Dubious Allies in the Gulf
ALAN, RAY
Euro Vista By RAY ALAN Dubious Allies in the Gulf Many Western officials and commentators have exaggerated the significance of the "alliance" between the United States, the European...
...to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict and secure peace throughout the Middle East...
...Having said this, one must admit that being the target of a stonethrowing mob can make anyone blow his cool...
...They were referring not to the war but to Israel and the PLO...
...Saddam believes expansion into Arabia would be an easier option: It would certainly yield richer dividends —economic (oil) and political (Iraqis, Syrians and Egyptians despise the Saudi and Gulf plutocracies...
...In Baabda, the corpses of 70 Christian soldiers were found after their surrender to the Syrians...
...It still is, while the Iraqis occupy and loot a defenseless neighbor, hold Western hostages and threaten to gas and incinerate Israel...
...Many Palestinians then fled to Israel, fearing their "Arab brothers" far more than they feared the Jews...
...Similarly, when Assad's Army killed about 8,000 Sunni Muslims in and around the towns of Horns and Hama, in central Syria, in the mid-1980s, in order to crush a demonstration against his regime, Western media coverage was negligible...
...Euro Vista By RAY ALAN Dubious Allies in the Gulf Many Western officials and commentators have exaggerated the significance of the "alliance" between the United States, the European Community and a few Arab governments...
...Even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is willing to overlook the Syrian dictator's red hands...
...As the Economisr said recently: "Despots, from Genghis Khan to Hafez alAssad, easily find apologists for their behavior...
...The Lebanon killings were described in France as a massacre...
...It is now fashionable in the Western media, as in political circles, to apply two codes of conduct in the Middle East: rather lax rules for Arabs, much stricter ones for Israelis...
...This would be "taken up with far greater determination than in the past...
...As Jimmy Carter has reminded readers of Time, the Arab League is "split down the middle, with at least nine of its members, including some that offer lip-service to the UN resolutions, giving overt backing to Iraq...
...Well, as a Syrian officer said, it's not unusual for soldiers to die...
...but, to compensate you, we're giving you the credit for breaking the Palestine deadlock...
...Read their lips...
...Foreigners cannot travel freely in Saudi Arabia, but enough oilmen, diplomats and businessmen have visited the country for the outside world to have few illusions about it...
...And one doesn't have to be a Zionist to understand that most of the coups, conflicts and killings in the Arab states and Iran in the last 40 years have not been connected with Israel...
...But let's return to the cynicism that seems to be polluting the way too many of us mediafolk treat Israel...
...Esteem for Jewish ethics or for Arab oil...
...So what causes this bias that persuades Westerners to shrug off Arab excesses, as if they are to be expected, but prompts loud protests when Israelis misbehave...
...President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's press secretary got into the act in late October, speaking of the need for a Middle East conference that could resolve all the problems of the region, "including the Palestine problem...
...But these soldiers were shot while kneeling, with their hands tied...
...The rulers of landlocked Iraq (aka Babylonia and Mesopotamia) were already expansionist in Biblical times...
...The Baath isn't big enough for both of them, and Syria's economy is in need of Saudi and American aid, so Assad has suddenly become a fellow traveler of what we used to call the Free World...
...British police officers believe they enjoyed official Syrian backing...
...Syria" means, at the moment, Hafez al-Assad, a more subtle dictator than Saddam Hussein, but almost as ruthless and no less contemptuous of the oiloozing Arabian potentates...
...Israel was involved neither in these incidents nor in the Middle East's worst war, that between Iraq and Iran...
...You'll be a hero...
...But they fear even more that success in Kuwait might tempt Saddam Hussein to undermine their regimes...
...Since 1950 there has, at some time, been tension—with fighting or the trading of threats—along almost every important inter-Arab frontier: Syria-Lebanon, Syria-Iraq, Saudi Arabia-Oman, Saudi Arabia-Yemen, North and South Yemen, Libya-Egypt, Libya-Sudan, Libya-Tunisia, Algeria-Morocco...
...The shooting of 20 Arabs by Israeli policemen in Jerusalem was given vast coverage in the Western media and recalled editorially for several days...
...Eloquent indeed is the fact that, despite the massive amount of sophisticated war material they have received from the United States and Britain, and despite Iraq's losses in its war with Iran, in Washington and London the Saudis were considered sitting ducks for Hussein, incapable of defending themselves...
