There is a famous episode in Stendhal’s novel, The Charterhouse of Parma, in which the hero, Fabrice del Dongo, participates in the battle of Waterloo without realizing at the time, and even until some time afterward, that he has taken part in—been part of—a momentous event. The episode is exemplary, indeed archetypal. It shows and illustrates a general condition inseparable from, and implicit in, politics, diplomacy, and war.
In these enterprises the participants inevitably operate in a fog. They may know where they have come from—although even this is not sure—and they may have some idea of where they want to go. But how what is happening at any particular moment, how their own actions and those of their friends, rivals, and enemies will help or hinder their venture—all this is wrapped in obscurity. Policies and their outcomes have no necessary connection with one another. To undertake any action is to elicit a response which, from the nature of the case, is unpredictable. And the response will in turn itself elicit a counter-response equally unpredictable. And yet action has to be taken, policies adopted, ventures fraught with dangers embarked upon. And it must not be thought that safety lies in abstention from action. To govern is to choose, and not to choose is also to choose. Action requires intelligence, shrewdness, prudence, strong nerves, and courage. But all these qualities may, nonetheless, fail to ensure success—may even end in failure.
In short, all politics is a dilemma—which, as the dictionary tells us, is a perplexing or awkward situation, a choice between risky alternatives, both unfavorable or disagreeable in some degree or other. Hence the response of the great Lord Salisbury to someone who commiserated with him on the great burden which the consequences of making so many momentous decisions imposed on him. “With the consequences,” Salisbury said, “I have nothing to do.” He meant that, once he had weighed the alternatives—the equally perplexing and awkward alternatives—and then made his decision, the consequences were in the lap of the gods, not for him to brood and worry over.
We, the historians who follow in the wake of the men of action and seek to make sense of what they did, have only one unmistakable advantage over them—that of hindsight. When all is consummated, if the evidence is there and we possess enough ability and imagination, we can pinpoint the exact place where the dilemma was resolved, can show where failure—whether of judgment or courage—happened, or how the unexpected intervened and then, despite the expenditure of much intelligence and courage, against all expectations a venture failed. In coming to these judgments, we do not presume to claim we are shrewder or that our nerves are stronger than those of the men of action—the contrary is probably often the case—but only that we possess what, from the nature of things, they cannot ever possess, namely, hindsight. It is because the decisions and their outcomes are past that we, from our vantage point, can see and make sense of them.
The dilemmas I speak of here are Middle East dilemmas. From World War I on, the Middle East has presented both foreign and native policymakers with a particularly large number of awkward and perplexing situations. The resolution of these dilemmas has generally led to failure and loss, not only with respect to the interests which the policy-makers had set out to protect, but also for groups and communities in the Middle East who were willy-nilly affected by the fallout from these decisions.
It is of course true that Middle East dilemmas and their resolutions are not to be compared in the gravity of their global consequences with decisions taken in the first half of this century in order to resolve European dilemmas: decisions such as Sir Edward Grey’s acquiescence in secret Anglo-French staff talks in the years before 1914; or Austria-Hungary’s policy in the weeks following the murder of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo; or Anthony Eden’s passivity following Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936; or Neville Chamberlain’s zigzag between the abandonment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the guarantee to Poland in 1939. But sufficient unto the day is the failure thereof. A historian of the modern Middle East has a long list of dilemmas, the resolution of which resulted in failure and loss. Some of the more significant and striking of these are worth some scrutiny.
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In April 1936, Arab disturbances broke out in Palestine which soon developed into a serious rebellion. The rebellion was a protest against the project of a Jewish National Home and the immigration of large numbers of European Jews. It was no less a protest against the policies of the British Mandatory administration which the Arab leaders held responsible for encouraging and supporting Zionist expansion. The issue before the British government was then how to deal with this rebellion which, in the event, went on from 1936 to 1939, with an intermission of sorts between the autumn of 1936 and the autumn of 1937. An armed rebellion is a challenge to the lawful authority, and it cannot be allowed to succeed. The British government eventually found that it had to brace itself and defeat this challenge. It finally did so, and the rebellion at last petered out.
