There Will Be a Very High Price for Peace

There Will Be a Very High Price for Peace A new acronym--DDIB--has been added to the lexicon of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and in keeping with the spirit of our times it has to do with money.

DDIB or double digits in the billions--has been coined by U.S. diplomats to describe the kind of money that the U.S. will have to provide in order to secure an agreement between Syrian President Hafez Assad and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

The U.S. has already earned a well-deserved reputation as bankroller of Arab-Israeli diplomacy, beginning with the billions still being spent as part of Jimmy Carter’s fashioning of an Israeli-Egyptian treaty at Camp David and continuing more recently with Israel’s agreements with Jordan and the Palestinians.

The cost of a deal between Barak and Assad is said to rival the tens of billions showered on Israel and Egypt for the past 20 years. DDIB means at least $10 billion, but figures as high as $80 billion have been suggested as the price to be paid to put this last piece of the Arab-Israeli peace puzzle in place.

This aid is of supreme importance for each of the principal players in this unfolding drama. Without the secure promise of such a peace dividend from President Clinton, it is unlikely that an agreement for Israel’s withdrawal from the Golan Heights and the subsequent redeployment of both Syrian and Israeli armies will be reached.

Israel has presented the more detailed case for DDIB. During his summer visit to Washington, Barak discussed with Clinton the cost of the massive redeployment required as Israel moves its forces westward and reconstructs an extensive array of intelligence and early-warning facilities.

Israel’s interest in making direct U.S. financial support an integral element of the peace with Syria is part of an overall effort to construct a strategic alliance with the U.S. aimed against Iran and Iraq. The $1.2-billion Wye River agreement aid package promised to Israel by Clinton and approved grudgingly by Congress has far more to do with this budding partnership against Baghdad and Tehran than the costs associated with Israel’s redeployment from 13% of the West Bank.

Similarly, an agreement with Syria will go a long way toward placing U.S. military aid for Israel on a new and more secure footing in Congress than the aging Camp David rationale. Tying the expenditure of untold billions into an overall U.S.-led strategy of containing the “rogue regimes” of Saddam Hussein and the ayatollahs makes enhancing Israel’s military power that much more palatable to Americans across the political spectrum.

Sending DDIB to the regime of Hafez Assad, which has few friends on Capitol Hill or on the editorial pages of American newspapers, poses a more difficult political problem for Clinton. Nevertheless, the president, in the course of the intensive personal diplomacy he has conducted with the Syrian leader since Barak’s election, has offered an extensive package of economic and military incentives no less wide-ranging than those offered to Anwar Sadat’s Egypt, to sweeten the deal with Israel. Removing Damascus from the terror list is only one of myriad benefits that are said to include large-scale investment, aid and even military hardware.

Both Syrian and Israeli leaders are placing tremendous trust in the credibility of President Clinton to make good on his undertakings. Yet Clinton, in his last year in office, must convince a skeptical GOP-led Congress to approve DDIB. By doing so, members of Congress will not only be committing billions to the region long after most of them are collecting their pensions, but they also will enable Clinton to claim a historical legacy that he hopes will overshadow the shame of impeachment.

In these circumstances, reaching an agreement between Barak and Assad may prove less difficult than winning American support to pay for it.