Alliance With King Tarnishes the Prince

The Reagan Administration’s long and tortured crusade against leftist insurgencies in Latin and Central America has muddied the moral waters among friend and foe.

Israel’s initial involvement in these activities demonstrates that a small power is ill-equipped to play big-power games without suffering severe damage to its reputation and image.

In its insistence on propping up the Contras in Nicaragua, undermining the Sandinistas and staving off Fidel Castro’s forces, the Reagan Administration used any and all means at hand to the point where Americans and allies like Israel, soldiers and spies, free-lance mercenaries, arms salesmen, drug-peddling dictators and the drug overlords themselves became entangled in an unsavory mix.

The results were, at best, mixed. President Bush, who once had dealings with the drug-dealing Gen. Manuel A. Noriega of Panama, now has declared a war on America’s drug problem and sent military aid to Colombia. In the process, Bush has also quietly left the Contras to wither on the vine and die an ignoble political death.

One of the casualties of these complicated Reagan-Bush policies--which led, among other things, to the Iran-Contra scandal--apparently is the reputation of Israel.

In the last few weeks, news reports have surfaced portraying Israeli mercenaries at the center of drug dealing in Central and South America. The “evidence” was a highly doctored piece of videotape advertising the security firm Hod Hahanit, or Spearhead, headed by Yair Klein, a former lieutenant colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces.

Yet to focus on Israelis, real or imagined, is a highly suspect approach.

We have already noted Bush’s relationship with right-wing Latin American dictators while he served as Reagan’s vice president. The CIA dealt with drug traffickers to help finance the Contra war in Nicaragua. In a world where arms dealers, drug dealers and terrorists mix freely and are all employed in the cause of “freedom fighters” or as anti-communists, it seems strange to single out stray Israelis as sinister forces in those dealings and to suggest that they operated with the guidance of their government.

This is remarkably similar to the tarnished paintbrush used on Israel for its part in the Iran-Contra affair. The truth is that Israel and the Reagan Administration had signed a document of strategic cooperation, which was perforce interpreted differently and unequally by the two partners. As is often the case, the weaker partner paid a higher price.

Strategic cooperation meant that Israel, a small country with a highly skilled military, would provide the pincers of a bulldozer--meaning that Israeli weapons would be used to buy influence in Iran with an eye toward bettering relations between Washington and Tehran and working toward the release of American hostages in Lebanon.

The consequences of this policy are already well-known. But if Israel played a key role in the overtures and dealings with Iran, its role thereafter was minuscule as money gained from weapons sales found its way to the Contras. In Central America, the United States and its crew of military experts, National Securty Council officials and CIA operatives were the initiators and the actors, not the Israelis, although it is probable that some Israeli experts and free-lancers may have had a peripheral hand in matters there.

Latin America as a whole is full of professional mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, “consultants” of all stripes who hire themselves out to regimes of whatever political stripe--and yes, even to drug lords. The mercenaries come from all over, many of them from the United States, as well as Europe and the Third World. No doubt a small number of them are Israelis.

It is one thing to accept the reality of military professionals and arms merchants for hire. It is quite another to suggest that Israelis--and there are very few there--should bear a special onus, and to suggest sinister Israeli governmental machinations at work. Yet, the emphasis on Israel is damaging precisely because it mars Israel’s image, despoils the good deeds of an ally acting in good faith as part of a strategic cooperation agreement. It continues to be true that Israel bears a large moral burden, the kind not bothered with by such countries as Syria or such groups as the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Putting the onus on Israel has become a blossoming industry in the media. It’s a carryover from Israel’s role in Lebanon and the one-sided visuals provided by the Palestinian uprising. It is also an example of a view held by the prophetic Machiavelli, who wrote five centuries ago that when a small prince allies himself to a mighty king, he will be cast adrift when he is no longer needed.