The War of the False Analogies : lllogic of comparing Six-Day War to Iraq crime

In the kettles of hostility that brew propaganda, lessons of history are less likely to be used than abused. This is the case with a bogus view of the past that was floated by Saddam Hussein after his invasion of Kuwait. The non-Arab world, he charged, quotes United Nations resolutions from both sides of its mouth.

The counterfeit was most recently seen being put into circulation during the post-summit press conference held by President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Helsinki Sunday. Correspondent Doris Atakarian of the Palestine News Agency, rose to ask why a U.N. resolution calling on Israeli troops to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza has been ignored for so long but sanctions against Iraq are such a big deal. “How come,” she wanted to know, “this aggression is so different from other ones?” A refresher course is in order.

By the “other” aggression, she clearly meant the so-called Six-Day War in mid-1967, an outburst that is simply not in the same league with Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, condemned by five U.N. resolutions so far.

By that June, Egyptian troops were moving toward Israel, U.N. observers had been ordered aside, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser had sworn to destroy Israel, and Syria and Jordan joined the attack. At the war’s end, Israeli troops had occupied a strip along the Jordan River in Jordan, Syria’s Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip, then part of Egypt.

By contrast, Saddam Hussein invaded his neighbor in the middle of the night with 100,000 troops. To talk of these “aggressions” in the same breath, it is necessary to believe that Kuwait’s army of 16,000, which was no match for Hussein’s, was contemplating aggression against Iraq’s 1 million troops.

Finally, it took months for the U.N. to work out its Resolution 242 after the Six-Day War ended, and it called not just on Israel but on all the Middle East to make concessions. To be sure, Israel was to withdraw from the occupied territories, but no deadline was set. By the same token, all parties in the Middle East were to guarantee to respect and acknowledge the territorial integrity of all states and “their right to live in peace.”

More than two decades later Israel is still waiting for an unequivocal statement from its neighbors that it can live in peace. Its view remains that it will talk about withdrawal after its hostile neighbors agreed to abide by all other terms of the U.N. resolution.

A companion resolution, No. 338, was approved after Egypt’s futile attempt to invade Israel in 1973 and simply reminded the Middle East that it needed to get back to work on Resolution 242.

A broader conference on the entire Middle East problem may make sense some day, although Bush was absolutely right Sunday to argue that lasting peace comes best one step at a time and that the Six-Day War and the gobbling up of Kuwait have nothing in common. Saddam Hussein is plundering Kuwait because he needed money to pay off his futile war on Iran. To contend that the U.N.’s Kuwait resolutions need not be observed until 242 is fully implemented is illogical and irrelevant.