Mideast Needs Uncle Sam’s Helping Hand

In an exciting world of new beginnings from Moscow to Mexico, it is tempting to see the Middle East as a permanent slum.

Even as the United States and Soviet Union agreed last week to convene a Middle East peace conference, many experts foresaw no change for an area marked by murderous hatreds since biblical times. One year after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the political and economic chaos that has become synonymous with the region continues.

But looking backward is too easy.

Looking forward makes more sense--because the Middle East in the next 10 to 20 years will change profoundly. It will change with America’s help as political mentor and protector, and hopefully with the involvement of American business.

Because the region of 15 or so Arab countries, plus Israel and Iran, is about to become one of the world’s great growth markets. It will create industry and wealth and climb out of its present torpor and underdevelopment.

That’s not a mirage born of desert heat. Hard economics are driving change.

The blunt fact is that most countries in the Middle East are broke. Their economies are not growing, and their populations are. The Arabic-speaking countries will double in population in the next 20 years. That means Egypt will have over 100 million people, Syria 26 million, Iraq 36 million.

Non-Arab Iran will have 150 million people; Israel’s population, swelling with Soviet emigres, will grow 20% in the next few years.

Until now, Middle Eastern countries have used oil income, directly and indirectly, to buy everything from rice and flour to Mercedes cars from the industrial world.

They have consumed much but produced little. That’s why, even with the oil, the yearly output of goods and services from all the Middle Eastern countries adds up to less than half that of Italy.

Yet the fact that one hears that statistical comparison all over the Middle East indicates the region knows it must change, that it must industrialize.

So it looks to America, first as a Super Power capable of guaranteeing peace among its nations.

And second, because the region honestly admires America. “Iraqis and all Arabs basically like the United States and Americans. They stand for materialism and dynamism,” says Jordanian economist Riad Khoury.

He’s right. Americans find themselves welcome these days in every Arab country, including Iraq. Government officials everywhere talk of America’s New Deal for the Middle East, of a new Marshall Plan.

They don’t mean a handout. They mean Marshall Plan as a symbol of what America achieved after World War II, when it saw that a Europe and Japan in which prosperity was rising would engage in peaceful pursuits, would give their young people something to look forward to.

America helped Europe and Japan by standing up for free elections and free markets, and it must do likewise in the Middle East.

True, it may seem naive to think that free elections could change a region in which Syria and Iraq remain noisome police states and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are ruled by backward monarchies.

But don’t underestimate the desire for change. Even Iraqis are speaking out.

The state-controlled economies of the Middle East can no longer provide rising living standards to their expanding populations, from Saudi Arabia to Syria and even to Iraq, they want to open up to private initiative and modern industry.

It’s a golden opportunity for U.S. business. American companies can invest and participate in the industrial development of larger countries such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran. And they can help realize the technological ambitions of Israel and the banking and financial service ambitions of Jordan and Lebanon.

The Middle Eastern countries may finally wake up to the fact that by working together they can be a major economy of 200 million people today, expanding to 400 million tomorrow.

Car production for that wider market is a natural. General Motors is making a start, planning to produce cars in Egypt by 1993. Iraq and Iran also want automobile production, to raise the skill levels of their workers and to gain the industrial infrastructure that built America years ago, and more recently built Japan and South Korea.

The Middle East is starting from zero: Fax machines are still illegal in Syria and Iraq. But soon telecommunications will be a major opportunity for U.S. phone companies--which will need to move sharply to beat European and Japanese companies already eyeing prospects in the region.

Agriculture will be a prime opportunity, not only for irrigation systems and farm equipment but also for biogenetic technology to create new crops in an arid landscape. American know-how would meet a warm welcome here.

The prospect is for the kind of investment U.S. business made in Europe after World War II and from which it reaps returns to this day. It is the kind of investment U.S. business did not make in Asia, where it has ceded growing markets to Japan.

But now there is fresh opportunity in the Middle East--opened up by U.S. diplomacy and the armed forces. U.S. business should pick up the ball and run with it.

In the Middle East today one often hears comparisons to Eastern Europe, where it took Poland 10 years to go from Communist dictatorship to Parliamentary democracy. The people of the Middle East are ready to start on Poland’s long journey--they are looking forward to it.