Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 24, 1991 TAG: 9102240075
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
America and its allies were convinced their moral case was clear: good vs. evil. And the final outcome, the coalition was promised, would also be clear: the total liberation of Kuwait, one way or another.
America and its allies would have done well to savor that moment, because once the fighting ends, high noon Saturday may be remembered as the last time anything about this conflict was clear.
Why? Because the clarity of this defining moment was produced by two very unusual, and fleeting, elements.
First, so much of the attention until now has been focused on achieving definable military objectives with high-tech weapons. In that sense, the clarity has been mesmerizing. Americans have been taken, through their televisions, into the nose cameras of smart bombs as they follow laser beams onto targets in Iraq.
Second, as the story evolved from one about defending rich Kuwaiti sheiks to one about defeating an evil dictator in Iraq, it assumed a moral clarity for many Americans unlike anything since the war against Hitler.
Since the demise of the Soviet "Evil Empire" there has been a hunger among Americans for a moral clarity to justify and shape their foreign policy, and Saddam provided it in spades.
The physical clarity inherent in military action, with its clearly defined means and ends, and the moral clarity provided by Saddam have made this a surprisingly popular war. But they have also been distracting in a way.
"They have obscured the fact that there is no comparable political clarity about what exactly we want out of this war and what we can expect to achieve," said Michael Sandel, a political theorist at Harvard University.
"What kind of Kuwait do we want? What kind of Iraq do we want? Will the region establish its own stability or will a permanent American military presence have to supply it?" he asked.
"There is still an enormous confusion about our political aims and there is no laser-guided policy to help us. There is no night-vision equipment that can pierce the veils of Middle East politics and define the American role after this war is over."
Indeed, just over the clear-cut horizon of this war lies a forest of ambiguities and paradoxes bathed in a half light.
Take the question of the "new world order" and the Middle East. For America's allies Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, this war is not being fought to build a new order, but to rebuild the status quo.
What these societies want out of this war is not to give birth to Jeffersonian democracy but to go back to their insular worlds where women cannot drive and no Western reporters roam the streets, where Iraq will no longer be a threat and where everyone will abide by the unwritten rules and limits of the neighborhood known as the Middle East, without foreign policemen.
There were certainly many worse governments and societies on the face of the earth than those being protected in the Persian Gulf, so the fact that they will be strengthened or preserved by this war is no crime. But will it be very satisfying?
Another paradox that lies ahead arises from the tremendous resentment between the haves and have-nots in the Arab world, a resentment Iraq's invasion of Kuwait exposed. The United States is expecting that after the war there will be some sort of redistribution of wealth to help prevent a repetition.
But the war itself is costing Saudi Arabia so much that it has had to borrow money on the world capital markets to finance it, and the Kuwaitis will need every penny they have saved - and more - just to rebuild their country.
In other words, after this war is over the haves are not likely to have anything left for the have-nots. And even if they did, the fact that the have-nots - Jordan, Yemen, Sudan and the Palestinians - all supported Iraq in this war already has the Arab oil states saying privately that they deserve nothing.
What about the possibilities for a wider Arab-Israeli peace? To be sure, if Saddam is decisively defeated and then ousted, there will be a much better chance than if he had been allowed a hero's exit, with his army intact. He offered the Arab world only false hopes for a military victory over Israel, and as long as his shadow dominated the Arab world nothing was possible. But how much is possible without him?
Ask the Israelis, for instance. At one level the destruction of Iraq's armed forces, as well as nuclear, chemical and biological potential, should leave them more relaxed than ever. The greatest strategic threat to their existence has been eliminated.
Yet the Scud attacks, while they have done no military damage to Israel, have terrified the country in a way that is almost worse.
What security lesson will the Israelis draw? Perhaps that they should never give up an inch of territory because strategic depth is critical; after all, that is one reason tiny Kuwait perished. Or perhaps they will feel all they gained from the West Bank's vaunted strategic depth was one second more of warning against the missiles.
Some in Washington already argue the Saudis, Kuwaitis and others, who have demonstrated a previously unseen quality of pragmatism and forthrightness in openly siding with the United States against another Arab country, might finally openly deal with Israel.
But this ignores the fact that it was only for reasons of survival that the Saudis joined forces with the United States, and that same survival instinct is likely to impel them to continue to shun Israel after this war.
Israel's army is no threat to Saudi Arabia, but an Israeli embassy in Riyadh would make the Saudis a gigantic target. In contrast to smart bombs, which navigate themselves right to the core of a problem, smart Arab politicians step around problems - especially one as sensitive as Israel.
Another paradox is that Saddam's cynical, but repeated, declarations that he raped Kuwait in order to liberate Palestine have probably pushed the Palestine question to the top of the agenda to be taken up after the war. But that has happened at a time when the question of who should represent the Palestinians will be more wide open than at any moment since the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964.
Yasser Arafat, by supporting the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, may have reinforced his popularity with his own people, but he lost all moral credibility with the Israeli peace movement, totally alienated his financial backers among the Arab gulf states and his political backer in Egypt, and generally disgusted every leader in America and Europe who overtly or tacitly was ready to work with him.
So just when there will be the most pressure to address the Palestinian issue, there will be the least inclination to deal with the Palestinians' chosen representative.
So at this moment of clarity, it is worth stepping back for a moment and recalling a lesson of Middle Eastern history. Up to now the only modern Middle East war that ended with a clear-cut victory was Israel's defeat of the Arabs in 1967. But that clear-cut victory proved to be untranslatable into political gains.
It produced as many political-security problems for Israel as it did benefits. Ironically, it was the 1973 war - which ended in something of a stalemate - that laid the basis for the only agreements between Egypt and Israel and Israel and Syria.
President Bush's ability to bring the gulf crisis to the clear-cut moment of decision that it reached Saturday seems now to be a diplomatic and military masterstroke. But wars are fought for political ends and one cannot help but wonder how this current clarity will translate at the end of the day.
"Americans are thinking in highly self-enclosed terms about this conflict," said Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. "Clarity is a cultural value of democracies, where governments are judged by performance and are accountable only to the living.
"Politics in the Middle East is governed more by the accumulated weight of history, traditions and tribal animosities - and certainly not performance alone. That is why this region has never been hospitable to straight lines or clear endings."
by CNB