Stalemate in the Middle East?:
Hehir, J Bryan
Church/world watch Stalemate in the Middle East? J. Bryan Hehir SUMMER IS a dangerous season in the Middle East. This would seem to be the message of the last two years. Last year at this time...
...First, it sought to resolve the impasse on the Palestinian issue by generally following the Camp David strategy, but modifying it by proposing a Palestinian homeland tied to Jordan...
...interests similar to that of 1973...
...J. BRYAN HEHIRJ...
...creativity or determination, or upon recalcitrant local actors, the danger of the moment is clear...
...In a Commentary article, "Our Obsolete Middle East Policy," Professor Robert Tucker of Johns Hopkins University indicts both Carter and Reagan policy as fundamentally misguided...
...For Saunders the key to peace is a comprehensive perspective in which each major actor in the Mid-East (Israel, the Arab states, Palestinians, Lebanon and the United States) is faced with specific choices which must be made in different ways from the past...
...policy is found in Harold Saunders's article "Time is Narrowing Choices for Peace" (Middle East Insight...
...After Secretary Shultz's recent hurried trip to the region, the fear is growing that the Reagan initiative in the Middle East, launched with his best foreign policy speech last September, is now at a dead end...
...support consistent with its view of its own interests and to say precisely what it will and will not support...
...Last year at this time open war ravaged Lebanon...
...c) the method of resolution should be a comprehensive regional settlement...
...interests...
...On the whole Saunders's analysis, normative concern, and policy prescriptions are more telling for me than Tucker's...
...should accord the Middle East a more modest priority than it has had in the last decade...
...The second objective is being shredded by Israeli, Syrian, and PLO resistance to commit themselves to a timetable for total withdrawal from Lebanon...
...The initiative involved a two-track approach...
...We will wake up one morning before long knowing that choices were forfeited in the first half of 1983 that could have saved a new generation from war and kept open the doors to peace...
...A strikingly different perspective and prescription for U.S...
...policy is precisely the wrong approach...
...For Tucker, "the strength of the American position in the Middle East has been a function of Israel's power just as it has been a function of the intimacy of the Israel-American relationship...
...BRYAN HEHIR...
...The mistaken premises of the policy since the mid-1970s have been that: (a) a new outbreak of fighting in the region will grievously injure U.S...
...For Saunders, the Israeli-American relationship is a central dimension of policy , but the core issue may be to "establish limits for U.S...
...The first objective failed to engage King Hussein...
...engagement in the Palestinian question a fruitless diversion...
...The drift of events is not promising: "Time is narrowing our choices for a just and lasting peace...
...For Saunders, one of the most experienced Middle East analysts in the United States, a laissez-faire U.S...
...Moreover, the way out of the present impasse is less than clear...
...But the existence of these two radically different views of where U.S...
...He finds U.S...
...policy should go highlights the difficulty the administration faces in trying to move away from its present dead end in the Middle East...
...He contends that any outbreak of fighting would not pose the threat to U.S...
...Second, it committed the United States to work for a withdrawal of all foreign forces from Lebanon...
...The policy perspectives on the Middle East are very 'divided...
...For Tucker, none of these premises accords with the facts of the last decade...
...our political and strategic energies should be di...
...Two recent essays by veteran Middle East analysts highlight the problem...
...verted to the Gulf...
...interests are threatened principally in the Persian Gulf...
...Finally, as a general principle the U.S...
...Whether one places responsibility for the stalemate on lack of U.S...
...it now is made even less likely by the self-destructive tendencies within the Palestinian movement...
...b) peace can be achieved only if the Palestinian question is resolved...
...The danger now is, as Ghassan Tueni put it in Foreign Affairs last year, that symmetrical withdrawal will become symmetrical occupation...
Vol. 110 • August 1983 • No. 14
