Flashpoint for Armageddon

I should begin by emphasizing that the two great wars of modern times had small beginnings. In our time, no local or regional conflict is as susceptible to internationalization as the one in the Middle East. Of the three most prominent crisis areas in the world today--Central America/South Africa, and the Middle East--this last one is the most likely to lead to the third world war, possibly involving nuclear weapons.

The reasons are numerous. First, conflicts in this area historically have involved the great powers of the time. The Middle East is a region that has never been easily defined as belonging in a single power's sphere of influence. In ancient times, the Roman, Byzantine, and Persian empires contested each other in the area. In modern times, the French, British, and Russians have been competing here. Today it has again become a primary area of superpower confrontation. This leads to the second point.

The centrality of the international struggle for power has shifted in the 1970s and the 1980s from the Atlantic and Pacific in the 1950s and 1960s to the area bounded by the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans. This puts Southern Africa and the Middle East in a central position, where the international struggle for power is heightened, its pace quickened, the risks and incidences of conflicts and proxy wars multiply, and the possibilities of the internationalization of. local or regional conflicts augment.

Since 1968, the United States has been concentrating on the Middle East as an answer to its desperate and unrealistic quest to restore its status as Number One. The Middle East is important to the United States economically in several ways. First, American business is able to compete favorably with both European and Japanese business only in the Middle East and the People's Republic of China. Therefore, American dominance over the Middle East is viewed as being basic to the maintenance of America's competitive edge over Japan and the Common Market countries.

Furthermore, the maintenance of the dollar as the sole medium of petro-exchange is viewed, at least in Washington, as very important for maintaining the supremacy of the American dollar as a unit of international exchange. For this reason, the U.S. government has, over the last eight years, objected to European proposals for creating a basket of different currencies for the exchange of oil.

Perhaps the most important factor in the shift of power plays to the Middle East is that U.S. control over the area that produces the primary resources upon which Japanese and Western European economies depend is viewed by the United States as an important new leverage over its old allies. This is important, because earlier U.S. leverages over Western Europe and Japan have, over time, substantively diminished.

One leverage was strategic, namely American monopoly of advanced strategic weaponry, which offered the "nuclear umbrella" over the NATO countries and Japan. The second was economic. With the attainment of strategic parity by the Soviet Union, the strategic leverage of the United States in Western Europe and Japan has obviously diminished, although it hasn't altogether disappeared. And the European and Japanese economies have become competitive with the United States.

Therefore, American foreign policy makers perceive that by obtaining a somewhat hegemonic control over the production and distribution of the oil resources of the Middle East and the mineral resources of Southern Africa, the United States would gain a major new leverage on Western Europe and Japan. This is the reason, rather than European repulsion over Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, that Middle Eastern policy issues and issues related to trade and monetary policies have become the most divisive questions between the U.S., Japan, and its NATO allies.

The Soviet Union is also actively engaged in contesting the presumptions of American power in the Middle East. In fact, as the parameters of the detente begun by West Germany have widened to include all the NATO countries, as economic relations between the Common Market and Eastern European countries have grown, and as the sentiment toward nuclear disarmament increases in all of Europe, the centrality of Soviet-American rivalry is increasingly shifting to the Middle East.

The USSR remains a reactive power, its hypersensitivity to territorial security always focused on the dangers of encirclement and land invasion. Hence, the Soviet Union's interests in the region augment in direct proportion to the American objective of turning Southwest Asia into an area of "containment." This development renders the Middle East extremely vulnerable to superpower confrontations and nuclear politics.

Thus, in the last 14 years, there were two instances of open nuclear diplomacy; both occurred in the Middle East; both were related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. On the first occasion, during the Jordan conflict of 1969, Richard Nixon combined the deployment of the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers of the Sixth Fleet off the Jordan-Israeli coast with a specific threat of using nuclear weapons if the Soviet Union failed to restrain Syria from entering the fray. In the second instance, during the October, 1973 war, Nixon and Kissinger ordered a worldwide nuclear alert to the third stage of nuclear readiness, bringing us two steps away from Armageddon. These are realities about the Middle East which the anti-nuclear movement in the U.S. has not begun to contemplate.

