War This Year?
ALAN, RAY
Euro Vista BY RAY ALAN War This Year? A Frenchman who claims to possess prophetic powers (he describes himself as "le plus grand voyant du monde") informed me a little over two years ago that the...
...The Mitwalis also have had contacts with the Israelis over the years: They used to guide Iraqi and Syrian Jews into Israel during the 1950s, and before the Palestinian takeover of the region Mitwali smugglers often supplied Lebanese markets with Israeli goods...
...Many Western Europeans fear that a scramble for oil could touch off a major war, though more probably in and around the Persian Gulf than in Europe...
...The Kremlin might do this, it is argued, if it were convinced that war with China was inevitable and concerned about the West aiding Peking, and if it were sure the U.S...
...Fine: but let's be honest about what is involved...
...and the many Russians who are looking forward to a higher standard of living, not to mention car ownership, may again be disappointed...
...Last February, residents of the ancient port of Sidon went on strike in protest against the conduct of the Palestinian factions—heavyhanded toward the Lebanese, and perpetually feuding among themselves...
...Having expanded production faster than prospection, the USSR does seem to be in danger of becoming a net importer of oil in the mid-1980s...
...Even so, few people on the Continent expect Moscow to go so far as to help itself to an oil sheikhdom...
...It supported the Egyptian dictator Carnal Abdel Nasser with this end in view, and in the 1960s and '70s encouraged Arab hotheads who wanted an oil-embargo against the West...
...In the winter of 1973-74, in the interests of detente, Henry Kissinger pressed the Israelis not to reveal that the nominally Arab army conducting a "war of attrition" against them on their Syrian border included two specially-trained Cuban tank brigades, East-German missile and artillery officers, and Russian planners, training officers and engineers...
...its hold over its Eastern European satellites might be weakened (Poland is already buying oil from a Western company...
...What my French seer predicted two years ago is a secret pact between the USSR and China...
...Paying for Detente Most sane people want detente between the West and the Soviet bloc...
...But here we are, knee-deep in 1978, and...
...Certainly, the Druzes of South Lebanon and Syria have cultivated good relations with the Israelis, but this is not a recent development: There are Druze soldiers in the Israeli army...
...Its troops would however be halted at Lyons, France, and ultimately would be defeated—a comforting thought, except for Germans and Belgians...
...Very many Western Europeans, too, would applaud a genuine revolution (as opposed to yet another palace revolution or military coup) in Arabia, Iraq or Iran, and it is hard to imagine any Western government rushing to the rescue of a Gulf oligarchy...
...well, maybe I should warn someone...
...Having supported Somalia yesterday, it backs the Ethiopian junta today and will ally with Somalia again tomorrow if need be...
...Still, the outcome could be explosive...
...When I disillusioned them, they dumped the artifacts beside my front door, anyway...
...South Lebanon has seen many invaders come and go, among them Egyptians, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, French, and British...
...Israel was where the scrub and boulders ended and cultivation began—As lush as the Bible, as neat as a map...
...Fear of war" is mentioned by Germans of both West and East as a reason for their falling birthrate...
...Now, though, it is thought to be worrying about its own supplies of fuel...
...In the past few years Palestinian gunmen had taken over Mitwali towns like Nabatiyeh and Khiyem, the Druze center of Hasbaya, and several Christian towns—from Damour, on the coast, where they killed nearly 500 Christians, to the once-flourishing pottery village of Rashaya el-Fouk-har, at the foot of Mount Hermon—disrupting local life and forcing many people to flee to Beirut and North Lebanon...
...In the meantime, the Kremlin is doing all it can to acquire a base in East Africa to oversee Arabia and the Red Sea...
...They are familiar only with what they consider his achievements—the biggest political entity (not to say "empire") in the world, the defeat of Nazi Germany, reconstruction and industrialization, space-probes...
...The region is a mosaic of mutually mistrustful religious sects, with the Mitwalis (a branch of the Shiite Moslems), Druzes (adepts of a secretive 11th-century religion compounded of Judaic and Shiite elements) and Christians (mainly Orthodox and Maronite) predominating...
...The people who are really paying for the Belgrade conference are the Russian dissidents who had hoped it might have a slightly less cynical outcome...
...would not risk devastation for the sake of helping—or avenging—bremen and Bonn...
