The Kissinger Experience

...But in the Middle East, the Soviet Union has shown few signs of willingness to cooperate in this new order: not only did the Russians urge other Arab states to join in the Yom Kippur War, but they threatened to intervene directly themselves, so that the Americans had to call a worldwide military alert to indicate our determination...

...He argued that in the absence of agreement on what is a reasonable demand, diplomatic conferences "are occupied with sterile repetitions of basic positions and accusations of bad faith, or allegations of 'unreasonableness' and 'subversion.' " Could there be a better forecast of the Geneva Conference...

...Kissinger still says his ideas are to be found in his books, and fundamental questions of integrity are at issue if Kissinger's policies by his own analysis are doomed to fail...

...As AlRoy points out, we play cards that have to lose...

...According to AlRoy, Kissinger is viewed with fear and mistrust in Israel, and certainly the recent Sinai agreement was signed with a great deal of apprehension...

...They can argue he demands too much from them and too little from the Arabs—their basic complaint about the Sinai agreement—but they are in no position to deny the fundamental assumptions of his negotiating process...

...Indeed, the Israeli government has shared many of his misguided conceptions...

...In A World Restored, his early book on the Congress of Vienna, Kissinger argued that diplomacy, "the art of restraining the exercise of power," cannot function where the basic order is not accepted as legitimate...

...Kissinger expects that, through "detente," the Soviet Union will cooperate with the United States in "restoring a world" of harmony and stability, the mutual restraint of the superpowers preventing local conflicts from developing into larger confrontations...

...Iran has vital interests of her own in combating Arab power, and AIRoy argues that the United States could have played a decisive role in the Middle East by building up her alliance with Israel and Iran...

...But the truth is that Israel too has been unable to face up to this unpleasant reality...

...But initially the Israelis received the Secretary of State much more warmly...

...Those illusions gone, the Israeli leadership was no better able to define the conflict for what it is, one of incompatible aspirations, and continued to treat ['he Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 29 it as if it were amenable to negotiation...

...During the Yom Kippur War Kissinger was responsible, AlRoy says, for the delay in resupply to Israel, for the imposition of a ceasefire as the tide of battle had turned, for preventing the surrender of the trapped Egyptian Third Army once fighting had resumed (by threatening America would airlift supplies to the beleaguered Egyptians if Israel did not allow supplies to go through), and for ensuring that Israel's strategic and political position was so uncomfortable at the end of the war that she was forced to welcome unilateral withdrawals of her forces, withdrawals that Kissinger arranged and euphemistically entitled "disengagement agreements...

...Israel's leaders can therefore not challenge Kissinger...

...Is this more likely to happen in the future, with the Arab economic and diplomatic clout even greater than before...

...A triumphant Israel with full American backing could have demoralized and destroyed (because of squabbling to apportion blame) the unity of the Arab states, and could have served as a powerful deterrent to their oil boycott and extortions...

...All Kissinger has accomplished is to shorten the interval between wars...

...The ultimate verdict on Kissinger may well be yet another reworking of the well-worked Churchillian line: Never was so much thought of so little...

...Nor can the United States benefit through gaining Arab friends...

...AlRoy singles out Kissinger for attack not because he created our Middle Eastern policy (since 1948 American policy has been to secure Arab recognition of Israel by lopping off pieces of her territory), but because he made its implementation possible...

...AlRoy is particularly good in explaining why Westerners have been able to close their eyes to the nature of Arab objectives in the Mideast—driving Israel and the Jews into the sea...

...Returning to Zion not merely to rebuild it and themselves but to act as a blessing to the region, to found the "just society" others would emulate, the Jews never adjusted their millennial aspirations to Arab intentions, but rather kept finding excuses for them...

...The real mystery is not, as the American public has thought, why Kissinger was accorded such a warm welcome in the Arab world—where he came bearing gifts like territory, nuclear reactors, and wheat—but why he was treated so well in Israel...

...Even Kissinger's short-term tactical goal, taking Egypt out of the conflict, was consistently pursued by Israel, most obviously in the Dayan plan for Israeli withdrawal from the Suez Canal, which would have offered Egypt more than the interim agreement Kissinger has just wrung from Israel, without, of course, any Yom Kippur War...

...Already Kissinger has made the reverse inevitable...

...Kissinger further observed that defenders of the status quo are reluctant to take "revolutionary" demands seriously, treating the revolutionary power "as if it really accepted the existing legitimacy but overstated its case for bargaining purposes...