...That Mideast Peace Year after year during the Iran-Iraq War, European commentators spoke and wrote frequently of "the Middle East peace process" and the need to "restore peace in the Middle East...
...mob panic fueling police panic" —in England...
...Yet, it is said, both Thatcher and President George Bush are now so amnesiac they can no longer even pronounce "Lockerbie...
...Bravo, Saddam...
...It also is insanely irresponsible to say or even hint to the Iraqi dictator: "Sorry, old pal, you really must leave Kuwait, or most of it...
...The Hashemite family, put in charge of Iraq and Transjordan by the British in the 1920s, intrigued to create a big "Fertile Crescent" state that, by incorporating Syria, would have had a Mediterranean coastline as well as an outlet to the Oil Gulf...
...Its report began: "Britain has joined the United States, France and the Soviet Union in promising that Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait will pave the way for a concerted drive...
...Although Western Europeans tend to accept the "allied" line-up in northern Arabia as an interesting geopolitical oddity, and better than nothing, they lack enthusiasm for hobnobbing with the Saudis...
...His fans were in raptures over his statement, for Arab consumption, that he sent troops into Saudi Arabia to prevent an American attack on Iraq...
...For their part, the Saudis and some other Oil Gulf rulers are uneasy about the possible consequences of associating with American and European infidels...
...British policemen in Ireland know this, as did their forebears in the Middle East and India...
...A few days after the Jerusalem clash, Syrian Armed Forces took advantage of Hafez al-Assad's improved relations with the West to shell and bomb the few Lebanese Christians who were still resisting them in and around Beirut...
...Recently, the Saudi prince who lost $ 130 million in one night, playing roulette, has become something of a symbol of the profligacy of Arabia's rulers...
...Neither the United Nations nor the European Community protested about these Syrian massacres, or against the killing of many Shiite Muslims at Mecca by a Saudi security force...
...The Old Villain Arab spokesmen tell Westerners "if it weren't for the Israelis, all would be peace and harmony in the Middle East...
...It was, surely, not only cynical but crassly dishonest to talk or write as if Arab-Israel relations were the only obstacle to "Middle East peace" when fanatical Iraqi and Iranian armies were hacking each other's guts out and piling up one million dead, and while the racist Iraqi dictator was using poison gas against his Kurdish subjects and driving them out of their ancestral land...
...This is the 1990 equivalent of the antiBritish and anti-French diatribes American diplomats and pressmen heard from Arab contacts in the 1940s and '50s...
...One does not have to be an imperialist to recognize that the Middle East has been a bloodier and more insecure region since the departure of the British and French than it was during their brief stay there...
...There has been no lack of applause for Assad's flirtation with the cause of international law and order...
...In a poll of Economist writers in the mid-1980s, it was voted one of the world's least attractive societies...
...This may be flattering for Israelis, the implication being that higher ethical standards are expected of them than of their Arab neighbors, but it can be unfair...
...Assad and Hussein head rival branches of the Baath Party (the Arab "socialist resurrectionists...
...Aheadhne in the liberal daily Guardian proclaimed recently: "British Plan for Peace in Middle East...
...According to her former Transport Secretary, the terrorists who sabotaged the Pan Am airliner that crashed over Lockerbie (Scotland) in 1988 were Syrian...
...Some British officers who have helped train Saudi officers and airmen are unenthusiastic about them, and are not surprised that the royal family has, in the past, employed Pakistani mercenaries...
...Give Saddam a success like that, and a few years to improve his chemical weapons and buy long-range missiles, and by 1995 he'll dominate half the Middle East and collect protection money on every cargo of oil leaving Arabia...
...In mid-October, senior Saudi personalities suggested that the Iraqi dictator might be allowed to keep a strip of Kuwait if he withdrew his forces from the Saudi border (though later, after some Western eyebrow-raising, they said they had been misquoted...
...It was deeply shocking and ought not to have occurred...
...A year ago, a writer in the London Times expressed sympathy for police facing "the terror of confrontations with mobs in urban riots...
...It does not herald a new world order or even a firm front against the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein...
...and it did not intervene when King Hussein of Jordan ordered his security forces to crush Palestinian activists who were trying to subvert his regime...
...but throughout Western Europe they received much less coverage than the Jerusalem shootings, even though these were more like an Ulster-type clash than a deliberate massacre...
...In Bsouss, the Syrians herded 14 villagers into a house, scrawled a slogan in praise of Assad on a wall, and shot them...
Vol. 73 • October 1990 • No. 14
