial setbacks like the Stark incident and mine damage sustained by the very first Kuwaiti ship the US undertook to escort up the gulf.

Then, as the tide of war reversed itself on the Iraq-Iran front, and the US extended protection to any merchant ship under Iranian attack, the gulf policy turned out to be the first success story in eight years of Reagan administration Middle East policy. If the Iranians observe the cease-fire, then that chapter is over and the next task is to normalize US relations with countries on both sides of the gulf. It will be a lot healthier for the United States and the area if the US stops playing favorites and pursues friendly relations with all Middle East states, the Arabs, Israel, and Iran alike.

Falling to Explain Gulf Policy

If, however, Iran is just playing for time, and the war resumes, the Reagan administration still has work to do. It has never properly explained that its gulf policy aims solely to prevent Iran from winning the war with Iraq, and politically and militarily dominating the other Arab states of the gulf.

Instead, Americans still saw it as a hasty US reaction to the Soviet offer to reflag and protect six Kuwaiti tankers. Administration spokesmen sometimes defined the US policy as an attempt to protect freedom of navigation in international waters. Such an explanation only raised questions as to why the US did not extend its protection to ships under Iraqi attack and why the US should take the leading role in ensuring the passage of oil from the gulf to Japan and Western Europe..

By not clearly explaining that the policy was a tilt against an Iranian victory, to make Iran abandon its war aims and opt for peace, the administration left itself open to many such questions. An example was the appearance, only one day after the disaster, of ousted White House Middle East adviser Howard Teicher on the nightly televised MacNeil-Lehrer public affairs hour on the National Public Broadcasting System. The program's producers are so zealous never to offend Israel that they are said to check with the Israeli Embassy in Washington the credentials not only of experts to be interviewed concerning Israeli viewpoints, but also those to be interviewed on Arab affairs. Robin MacNeil and Jim Lehrer outdid themselves in selecting Teicher to comment on the Iranian airliner, however. His claim to knowledge of Iranian affairs is his role in helping to carry the Bible and key-shaped cake, baked in Israel, aboard the aircraft that took him, Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, and Amiralm Nir of the Israeli prime minister's office to negotiate arms for hostages with the Khomeini government in Tehran in May 1986. Teicher, a supporter of Israel's hard-line policies, predictably called for a reassessment of the gulf policy that found the US working closely with Arab states.

The dominant question had been how the tragedy, with its shocking toll of civilians, would affect an American gulf policy that has elicited little public understanding and much congressional criticism.

If the administration had correctly defined its policy, it would have reduced its vulnerability to friends of the Israel lobby like Teicher, as well as to questioning from well-meaning Americans, like presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, who asked after the aircraft disaster what the US presence had accomplished in an area where merchant ships still were regularly damaged by both Iraq and Iran.

In fact, with Iranian acceptance of a cease-fire, the US presence has accomplished its purpose. Should the war resume, however, some fine-tuning would enable the United States to ensure that it can maintain its policy over the long pull. Militarily, as ships from other navies join the gulf p US Navy ships can lower their profile, at least pulling back from the traveled commercial airline routes.

Politically if the war resumes, the US should continue pressing the UN to drop the other shoe, passing an arms embargo resolution to give to the July 1987 cease-fire resolution 598, which now has been ac by both Iraq and Iran.

The momentum of war has rapidly shifted against the Ayatollah's whose home front, armed forces, and government seemed almost to crumbled into chaos before Iran accepted a cease-fire. Credit goes

first and only Reagan administration Middle East initiative ma Washington rather than Israel, and carried out resolutely despite the d of criticism from Israel's claque in Congress and the media.

If the gulf war resumes, the administration should resume its policy. If it's really over, it's time to apply made-in-America solutions rather made-in-Israel solutions to the Middle East's other problems.

Richard H Curtiss, a retired Foreign Service information officer, is author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute, and editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.