TV REVIEW : Complex Politics in PBS’ ‘Files’

Even with the revelations that pepper the Washington Post-WETA co-production, “The Secret Files: Washington, Israel and The Gulf” (at 10 tonight on KCET Channel 28), it doesn’t contain the most remarkable news to surface this week about U.S. relations with the Middle East. That belongs to The Times’ report on the Reagan-Bush administrations’ dogged support of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, virtually up to the eve of the Gulf War.

But the Iraq affair is made even more interesting by the Post’s report, gruffly hosted by Post editor Ben Bradlee (the loosened tie and rolled-up sleeves tip his gruffness, though, into outright parody). The point of the broadcast is that the United States has equally befriended Saudi Arabia and Israel for nearly 45 years, arming bitter enemies in perhaps the ultimate balancing game of national self-interest. Add in U.S. build-up in the ‘80s of the war machine in Iraq--the Saudis’ eternal Arab enemy--and you have a deadly game that could only lead to war.

Dipping liberally into previously classified documents, “The Secret Files” follows the chronological trail of the trilateral links between Mideast enemies and a United States torn between a moral commitment to a Jewish homeland after the Holocaust and the need to be on good terms with a key oil supplier.

Bradlee, with less-than-enlightening commentaries from journalists Amos Elon of Israel and Jamil Mroue of Lebanon, constantly drops obscure, fascinating tidbits in our lap. Did you know that Franklin Roosevelt promised King Ibn Saud that the United States wouldn’t support a Jewish homeland in Palestine? Or that Harry S. Truman reversed his position on a Jewish state at least three times? Or that the United States secretly committed itself to Saudi Arabia’s defense in 1950, leading to seven massive military complexes that were the bases of operation during the Gulf War?

Perhaps the biggest scoop here is previously unshown footage of “Operation Hard Surface,” John F. Kennedy’s secret mission that sent U.S. air power to protect Saudi Arabia from Egyptian incursions.

All of this is remarkable history, but hardly scandalous. Foreign relations teem with strange bedfellows: U.S.-China links as a wedge against the Soviet Union; U.S. support of hostile neighbors India and Pakistan; the Hitler-Stalin pact, followed by the Roosevelt-Stalin pact against Hitler. They’re deals, like Bush’s 1989 aid to Iraq, often made in secret, guided by only one principle--of mutually perceived self-interest.

“The Secret Files,” so densely packed with information that taping is essential, becomes a dry anatomy of such a deal.