A government faced with such a rebellion must seek to examine the grievances which brought it about, and if possible provide remedies. The leaders of the Palestine Arabs insisted that at the root of their grievances was the policy of a Jewish National Home, and that Jewish immigration was the most threatening and dangerous aspect of this policy. A government seeking to tranquilize would couple suppression of violent rebellion with measures to remedy the grievances. The limitation—perhaps even the drastic limitation—of Jewish immigration would now most probably be necessary. And Jewish immigration was in fact limited, and in the end quite drastically limited.
But the rebellion elicited yet another response from the British government—a response which was to have dire consequences for British interests in Palestine and the Middle East, as well as for numerous Middle Eastern groups, and not least for the Arabs of Palestine themselves. This second British response to the rebellion was predicated on an analysis of the situation by a high official in the Foreign Office, George Rendel, who was head of the Eastern Department. He argued that the rebellion in Palestine was not simply a local phenomenon, but in reality a manifestation of a much wider movement, that of pan-Arabism—a movement which he saw sweeping with an irresistible force across the whole of the Arab world.
It thus followed that the Palestine problem could not be settled in Palestine itself. Rather, its settlement required that the Arab states should be involved, and the aims of Arab nationalism satisfied. This was in fact done at the urging of Rendel and of Eden, the new, young, inexperienced Foreign Secretary who was much influenced and inspired by the forceful, persuasive, and pertinacious head of the Eastern Department. This proved a fateful development, since it introduced a large number of parties with many discordant, not to say incompatible, interests into what had been a fairly limited—indeed, parochial—conflict. Thus, by their action, the British made it impossible for themselves either to settle the conflict or to preserve their interests in Palestine, since (as a general rule which this case confirms) the greater the number of parties to a conflict, the more difficult it is to settle.
Eventually, in 1947, the British decided to refer the problem to the United Nations, since—as they saw their dilemma—they were unable either to impose a settlement on the Jews or to devise one which would satisfy all of the Arab parties. This particular resolution of their dilemma rested on a calculation: since any settlement which attracted U.S. support would ipso facto attract the hostility of the USSR and its followers, and vice versa, there would not be found a sufficient majority in the UN to support any settlement whatsoever. and the resulting deadlock would then leave Britain with a much freer hand to deal with the problem. How this happy conjuncture was to be exploited remained, however, obscure. In any case, the calculation proved to be a miscalculation, since in the event the Soviet Union and the U.S. supported the same solution, namely, partition of the land between two sovereign states, one Jewish and the other Arab, with an internationally administered enclave in Jerusalem. This singularly limited—in fact, it did away with—any British freedom of action. There is no evidence that anyone in the British government envisaged this possibility, or asked himself what options would be open should the possibility materialize. The miscalculation became evident in the autumn of 1947, and by then there was hardly time or opportunity to avoid, or remedy, or palliate its consequences.
The dilemma was now sharper than ever. It was resolved by declaring that Britain would not help in enforcing any settlement which did not have the agreement of both sides, and that in any case the British were shortly withdrawing from Palestine. It was obvious that thus to leave the hapless inhabitants to their own devices would at the very least lead to civil war, or perhaps even to international war. But this was thought preferable to giving offense to the Arab states by agreeing to and helping to enforce the UN decision. In such a case, it was feared, the substantial British interests in the Middle East would all be put at risk.
The miscalculation here was based on a twofold premise: that there was a tight connection between what happened in Palestine and the safeguarding of British interests in the region; and that the hostilities in Palestine which would necessarily result from the British evacuation could, in no conceivable circumstances, redound to Britain’s disadvantage. But British interests in the Middle East were then much too varied, and threats to them much too multifarious, to be simply governed by what happened in Palestine. And to the extent that they were so governed, hostilities in Palestine, made inevitable by the sudden and total British withdrawal, did damage these interests, since hostilities ended with the creation of the state of Israel and the defeat of the Arab states in war. This defeat administered a severe shock to various Arab regimes, and this in turn led to a series of military coups d’état which brought to power new regimes distinctly more inimical to Britain.
