By Iqbal Ahmad It looks like a different drama each time. But it is the same cast of characters, playing their part with tedious familiarity. The confrontation again ended without bloodshed, but the casus belli remained. "Who blinked?" asked R W Apple of the New York Times, and answered: "Both of them, Bill Clinton every bit as much as Saddam Hussein..." Correct, but why? The answer lies in the failures of American policy in the Middle East, a region which has been a focal point of its strategic design. The non-event reveals also the futility of Saddam-style confrontations and grand-standing. An overview of recent history may help put matters in perspective. Three decades ago, there was a renewal of American interest in the Middle East. Since the end of World War II, the architecture of American power had rested on four pillars: United States strategic superiority over the USSR, its strategic and economic leverage over Europe and Japan, its will and capacity to police the world, and an overriding domestic consensus behind of American foreign policy. By 1970, all four pillars were crumbling. Soviet achievement of strategic parity had greatly diminished the value of America's strategic umbrella over Western Europe and Japan. Furthermore, as European and Japanese economies recovered to become competitive with American capital, Washington's economic leverage over the industrialised countries was significantly reduced. Its will and capacity to police the world came into question as the massive American military intervention was defeated in Indo-China. The war in Vietnam also wrecked the foreign policy consensus at home. By 1969, the need to redesign the structure of America's international relations was apparent. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, then the National Security advisor, drew up the new design to restore the lost premises of American power. To regain strategic superiority, they shifted American nuclear doctrine away from "massive retaliation" to the development of "first strike" capabilities. The latter included a range of new weaponry, from B-1 bombers and MX missiles to space-based weapons (star wars). To gain new leverage on old allies, they focused on controlling such key resources as minerals and energy, on which the resource poor and industrially advanced economies of Europe and Japan are entirely dependent. To overcome the problem of policing the world with diminished domestic willingness to intervene abroad, they devised the Nixon Doctrine. It envisaged creating regional constellations of power to police each region. To further regain domestic consensus, the rhetoric of peace and human rights replaced the discredited language of "standing watch on the walls of world freedom". Countries to the south of the Mediterranean appeared centrally important in this new strategic design. Their proximity to the USSR rendered it valuable in a nuclear doctrine that sought first-strike and war-fighting capability. Europe and Japan depended heavily on energy supplies from the Middle East; American hegemony over the region would yield a powerful new leverage over old allies. Israel's popularity in the United States and its influential lobby would help overcome domestic constraints against an activist policy there. Hence, the Middle East became the centrepiece of the Nixon Doctrine. Israel and Iran were chosen as the regional marshals. American arms flowed generously into the "two eyes (Is) of America in the Middle East". In a single decade, they received nearly $50 billion worth of the most advanced weapons in America's arsenal -- one as a gift, the other at exorbitant costs. The burden was too heavy and dry for the brittle Pahlevi state, which paid for the arms and 40,000 advisors who descended on Iran. Before the Shah fell, Israel ran into trouble. In October 1973, it faced so great a military debacle that Henry Kissinger argued for and got the largest logistical operation in military history to save Israel. Fortunately for Israel and Kissinger, and unfortunately for the Middle East, Egypt stumbled. Anwar Sadat, who had called the October 1973 War a war of limited objectives, ignored first the limit then the objective. A week and $3 billion of airlifted weapons later, Israel redeemed itself with a bold military riposte. Either from this development or by prior determination, President Sadat decided that the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict lay in Washington. So began Kissinger's "step-by-step" diplomacy. Frustrated by the lack of progress, Sadat saw the road to Washington as going through Tel Aviv, and arrived at Camp David. He was welcomed with delirious excitement. The absence of a viable Arab star in the Nixon Doctrine's Middle Eastern constellation had been the singular weakness of the American design. Egypt's entry promised to fill that gap. Arab, especially Saudi, opposition to the Camp David Accord, and