U.S. Launches Quiet Effort to Mollify Arabs Angered by Arms Deliveries to Iran

The Reagan Administration has launched a quiet but concerted effort to mollify angry Arab leaders and repair the damage done to its reputation in the Arab world by Washington’s admissions that it has been secretly supplying arms to Iran.

The effort, which appears to be meeting with only mixed success, has taken the form of letters from President Reagan to Arab leaders in the region as well as meetings between U.S. envoys and senior Arab officials.

The letters, according to Egyptian sources, reiterate the points that the President tried to make in his address to the nation last week--that the arms supplied to Iran were limited in quantity and defensive in nature and were not supplied simply for the purpose of ransoming the Americans held hostage by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon.

Assurances Offered

Additionally, U.S. diplomats have sought to assure Arab officials that there has been no change in either Washington’s stated neutrality in the Iran-Iraq War or in its policy of punishing states that sponsor or support terrorism. In the past, the United States has accused Iran of being among those countries that support terrorism.

Repeating Reagan’s line of reasoning, the diplomats have argued that the secret arms shipments to Tehran were aimed at weaning the Iranians away from terrorism and bolstering the position of moderates who, the Administration hopes, will emerge on top after the resolution of a power struggle now said to be under way in Iran, one that is likely to determine the country’s leadership after the death of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

These arguments, however, have been received in the Arab world with considerable skepticism and, in a few cases, even scorn.

For the last several days, the official and semiofficial Arab press has been denouncing Washington’s secret dealings with Iran and its justification of those dealings. “Duplicitous,” “hypocritical” and “anti-Arab” are but a few of the adjectives appearing in newspaper editorials from Cairo to Kuwait.

Investing in Iraq

Moderate Arab governments, among them those in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have invested billions of dollars in the Iraqi side of the six-year-old Persian Gulf War in the belief that Iraq represents a strategic barrier against the spread of revolutionary Islamic fundamentalism from non-Arab Iran to their own countries.

They see Iran less in terms of its once and possibly future role as a bulkhead against Soviet influence in the region and more as a clear and present threat to the stability of their conservative regimes.

While most Arab governments have yet to comment publicly on the disclosures, Jordanian Prime Minister Zaid Rifai broke his country’s silence Wednesday, telling an Associated Press interviewer that Jordan found the covert supply of U.S. arms to Iran to be “a very shocking development and a regrettable one.”

“The explanations given (by the Reagan Administration) are not convincing and did a lot of damage to American credibility in the area,” Rifai added. “For whatever reason, it does not make sense as far as we’re concerned.”

Mubarak Embarrassed

Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak has refrained from publicly criticizing the United States, in part because to do so would only magnify his embarrassment. Heavily dependent on U.S. aid, Egypt is currently trying to elicit more economic favors from Washington to help see it through a financial crisis. “Like it or not--and I’m sure he doesn’t like it--Mubarak cannot afford to dump on the Reagan Administration now,” one Western diplomat said.

In private, however, a confidant of Mubarak describes the Egyptian leader as having been shocked and angered by the revelations. Like Jordan’s King Hussein, he is understood to regard the Administration’s explanations of its secret dealings with Iran as “inadequate.”

The disclosures have been especially humiliating for Mubarak because of the comparisons now being made to an episode he would rather forget--last year’s hijacking off the Egyptian coast of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro.

Recalling that Washington accused Mubarak of being soft on terrorism because of his attempt to spirit the hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise liner out of Egypt, a senior Egyptian official noted that the Achille Lauro affair occurred after the first secret shipments of arms were sent to Iran by the United States.

“You accused Mubarak of being a liar then. What, now, can we say about Reagan?” the official asked.

“You Americans,” he added bitterly, “have a genius for embarrassing your friends.”

The argument that the United States ought to cultivate Iranian moderates does, however, strike a chord of understanding among moderate Arabs, especially in the Persian Gulf states, whose leaders must now begin to reconcile their horror at the thought of an Iranian war victory with the pragmatic realization that some sort of accommodation with Tehran must be achieved in the event that it does win.

Their dismay stems not so much from Washington’s geopolitical justification as it does from the “clumsy and amateurish way” in which these interests were pursued, one diplomat said.

Most embarrassing, from the Arab point of view, was the Israeli role in funneling the arms to Iran. The Israelis, who many believe have a vested interest in prolonging the gulf war in order to destabilize the Arab world, have long been suspected of supplying arms to Iran, a non-Arab state. Rightly or wrongly, the Israeli connection in this instance has reinforced the popular perception that U.S. policy is lopsidedly pro-Israeli and anti-Arab.