THE DULLES DILEMMA IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Lens, Sidney
The DULLES DILEMMA in the Middle East by SIDNEY LENS rpHE latest Middle Eastern crisis spotlights once again the dilemma built into the policy pursued by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: To...
...The alliance of Western capital and native feudalism was buttressed in more flourishing days by an occupying army...
...None of them is friendly to the Soviets...
...One way or another most of the money spent by the Board seemed to wind up in the hands of the sheikhs because the sheikhs owned the government...
...The oil riches have done almost nothing for the people even though a development board was established some years ago to spend 70 per cent of the oil revenue for improvements...
...In Biblical times Iraq (Mesopotamia and Babylon) supported a population of 30 million...
...But Chamoun has long ago forgotten this program, and American policy has merely helped maintain the status quo...
...Caught between the interests of Standard Oil on the one hand and the world-in-revolution on the other, the American Secretary of State has been incapable of consistently supporting reaction or consistently planting his feet with the inexorable revolution...
...Jumblatt, a "third camp" socialist, was considered friendly enough to the West so that the State Department invited him to the United States a few years ago to tour the country at its expense...
...In Saudi Arabia there are no unions, no democratic rights whatever...
...What Jumblatt would do for his country is to industrialize it and to liberate the peasant from the landlord class...
...A man like myself could not impose his personal will...
...They respected him as the head of an old family, rather than as the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party which aspired to broad social changes for the country...
...It is not "Soviet aggression" that the people of Lebanon fear, but continued Western maneuvers against Arab unity...
...It is no exaggeration to say that without the Standard Oils, Dutch Shells, or Anaconda Coppers the feudal classes would have fallen long ago...
...He seems unable to break with those titans of American and European industry whose policies stoke the fires of revolution the world over...
...Why should anyone in Iraq be horrified by what goes on in Rumania when we are suffering from almost identical evils here...
...In the elections of May 5 this year, 129 of the 145 seats in parliament were uncontested...
...And how can you criticize Rumania when you fail to criticize Iraq...
...But in 1953, while driving my wife and me to the ruins of Babylon, he rehearsed his words with us: "I listen quite often," he was going to tell Dulles, "to your Voice of America programs beamed at Iraq...
...They recognized that the feudal lords were too corrupt and too inept to defend themselves from the people's wrath...
...With such sums at its disposal some things did get done, but the corruption and boon-doggling were indescribable...
...To maintain this source of huge profits, however, they must have "safe" regimes —regimes that will: • Be content with a 50-50 share of the profits, and a liberal interpretation of what the word "profit" means...
...Following World War II the United States picked up the mantle which the British had to discard...
...What historians and political scientists have known for more than a half century—that the old classes of the Middle and Far East can no longer defend their own system by themselves—seems to have been totally lost on Dulles...
...They have a long common history, and a single language...
...The neutralists could seal off the whole underdeveloped world against Communist infiltration if they were encouraged by American policy...
...In presenting his case to the American public, Dulles glosses over these "details...
...Since there is no industrial program he can not move to the city to find work...
...King Saud builds himself great palaces— he now has 20 and is erecting two more at a reported cost of $100 million—and buys dozens of Cadillacs for himself and his retinue...
...The Middle East is the strategic crossroads between Europe and Asia, in addition to being a lucrative source of profits...
...It was always there in an emergency...
...The leaders of the Middle East revolution, like Jumblatt, Samme-raiey, the Baath Party, and others who are just as opposed to the Soviets as they are to Dulles, correctly denounce this Dulles argument as specious...
...Now we can do as we please...
...No one pretends that there is any freedom or democracy in the nations where the Western corporations and the feudal lords have their cozy alliances...
...When the latest revolution occurred in Iraq on July 15, there were 8,000 political prisoners in Nuri Said's jails...
...The British—until their empire began to crumble between the two wars—at least had the virtue of consistency...
...One of the leaders of the revolt against Chamoun in Lebanon was a 40-year old Socialist named Kemal Jumblatt...
...The process is all too familiar...
...Per capita income in this nation of seven million is only $70 a year—$1.40 a week—even though $600 million a year in profits is shared by King Saud and his feudal friends on the one side, and Aramco, the American oil company, on the other...
...Dulles seeks his friends from the most conservative rather than from the most progressive elements of these nations...
...This year alone the oil companies will make a profit of one and a quarter billion from just the Middle East...
...So long as the area festers in poverty and remains inhibited by semi-feudal social institutions, it can only be a source of never-ending strife and war-potential...
...The feudal lord buys tractors and agriculture becomes more efficient, but the peasant is usually thrown off the land and made to shift for himself...
...What then is wrong with the new revolutionary regimes of the Twentieth Century following the same course...
...But its policy has lacked the old British consistency...
