US Policy
Bush Locks Horns with Shamir
On January 21, six days into the US air war against Iraq, Israeli Finance Minister Yitzhak Modai took advantage of Washington’s praise for Israel’s “restraint” in the face of 11 Scud missile attacks to drop a bombshell of his own. Before the assembled Jerusalem press corps, he advised visiting Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger that Israel would require an additional $13 billion dollars from the US at the conclusion of the war, $3 billion as “compensation” for the bombing and $10 billion in loan guarantees for the anticipated immigration of Soviet Jews.
Ehrenfeld, Narcoterrorism
Rachel Ehrenfeld, Narcoterrorism (Basic Books, 1990).
Ever since the Reagan administration elevated “narco-terrorism” to the status of a national security threat, ideologists of left and right have staked out predictable positions. [1] Foes of Cuba, Nicaragua and other leftist regimes or movements condemn them as primary purveyors of mind-warping drugs; some champions of “progressive” politics in the Third World in turn denounce any suggestion that such regimes could depart from the straight and narrow.
“The Regime Has Simply Barricaded Itself in Khartoum”
Bona Malwal was elected to the Sudanese parliament in 1968. He was minister for culture and information from 1972 to 1978 and minister of finance and economic planning for the south from 1980 to 1981. His English-language newspaper, the Sudan Times, was banned when the current regime seized power in June 1989. He now lives in Britain and publishes the Sudan Democratic Gazette. Joe Stork and Gayle Smith interviewed him in Washington in June 1991.
Will the developments in Ethiopia and Eritrea make it more or less difficult to move things forward in Sudan?
This Is Not Vietnam
In 1926 the French surrealist, Rene Magritte, painted an unmistakable pipe and labeled it, in careful schoolboy script: “This is not a pipe.” In 1991 George Bush began a war in the Persian Gulf which, he insisted, was not Vietnam. Iraq, he pointed out, is a desert; Vietnam was a jungle. Moreover, Iraq was not Vietnam because this time the US would win.
It was at this point that Iraq became Vietnam. The difference between Iraq and Vietnam, according to the president and his men, did not lie in their histories, cultures, political ideologies or geographies, but only in what the US had not done to one and would most certainly do to the other.
America’s Egypt
Open almost any study of Egypt produced by an American or an international development agency and you are likely to find it starting with the same simple image. The question of Egypt’s economic development is almost invariably introduced as a problem of geography versus demography, pictured by describing the narrow valley of the Nile River, surrounded by desert, crowded with rapidly multiplying millions of inhabitants.
A 1980 World Bank report on Egypt provides a typical example. “The geographical and demographic characteristics of Egypt delineate its basic economic problem,” the book begins:
“Eventually There Can Only Be an Arab Solution”
Amb. ‘Abdallah al-Ashtal is Yemen’s representative to the United Nations. He served as ambassador for the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen from 1971 until May 1990, when he became the representative of the newly unified Republic of Yemen. In March and December 1990, he chaired the UN Security Council. James Paul interviewed him in New York City on December 26, 1990.
How would you assess the role of the United Nations in the Gulf crisis?
Even before the crisis, the UN had begun to work differently. One could sense a spirit of accommodation between the superpowers. The Security Council was no longer a forum for rhetoric but a place to lay out possibilities and try to come to a common position.
Calculating “Collateral Damage”
Early reports of casualties in Iraq provided only a scattershot picture of damage to residential areas and loss of civilian life, not a clear sense of scope or scale. Only on February 11, after four weeks of intense bombing, did Iraqi officials acknowledge that civilian deaths were in the range of 5,000-7,000. Then, on February 13, two US “smart bombs” smashed into a Baghdad bomb shelter, incinerating hundreds of women and children gathered there.