It is noteworthy, also, that while their strategic interests have vastly augmented, the actual superpower influence has substantively declined in the Middle East. In Egypt, the political and cultural center of the Arab world, the Soviet Union had, for a quarter century, invested enormous political, economic, and military resources. Yet, under Anwar Sadat, the country took a dramatic anti-Soviet turn, and has stayed on that course since. Somewhat less dramatically, Soviet influence has also disappeared from Somalia and Iraq, which for two decades had been closely associated with the USSR. In Libya and Algeria, Russia's influence remains nebulous and suspect. Its influence is, at the moment, primarily confined to two countries: Syria, which is an important country ruled by a shaky and repressive government of the minority Alawite Muslim sect, and South Yemen, which is a small, ill-endowed, poor country.

The United States has gained a major, but most likely not a lasting, ally in the region in Egypt. But its losses have also been enormous. To begin with, the centerpiece of Kissinger's grand global design fell apart in 1973 and 1974 with the fall of the fascist regime in Portugal, the pro-U.S. junta in Greece, the monarchy in Ethiopia, the near-defeat of Israel in October, 1973, and the failure of its own, and then South African, intervention in Angola. With the start of the Camp David accords, the U.S. also began losing influence among such traditional Arab allies as Saudi Arabia and Jordan. And, of course, the U.S. completely lost influence in Iran, a country which had become, since 1969, one of the two main pillars of U.S. strategic design in the region (Israel being the other).

The decline of superpower influence in the Middle East has had two ramifications. One is that in some instances it can, for a while at least, prevent the internationalization of a local conflict. This phenomenon explains the remarkable localization of the war between Iraq and Iran, both oil-producing and strategically located countries. Had Iraq and Iran been counted in the Soviet and American spheres, respectively, at the time when their conflict broke out, it would most likely have acquired an international dimension.

This tendency toward localization has, however, a hidden and terrible cost to it: it encourages hegemonic and ambitious powers to proxy wars. Hence, Syria and Israel played a cynical and cruel role in exacerbating and prolonging the long-standing but always manageable conflict of communal interests in Lebanon.

Here is a dangerous paradox: the superpowers' augmented interest and diminished real influence have sharpened their rivalries and rendered the Middle East more vulnerable to interventionary and proxy wars. Thus, for months there was fear in the Middle East of an imminent Israeli invasion of Lebanon. (When it actually occurred in June, 1982, it proved longer and more brutal than anyone could have surmised.) It is thus, also, that in addition to the American-equipped Israeli strike force, the U.S. is engaged in setting up a sophisticated interventionist machine in the region. The reason for this negative correlation is that in the Middle East, the decline of superpower influence is not a willed reality. Rather, it is a reflection of the failure of superpower, especially American, policy, the weaknesses and venality of Middle Eastern regimes, and the vacuities associated with disorganized and uneven development.

Like other parts of the Third World, the Middle Eastern countries are experiencing social tensions and undergoing political upheavals associated with rapid social change. The crisis is accentuated because of the enormous influx of money into the area and because of Middle Eastern peoples' unsettling encounter with the Zionist movement and Israel. The area offers models of inorganic development, of wealth without work, profits without production, abundance of machines without technology, sophisticated arms and demoralized armies. Above all, there is the total inability on the part of its ruling elites to link rhetoric with a semblance of reality and convert the Middle East's considerable economic and strategic importance into power, at least enough to protect the sovereignty and integrity of the peoples and countries in the region.

The Middle East is a region of sharp contrasts. Here, hospitable cultures thrive in inhospitable terrains, deserts lead into cities of high civilization. But in the paradoxes of the contemporary Middle East, there are no reliefs, only ironies and tragedies. Economically, it is the richest region in the Third World; strategically, the most important. Yet the Arabs are among the only people in the world still subject to conquest and colonization.

The era of decolonization opened in the rest of the world in 1948 was marked for the Palestinians by the loss of the greater part of their homeland. They are now experiencing systematic dispossession from its remnant, the West Bank and Gaza. Jerusalem, that monument to ecumenism and touchstone of Arab cultural achievements, has been unilaterally annexed, as has been the Golan Heights--both in violation of U.N. directives, including Resolution 242. Since the creation of the United Nations, only three of its members lost territories without being able to regain them. All three were Arab states. A fourth, Lebanon, may also stay indefinitely on the list of occupied countries. Egypt finally reclaimed, in 1982, territories lost in 1967. But it did so at the cost of betraying others under Israeli occupation and of isolating itself from its Arab milieu.