There is another Middle East dilemma relating to Palestine in 1948—one which faced a local ruler rather than a great power. In the wake of the November 1947 vote in the UN to partition Palestine, Abdullah, the king of Jordan, desired to annex those parts allotted to the Arabs, and in February 1948 he obtained the consent of his allies and patrons, the British, to such a step. This need not have led to hostilities between him and the Jews, who had welcomed the UN resolution; Abdullah, however, decided that he wanted more than the areas allotted to the Arab state. In particular he coveted Jerusalem. Therefore, at the last minute, just before the British evacuation, he broke with the Jewish Agency, with which he had been the only Arab ruler to maintain good relations ever since the beginning of the British Mandate, and then opted for war. This decision led the other Arab states to join in the invasion of Palestine, either out of solidarity (as in the case of Iraq which was ruled by Abdullah’s relatives) or (as in the case of Egypt) out of rivalry and dislike of the prospect of Abdullah’s aggrandizement.
This war is still, almost forty years later, not settled, but this much at any rate is clear: Abdullah’s very adventurous resolution of his dilemma—the dilemma of whether or not to fight the Jews—led directly to his murder in 1951 by a Palestinian Arab in the Jerusalem he had so coveted.
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Another Middle East dilemma arose for Britain following the military coup d’état of July 1952 in Egypt, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. The new rulers took over and pursued with even greater insistence the twin demands which Egyptian governments after 1945 had been making, namely, the unity of the Nile Valley and the evacuation of British troops from Egyptian territory. The new regime failed to attain its first objective, but, after much negotiation, the British did agree to the evacuation of the Suez Canal base. This gave Nasser much prestige and greatly increased his elbow room in the conduct of foreign policy.
At the same time it was involved in negotiating the evacuation of its troops from Egypt, the British government was trying, with the help and support of the United States, to set up an anti-Soviet defense organization to include both Arab and non-Arab states. An attempt was made to persuade Nasser to join this treaty, but the attempt failed, essentially because he could not obtain in exchange a recognition of Egypt’s primacy over other Arab states. In the event, the defense organization materialized as the Baghdad Pact, which Iraq joined, thereby seeming to secure for itself the prestige and influence Nasser had sought for Egypt.
The Baghdad Pact alienated Nasser from the Western camp, but the alienated Nasser had been strengthened and given greater freedom of action by the disappearance of the British military presence in Egypt. He used this freedom of action to establish increasingly close relations with the Soviet Union which, at one bound, was now able to leapfrog the territory of the Middle Eastern members of the Baghdad Pact and ensconce itself in the eastern Mediterranean. If Nasser was to be alienated then he should not have been strengthened, and if he was to be strengthened then he should not have been alienated.
When the 1952 military coup occurred in Egypt, it enjoyed the sympathy and support of U.S. officials. The theory behind this support was that the coup represented a progressive development likely to benefit American interests. The coup, it was believed, would improve social and economic conditions in Egypt and would thus conduce to stability. It would hence diminish the possibility of civil unrest, which otherwise would have been inevitable under the reactionary monarchical regime of King Farouk. In short, it was believed that the U.S. and Nasser’s Free Officers were bound by natural affinities, not to speak of a natural alliance—the more so since the Free Officers were against the continuation of the British presence in Egypt. For this meant that they were nationalists and opposed to imperialism; and these U.S. officials fervently believed that a new and stable world order was possible only with the eradication of imperialism.
These views were based on political and sociological theories the cogency and coherence of which were most doubtful, depending as they did on long chains of assumptions and inferences joined by weak or nonexistent links. To base a policy on such theories was, as events soon proved, both hazardous and foolish. It took under a year from the signature of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty in 1954, whereby the British undertook to evacuate the Suez Canal base, to the Egyptian arms deal with Czechoslovakia which alienated Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and led him to cancel the financing of the Aswan Dam. This was followed by Egypt’s nationalizing of the Suez Canal, and eventually by the Anglo-French expedition against Egypt in the autumn of 1956.
The expedition, in turn, led to an abrupt and violent turnabout in U.S. policy. The U.S., in virtual collusion (to use a word much favored at the time) with the USSR, took up the cudgels on behalf of the Egyptian regime, humiliated its two principal NATO allies, and procured a triumph for Colonel Nasser. This act seems to have been justified in the mind of President Eisenhower—who was the prime mover—by some of the same cloudy sociopolitical speculations that had led the U.S. to support the Egyptian coup in 1952. His impolitic act dealt a powerful blow to NATO solidarity, whose reverberations are still by no means exhausted. With it originated what may be called the neutralist current within NATO, seen today at its most striking in the condemnatory European reaction to the American raid on Libya in April 1986.
