A Durable Peace (17 page)

T
he first casualties of the 1991 Persian Gulf War were not people but cows. For years, opponents of Israel had tended and nurtured
a herd of sacred cows, unchallengeable axioms that had come to constitute the basis for a false and misleading—but very widely
held—conception of the nature of the Middle East and Israel’s role in it. Only the harsh reality of Iraqi armor grinding over
a defenseless Arab state was finally able to drive some of these creatures from the field of rational discourse.

First among the sacred cows to be crippled in the Iraqi onslaught was the belief that all the turbulence in the Middle East
was somehow the consequence of what had come to be known as the “Palestinian Problem.” Before Iraq invaded Kuwait, this untouchable
assumption had been the linchpin of nearly all analyses of the region’s problems, as well as of proposals for resolving them.
For years, not a day had passed without a spokesman for some Arab nation or organization declaring that the “core” or “root”
or “heart” or “underlying cause” of the Middle East conflict was the Palestinian Problem. Those who made such pronouncements
were always careful to refer to
“the
conflict”—in the singular—as though life in the Middle East would have been idyllic were
it not for this solitary, frustrating sticking point. Consequently, the impression relentlessly presented to the media and
the world was that all one had to do was to solve that Palestinian Problem, and there would be peace in the Middle East.

The proponents of this account of the endless turmoil in the region were by no means only the representatives of the Arab
regimes. The choir chanting the monotonous tones of the Theory of Palestinian Centrality included numerous Third World governments,
in addition to the leadership of the then-still-vibrant Soviet bloc. With the help of the United Nations, this theory was
ceaselessly proclaimed and endlessly elaborated.

Nor did it take long for Westerners to join the chorus. At nearly all the diplomatic functions I can remember, from the day
I first came to Washington as deputy chief of the Israeli mission in 1982 right up to the day of the invasion of Kuwait, Western
diplomats of all ranks and extractions would solemnly point out that peace would not be achieved in the Middle East as long
as the Palestinian Problem was not resolved. And each one of them was utterly convinced that this was so “because, after all,
it is the core of the conflict in the region.” Thus, what had started out two decades earlier as a transparent slogan of Arab
propaganda had assumed, through constant embellishment, a patina of self-evident truth—and had been accepted as such by many
of the men and women responsible for the safety and governance of our world.

Then, in August 1990, came Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It is difficult to appreciate the astonishment with which the international
community received this unexpected event. For here was one Arab country (Iraq) invading a second Arab country (Kuwait) and
threatening still other Arab countries (Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states)—all with no discernible connection to the Palestinian
Problem, nor to anything else that was directly or indirectly attributable to Israel. Worse, a few months later, Saddam Hussein
began to launch daily Scud missile attacks on Israel, even though he knew full well that some of the Scuds might undershoot
Israel’s cities and instead hit the Palestinian areas in the territories (which
some of them actually did). When Saddam was asked how he could possibly justify such callous disregard for the very people
whose champion he was supposed to be, he replied that he did not concern himself “with sorting beans.”

The true nature of Saddam Hussein and his regime came as a genuine shock to countless well-meaning officials the world over,
including many who count themselves friends of Israel. After all, during the preceding decade, Saddam had been regarded not
merely as unthreatening but as
a friend
of the West and the Gulf states, and he had been wined, dined, and fed extraordinary quantities of assistance and armaments
based on this premise. During the Iran-Iraq War, numerous op-ed pieces in the American press by so-called experts on the Middle
East advocated a “tilt toward Iraq” as serving the best interests of the United States. So when Western leaders finally realized
that Saddam hadn’t been named the Butcher of Baghdad by his own people for nothing, it came not as an insight but as a revelation.

Still, one cannot help but feel amazed at the amazement that then prevailed in political circles in the West. After all, one
did not have to wait for the destruction of Kuwait to realize that the Middle East is rife with wars that are utterly unconnected
to the Palestinian Arabs. Barely a year before the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq itself had emerged from a nine-year crusade against
neighboring Iran, a devastating conflict that had claimed well over a million lives and demolished vast sections of both countries.
And even the most cursory survey of the region would have readily revealed that such bellicosity had never been confined solely
to Iraq. Ever since independent Arab states emerged in the first half of this century, virtually every one of them had been
involved in wars, attempts at subversion and assassination, and unending intrigue against one or more of its Arab neighbors—and
against its non-Arab neighbors, too.