...Though he was the head of a feudal family of the Druze religious sect, Jumblatt gave most of his land to his peasants...
...Instead, the United States has tried to accomplish its ends through economic bribery...
...The policy of exploiting the area demanded that whatever nations might emerge should be relatively helpless...
...Point Four irrigation thus makes the landlord much richer and the fellah even more downtrodden...
...Guarantee the corporations against expropriation...
...help us overthrow it and introduce true democracy...
...Fayek Sammeraiey, one of the leaders of the Istiqlal Party which made the recent revolution in Iraq, has been telling the American embassy for years about this inconsistency...
...When a Point Four program introduces irrigation to some of the villages, it helps only the landlord class—not the peasants...
...As Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan have gained independence in the last two decades the flames of this Pan-Arabism have spread spectacularly...
...Here, in the shadow of the wealth-producing oil tanks, live thousands of persons in heartrending poverty, amid a stench that beggars description...
...The British army did that job for them —in India, Burma, Iraq, Egypt, and many other places...
...It is a mistake to assume that the Western capitalists inherited the corrupt, reactionary, dictatorial regimes of the underdeveloped areas...
...If this money were shared among the people it would double their living standards...
...The children were skinny, shoeless, diseased, with only a 50-50 chance of reaching their teens...
...Only a decade ago most of the forward-minded men of the Middle East looked to America for deliverance from the old imperialism of Britain and France...
...Until it can stabilize its power, free its economy from the fetters of the past, and industrialize, a revolutionary regime has little choice but to maneuver between the great powers...
...But it is not shared...
...The adults were woebegone, hopeless refugees who had fled, not from any foreign conqueror, but from their own Iraqi sheikhs who tyrannized and brutalized them to the point where they preferred El Assiman to "home...
...I need time," he said, "to educate the peasants around a social program, to awaken them from their backwardness...
...there were some restraints...
...The results, proven once again in Iraq and Lebanon, have been quite the opposite...
...Secretary of State Acheson yesterday and Dulles today did nothing to shake the power of the feudal lords...
...In 1953 he was scheduled to meet with Dulles for an informal chat...
...Help us destroy the feudal aristocracy, divide the land, establish cooperatives, industrialize...
...To understand it we must try to visualize a United States divided into forty-nine countries, held under a brutal foreign rule for four centuries, and then finally taking its first steps towards independence...
...If both the West and Russia would stop trying to use the Middle East as a pawn in a power game or as a field for exploitation, and permit it to develop its own—neutral—way, there would be a genuine prospect for peace in these ancient lands...
...They want to draw closer to their Arab neighbors, to set up some kind of common economy and development program, to join together culturally, to regain some of their common former greatness...
...Instead the United States continued the old policies, but without even the courage of consistency...
...It isn't that Dulles is stupid or uninformed...
...The high living of this small clique of robber barons is an international disgrace...
...In 1952 he was the leader of the revolution which put Chamoun into power, but he refused to take a leading role himself because he came from a minority religious group and because he felt that half his supporters followed him for the wrong reasons...
...Then you will have a real ally in Iraq...
...The State Department stuck with Nuri to the end, even when revolution was deposing him, and has finally lost not only Nuri but Iraq as well...
...A network of military alliances—NATO, the Bagdad Pact, SEATO—formalizes this strategy...
...The DULLES DILEMMA in the Middle East by SIDNEY LENS rpHE latest Middle Eastern crisis spotlights once again the dilemma built into the policy pursued by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: To contain the Soviet empire the United States has forged a ring of military bases around the Russian heartland...
...A barrel of oil that sells for $2.12 in the United States costs only 10 cents to 30 cents to produce in the Middle East, and earns an enormous gross profit of more than 1,000 per cent...
...The Dulles policy not only cuts us off from hundreds of millions of potential friends, but undermines its own end of military encirclement (itself a mistaken policy) by driving one country after another out of the Western camp...
...I don't know whether this meeting actually took place because Sammeraiey spent a good deal of the time since then in prison and hasn't written me on this point...
...The country where the United States has the greatest influence, Saudi Arabia, is probably the least changed from a social standpoint...
...But somewhere in the hard core of this old Wall Street lawyer is a blind spot that prevents him from seeing and understanding the nature of the revolution sweeping the underdeveloped areas of the world...
...It continued to bark like the old imperialists but without the teeth of imperialist occupation...
...Washington's policy of "no entanglements"—the guidepost of our foreign policy for more than a century—was not much different from that of modern neutralism...
...The leading spirits of Lebanon feel that the West has kept them from federation with their fellow Arabic nations because it wants them all to remain weak and easily exploited both economically and politically...
...All Dulles has to do is keep these allies happy—and in power...
...Among his books are "A World in Revolution," and "The Counterfeit Revolution...