Less than two years after the Suez affair—in still another turn of the screw—the U.S. was compelled to send a military expedition to Lebanon to protect it from the threat of a Nasserite takeover, a threat which was the direct outcome of U.S. support for Nasser in the autumn of 1956. Thus, during the space of six years, between 1952 and 1958, the Egyptian military regime was first supported, then opposed, then even more strongly supported, only to be again strongly opposed. Had these gyrations not actually taken place, they would have been beyond belief. It is highly unlikely that the predictable consequences of the various and contradictory decisions were carefully weighed and considered; it is perhaps just as unlikely that the policy-makers, blithely entering upon their decisions, were at all aware of the dilemmas which faced them.
The same may be said of the Kennedy administration which followed. In 1962, a coup deposed the Imam of Yemen. Nasser, who had been aware of the plot, hastened to send an expedition to support the new regime at San’a. This was in the hope that Yemen would provide a base from which to subvert the Saudi regime and perhaps—who knows?—eventually control the oil riches of the Arabian Peninsula. The new U.S. administration, all sympathy for liberation struggles, hastened to recognize the new Egyptian-sponsored regime in San’a. It thus gave its benison, wittingly or not, to Nasser’s schemes. Had he succeeded in his main purpose and destroyed the Saudi regime, the outcome would have been extremely disagreeable to the U.S. As it was, the Egyptian expedition became bogged down in tribal and guerrilla warfare which it failed to control or eradicate, and was withdrawn in 1967, following the Six-Day War, when Nasser was in no position to resist the conditions the Saudis attached to the economic help he sorely needed.
But the Egyptian presence in Yemen helped greatly to subvert the British position in Aden. Guerrillas and terrorists, organized, armed, and financed by the Egyptians, created much disorder in Aden and its hinterland. This persuaded the Labor administration in Britain—which, it is true, did not take much persuading—abruptly to abandon the colony to one “liberation front” which had eliminated its rival, thus giving a practical demonstration of Mao’s barbarous dictum that authority and legitimacy come out of the barrel of a gun. Soon afterward, Aden became a Communist stronghold and a Soviet base. That the Egyptian presence in Yemen would damage the British position in Aden was a reasonable expectation. How such damage would conduce to U.S. interests was, most probably, a question never asked when recognition was accorded to a regime which was an instrument of Nasser’s purposes.
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American policy toward Egypt, if it is to be judged by these episodes, must be held to have been lacking in strategic vision, to have failed to ask what the interests of the U.S. in the Middle East were and how they could best be realized. No policy based on a strategic vision would have dealt with Nasser as he was dealt with during the Eisenhower administration, nor would it have seen any benefit in acquiescing in, and thus in a measure supporting, his adventure in Yemen. Policy seems rather to have been dominated by unexamined presuppositions concerning the character of Arab politics and Arab society, heedless of the changes and vicissitudes to which it was reasonable to expect they would be subject.
Another particular shortcoming of U.S. policy was to be excessively dominated by preoccupations and problems considered highly important by states in the region but which did not necessarily have the same importance for the U.S. A case very much in point is the Arab-Israel conflict.
Over the decades, many administrations tried to resolve or mitigate that conflict, but none came to office so determined to settle the issue once and for all as did the Carter administration. Could it be that such determination, such insistence, was misplaced, that the question was whether the U.S. should take the initiative in resolving this conflict? For all attempts by outsiders at promoting a settlement had hitherto aroused great suspicions, and raised tension instead of abating it. The reason is simple and has already been touched upon: owing to the large number of parties who had become involved, any possible resolution of the conflict would work to the detriment of one party or another, who would thus have every incentive to prevent what the Carter administration yearned for, namely, a comprehensive settlement.
To attempt such a settlement necessarily attracted the hostility of Israel, which did not relish the prospect of all its enemies ganging up on it, aided perhaps by the U.S. and certainly by the USSR which, for good measure, the Carter administration wished to involve in the negotiation. And a comprehensive settlement at that juncture also worked against Egyptian interests, since Sadat was at odds with the Soviets, and did not want to sit in a conference where they would favor and support Syria. Hence his dramatic move for peace in October 1977, which disturbed and shocked the Carter administration.
