Middle East Diplomacy: Continuities and Changes
Noam Chomsky
Z Magazine, December, 1991
On October 30, the US-brokered conference on the Middle East opened in Madrid. The conference was described on all sides as a "historic event," a remarkable achievement of George Bush's diplomacy and the tenacity of his Secretary of State James ***** in exploiting the "historic window of opportunity" opened by changes in the world order. These observations are not unrealistic, when understood within their historical and policy context -- a question of perspective and judgment, of course. I will review the way these matters look to me, contrasting that picture with a different one that dominates public discussion.
Three related questions arise at once about the current diplomatic efforts: First, why are they taking place right now? Second, do they signify a departure from the traditional US stand? Third, what is the meaning of the disputes between the US and Israel?
The answer to the first question is clear enough. The Bush administration desperately needs a foreign policy success to obscure the outcome of its war in the Gulf: hundreds of thousands killed and the toll mounting as a long-term consequence of the devastating attack on the civilian society; the Gulf tyrannies safeguarded from any democratic pressures; Saddam Hussein firmly in power, having demolished popular rebellions with tacit US support. US government interests and goals are hardly concealed. Washington seeks "the best of all worlds," New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman explains: "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein," a return to the days when Saddam's "iron fist held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia," along with the Reagan-Bush administrations, which gave unwavering support to their murderous ally. These images, however, cannot be left in the public memory in the United States or elsewhere. The reality can be effaced by what the press describes as the "remarkable tableau" in Madrid, with its promise of a "sweet victory" built on the ruins of the Gulf slaughter.1
Furthermore, the Arab clients who lined up in the US war must be helped to maintain some credibility. This requires gestures to suggest that the US-led crusade aimed at something more than merely reinforcing US dominance over the oil-producing regions, with the family dictatorships of the Gulf playing their traditional role as an "Arab Facade," in the words of British imperialists of earlier days.
It is also necessary to divert the attention of the American public from the social and economic crisis resulting from Reagan-Bush domestic programs. Under such conditions, any powerful state would seek diversionary foreign policy exploits.
The second question is also readily answered: the available evidence reveals no departure from the traditional US stance on a Middle East settlement. In fact, another reason for the current diplomatic efforts is that the US monopoly of violence now offers a "historic window of opportunity" to advance traditional US goals.
The urgency of the current Bush-***** diplomacy is understandable. Not surprisingly, Washington refused to permit the Madrid conference to be derailed by the intransigence of Israeli hawks, even at the cost of a confrontation with the government of Israel and its domestic lobby.
That brings us to the third question, the Bush-Shamir conflict. Though real, it is narrowly circumscribed. There is no fundamental disagreement about the denial of Palestinian rights or US support for measures to extend Israeli control over the territories, just as both governments agree that Soviet Jews should be denied freedom of choice and directed to Israel, with the US paying the bill on humanitarian pretexts. Not an eyebrow is raised when the Jewish Agency meets in Jerusalem to demand that Jewish organizations "unite to sabotage" any efforts to open US doors to Soviet Jews, while in the Israeli press, Minister of Immigration and Absorption Michael Kleiner explains how he will induce Germany to reverse its decision to admit Soviet Jews but no other refugees: "Germany has already fulfilled its quota for discrimination concerning Jews in this century," Kleiner will inform these German criminals, "and the time has come for it to treat Jews just like other people" -- denying entry to Jewish refugees, so that they can be forced to Israel.2 The cynicism of the enterprise will surprise only those unfamiliar with the vastly more shameful practices of the 1940s, well into the post-Holocaust years when the miserable remnants of the extermination camps were treated in much the same way.
The Bush-Shamir conflict arose over the timing of US guarantees for loans -- which may eventually turn into grants -- for the theoretical purpose of absorbing Soviet immigrants, though in fact they will be used to expand settlement in the occupied territories, whatever formalism is adopted. Huge sums are being "spilled like water" into the territories by the Israeli government for "ordinary and deluxe settlements," including elegant subsidized villas for privileged settlers, the Israeli press reports, diverting the funds that Israel has available to absorb Soviet immigrants (thanks to US largesse). And while "Jewish immigration from the USSR may be a great accomplishment in Zionist or Jewish terms, there is nothing humanitarian about it.... The humanitarianism is one of the lies the two states have agreed upon," in full knowledge that "the Jews of the USSR are now better off than any other ethnic group in that country," protected by foreign powers, able to leave if they wish, permitted to obtain foreign currency from abroad, and so on -- surely far better off than the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and others fleeing torture and harsh repression in Kuwait, most of them crowding into impoverished Jordan, or numerous other examples that readily come to mind. Israel's 1992 budget calls for up to $2 billion for expanding settlement in the territories, an amount "equivalent to one year's installment of the loan guarantees that Israel wants from the United States," the New York Times reports, hence an amount that Israel can take from other sources if these funds are assured by US "humanitarian" assistance.3
An official US decision to provide financial support for these projects would have made it very difficult for the US Arab allies to attend the Madrid conference; a few months down the road, it is assumed, the matter can be handled without too much fanfare. Ariel Sharon and other Israeli extremists were unwilling to accept even a temporary delay in their ambitious settlement project, and were also intent on undermining the US-run negotiations, which might interfere with their annexationist plans. That is one reason why "official Israel was dead silent" about the August coup attempt in the Soviet Union, while "some influential Israelis found it advisable to extend to the conspirators their joyous greetings and good advice," possibly including Shamir's expert advisers, the Israeli press reported, noting that a successful coup in the USSR might have undermined the unwanted Madrid conference.4 After the Soviet coup, the US propaganda system produced the required gestures of outrage about the alleged support for the coup or vacillation about it on the part of assorted official enemies, while keeping "dead silent" about unwanted realities, the usual pattern when atrocities and crimes afford an opportunity for service to power.