...Whatever one may think of Kissinger's role in Vietnam, he acted under severe constraints, for the American public wanted out, and in his own view he bought no more than a decent interval before the South's collapse...

...Ultimately the Middle East must prove a major test in evaluating Kissinger's effectiveness, for there he had unprecedented freedom to make policy...

...AlRoy rightly devotes only a few ,entences to the subject: "As for guaranees and arrangements Israel might obain, they never worked in the past and tre not likely to work in the future, since hey are only as good as the intentions ofthose who implement them...

...A more effective The Kissinger Experience: American Policy in the Middle East by Gil Carl AlRoy Horizon Press $7.95 kind of criticism, it seems to me, would be to point up the difference between Kissinger the theorist and Kissinger the man of action...

...Kissinger's goal in thus weakening an ally was to make the situation "fluid," giving diplomacy a chance to effect a broad settlement...

...Kissinger's policy of "territories for legitimacy'' is virtually identical to Jerusalem's long-cited policy of "territories for peace...

...Is there a better diagnosis of Kissinger's own myopia...

...We are to be sure in a much better position than the Soviet Union to extract territorial concessions from Israel...

...Why Kissinger should expect the Soviet Union to be able to determine the behavior of the Arabs when their enormous funds are making them quite independent of Soviet largesse is baffling indeed...

...Too much of his criticism of Kissinger consists of ad hominem assaults on his character and competence...

...AlRoy also fails to set Kissinger's Middle East policies in the context of his faulty global designs...

...Appeasement,' where it is not a device to gain time, is the result of an inability to come to grips with a policy of unlimited objectives...

...But AlRoy states what should be obvious but has been obfuscated: the Arabs have never accepted the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and the Yom Kippur War, far from producing any fundamental changes in attitude, merely robbed Israel of her deterrent power...

...30 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975...

...In view of AlRoy's attitude toward "guarantees," he would probably consider acceptance of American technicians in the passes as a serious mistake on Israel's part...

...But by weakening Israel to the point where her very existence has once again been put on the international agenda, the United States has sent Iranscurrying to mend her fences in the Arab world...

...The opening of the Suez Canal to the Soviet navy, in enormously simplifying Soviet access to the Indian Ocean, may yet prove to be the most significant, if the least criticized, of Kissinger's actions, one, incidentally, that AIRoy does not even probe...

...While I find AlRoy's central argument unassailable, he does make some errors of commission and omission...

...Finally, Israel's leadership comes off too lightly in this book...

...Although AlRoy's book was written before the Sinai agreement, there is no question what his view of it would be: that far from being a stage toward peace, the agreement is another stage in the weakening of Israel, bringing renewed Arab attack closer...

...This important book says what no one wants to hear: Kissinger's Middle Eastern policy is instead an unmitigated disaster...

...In the case of Israel, Kissinger deliberately weakened an ally in the hopes of gaining influence among her enemies and restraining Soviet expansion...

...AlRoy thus falls into the very trap he laments in speaking of other critics of Kissinger...

...Believe it or not, the New York Times has recently called guarantees an alternative policy for the Middle East ( July 6, 1975), and a series of pundits in Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs have pointed to them as the key to a settlement...

...Foreign guarantees always turned useless when really needed, because no foreign power was prepared to act decisively against the Arab world for the sake of Israel...

...But AIRoy does point out that Kissinger threw away a potentially winning hand...

...They will not protect Israel in time of crisis and in the meantime they will serve to undermine support for Israel in Congress and the American public, where one of Israel's strongest claims has been that she never asked for American manpower...

...The recent Sinai agreement will intensify the belief of many commentators that American policy in the Middle East is the crown jewel of Kissinger's diplomatic triumphs...

...as if it were motivated by specific grievances to be assuaged by limited concessions...

...Furthermore, even if the Soviet Union were ready to cooperate, both superpowers face a world of ideological passion and nationalist enthusiasm, unrestrained by any framework of common assumptions, discourse, values, or respect for another's sovereignty...

...The Arabs would love them once the wicked effendis, who fanned the conflict to distract peasants from their exploitation, were displaced by the class struggle...

...But the Soviet Union can afford to wait in the wings before declaring its hand: once the United States has provided the "conquered territories" the Soviet Union can play its trump—the offer of the State of Israel itself...

...The United States will be left holding the bag—a bag of guarantees we will have offered for the inviolability of the settlement...