...It seemed disturbingly industrious by comparison with our side of the border, where an amazing number of able-bodied men sat around most of the day, talking politics and playing triktrak (an ancestor of backgammon), mysteriously financed by remittances from relatives in the Gulf states, America and Beirut...
...What is a poor journalist to do with "information" like that...
...In April, inhabitants of Tyre (the port through which the PLO was receiving substantial shipments of Soviet arms until the Israelis intervened) welcomed the UN peace force and demonstrated against the gunmen...
...The Palestinian leaders say the Druzes and other South Lebanese are "chameleons...
...Russia's tightly indoctrinated young officers are not old enough to have suffered personally under Stalin...
...The Lebanese frontier need no longer be considered a hostile one by the Israelis if their politicians and soldiers respect the susceptibilities of the communities living along it and if the UN peace force restrains guerrilla activity...
...Detente has to be paid lot And not only hv the taxpayers who finance diplomatic junkets like the recent Belgrade conference to review compliance with the Helsinki Agreement...
...I had collected five or six before a sympathetic Lebanese officer arranged to have them removed and dropped into a ravine...
...Western diplomats have recently adduced a rather alarming reason for allowing Moscow to make a profit out of detente: the rise of nationalism and Stalinism in the Soviet Armed Forces...
...If this happens, its balance of payments could be upset (40 per cent of its hard currency earnings derive from oil exports...
...Then, he said, the Soviet Union would launch a lightning attack on Western Europe, crushing Germany and Belgium...
...Writers &Writing...
...These officers are an ultraconservative force that the Soviet gerontocracy—Already Europe's most conservative ruling class—has to respect and appease from time to time...
...The periodicals I write for don't run astrology columns...
...A Frenchman who claims to possess prophetic powers (he describes himself as "le plus grand voyant du monde") informed me a little over two years ago that the next pope would be a German, and that there would be a European war in 1978...
...Since all Englishmen in the Near East are assumed to be agents of Whitehall (that's why the British SIS employs so many Levantines and Irishmen), they expected me to reward them for returning Her Majesty's property...
...His letter went into a file of unusable material, and until last week I thought no more about it...
...I am not a gambler...
...Battered Borderland I lived for several months in a small town on a Lebanese mountainside overlooking the point where Lebanon, Syria and Israel meet, and I have an abiding affection for the hospitable, inquisitive, often charming, frequently exasperating people of the region—lebanese, Syrians and Israelis alike...
...Lebanese Christian Army officers and mukhtars (village mayors) have thanked the Israelis for chasing out the Palestinian gunmen...
...Israel's many casualties between the beginning of February and the end of May, 1974, paid the bill for detente that time...
...A CIA report published last year, predicting an energy shortage in the Soviet Union, is suddenly being taken seriously by European observers who initially considered it propaganda...
...During my stay in South Lebanon I was occasionally visited by farmers carrying a rusty bomb or shell they had unearthed while plowing, which they said was English...
...The British passed through in 1943 when they persuaded the pro-Nazi Vichy-French administration to go into retirement...
...I gather from colleagues of different nationalities that a surprising number of people are worrying about the possibility of war...
...The Russian scientist Andrei Sakharov has revealed that as far back as 1955 the Kremlin had hopes of provoking a fuel shortage in the West...
...Friends who toured China recently report that every official they spoke to, from the Politburo down, said he was sure a defensive war would have to be fought soon against Russia—preferably in Europe...
...In several towns Lebanese merchants and farmers accused Palestinian factions of running extortion rackets...
...They were accompanied by Australian, Free French and Jewish Haganah units: The operation was, I believe, the one in which Moshe Da-yan lost an eye...
...Mitwalis and Druzes have said they want the gunmen kept out: They dislike them partly for religious reasons (most Palestinians are Sunni Moslems), but mainly because Palestinian braggadocio and depredations were becoming unbearable...
...During a recent military ceremony in Moscow about 6,000 officers applauded vigorously when a speaker mentioned Stalin...
...The West should watch that the UN force does not serve to screen preparations for fresh operations against Israel that would spark off more fighting and more suffering for innocent people on both sides of the border...
...A Belgian general has impressed nato officers and European Community officials with a scenario in which the Russians occupy West Germany in 48 hours...
...and 1 can't afford to build a bunker...
...But it does seem likely to give active support—Including the muscle of its mainly Cuban foreign legion—to any credible revolutionaries who may try to take over an oil state...
Vol. 61 • April 1978 • No. 9
