Again, the Middle East Turns Byzantine

The wind is blowing again across the marsh grass of Middle East politics. Patterns form and disappear deceptively. Only by intuition and experience can one tell where there is solid ground or quagmire. Beneath it all lies the bedrock of Israel and the Islamic movement.

A distinguished British diplomat with unsurpassed Middle East credentials once prefaced a talk by noting this scenario: Had he predicted in 1970 that within a decade oil prices would skyrocket, the Shah would fall, Lebanon would erupt, Egypt and Israel would shake hands and Islam would become the region’s most feared political force, he would have been dismissed from Her Majesty’s service for recklessness and incompetence. But every sober and responsible prediction to the contrary was OBE--overtaken by events. Being overtaken by events is the norm in 20th-Century Middle Eastern history.

Too many variables, too much interconnection. Middle East politics is like a three-dimensional pool game in a weightless environment. The Iran-Contra affair embarrassed Saudi Arabia and raised suspicions of American inconstancy. Therefore, when Iranian pilgrims drew their knives in Mecca, the Saudis were more inclined than they would have been to respond in a confrontational manner. Iran reciprocated with threatening words for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Scrambling to recover its lost innocence, the United States agreed to escort Kuwaiti tankers and then raised the temperature of the Persian Gulf with the naval buildup that followed the attack on the frigate Stark. Heightened confrontation and Saudi jitters led to an Arab summit in which opposition to Iran was placed on the front burner and the gas was turned off on the Palestinian issue.

In response came the uprising on the West Bank and in Gaza. In the fifth month of unrelenting violence and steady erosion (in American eyes) of the moral high ground on which Israel had been standing, come three more events: the hijacking of a Kuwait Airways flight from Bangkok, an assassination in Tunis, a violent naval exchange in the gulf. How are they interconnected?

Ever willing to believe the worst of Iran--the questionable reliability of accusations by released airplane hostages not withstanding--Americans are likely to applaud the attacks on Iranian targets in the gulf, despite their being incommensurate with the isolated mine explosion that tore a hole in the bottom of an American vessel. The ball has been smashed back into the Iranian court and there, as in the past, it will probably safely die.

At the same time the perpetrators of the Kuwaiti hijacking have reinforced world horror of terrorism just as the world was pressuring Israel to relent vis-a-vis the Palestine Liberation Organization. After all, resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not in everyone’s interest. And Israel takes the opportunity offered by the hijacking to carry out an assassination that could affect the political stability of the PLO and thus outflank the West Bank and Gaza demonstrators.

Our natural inclination as rational observers of world events is to search for a civilized resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma, to urge all countries to maintain a steadfast front in the face of terrorism, to exert carefully measured pressure to keep the gulf situation from getting out of control and to work for a cessation of the carnage on the Iran-Iraq war front.

But this assumes that these are discrete crises that can be considered individually. They aren’t. Everything in Middle East politics is interconnected. That is why every plausible projection of a likely resolution of conflict is predictably overtaken by unpredictable events.

Beneath the shimmer of the waving grass, intuition and experience suggest but do not fully reveal the firm ground. The gulf situation remains a bomb without a detonator; the Iranians will absorb our punishment--so little compared to what they suffer from the Iraqis--and let our hackles subside. Israel and the PLO, barring the death of Yasser Arafat, will doggedly persist in their mutual non-recognition. Terrorists, acting sporadically and with at most only tenuous authorization by sponsoring governments, will continue to attempt to disrupt all movement toward restoration of order.

In the face of such disorder, who can reliably counsel conciliation and sacrifice for future gain? Solidity in such a situation lies with the Israeli right, plausibly arguing that anything offered now will be irrevocably lost, and the Muslim activists, dependent on the rapidly growing perception that they deserve a chance in the face of the failure of secular nationalist regimes and their imported Western institutions.