The Dark View from Israel

...AS IRAQ SITS TIGHT The Dark View from Israel By Eliahu Salpeter Tel Aviv Israel has spent the late summer and early autumn caught in conflicting modes: It has been trying to respond cautiously to Saddam Hussein's threats of a missile and chemical attack, and to advance the promise for positive change in the country held out by an influx of Soviet immigrants expected to reach the million mark within five years...

...Should the West come out the winner, Israel will face a Syrian-Egyptian-Saudi coalition that might not be so virulent, but is better armed and holds a big political promissory note signed in Washington...

...As the Defense Ministry announced that gas masks would after all be distributed to the civilian population, the Ministry of Absorption warned that some of the newcomers would have to be housed in military camps because of the lag in housing construction...

...The frustration is palpable...

...The satisfaction felt in August when PLO chief Yasir Arafat seemed to have foolishly jumped on Saddam's chariot was not limited to the Likud and the extreme Right...

...The State Department, the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex in general have seized upon the evident need and the improved public image of "pro-American" Arab countries, Saudi Arabia in particular, to promote enormous new arms sales...

...Whether or not such concerns are valid, theoretically all possible resolutions of Baghdad's Kuwait annexation are variations on one of four main scenarios...

...This eliminates the imminent danger of a bloody war facing Israel, and the problem of inflated oil prices...

...and its allies bring about Iraq's total withdrawal from Kuwait, but Saddam is not removed and his arsenal is left untouched...

...In response to the argument that Saudi Arabia's small Army cannot possibly utilize the huge number of tanks, planes and missiles it has been ordering, Riyadh has decided to set up a 50,000-man National Guard...

...To them what is important is not the looting but the removal of the Kuwaiti population and its replacement by masses of newly arriving Iraqis and Palestinians...

...Labor Party leaders, who believe in the need to negotiate with the Palestinians, also hoped the West would finally realize that Arafat cannot be a partner to any stable settlement of the West Bank and Gaza Strip dispute, and that Israel cannot live with a PLO-dominated state just 15 miles east of Tel Aviv...

...troops will strengthen the call to "bring the boys home," and the time gives Iraq's propaganda specialists a further opportunity to destabilize the Arab countries siding with the West, or at least to undermine their resolve...

...UNHAPPILY FOR ISRAEL, the Kuwait crisis has created an enormous new threat to its security from the West, and specifically from the United States...

...By now doubts have crept in about the achievementofthat objective...

...Similarly, when Israel adopted its low-profile position in the current upheaval with Washington'sappreciation, almost everybody assumed this would contribute to hastening the destruction or dismantling of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear arsenal...

...The overall figure of $21 billion that the Pentagon is shooting for is simply surrealistic...

...On the simplest level, Riyadh will be tremendously tempted to buy off threatening Arab leaders by transferring some of the American equipment and/or putting it to use against Israel...

...The tightly thoughtcontrolled Iraqis and most Arabs hail Saddam's victory...

...4. Saddam is removed and Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities are destroyed...

...The amount of ultramodern equipment in the $7.5 billion first-stage package already means a basic erosion of Israel's "qualitative edge," which is supposed to offset the quantitative arms and manpower advantage of the Arabs...

...A third factor that Washington and the UN have to consider, of course, is the impact of doing nothing on oil prices...

...Then came the not-soveiled linkage statements of Presidents George Bush and François Mitterrand, and of British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd...

...But the aggressor nation is left in possession of its conventional and nonconventional weapons...

...1. Iraq's present waiting game works...

...In the past, Saudi rulers have always been careful to distribute arms only to a hand-picked group of officers and soldiers recruited from devoted tribes...

...For a precariously isolated Israel, this means an inevitable war whenever Saddam and his allies decide to pounce...

...Although it takes him a little while to refurbish his image, he is soon rallying the Arabs for an antiIsrael adventure...

...As long as the present uncertainty continues, speculation feeding on fear of a Gulf war may keep oil at anywhere between $30 to $50 a barrel...