The people of the Middle East are angry, bewildered, and traumatized. Their trauma spells rebellion and instability, and the fear of such instability in its areas of influence has so far been the prime mover of U.S. intervention.

Against the external threats it faces, the Middle East is unlikely to be united behind a policy that could keep aggressors away. There are multiple causes for Middle Eastern divisions, some old, others new. Among the new ones is the fact that to the traditional divisions between town and country, Shia and Sunni, rich and poor, are added the colonial-created modern states, each with an elite jealous of its turf.

The universalist civilization of the old Islamic rule is now not only divided into nation states but further separated by enormous, if artificial and ironic, differences in wealth. Sparsely populated Saudi Arabia is rolling in petro-dollars while populous Egypt remains undernourished. Kuwait has the highest per capita income in the world; next door, South Yemen has one of the lowest. In the Middle East, the dialectic of rich and poor countries has been added to the dialectic of classes. Divisions--of ambition, ideology, and mere jealousy--are likely to persist for a while in the region. And imperialism and interventions have long fed on the division of natives.

The Israeli-Arab conflict is the most dangerous flashpoint in a region that is now central to world struggle for power, and that conflict is the most likely ignition-point for World War III. Pro-Israeli propagandists often point out that the Israeli-Arab conflict is but one of the many ongoing clashes in the Middle East and North Africa. We are presented with an accurate list of past and ongoing conflicts in the region: between Pakistan and India, Morocco and Algeria, North and South Yemen, Libya and Egypt, and of course Iran and Iraq. Some, like the India-Pakistan war in 1965 and the ongoing Iran-Iraq war, have been enormously costly in human life and material destruction. Why then is there so much attention paid to the Israeli-Arab conflict?

That the Middle East is replete with multiple conflicts is true, and reflects the troubled nature of the region. Yet it is self-evident that no active conflict in the world today is more susceptible to internationalization than the Israeli-Arab one. Neither the Algerian-Moroccan, nor the Indo-Pakistani, nor even the Iranian-Iraqi wars produced international tension leading to the rattling of nuclear weapons. The Israeli-Arab war of 1973 did, and so did the Jordanian crisis of 1969. In short, the Israeli-Arab conflict gets more international attention because, unlike the other local disputes, it cannot be played out in the framework of Middle Eastern politics; it always acquires an international dimension. As such, it affects us directly, as Americans and Europeans have learned since 1973.

Localization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impossible for various reasons. First, the conflict invariably involves other states and peoples, because Middle Eastern peoples view Israel as a colonial power, created by Britain and sustained by the United States. Thus, the nationalist impulses of diverse, often divided, Arabs tend to converge when conflict between Israel and its opponents breaks out.

Second, this image of Israel as an alien presence is often reinforced by Israeli officials' claim to being the only outpost of Western civilization and the most effective instrument of Western interests in the Middle East.

Third, Israel is believed by the peoples in the area to be a state which practices discrimination against non-Jewish Christian and Muslim natives. Israeli laws and practices grant superior rights and special dispensations to Jews, including foreign Jews, while denying these to the indigenous Arab-Palestinian population. Whatever one's view of the justice of these Israeli policies, it is not fair to blame their Arab victims for viewing them bitterly as racially motivated.

Fourth, Israel is feared in the region as a powerful and expansionist state. Again, there is a chasm between Western and Arab perceptions of Israel. Every Arab remembers and few Americans know that Israel is the only member of the United Nations (a) which has not yet officially declared its territorial limits; (b) whose boundaries have expanded to some eight times its 1947 U.N.-envisaged size--this without taking into account the imminent annexation of the West Bank and Gaza; (c) whose ruling government coalition has a stated manifesto of eventually achieving a land of Israel that would include large chunks of Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria; (d) which has ignored or rejected more U.N. resolutions and directives since 1948 than any other member state; and (e) on whose behalf the United States has cast more vetoes than on any other single issue before the Security Council.

This brings me, finally, to the question of Palestine which, so everyone repeats, is central to the resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, but which the United States and Israel have assiduously ignored. This is a complex and important enough question to be treated at length. But here I wish to briefly mention two basic points.

