PERSPECTIVE ON THE PERSIAN GULF : What Arabs Know, and You Don’t : The political tilt of U.S. strategy, from oil to Israel, is overlooked in the emphasis on war talk.

In their coverage of what has come to be known as the Persian Gulf crisis, the American media have served largely as a vehicle of propaganda and prejudice rather than of balanced and informed news and analysis. The costs of the propagandistic bias should be apparent when we consider what the media have failed to do. I list as briefly as possible six crucial failures that, taken together, amount to denying the American public an overall perspective on the crisis.

1) Until very recently, there has been virtually no attempt to analyze or explain what is behind Saddam Hussein’s extraordinary ambition. After all, he has been effectively in power for two decades, yet became identified as a villain in the United States only five months ago. Why?

If this question were pursued, the Camp David accords would inevitably have emerged as a defining event. Camp David worsened the plight of the beleaguered Palestinians and isolated Egypt--since the early 19th Century the political center of the Arab world--from its Arab milieu. Smaller players attempted to fill the resulting vacuum. Saddam Hussein betrayed his ambition to be leader of the Arab world when he invaded Iran. The United States, alienated by Iran’s Islamic Revolution, encouraged him; the Saudis and Kuwaitis financed his aggression. The monster, if that is what President Hussein is, was helped to grow by U.S. policies.

2) The media have noted that a significantly large popular sentiment throughout the Middle East is against the U.S.-led military intervention in the gulf. But scant attempt has been made by reporters and columnists to tap its rationale. Most have relied on so-called experts in Washington who spout supercilious bromides about Arab insecurity, anti-Westernism and fundamentalism.

The simple answer has been strenuously avoided: No sane Middle Easterner can possibly take seriously President Bush’s assertions about the unacceptability of territorial acquisition by force, or the necessity of upholding the U.N. Charter. After all, the United States has been sustaining Israel’s occupation of Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian and Lebanese territories, and has continually frustrated U.N. efforts to uphold its charter in the Middle East. Furthermore, few informed Middle Easterners are unaware that for two decades the United States has been enlarging its military presence in the Persian Gulf and seeking a permanent presence there.

There is also a complex answer, but that would require inquiring into the patterns of 14 centuries of antagonism and collaboration between the Western and Islamic civilizations, and into the nature of the more recent colonial encounter in the Middle East. One can argue that it is unfair to expect the media to enter into complexities.

3) Equally curious has been the dearth of reporting and commentary on the politics and economics of oil, which underlies this conflict.

Oil is one of those rare commodities whose price has consistently and drastically fallen since 1980, reaching a low in 1990 of $18 a barrel of crude. Iraq wanted a higher OPEC price, at around $25; Kuwait resisted. Why? How could the interests of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and their client emirates be better served by low oil prices? One answer is that they have relatively small populations to satisfy and plentiful reserves, as well as other sources of income. And they have massive investments in the West, especially in the American market.

The media have ignored this obvious Middle Eastern anomaly: The larger and more populous countries have small oil reserves; the small kingdoms and sheikdoms control vast reserves. The rulers of the gulf know the significance of this issue, which is one reason why many, including Saudi Arabia, do not conduct censuses and do not publish population figures. Could there be any truth in the popular belief that the imperial powers, which drew the boundaries of nation states in the region, purposely delinked the wealth and the people of Middle East?

The answer may not change one’s judgment of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but it could provide a better understanding of why neither the Kuwaiti sheiks nor their Western allies elicit much support among the majority of people in the region.

4) There has been an absence of inquiry into the purpose of this unusually forceful U.S. intervention in the gulf. The media have reported the official justifications, which vary widely from the sublime to the ridiculous--from the defense of Saudi Arabia to protecting American jobs.

Every editor and network news producer knows that the focus of American military and diplomatic attention began shifting toward the Middle East in the early 1970s. With Iran on its eastern flank and Israel to the west playing the role of Henry Kissinger’s much vaunted “regional influentials,” the Middle East became the centerpiece of Nixon Doctrine.

Throughout the 1980s more than 75% of total American military and economic aid went to three countries--Israel, Egypt and Pakistan--in the region. The deployments of the modernized U.S. Navy were concentrated in the Mediterranean and Indian oceans; the Rapid Deployment Force was created and remained geared for intervention in the Middle East. These decades-long planning and investments suggest purposes greater and more complex than what the media have offered.

5) Officials have invoked, and some columnists have repeatedly emphasized, the menace to world security posed by Iraq’s imminent possession of nuclear weapons. The media have yet to discuss soberly the issue of nuclear proliferation.

Nuclear arms threaten human survival. They should not be a subject of polemic and propaganda. A superpower that possesses awesome nuclear arsenal bears a special responsibility to deal with this issue honestly and equitably. And this is precisely what is not happening in this country, either at the government or public level.

Official and academic experts in Europe and the United States estimate that Iraq is years away from acquiring an operational nuclear capability. Pakistan is closer. India is nuclear capable--that is, while it may not have manufactured the bombs, it has the capability to produce and deliver them. In all of South Asia and the Middle East, Israel alone actually possesses a nuclear arsenal of between 100 and 200 bombs and, thanks to U.S. aid, the capacity to deliver them to distant targets.

There are American laws prohibiting aid to countries that engage in proliferation; these were invoked in the fall when Congress cut off aid to Pakistan. No one has noted that the biggest violator, Israel, remains above the law.

To the best of my knowledge, no newspaper or magazine has thought it important to find out how the people in the region feel about living under the shadow of Israeli nuclear weapons. Yet Baghdad’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal is now mentioned as a justification for war.

When the guns are silent, millions will mourn the dead and walk the ruins knowing that the only country in the world without declared boundaries is next door and armed with nuclear weapons.

6) Finally, in the news coverage of this crisis there has been no discussion about the meaning and uses of America’s much-invoked but suddenly forgotten “strategic alliance” with Israel. More than $60 billion worth of U.S. aid went into the making of the world’s third-strongest military, all of it justified on the ground that Israel was our “strategic ally” in the Middle East.

At the outset of the gulf crisis, Washington requested Israel to please do nothing, and Israel complied. In gratitude, President Bush has promised significant increases in Israel’s military aid. Whatever the merit of Israel’s case for more arms, we have in this instance a historically unique possibility for a revolutionary redefinition of strategic and alli ance. This merits at least some discussion.