The Bush-Shamir dispute goes beyond the timing of US financial support for Israeli settlement plans. There are real disagreements between Washington and the current Israeli government, serious and long-standing ones. But they concern the modalities of rejectionism, not its essence, a matter that merits a closer examination, to which we return.
To clarify what follows, by the term "rejectionism" I mean the rejection of the right to national self-determination on the part of one or the other of the contending parties in the former Palestine. This is distinct from US usage, which restricts the term to those who reject the rights of Israeli Jews, denial of the right of self-determination of the indigenous inhabitants being considered proper and natural.
The standard usage reflects the limits of US discussion, largely restricted to support for some version of Israeli rejectionism. At one extreme, we find those who suggest that Palestinians deserve nothing, like all of those who stand in the way of civilization. Others, like Times chief diplomatic correspondent and Middle East specialist Thomas Friedman, take a more forthcoming approach, because "only if you give the Palestinians something to lose is there a hope that they will agree to moderate their demands," abandoning the ludicrous hope for mutual recognition in a two-state settlement -- a "demand" that Friedman refused to report and consistently denied while producing the "balanced and informed coverage" for which he received the Pulitzer prize. "I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands," Friedman added, adopting the racist rhetoric used as a matter of course when dealing with the lower orders. He advised Israel to run the territories on the model of South Lebanon, controlled by Israeli troops and a terrorist surrogate army, with a hideous torture chamber in Khiam where hundreds are held hostage to ensure that the population will submit, Israeli administration of the flow and profits of heroin from the second largest drug production area in Lebanon (the most productive being the Bekaa valley, run by Bush's other friend, Hafez el-Assad of Syria), and regular bombardment beyond the borders to prevent resistance -- called "terrorism," a term that extends to attacks on drug cultivators protected by the Israeli army and its clients.5
At the time of the US-Israel confrontation, it took scarcely more than a raised eyebrow from the President for the Israeli lobby to collapse, while major journals that rarely veer from the Israeli Party line took the cue and began to run articles critical of Israeli practices and hinting that US support for them was not inevitable. That should also occasion little surprise. Domestic pressure groups tend to be ineffectual unless they line up with significant elements of state-corporate power, or have reached a scale and intensity that compels moves to accommodate them. When AIPAC lobbies for policies that the state executive and major sectors of corporate America intend to pursue, it is influential; when it confronts authentic power, largely unified, it fades very quickly.
The essential issues just reviewed are more or less recognized within the doctrinal system, though they are presented more obliquely. It is no great secret that alleged "foreign policy triumphs," quickly removed from view to obscure what has actually taken place, can help to divert the public from domestic crises, along with racist and jingoist appeals, manufacture of awesome foreign and internal enemies, and other familiar devices of population control. The utility of the Madrid conference in obscuring Gulf realities is outlined by New York Times diplomatic correspondent R. W. Apple in the column already quoted, as the conference opened: "Critics have suggested that the United States achieved far too little in the war, because Saddam Hussein was not overthrown, Iran remained as hostile and Kuwait as undemocratic as ever, and Saudi Arabia shed neither its isolation nor its archaic ways." But the "remarkable tableau" in Madrid revealed "that a very great deal had changed," thanks to the "diplomatic skills" of James ***** and the Gulf triumph. Thus "George Bush and the United States today plucked the fruits of victory in the Persian Gulf war, but it is still much too early to predict how sweet they will be."
To rephrase in more accurate terms, by limiting the options in the Gulf to violence, its strong card, Washington was able to determine the basic contours of what happened. It barred any challenge to the "iron fist" in the client states. It continues to torture the Iraqi people exactly as planned in the attack on the civilian infrastructure, which had no relation to the military conflict -- this was not a long war against Nazi Germany -- but did lay the basis for postwar US policies, including the current policy of holding the population hostage to induce some tolerable duplicate of Saddam Hussein to restore "the best of all worlds." Iraq aside, the US also intends to exploit the opportunity to teach valuable lessons to others who might have odd ideas about disobeying US orders, another standard policy; thus in mid-October, Washington once again blocked European and Japanese efforts to call off the embargo that the US imposed on Vietnam 16 years ago after direct conquest failed.6 Those who do not follow the rules must be severely punished, indefinitely, and others must learn these lessons -- though the lessons must remain invisible to the American public, who are to be regaled with tales about the nobility of our aspirations and the grand achievements of our leaders.
Crucially, the American public must not be allowed to perceive that the outcome in the Gulf reveals the priorities of the state that held all the cards, the state that could accurately proclaim that "What we say goes," in the President's words. The consequences of Washington's decisions must therefore be construed as a failure to achieve our noble goals, now to be compensated by Washington's diplomatic triumphs.
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