Gulf Hysteria

President Reagan is half right and half wrong in his decision to escalate the American role in the Iran-Iraq war. He is right to support international efforts to end the almost seven years of warfare. He is wrong to rush ahead with the plan to place the American flag on 11 Kuwaiti tankers, an intervention both risky and unnecessary.

The peace initiative will not be easy for the Reagan Administration. In the reckless and illegal transfer of arms to Iran, masterminded by Reagan’s own National Security Council staff, the United States lost credibility as an impartial peace broker. Now the President appears ready to wage war against Iran, tilting the scales the other way to favor Iraq by helping Iraq’s ally, Kuwait. All this is cloaked in righteous declarations about free passage and the importance of petroleum to the free world--declarations with a hollow ring in the absence of any basic change in the situation in the Persian Gulf or evidence of the need for intervention.

Draping Kuwaiti tankers in American flags raises extraordinary risks. Nevertheless, the President seems determined to plunge in, suggesting that there is the risk of action by “a hostile power to establish a dominant position there.” Some of the most thoughtful members of Congress--including Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the most influential senator on defense matters--have urged the President to delay this initiative until there can be further study of the consequences. They are right.

The consequences are imponderable and unpredictable, but it does not take much imagination to picture the unfolding of terrible events as the USS Missouri joins a carrier task force off the Straits of Hormuz. What if Iran, in another display of its unpredictable xenophobia, unleashes its new Chinese-made anti-ship missiles against a Kuwaiti tanker flying the Stars and Stripes? Does the Missouri open fire with its 16-inch guns or does the carrier task force launch its fighter-bombers in a massive response? But against what target? The missile launchers? An air base? Tehran? And does the Navy then presume that war is declared and engage all hostile ships and aircraft? To what purpose? Freedom of the high seas? Perhaps. But that freedom has hardly been at question, for the tragic war has spilled over into attacks on less than 1% of Persian Gulf shipping.

The measure of how tall America stands in the world is based on how it uses its power, not on how belligerently it behaves.