OIL, THE MARINES, AND PROF. TUCKER

...I have done some checking and conclude there is no reason to doubt that it was the author's own idea to write it...

...He doubts that the former could wage guerrilla warfare in the desert and assures us that "the Russians still lack the naval forces needed for effective interposition in the Persian Gulf...

...of the Arabian coastline bordering the Persian Gulf that produces 40 percent of the total petroleum produced by the OPEC countries and contains-an equal proportion of the entire world's proven reserves...

...But the January issue of Commentary reached subscribers at least two weeks before January 13...

...But there are a lot of sand dunes and the emptiness of the land would, I should think, facilitate as well as hamper regular or irregular troop movements from Iraq or the unoccupied interior...

...Not to be confused with Professor Robert C. Tucker of the Department of Politics at Princeton, a onetime foreign service officer, author of books on Marxism and on Soviet politics, and in the past a contributor to DISSENT...

...The attention received by Tucker's article recalls that given to the anonymous 1947 article in Foreign Affairs advocating American "containment" of the Soviet Union, whose author was later revealed to be George Kennan...

...I have nothing against theorizing or professors who specialize in it, but in the world of action the applications of a theory must always be made in a time-bound context that the theory necessarily minimizes...

...Few recent articles have aroused such attention...

...He blurs, however, the factual issue of whether the public would in fact support or "consent to" a war over Middle Eastern oil with the moral issue of whether it should give its consent— a posture often assumed by advocates striving to influence the very public opinion they recognize as crucial to the adoption of the policy they favor...

...Couldn't they lend a few with "volunteer" crews to the Arab countries...

...TUCKER ARGUES that American forces could occupy COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 111 the coastal oil-producing region, restore full production after sabotage within three or four months, and avoid extended military involvement with either the Arabs or Russia...

...Stone complains that the timing of the article was "unfortunate" because it came "after the appearance...

...Yet all of this has little bearing on the specifics of intervention in the Middle East, even if it is agreed that a vital national interest is at stake there, as was not the case in Vietnam...

...Nor is there any evidence that Israeli hawks or their American supporters had anything to do with its acceptance by Commentary...

...Did Tucker, a professor at Johns Hopkins, have any ties to policy-makers in Washington...

...Whatever the merits of Tucker's general thesis about the risks of a world order in which no nation is free to use force in defense of its vital interests, his case for American intervention in the Persian Guif amounts to a 1970s version of General Omar Bradley's "wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place...

...The Russians have submarines...

...In any case, "the Russians simply do not have the interest here that we have...

...Another dubious feature of Tucker's projected intervention is that he nowhere discusses just how we will get the oil out of the region and to the West Europeans and the Japanese whose potential economic collapse as a result of the OPEC price rise provides the rationale for the venture in the first place...

...The Russians might wish to appear uninvolved, apart from rhetorically exploiting the situation to win credit with the Arabs and the Third World, but without difficulty they could clandestinely supply Arab forces in the area to harass the Americans...

...He justifies his perfunctory review of the difficulties by arguing that the burden of proof must rest upon those who dissent from the judgment that intervention in the Persian Gulf is not militarily feasible...

...The major theme of his article, and of a later article in the February issue of Commentary referring only briefly to the oil crisis, is that the apparent post-Vietnam proscription of the use of force in international affairs may have worse consequences than the selective application of limited force...

...Modern military technology has not disproved the adage that he who sows the seeds will reap the whirlwind...

...I claim no expert knowledge of either warfare or oil technology, but even without making what Tucker disparages as the "worst-case assumption," this "scenario" surely slurs over a lot of difficulties...

...Stone's preoccupation with American Jews and Israel seems a bit odd because Tucker barely touches upon Israel in two short paragraphs in which he says the American "interest in oil would be unchanged with or without Israel...

...Moreover, the article has been originally rejected by Foreign Affairs itself...

...Stone's concern with the appearance of the article in a Jewish magazine would scarcely be worth dwelling on, were it not that James Reston quoted Stone approvingly in the New York Times in support of his contention that the intransigeance of Israel's American Jewish supporters was making it harder for Kissinger to negotiate an Arab-Israeli settlement...

...About the moral issue of intervention, Tucker is singularly mute...

...I have never been to Arabia, but I have flown over the Gulf region and refueled at Kuwait, and Tucker is quite correct that there are no trees and few people...

...An effective critic of American involvement in Vietnam, Tucker is now concerned with the possible overgeneralization of its "lessons...

...We are not talking about Caribbean islands in America's backyard, or peninsulas separated by mountain ranges from the Asian landmass, but of a landlocked gulf coast that is at some points less than 700 miles from the border of the Soviet Union...

...Tucker is even more perfunctory in discussing the potential deterioration of conditions in Western Europe and Japan resulting from higher oil prices, although this deterioration is the sole justification for the intervention he proposes...

...Although there was nothing particularly novel about these carefully hedged remarks, they were interpreted as giving greater substance to earlier reports of Pentagon plans and troop maneuvers envisaging military intervention against oil-producing countries in the Middle East...

...Tankers would have to be heavily convoyed by destroyers...

...Tucker tries to refute the claim that the country would not "stand for" another intervention after the Vietnam experience...

...of the Secretary of State's interview which put war into the headlines" (my emphasis...

...Does not all the experience of the past quarter-century (and of World War II) suggest that military enterprises are by their very nature fraught with incalculability...

...Was his article a "trial balloon...

...If they successfully traversed the Persian Gulf without "Russian interposition," those heading for Europe would have to go the long way around Africa since the Suez canal would certainly be blocked to them...

...No doubt these are historical "accidents," from a theoretical perspective, but their implications cannot be ignored in assessing the wisdom of a new unilateral military action abroad, particularly this one, with all the deeply distasteful moral issues surrounding it...

...Tucker actually devotes only about a page and a half of his ten-page article to discussing the technical feasibility of American intervention...

...This last point is worth stressing because I.F...

...Given the American force structure and the experience we possess, however, why is it unreasonable to insist that the burden of proof rests upon those who insist we lack the military capability to intervene successfully...

...As for restoring the flow of oil after sabotage, perhaps the repair of pipelines presents no great problem, but what about the power to operate pumps, some of which, I understand, is generated in the interior of the peninsula...

...One reason was the publication later that month of an interview with Henry Kissinger in which, referring to the oil crisis, Kissinger denied that "there's no circumstance where we would not use force" and suggested that "some actual strangulation of the industrialized world" might be such a circumstance...

...To recognize this is the essence of what is usually called "historical perspective...

...The oil 112 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS crisis comes only two years after the still incomplete American withdrawal from Southeast Asia, less than a year after Watergate has discredited the "imperial presidency," and when—a situation without precedent—neither of the nation's two top officeholders owe their positions to the national electorate...

...One does not have to be much of a military expert to be staggered by this reasoning...

...An area, moreover, in which neighboring and nearby countries have been richly supplied by the great powers with the most advanced weaponry...

...Stone attacked Commentary in the New York Review of Books for publishing the article on the grounds that it was likely to encourage "antiSemitic paranoia" in the United States, deepen American Jewish "hysteria over Israel," and play into the hands of "Israeli hard-liners...