In North Africa, for example, Libya has clashed with Tunisia and bombed the Sudan, and in 1977 it narrowly avoided a war over
the penetration of Libyan tanks into Egyptian territory.
(These are all countries that Qaddafi has wished to persuade to “merge” with his.) Declaring its support for various “liberation
movements” as part of Muammar Qaddafi’s “Third Universal Theory,” Libya has financed numerous efforts to topple other Arab
regimes or assassinate their leaders, including those of Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and Somalia. It has also announced
a campaign to liquidate Libyan exiles in the West. Similarly, Egypt under Nasser tried to assassinate the leaders of Jordan,
Lebanon, and Iraq. In 1958 Egypt attempted to impose its regime on Syria, and in 1962 it began a brutal occupation of the
nation of Yemen that sputtered on in various forms for half a decade. In the meantime, for years Algeria coveted the Colomb-Bechar
and Tindouf regions claimed by Morocco. It clashed with Moroccan troops along the border and finally went to war with that
country in 1963. Since 1975, Algeria has channeled its antagonism toward Morocco into a relentless war in the Western Sahara,
which it pursued through its Polisario proxies.
¹

No more pacific has been life on the Arabian Peninsula, where until recently South Yemen regularly launched subversive forces
into the Dhofar in an attempt to tear this region away from Oman. North Yemen and South Yemen have each viewed the other as
an integral part of its own territory, actively promoting subversion and intrigue against each other. Hostilities erupted
into border incursions and armed conflict in 1972 and again in 1979, after the President of North Yemen was killed by an envoy
from South Yemen carrying a booby-trapped briefcase.
²
In 1991, a union of the two was once again attempted, and it remains an uneasy one. When they had not been fighting with
each other, both Yemens lived in constant fear of Saudi Arabia, which under its founder Ibn Saud raided not only the territory
of Yemen but those of Oman, Kuwait, and the other Gulf emirates, as well as Iraq and Jordan.
³
More recently, Yemen had to contend with absorbing the hundreds of thousands of former Yemenis who had been forcibly expelled
by the Saudi regime, which in turn feared Yemeni subversion during the Gulf War.
⁴

The fact that Kuwait had fretted for years over Saudi encroachment on its territory, even though it was Iraq that had actually
invaded the country in 1973, is especially worth contemplating. Only the
second
Iraqi invasion of 1990 seems to have stilled Kuwait’s fear of Saudi Arabia, at least for the moment. But Iraq itself had
racked up an impressive record of aggression long before it attacked Kuwait. For years, it had carried out an energetic campaign
of subversion and terrorism against a number of Arab states, including its traditional enemy, Syria, and its western neighbor,
Jordan. Hostilities with Syria reached a peak in 1976, when Iraq closed an oil pipeline through Syria, leading Syria to completely
seal its border with Iraq for two years. Iraqi efforts to depose the Syrian government continued throughout the Iran-Iraq
War because of Syrian support for the Ayatollah Khomeini.
⁵

Syria, too, qualifies as a predator of considerable standing. It has repeatedly threatened Jordan, murdered its diplomats,
set off bombs in Amman, and even invaded Jordanian territory. It has vilified its fellow Ba’thists in Iraq and openly and
tirelessly worked to overthrow the regime in Baghdad, its main rival for control of the Euphrates River basin and therefore
of crucial parts of “Greater Syria.” Similarly, the reason for Syria’s ongoing and brutal occupation of almost all of Lebanon
is neither to topple a regime that has already been vassalized, nor to change a border that it treats as meaningless, but
to swallow the country whole. These designs go at least as far back as 1946, when both countries gained independence; even
at the time, Syria refused to accept the existence of a separate state in Lebanon or extend it diplomatic recognition, a policy
that has endured to this day. Since the early 1970s, Syria has declared Lebanon to be part of its “strategic defense sphere,”
and it has flooded the country with its troops. In pursuit of a thorough Syrianization of Lebanon, the Assad regime, with
impeccable impartiality, has slaughtered any Lebanese who thought to oppose it—whether Christians, Moslems, or Druze. To justify
this conquest, Syria has always maintained that its forces in Lebanon are a “peace-keeping” force mandated by the Arab league
(and “invited”
into the country in 1976 by a desperate Lebanese government), and that only an all-Arab directive could terminate its mission.
⁶
Finally, in 1991, with all eyes on the crisis in the Persian Gulf, Syria did to Lebanon what Iraq had failed to do to Kuwait.
It devoured its neighbor outright, then asserted legitimacy for its action with a fake Syrian-Lebanese amicability treaty.