...and the formation of the United Arab Republic with Syria was aimed, in part at least, towards obliterating Communist influence in that country...
...But what you tell us about Rumania is true here...
...For 40 years, therefore, the youth and intelligentsia of the Middle East have been bitter against Britain and France—and now America-—for thwarting Pan-Arabism, for keeping the area disunited...
...But the British endowed the sheikhs with many privileges, absolved them from taxes, registered lands in their names, and raised many of their allies to the sheikh level...
...Dulles," so Fayek intended to conclude, "don't support the Nuri government...
...The United States, during its own revolution of 1776, accepted liberal help from the French monarchy against the British...
...No statesman in modern times has tried so hard or traveled so far to make friends for American policy...
...When Dulles reneges on a promise to help Nasser build the Aswan dam, he forces him to seek financial aid from the only other country that can offer it, Russia...
...And in a world that is currently undergoing the most widespread revolution in all history, such regimes are toppling with increasing frequency...
...The water of El Assiman was so polluted that even mosquitoes and snails shied away from it...
...Instead he vegetates in the interior, living with his equally poor relatives, a prey to revolutionary agitation...
...The stink of those thousands of people living together with their animals, lacking toilet facilities or clean water, is indescribable...
...But such a policy, heedless of the realities of these countries, could end only in failure...
...the country, rather than require them to invest in native industry and improvements...
...Three thousand of them were members of the Baath Party, a Pan-Arabic Socialist party which opposes Russian as well as American foreign policies...
...See to it that wages are kept reasonably low and that trade unions are either non-existent or weak...
...One after another of our so-called allies in the "free world"—Chiang Kai-shek, the mon-archs of Viet Nam and Egypt, the British-held states of India, Ceylon, and Burma, the French-held states of Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and now the whole Middle East—have fallen either to neutralism or Communism as the tidal wave of revolution engulfs them...
...His insistence that neutralist governments help Soviet foreign policy and must therefore be challenged on that score alone has contributed greatly to American reverses in the Middle East...
...On the contrary, they often sought out these unsavory elements...
...An executive who worked for the Board told me: "You feel you are losing your principles by working for the government...
...No Westerner who has been there will ever forget that smell...
...When Dulles and Eisenhower send troops to the Middle East to support conservative regimes like that of Hussein in Jordan and Chamoun in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and the oppositions in Lebanon and Jordan can only turn to Russia for arms and diplomatic help...
...Be willing to permit foreign corporations to take their profits out of SIDNEY LENS is a Chicago labor leader who has made foreign affairs his specialty...
...Caught in the vise of opposing the nationalist revolution while speaking glowingly of its own revolutionary principles, the United States did nothing but try to deflect internal hostilities in the police states of the Middle East towards Russia...
...They formed, in effect, an alliance with them against the people...
...The same pattern evolved in Egypt, and now in Lebanon...
...And if he befriends the tyrants and dictators, he eventually loses the countries themselves...
...Dulles' problem is that, like the Austrian Metternich of a century and a half ago, he keeps throwing empty sandbags against an inexorable flood...
...Perhaps symbolic of this contradictory state of affairs was a section of Bagdad which the natives cynically called El Assiman—The Capital...
...When the British and French finally began to chip away at the Turkish Empire, with Britain taking Egypt in 1882, and both powers the whole Middle East after World War I, they divided the area into small, economically unviable units...
...He insists that he must follow his current courses because of the "greater enemy"—Russia...
...You get to the point of talking like a Communist even though you are not one...
...But if he befriends the people and their nationalist leaders, he offends his own best friends at home—Standard Oil, United Fruit, and their kind...
...The trouble, as Iraq proves so eloquently, is that military bases are no more formidable than the stability of the country in which they are built...
...If a "friendly" regime topples, our bases topple with it...
...A man may have his hand cut off for stealing a trinket...
...They recognize in federation a major step towards breaking the sinews of feudalism and backwardness...
...As it is, they become richer and more gluttonous, while the great majority of the people gain little or no benefit from the wealth of oil, copper, and other resources extracted from their soil...
...Britain added Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq to her possessions...
...Our nation, though nominally independent like Rumania, is actually controlled by Britain through her perennial stooge, Nuri Said...
...Now, finally, their dream is moving toward reality...
...Almost every university student—and in semi-literate nations these men play key roles in politics—is a zealous devotee of Pan-Arabism...
...Sammeraiey's words were all too prophetic...
...If a native wants a job with an oil company he usually gets it through his pasha, sheikh, mukhter— by whatever name the feudal lord is known...
...On the one side are the large oil tanks, source of great profits for the government and the Anglo-American corporations...
...But the Americans have only followed British methods...
...There was no oil production in the Middle East, of course, when the British and French started their little game of imperialism at the end of the Nineteenth Century and after World War I. But there were other resources, such as high grade cotton in Egypt...