Editor’s Bookshelf
Egypt has been central to providing an Arab cover for the US-led military expedition to the Persian Gulf, in addition to Saudi Arabia. As of December 1990, Egypt’s 15-20,000 troops constituted the third largest force confronting Iraq, after the United States and Saudi Arabia itself. Joint military exercises during the 1980s prepared the way for this US-Egyptian military cooperation, whose value is more symbolic than substantial. In The United States and Egypt: An Essay on Policy for the 1990s (Brookings, 1990), William Quandt surveys the development of the US-Egyptian relationship since the early 1970s, examines the strains it may experience in the 1990s and offers some recommendations to policymakers responsible for managing them.
Al Miskin
The first “instant book” on the Gulf crisis has already reached stores across the United States. In his October 22 column in The Nation, Alexander Cockburn related how Judith Miller of the New York Times sought unsuccessfully to induce Samir al-Khalil, the pseudonymous author of Republic of Fear, to collaborate with her on a shlockbuster version for the American public. Instead we now have Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, which Miller co-authored with Laurie Mylroie, until recently an assistant professor of “government” (i.e. political science) at Harvard.
Washington Watch
House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Lee Hamilton (D-IN) offered the first criticism by a Washington insider of the Bush administration’s handling of the Gulf crisis when, on September 18, 1990, he blamed Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs John Kelly for not sending a firm signal to Iraq that the United States would come to the defense of Kuwait if it were attacked. Kelly had told the committee two days before the Iraqi invasion that the US had no formal commitment to protect Kuwait from outside threats.
The US in the Persian Gulf
The scale of the US military deployment in the Persian Gulf — half of all US combat forces worldwide — is something of a shock, even to the Pentagon. “Nobody ever thought they’d be free to commit all those forces,” one military official said.
Halliday, From Kabul to Managua
Fred Halliday, From Kabul to Managua: Soviet-American Relations in the 1980s (Pantheon, 1989).
To give an account, in a mere 163 pages, of Soviet-American competition in the Third World is no mean feat. After all, this rivalry has lasted nearly half a century and its form has varied considerably. Moreover, there are now 120 independent states in the Third World, and there have been over 100 diverse conflicts. There is, to say the least, much to account for. Yet this is precisely what Fred Halliday has done, with lucidity and thoroughness. At times, Halliday’s conclusions are even provocative and unpredictable.
Washington Watch
Supercomputers
Some chips in the bargaining between Washington and Tel Aviv prior to the Gulf crisis were two-year-old Israeli requests to buy supercomputers — mainframes that perform scientific and mathematical calculations with great speed, enabling scientists to accomplish rapidly tasks such as simulating nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches.
US Aid to Israel
The US has provided over $50 billion in economic and military aid to Israel since 1949, more than to any other country. Israel has the highest GNP per capita of all US aid recipients ($6,810). In 1991 Israel will receive more US aid per capita ($686) than the total GNP per capita of many countries, including Egypt ($670), Morocco ($620), the Yemen Arab Republic ($590), Mauritania ($440), Sudan ($330) and Somalia ($280).
Total US Aid to Israel By Decades
Fiscal Year $ Millions, Current Percent Military
The Money Tree
How much money flows from US taxpayers’ pockets into the Israeli treasury each year? Is it the $3 billion figure so often quoted in the press? And what is it used for?
When Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN) asked the State Department these questions, he learned that the total for fiscal year 1989 was actually $3,742,100,000 — almost 25 percent more! [1]
Washington’s Game Plan in the Middle East
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Nowhere does this cynical adage seem more descriptive than regarding United States policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
From the Editors
Events elsewhere in the world — elections in Nicaragua, death squads in South Africa and recent decisions by the European Commission — hold much instruction for people concerned with the Middle East. Elections, after all, are not the same as democracy. After ten years of US armed intervention and economic aggression, a majority of Nicaraguans voting on February 25 chose an alternative to 10,000 percent inflation, to pervasive shortages, to the killings and sabotage of the Contras. “Sandinistas Lose the Hunger Vote” was the accurate headline in the Financial Times. The winning opposition front was cobbled together and financed by the State Department.
