Stay the Course!

"The United States seriously risks being drawn into war in the Persian Gulf...At present prospects are for an escalating war, absent success in the peace process...An Iraqi defeat would be catastrophic for Western interests."—Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, October 1987.

Those three excerpts from a report on the Gulf war prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee state the problem accurately. To solve it, the Reagan administration is protecting the Kuwaiti and other Arab oil exports that keep Iraq in the war. It is allowing Iraq to use its air superiority to slow the Iranian oil exports that keep Iran in the war. At the same time, the US has worked hard in the United Nations Security Council for a cease-fire resolution to stop the war, and is working now for a binding arms embargo against violators.

Polls show the American people agree overwhelmingly with each element of the diagnosis, and with each element of the administration's solution, as described above.

But not when it's called tilting toward the weaker party, Iraq, in order to prevent the stronger party, Iran, from winning the war. That elicits accusatory questions. Isn't Iraq the aggressor? Why should the US support Iraq when it is armed by the Soviet Union? Won't this drive Iran into the Soviet camp?

If it serves any purpose, these questions can be answered one by one. To the first, the Iraqis respond that the war began when the Shah's Iran (with support from the US and Israel) armed indigenous Kurds for a bloody rebellion. The Iraqi government ended the rebellion in 1975 by signing over to the Shah control of half of the Shatt Al-Arab, Iraq's only outlet to the sea, and the Shah hung the Kurds out to dry. Iraqis say Khomeini's Iran picked up where the Shah left off by seeking to incite Shi'ite Iraqis against Iraq's secular regime. To heat things up, the Iranians shelled Iraq's port city of Basra in mid-1980. It was only after that, the Iraqis say, that their troops crossed the Iranian border in September 1980, to force a renegotiation of the Shatt Al-Arab agreement.

The undisputed answer to the second question is yes, the Soviets arm Iraq. They're probably sneaking arms to Iran too. The theoretical answer to the third question is also yes, but it would be the most unlikely rapprochement in history. The mullahs would truly be mad to ignore centuries of Russian aggrandizement at Iran's expense. Mikhail Gorbachev in turn would have to abandon pending disarmament agreements with the US that could salvage the USSR's wretched economy for the opportunity of becoming involved in Iran, a country of rugged terrain and fractious people not unlike Afghanistan.

Instead of ruminating on those three questions, however, it is pertinent to return to the key statement from the Senate report: "An Iraqi defeat would be catastrophic for Western interests."

If Americans accept that statement, as the Reagan administration's actions demonstrate that it finally has, there isn't much choice except to stay the course.

That is driving Israel's friends in the US up the wall. Once again Israel's longed-for US-Israel-Iran axis against all the rest of the Middle East falls apart when confronted with reality. It's a pyrrhic victory, however, for the Arab countries and for American Middle East specialists in and out of the administration. They warned throughout the first six years of the Reagan administration that its Israel-dictated Middle East policies were a one-way ticket to disaster. Americans now are dodging rockets in the Gulf, they point out, thanks to:

• A president who could read aloud at a National Security Council meeting an Israeli intelligence report saying Iraq was winning the war and not be contradicted by a single member of his cabinet, even though they all knew it was false and intended to manipulate the US into permitting the Israelis to go on selling arms to Iran.

• A secretary of state so mesmerized by the Israel lobby that he leaves the country whenever the US is faced with a decision on a Middle East problem, allows himself to be lionized as the savior of Israel's economy, and at the same time privately says Israel has "suckered" the US.

• National Security Advisers Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter, who for Middle East and political-security matters, knowingly took their advice from staff aides and "consultants" notorious for their ties to Israel's political, security, and intelligence establishments.

• White House aide Oliver North, so thick with the Israelis that he didn't worry about reporting the million dollar bribe they offered him, and so muddled politically that he didn't realize they were using the American arms he was providing them to set up the "catastrophe" the West faces today.

So America is right where the Reagan administration's madcap made-in-Israel policy took it—in the Gulf, under fire by contemptuous Iranians and under scrutiny by incredulous Europeans and distrustful Arabs.

Israel—the "strategic ally" whose cooked intelligence got the US there—can be of no help. Strategically, Israel is a gigantic liability whose separate agenda has always been to estrange the US from every friendly Arab country. Now, America is alone for its moment of truth in the Gulf.

What does the US still have going for it there?

History? President Reagan came to office really believing his campaign rhetoric, that Israel would handle the Middle East for the US. Israel pulverized Lebanon, America's oldest Middle Eastern friend. It ended America's near-monopoly on the Arab petro-dollar export market. It eventually got 241 US Marines blown up in one night in Lebanon. But by the end of his first term, President Reagan had learned nothing from all this about the Middle East. It would therefore be rash to think he has learned anything from his second-term fiascos there.

Fortunately, the White House advisers who orchestrated those fiascos are gone, to a man, discredited by their own advice. So who will make policy in the one year the administration has left?

For one, Caspar Weinberger, and that's good news. His job was to build up our armed forces and he did. If the US makes those disarmament agreements with Gorbachev, it will be because Weinberger's achievement terrified the Soviets and gave the US a huge bargaining chip. It's too bad Reagan bought that achievement with credit rather than cash, but that wasn't Weinberger's department.

Weinberger has been right on the Middle East from the first month of the Reagan administration. His version of "strategic consensus" was based upon Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the very countries we need to work with now in the Gulf. It was not the unworkable Israel-based strategic consensus of the now-departed Richard Allen, Alexander Haig, Robert McFarlane, and John Poindexter. And, of course, George Shultz, who's still around because he was out to lunch when most of the mistakes were being made.

The naval forces Weinberger built up are what the US needs for its Gulf mission. The US situation there is what a 600-ship navy is planned for, and not at all comparable to the Marine expeditionary force without a mission in Lebanon, which Weinberger vociferously opposed at the time.

There are other human assets. The CIA is now run by a man who has spent even more years enforcing the laws than his predecessor spent breaking them. Since White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker mortgaged his future in the Republican Party by shepherding Jimmy Carter's Panama Canal treaty through the Senate, he's probably prepared to put principle and patriotism ahead of personal considerations again. National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci understands the Third World as well. He's worked there, and so have the area specialists who now advise him. They know where long-term American interests lie and they won't put Israel's separate agenda first.

The current confrontation probably suits Khomeini for the short run. He amazed intimates this summer by confessing that he was at his wits end. That's startling from a man whose followers assume he has a direct line to God. Now, although he's sick and old, the US-Iran violence distracts the mob from his incapacity.

Nevertheless, Iran's oil isn't reaching world markets and it appears the Khomeini government is thinking more about how to get peace with reparations than continuing the war.

Europeans, who said no initially when they assumed the US would cut and run if it suffered casualties, are now helping patrol the Gulf. No Arab leaders want to be remembered for reopening the kind of foreign military bases it took them generations to eradicate, but they're also helping, cautiously.

The Reagan administration, mired in troubles at home, resisted the temptation to seek instant popularity with an initial spectacular military action. Instead its strike on radar-bearing platforms, after giving the crews time to evacuate, was such a "measured response" that one Democratic congressman complained it didn't send a clear enough message to Khomeini. Perhaps, however, it sent a clear message to Arab friends, European allies, and the American people—all of whose support is needed: "Stay the course."