In U.S. Eyes, Gulf Matters Are Gray

The United States has no peer in world affairs in understanding and responding to an urgent challenge painted in black and white. Painting challenges in shades of gray, however, disorients U.S. presidents and legislators as well as the public. Complex situations like the Balkans seem to confirm the Churchillian theory that Americans will always do the right thing after trying all other alternatives. This partly--but only partly--explains the difficulties successive U.S. governments have had in crafting coherent and effective policies to deal with the Persian Gulf countries, which simultaneously constitute an economic lifeline and a moral quagmire for Americans.

To protect the U.S. oil lifeline in the Gulf, every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush has overlooked the dilemmas in this implicit Faustian bargain. U.S. support for democracy and human rights in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and even in Iraq has ranged from nonexistent to tepid.

But access to the oil, and to the kings, emirs and other leaders who control it, has not produced great insight into the politics of a region that has constantly surprised Washington. The Arab rulers of the Gulf are an insular lot. But Americans have a habit of shutting out things they do not want to see if those things conflict with predetermined needs.

Washington willingly blinds itself to keep the Gulf bargain afloat as long as possible: The State Department forbade its diplomats to have any contact with the political opposition in Iran as the 1979 revolution took shape and in Iraq before and during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The same arrangement has essentially been in place in Saudi Arabia since the Saudis forced the withdrawal of the U.S. ambassador in 1988 after he met with unapproved Saudi citizens.

More than history’s sense of irony produces the greatest Persian Gulf puzzle: How is it that the U.S. is so deeply committed militarily and economically in a region that it understands so shallowly? Or is the commitment so deep precisely because the understanding is so shallow?

When Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief was dumped recently and a prince a generation older named as his successor, Washington’s Middle East analytical community speculated furiously about how it changed succession and power balances in the royal family. A series of unusually high profile public warnings of a regional explosion came from the normally somber foreign minister, Saud al Faisal, and added to the sense here that something is stirring in the desert kingdom. But what--and what the U.S. could do about it--remained mysteries.

Kremlinology was also a highly imperfect art. But self-knowledge and awareness of what had to be done kept U.S. policies and goals steady throughout the Cold War. The United States does not permit itself such a moral compass east of Suez. The current administration and its predecessors have been unable to imagine (or perhaps articulate) anything beyond the status quo for the lands on the Arab side of the Gulf.

That has been true at each turn in the last three decades as war, revolution, assassination and economic boom-and-bust cycles have reshaped the region and caught U.S. policymakers flatfooted. Exaggerated fears of the impact of political change--particularly of the rise of influence of Shiite minorities in Arab countries--blinkers official Washington.

The minorities of the Middle East would benefit the most from U.S. support for the introduction of democracy and human rights into the region. The Shiites, Kurds, Druze and others should be natural constituencies for the U.S. and its stated commitment to supporting democracy abroad.

But immediate needs trump clarity and long-term commitment. In the obscurity of the moral concessions systematically made in the Persian Gulf to preserve an unpreservable status quo, Washington wears a color that does not suit its talents: gray.

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Excerpted from Jim Hoagland’s syndicated column.