Deeper and Deeper

Last year the decades-old symbolic U.S. naval presence in the Persian Gulf was modestly increased to provide armed escorts for American merchant steps steaming through the troubled waters of the Iran-Iraq war zone. Now, in a move that would steeply escalate the U.S. presence and commensurately boost its risks, President Reagan proposes launching an open-ended military commitment that could effectively make the United States a co-belligerent in a long and brutal war. Reagan pleads national and international necessity to support this action. There is no credible evidence to support that claim.

The world, says Reagan, would be in sorry shape if the oil that now passes through the gulf were lost. Indeed it would be. But there is absolutely no reason to think that those oil supplies are at any greater risk today than they were three years ago, when Iraq and Iran first decided that oil tankers were fair targets for attack. Since 1984 fewer than 1% of ships using the gulf have been shot at. The rate of attack hasn’t lately increased; if anything, it seems to have diminished. The Administration’s new-found sense of danger and urgency is not supported by the facts.

The President further claims that if the United States doesn’t move quickly to fill up the gulf with its warships, then, by God, the Soviets will. Again, this evokes a fright without foundation.

The few small naval vessels that the Soviets have in the gulf are there largely because Kuwait, whose oil tankers have occasionally been shot at by Iran, invited them. Kuwait, an ally of Iraq, also wants 11 of its tankers put under the U.S. flag. To protect that flag, the Administration says that it must commit more of the Navy--perhaps even a battleship. The last time a battleship was used to demonstrate the power and determination of the United States, it might be recalled, was in the disastrous Lebanon venture. It even fired its 16-inch guns, whose World War II-vintage shells succeeded in killing a number of civilians.

Congress remains skeptical about the President’s perceptions and his plans, and certainly it should be. The arguments that he makes for intervening in the gulf are specious and unconvincing, while the commitment that he proposes is shrouded with potentially perilous consequences. The fundamental U.S. interest is to be seen not in intervening in the gulf war but in helping to bring it to an end in a way that would leave no victorfree to lord it over its neighbors. That is a task for multinational diplomacy and pressure, not for battleships and bluster.