Just as Syrian regimes have always claimed Lebanon to be an integral part of Syria, so too have they always asserted that
Palestine is part of Syria. Anyone who has any doubts as to what kind of relationship would exist between Syria and a Palestinian
Arab state, should one ever come into existence, ought to consider what Syrian president Hafez Assad once told PLO leader
Yasser Arafat:

You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people,
there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral
part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people.
⁷

Indeed, Syria savaged Arafat’s PLO in Lebanon in 1976, and in 1983 it backed a successful military effort by pro-Syrian Palestinians
to expel the PLO from Tripoli in northern Lebanon.

With such a record of chronic aggression against their brothers, it can hardly come as a surprise that Arab regimes have also
created problems for their non-Arab neighbors. Libya, for example, conquered a large part of the country of Chad, sent a suitcase
full of explosives to its cabinet, and even succeeded in installing a puppet regime in the capital, until it was pushed out
of Chad following the American raid on Tripoli in 1986. Qaddafi has trained special units to bring down black African governments
and has been implicated in plots as far afield as Senegal.
⁸
As the Egyptian government has testified, he has been engaged in conspiracy on a global scale, commissioning the assassination
not only of fellow
Arab rulers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates but also of such non-Arab leaders as Margaret Thatcher,
François Mitterand, Helmut Kohl, and Zia al-Haq of Pakistan.

Like that of Libya, Syria’s appetite does not limit itself to Arab prey. Syria claims for its own, for example, the region
and city of Alexandretta in Turkey. The dispute was supposedly settled in 1939, but official Syrian maps continue to include
Alexandretta within Syrian territory, and the government has on occasion assured the press that it fully intends to regain
this land.
⁹
The Syrians have supported both Kurdish and Armenian rebel groups in Turkey, providing them with training and money and helping
them infiltrate the country.

The Gulf War made Iraq the Arab regime best known for its aggressiveness. Yet a full decade before the Gulf War, Saddam had
sought to move on Kuwait. He amassed troops on its borders, rekindled Iraq’s alleged historical claims to the country, and
proceeded to fabricate border provocations in preparation for an invasion. But then Saddam’s attention was suddenly drawn
to what he thought were better pickings: postrevolutionary Iran, which he perceived as weak and ripe for plunder after the
collapse of the Shah. Saddam swiftly renounced the border agreement he had signed five years earlier with the Shah and seized
the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, which abuts Iran’s oil-rich provinces. The result was the Iran-Iraq War, which raged
nearly a decade during which chemical weapons and poison gas were used and civilian populations were targeted, exacting a
toll in lives horrific even by the standards of this century’s bloody wars.
¹⁰

Nor is the violence in the Middle East limited to aggression
across
borders. Many Arab regimes are also ready practitioners of violence against the citizens of their own countries, relying
on force and the threat of even greater brutality in order to stay in power. This habitual willingness to resort to violence
against their own citizens is a feature of most governments throughout the Arab world. Not surprisingly, many of them are
military dictatorships. Thus, Libya is ruled by a colonel and a small clique of officers,
as Algeria was for many years. In Saudi Arabia, not one but
two
armies (they watch each other) protect the princes from their own subjects. In Syria, an officer corps dominated by the minority
Alawite sect suppresses dissent with the assistance of no fewer than five independent intelligence organizations (which also
watch one another). To such a regime, not even the slaughter of a significant part of the population of an entire Syrian city
is too great a price to pay for staying in power—as Assad demonstrated in 1982, when his tanks ringed the city of Hama, thought
to be sympathetic to the Moslem Brotherhood, and leveled the city center, killing an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 civilians.
¹¹