Sadat’s initial move, undertaken without benefit of U.S. mediation, was a windfall, miraculously showing a way out of the dilemma which the U.S. had set for itself. Indeed, the agreement between Israel and Egypt bade fair to make the Arab-Israel conflict die of inanition, since without Egypt, no combination of Arab states could risk another outbreak of fighting. In the meantime, American attention was urgently required elsewhere. Conditions in Iran were visibly deteriorating, and Iran was incomparably more important to U.S. interests than a comprehensive settlement—most likely unattainable—of the Arab-Israel dispute.
Yet the impression is very strong that there was barely an attempt to understand, let alone arrest, the damage to U.S. interests represented by a timid and hesitant Shah floundering in uncharted and perilous waters. One might almost say that the Shah’s timidity and hesitancy were no less than that of the administration. Such was the disarray in Washington that the Shah’s downfall and Khomeini’s triumph were initially received with relief. Yet the Ayatollah’s advent, as could have been prudently foreseen, spelled serious perils arising out of regional turbulence, and out of the temptations and opportunities thereby presented to a superpower which happens to be the next-door neighbor of Iran and Afghanistan, and scarcely more distant from Pakistan and India.
The same absence of strategic vision, the same dominance of unexamined presuppositions, are evident under Carter’s successor. When the Israelis laid siege to Beirut during the summer of 1982, the PLO was escorted to safety by a quadripartite force including a U.S. contingent. What was the utility of saving Yasir Arafat and the PLO? Even if a settlement of the Arab-Israel conflict were really an overriding necessity, the PLO could not possibly deliver such a settlement. Dealing with it would antagonize Israel, and also Syria, Israel’s most important antagonist today.
With the PLO escorted to safety, the quadripartite force withdrew from Beirut. But it came back shortly afterward, following the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Apart from administering a public rebuke to Israel, for what purpose did these contingents remain in Beirut for months on end, until forced out by Syrian-instigated terrorism? The purpose came to be the protection of a Lebanese government dominated by a Maronite-Sunni coalition, as had been the case since the beginning of Lebanese independence. But to protect such a government was misplaced benevolence, since this alienated—to no purpose—the Druse and the Shiites, who no longer acquiesced in the old order, and were thus drawn to the Syrian connection. In any event, the quadripartite force was too feeble, and the governments from which its contingents received their orders too timid, to go about protecting the Lebanese regime in earnest.
The U.S. in particular embarked on two whimsical enterprises in these months. It set out to reconstitute a nonsectarian and efficient Lebanese army, and it promoted an Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty. A Lebanese army is today a contradiction in terms, while an Israeli-Lebanese negotiation which leaves out Syria is like Hamlet without the Prince. Yet we have seen a great power embark in all seriousness on these paradoxical and absurd enterprises.
The peripeties of the Lebanese affair did offer an opening, which, however, the U.S. failed to exploit to advantage. Whatever the reasons for the presence of American troops in Lebanon, the fact remained that they were there at the invitation, and with the approval, of the lawful government. Could not this beachhead have been enlarged, and the U.S. presence appreciably increased? This would have changed the balance of power vis-à-vis the Soviets in the Middle East, and counteracted the neutralism or worse of NATO members in the Mediterranean. But it is most doubtful that the Lebanese situation was ever considered for its bearing on the difficulties and perils created by the Shah’s downfall.
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The dilemmas and perplexities discussed here are, with the single exception of Abdullah’s, those facing British and U.S. policy. This is only proper: Britain, in its day, was the dominant power in the Middle East, and today in that region one superpower, the U.S., faces another, the USSR. It is the dilemmas of such powers which have the greatest reality and significance. For they dispose of much greater weight than do smaller powers, and the way they resolve their dilemmas has far-reaching consequences for themselves and for others.
The resolutions of the dilemmas I have reviewed here have so consistently led to disappointment and failure that we may be tempted to agree with the famous sentiment expressed by the Swedish statesman Oxenstierna: “Do you not know, my son, with what little wisdom the world is governed?” Yet perhaps, on reflection, this verdict, at once so skeptical and so categorical, seems harsh or—worse—presumptuous, if not in Oxenstierna’s mouth, then in that of a mere historian. For who among us, placed in the position of Carter, Eisenhower, Dulles, or Abdullah, can say, hand on heart, that he would have done any better?
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