...But the Dulles policy of combating the nationalist revolution only drives our best potential allies further towards the Soviet camp...
...Our parties are illegal, our leaders—including myself—are thrown in jail, there is no such thing as democracy, our government is corrupt, our people—despite the oil— are poor...
...The damage to American policy can hardly be repaired until we make the present revolution, including Pan-Arabism, the pivot of our strategy for the Middle East...
...The great corporations invest their money abroad to earn profits far greater than they can earn at home...
...France took Syria and Lebanon...
...Political parties were outlawed, and anti-government newspapers suppressed...
...For both reasons Britain wanted it to remain politically impotent, socially backward...
...A wiser Secretary of State would recognize that Nehru's and Nasser's neutralism could become one of the most potent weapons against Communism and Russia...
...In contrast, not a few of the sheikhs enjoy an annual income, after taxes, of more than $1 million dollars...
...It is the consuming passion of the Middle East in a way that we Americans can not understand...
...And the gap between the rich and poor is so great that the average fellah is fortunate if he earns $30 a year...
...On the other side is one of the most squalid areas anywhere in the world...
...It is of the same compelling force as the centuries-old dream of the Poles for independence from Russia, or of the Bulgars, Greeks, and others for independence from Turkey, or of the Latin-Americans for independence from Spain in the Nineteenth Century...
...If you're really for democracy, Mr...
...This made many friends for him in Lebanon and elsewhere, whereas the American policy of "guaranteeing Lebanese independence" can only alienate a people that does not want separatism but federation...
...it has lavished hundreds of millions on corrupt regimes in the hope that this would strengthen them...
...Nasser, in fact, has put the Communist leaders in jail...
...Despite its oil riches, the per capita income of Iraq is only $115 a year— about one-fourth that of Israel, one-half that of Lebanon, one-fifteenth that of the United States...
...The sheikhs were far less affluent before the West took over...
...In the Dulles political rainbow those regimes that side with the United States are "good," regardless of their social crimes, and those that are neutral or revolutionary are "bad," regardless of their social achievements...
...When Jordan and Iraq federated, Nasser sent them a message of congratulation and expressed the hope that this was a step in the broader direction of total federation...
...A million and a quarter of our troops are stationed in 950 military installations in 73 countries ready to drop retaliatory warheads at a moment's notice...
...What I hear is the story of Rumania and Hungary, about their dictatorships, their slave labor, and how their op positionists are being put in jail...
...After their empire disintegrated the Turks ruled them for three or four centuries...
...But evidently neither Aramco nor the State Department are bothered: Saud was invited to the United States recently and given royal treatment, including a visit with President Eisenhower...
...After World War II the United States wedged itself into the position formerly held by the British in the Middle East, but disturbed none of the existing social fabric...
...The very military forces we were buttressing as a counterfoil to the people went over to the people in Iraq, and in Lebanon played a neutral role, refusing to put down the revolt...
...It isn't that he has failed to read his history books...
...It lacks the tiger quality of the old imperialism because it has been unable for many reasons—including public opinion at home—to occupy and police the semi-feudal countries of the so-called free world alliance...
...According to a report of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, there were 603,698 cases of malaria and 524,740 cases of trachoma in 1948 in Iraq—a nation of only five to six million people...
...Today it is only one-fifth as populous...
...It must be remembered that once all the Arab countries, including those of North Africa, were part of the great Arab empire, united into one strong nation...
...Sheikh Ghazi Ali El Kreim, a member of parliament who opposed Nuri Said, told me: "The British showed us sheikhs how to exploit the people...
...In nations like Lebanon, therefore, where Western oil interests are not a direct issue, it is the policy of keeping Arabia disunited which evokes hatred against the West...
...When the British first occupied Iraq in 1919 there were perhaps 10 or 15 sheikhs in the whole land...
...Before that we were much closer to them, and far less rich...
...He has traveled through 50 foreign countries, including those of the Middle East, where he conferred with many government officials and private individuals...
...They helped them to power, gave them guns, trained their armies, registered the lands in their names...
...Trachoma and dysentery were rampant...
...We used to have a small parliament in our home areas which decided on issues...
...Except for a few areas in the big cities there was not a semblance of opposition...
...The Ottoman empire had given them little power, and the last Turkish government had introduced some reforms which would have whittled that power even further...
...Now that the United States had become the dominant world power they thought it would introduce the principles of the Declaration of Independence around the globe...
...Despite all of Dulles' forensic bombast—and before him Acheson's—American policy has remained weak and ineffective...
...Today he is a leader of an anti-Western revolt...
...Our big tragedy," he concluded, "was that we thought American interference into our affairs would help the people...
Vol. 22 • September 1958 • No. 9