Israel's delaying tactic and intransigence -- over Sharm El-Sheikh, Taba, and the Palestine question -- torpedoed the "peace process" and stalled Egypt's full integration into the American constellation. Then the Shah fell and Iran's Islamic regime proved deeply hostile to the United States' interests in the Middle East. Iraq's invasion of Iran, and the US and Arab support for it, caused death and devastation on a large scale, yet proved inconclusive. Meanwhile, US military presence in the region was increasing significantly. The US base in Diego Garcia expanded, missiles were deployed in southern Italy, American naval presence in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean vastly expanded, and large quantities of arms were stockpiled in Israel and Saudi Arabia. The United States appeared ready and eager for an opportunity to intervene in the oil belt of the Middle East when Saddam Hussein opened the door. America came in roaring like "Desert Storm". The American challenge now was to consolidate its post-Gulf war gains in the Middle East. This required the fulfillment of three goals. First, relations had to be rendered normal and stable between Israel and the Arab states. This demanded an end to Syrian-Israeli hostility which would mean the end of Israel's occupation of the Golan and southern Lebanon, and defusion of the question of Palestine. This done, the Pax Americana in the Middle East could include strategic cooperation between Israel, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Together, they will guard the peace against possible disturbances by "rogue states". The Madrid Conference in October 1991 was the first step in this direction. But distrustful of Arab ability to collaborate with its expansionist agenda, Israel did not share the Bush administration's perspectives. From this point on, Israel shall scuttle the American plan. George Bush will make a show of putting down his foot. But his successor shall be less forceful. As Sadat had sought a short-cut via Tel Aviv, so did Yasser Arafat. But unlike Sadat, he derailed an ongoing Madrid-related negotiation which might eventually have yielded more than Oslo. The Oslo Accords relieved the Clinton administration of its responsibility to forge a settlement between Israel and the PLO. In the glow of the White House ceremony which consecrated Oslo, the question of Palestine was defused indeed. After Arafat's entry into Gaza and Jericho, American policymakers could return to the interrupted task of creating a grand Middle Eastern alliance. In a speech at the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, a pro-Israeli outfit, Anthony Lake, then Clinton's National Security advisor, spoke of American expectations of "a decisive settlement between strong states entering together into a peace of the brave". He envisaged such a peace to serve as a bulwark against the "rogues states" (read Iran and Iraq) as well as Islamic extremism, forces he described as threats to "our nation's interests." As America's strategic ally and the region's only nuclear power, Israel was to lead this pro-American constellation of power. But since it could not give up on conquests, it was not interested. This design failed because, as Geoffrey Aronson put it in a recent report of the Washington-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, the US government deemed "the price of success... higher than the cost of failure". There are unconfirmed rumours that because he had advocated paying the "cost" of herding Israel toward such an arrangement, Anthony Lake was shown the door in Clinton's second term. The US national security administration now passed almost entirely into the hands of those whom the Israeli daily Ha'aretz once described as the "Jews who control Clinton's court". They supported Israel's alternative agenda -- an Israel-Turkey axis into which may be drawn, somewhat gradually, Jordan and Pakistan. The United States has bitten the bait. It is stuck in Jordan's throat. And Pakistan's establishment eyes the matter with greedy ambivalence, which is normally a formula for becoming a "little bit pregnant". Whatever comes of this return to the "Northen Tier", it is obvious that America's Middle Eastern policy is in shambles, partly because of the Clinton government's poor analytical acumen and largely because the tail that wags the dog does not really care about the dog's welfare. Excepting Samuel Berger, all of Clinton' aides, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defence Secretary William Cohen, are reported to have advised Clinton to proceed with the deadly strikes against Iraq even after Saddam Hussein had informed the UN secretary-general that he would accept the return of UNSCOM to Iraq. Before them was a Pentagon estimate that some 10,000 Iraqis would perish from the strikes. How the Arabs would have greeted this American massacre of Iraqis is hardly a matter of speculation.