...For another, Iraq's accelerated dismantling of Kuwait as an administrative, economic and demographic entity is perhaps more significant than has been realized...

...Eastern Europe and the less developed countries certainly could not hold off collapse for very long...

...According to a recently floated theory, the systematic stripping of Kuwait's factories, offices, hospitals and private homes of everything movable indicates that Baghdad expects to be obliged to leave...

...Scenarios aside, however, there are some practical forces that have to be considered in terms of the timetable of events in the Persian Gulf...

...For the rest of the world, it means sky-high oil prices set by Baghdad that play havoc with the international economic order...

...If and when he is compelled to calculate the odds of his personal survival should he retreat, as opposed to a full-blown military confrontation, he will opt to retreat because he fears the wrath of the Iraqi Army less than the might of the American Army...

...A seemingly purposeless stay in the desert by U.S...

...There is, at this point, considerable recognition here that the matter can no longer be avoided, yet Israelis worry that the scales are tipped against them because the West believes it must "compensate" Arab nationalism for the blow its pride suffered with the Iraqi defeat...

...Israel has no doubt what his new target will be, and wonders whether the West would accord it the same protection it provided for Saudi Arabia...

...At the minimum, the whole armsstuffing enterprise qualifies as a textbook example of planting the seeds of trouble...

...And from Israel's point of view these range from tragic to unfavorable...

...Next on the Western agenda is an all-out effort to resolve the Palestinian issue, especially given its potential for igniting yet another Middle East crisis...

...If the crisis ends with Iraq undefeated, Israel will face, to the north and east, an ever more virulent Baghdad-led Arab coalition that includes a strengthened PLO (whose shares have gone up greatly of late on the Arab market...

...So are the second thoughts about initial reactions here to the Persian Gulf crisis...

...There is no way the Saudis can usefully absorb the $7.5 billion worth of additional sophisticated armaments Congress has approved...

...On a different level, the fantastic quantities of military hardware going to Saudi Arabia could lead to the collapse of the House of Saud...

...The victory confirms Saddam's belief that he is destined to revive the old Arab-Muslim empire...

...Should the American reluctance to take military action drag on, they argue quite reasonably, there will literally be no Kuwait (and no Kuwaitis) to liberate...

...Eliahu Salpeter, a regular NL contributor, is a correspondent for Ha'aretz...

...2. An ostensible compromise is reached, including a partial Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait...

...Indeed, a good argument could be made that Saddam may be a "madman," but he is not irrational...

...3. The U.S...

...For one thing, at a certain stage the strategic buildup there will reach its optimum, and beyond that every passing day will become a negative factor...

...By expanding the size of his forces, King Fahd has considerably increased the risk of a military Putsch ousting him—and of tens of billions of dollars worth of American weapons falling into hostile hands, along with control of the country's oil riches...

...It is open to debate how long the world economy could avoid a depression with energy costs that high...

...He emerges as the commanding figure of the Middle East...

...That is not ho w the Kuwaitis (and the Saudis) see the situation, though...

...As the Tel Aviv independent daily Ha'aretz has noted, "unless Iraq's warmachine is obliterated, nothing will, in the long term, compensate for the steppedup arms race in the region...

...Tactically as well, the extended waiting for the other shoe to drop best serves Saddam Hussein...

...it marches off the complete winner, in control of two-thirds of the world's oil reserves...

...Israelis across the political spectrum began to worry that even if Iraq withdrew from Kuwait under pressure of the UN tradeembargo, the West would attempt to force an inimical solution of the Palestinian problem...

...It is now beginning to dawn on the originally somewhat smug Likud-led government in Jerusalem that regardless of how the Kuwait crisis is resolved, Israel is likely to find itself in an even less friendly Middle East environment than before...

...Moreover, there is unease lest the lo w-profîle posture result in the sidetracking of "America's key ally in the Middle East" and make it the poor relative kept away from important family events...

...The West forcefully declares collective security a success...