First, what is at stake in the Israeli-occupied territories and in Lebanon is the national survival of a people. Israel has embarked on a policy of exterminating the Palestinians as a national community. In the West Bank and Gaza, the beleaguered natives have already lost 37 per cent of the land to Israeli expropriation, control over 90 per cent of their water, and access (because of dismissal of mayors, jailing, and deportation of local leaders) to an estimated 60 per cent of their leaders. No native community can survive without land, water, and leaders.

Second, the Camp David agreement fulfilled a long-standing American and Israeli goal of isolating Egypt from its Arab milieu, but it did not resolve any of the central problems related to the Israeli-Arab conflict. Far from settling the Palestinian issue, Camp David exacerbated it. Assured by a separate peace with Egypt, Israel accelerated the process of dispossession and establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Jerusalem has been annexed with its suburbs, and its 150,000 Arab inhabitants have become non-citizens.

Israel's full-scale invasion of Lebanon became imminent, also, as a result of the Camp David accords. General Ariel Sharon has declared Israeli supremacy over the region from "Pakistan to Morocco."

But we must remember the artificiality of this situation. Some $40 billion worth of American arms to Israel, and a peace treaty underwritten by Washington, have made Israel into an aggressive regional power. But Israel's power is still derivative, and the future of American policy has been linked with it. This situation is unbalanced enough. But the danger is compounded by the fact that Israel commands leverage on American politics, and there are no countervailing American forces. Thus, an aggressive Israeli tail acquires the capacity to wag the American dog.

With Central America, the Middle East has become a primary focus of American interventionist planning. The largest concentration of American interventionist forces is, however, in the Middle East, and not in Central America. The fast-growing rapid deployment forces, the plans to float two more aircraft carriers, and to introduce a fifth fleet in the Persian Gulf, the land and naval bases that are being sought in Egypt, Oman, Kenya, and Sudan, and the strategic consensus with Israel, Pakistan, and Egypt, are all indicative of America's augmented interest in the Middle East.

Above all, the constraints on interventionism--public opinion, media criticism, a critical Congress--which apply in regard to both Central America and Southern Africa, do not apply in the Middle East. It is an unfortunate fact that Congress almost unanimously supports every step that the American government and the Israeli government take in the Middle East.

It is equally true that the media has been largely unsympathetic to the aspirations of the Palestinian people in the Middle East, while mostly remaining supportive of Israeli militarism as well as the American interventionist posture. It is an even more painful fact that the peace constituencies in this country have been scandalously silent, and when they speak, they have, with a few exceptions, tended to speak the Israeli government's language on the question of the Middle East.

So without major changes in U.S. policy, the outlook for the Middle East is grim. As this article goes to press, Israel has invaded Lebanon. The ancient cities of Sidon, Tyre, and Nabatiya are in ruins. For two months, Lebanon's besieged capital, Beirut, has burned. Thousands are dead. The end is not in sight. What will happen to Beirut and the PLO leaders trapped there is still unclear. But I can make some predictions of which I fervently hope a few will prove to be wrong:

1) American diplomacy has and will continue to concentrate on getting the PLO out of Lebanon without linking it to Israeli withdrawal, or the disarming of its "Christian" allies, or even guarantees for the safety of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. Obviously, Washington has sought for Israel a free hand in re-ordering the future of Lebanon.

2) Israel will indeed attempt that re-ordering, but not according to an American blueprint. In invading Lebanon, Israel had only one stated goal: creation of a 25-mile cordon sanitaire along the border to protect the Israeli settlements in Galilee from PLO artillery attacks. This is now understood to have been a pretext. Israel's real objectives are not difficult to surmise. Israel would like to directly control, and perhaps eventually annex, the south of Lebanon up to the Litani River. That has been on the Zionist map of the land of Israel since 1919. Israel would pressure the Palestinian refugees through its "Christian" allies to move on to Syria or Jordan. While attention remains riveted on the Lebanese questions, the repression in and colonization of the West Bank and Gaza shall increase.

3) If Yasser Arafat is killed, Palestinian groups will take to random terrorism, providing the justification for further Israeli expansion and repression. But the question of Palestine shall persist, and haunt the Arab world.

4) Instability is likely to increase. Arab governments, discredited by their inaction and disunity during the Lebanese crisis, shall be challenged by rebellion, and some may be overthrown by coups. In sum, as failures of U.S. diplomacy become apparent, the military options would seem increasingly attractive.

Eqbal Ahmad was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies when this article appeared. This article was adapted from a talk given at the Institute.