The Mid East: Search for Stability

THE Middle East, Richard Nixon had observed several times, is the greatest hazard to world peace because it could draw the superpowers closer to the ultimate conflict. The melancholy accuracy of his warning was established anew last week when Jordan's civil war threatened to go international. The column of tanks from the puny power that is Syria challenged more than King Hussein's army; it tested statesmanship and will in Washington, Moscow, and throughout the Middle East. Jordan's agony deferred still further any efforts to start Arab-Israeli peace talks.

It cast fresh uncertainty on Soviet-American relations at a time when Nixon was hoping to bring his "era of negotiation" to full reality. The eruption posed a new dilemma for a President whose doctrine is to reduce U.S. forces and commitments abroad while at the same time preserving stability. Most frightening of all, it emphasized the difficulty both world powers have in applying their strength with precision and in small doses.

Even when the crisis abated, leaving Hussein still in power and the Syrians in retreat--just as Washington wanted it--there was a bitter aftertaste, a feeling that the U.S. was being pressured in a manner that required new toughness on its part. Nixon was able to leave for his trip to the Mediterranean and Europe as scheduled, but the journey took on fresh and weightier significance. Although concern about Soviet activities in the Middle East was genuine enough, the original decision to take the trip had contained elements of routine flag showing and pre-election headline grabbing. Now the excursion assumed an air of urgency. The fleet he visits will have just returned from action stations where it was poised for combat. Conversations in Rome, Belgrade, Madrid and London will have less small talk, more serious discussion about where matters stand in the Middle East and between East and West.

His travels will serve to keep the nation's attention focused on the Middle East. The Chief Executive's physical presence near the danger zone is useful symbolism but will settle none of the Middle East issues. He will consult with his Viet Nam negotiating team at a country house near Tipperary in Ireland--but such consultations have been commonplace in Washington.

Dick and Pat will spend two nights in Belgrade with President Tito, lunch with Queen Elizabeth, and briefly visit Prime Minister Edward Heath outside London. They will see Pope Paul VI at the Vatican, spend a night with Italian President Giuseppe Saragat, visit Spain's Francisco Franco in Madrid. Before flying home, the Nixons will seek grave sites of ancestors in the Irish countryside southwest of Dublin. Perhaps the biggest symbolic point of the trip is that it takes the President in and near the ancient regions where Western culture has its roots, and where U.S. security interests are so seriously at stake.

Tensions Start

The first urgent intelligence that the region was on the brink of convulsion arrived in Washington on the night of Sept. 15, as many of the Administration's highest officials gathered in Virginia's Airlie House to honor Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, who was given a "Statesman in Medicine" award. Henry Kissinger, the President's adviser on national security, received word that Hussein had marshaled his troops for a showdown with the fedayeen, that civil war in Jordan was imminent, and that the British Foreign Office was on the London-Washington line asking what the U.S. planned to do about it. Kissinger quietly but swiftly tapped those of the dinner guests who are members of the Administration's crisis-management team, the Washington Special Action Group: Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard, CIA Director Richard Helms and Joseph Sisco of the State Department (the only missing member was Under Secretary of State U. Alexis Johnson). Their black limousines reached the White House by 10:30 p.m. They conferred past midnight in the first of at least a dozen meetings on Jordan.

The group considered some possible outcomes of Hussein's move: a clear-cut routing of the guerrillas; a smashing fedayeen victory and Hussein's fall; a prolonged stalemate. They outlined U.S. options to deal with each eventuality. Far more ominous, however, was another possibility: that the Iraqis and Syrians, long sympathetic to the commandos, might intervene. That could tempt Israeli troops, armor and airpower to plunge in too. Then Egypt might respond--and Soviet pilots and technicians have become an integral part of Gamal Abdel Nasser's military forces. The first aim of U.S. strategy had to be to confine the fighting to the initial parties. The U.S. also hoped that Hussein would survive as a check on commando extremists. Finally, if the need arose, Americans trapped by the fighting would have to be rescued. The planning time for all that was short. Nixon insisted on a summary of his options by morning.

He got it just an hour before he took off to deliver an Alfred M. Landon Lecture at Kansas State University. Nixon went on to Chicago, where he, Kissinger and Sisco spent 90 minutes discussing the memo. Nixon's deepest worry was that the Israeli troops perched on the Golan Heights and the West Bank of occupied Jordan might not resist the temptation to attack the commandos. Kissinger learned that full civil war had indeed erupted. He awakened Nixon at 3 a.m. with the bad news. Nixon decided not to inflate the crisis at that point by cutting his trip short and returning to Washington.

But the President concluded that he had to signal the Soviets that the U.S. did not intend to stand by idly in this crisis. There was an element of compensation in this; two weeks before, the U.S. had appeared helpless and indecisive when Egypt and Russia callously violated the Suez standstill agreement. A second display of weakness might be highly damaging. He kept a date with editors of the Chicago Sun-Times and Daily News--and deliberately took an overly tough line. Nixon hinted that the U.S. might use the holding of the airline hostages as a handy excuse to attack the commandos. In an odd bit of gamesmanship, a mixture of guile and almost naive candor, the President indicated that it might be beneficial if the Soviets thought the U.S. capable of "irrational or unpredictable" action.

Heightened Determination

Meanwhile, Kissinger and company decided to move another aircraft carrier, Saratoga, into the eastern Mediterranean to join Independence, which had sailed eastward after the hijackings occurred. A group of C-130 transport planes was flown from Europe into Turkey. An airborne brigade had already been placed on semi-alert in Germany. At a later meeting, the group proposed moving a third carrier, John F. Kennedy, into the Med, and ordering the helicopter carrier Guam and its Marine landing team to leave North Carolina for scheduled NATO maneuvers in the Mediterranean a day early. Each move, as the Administration anticipated, was reported by newsmen. The sense of U.S. determination was now being deliberately heightened.

On the day after Nixon returned to Washington, intelligence sources passed along unconfirmed reports of movements in Jordan by both the Iraqis and the Syrians. Iraq has kept about 18,000 troops and 100 tanks in the country with Hussein's approval since the Six-Day War in 1967. The White House considered an Iraqi assault on Hussein's troops more likely, partly because Soviet officers serve with Syrian troops and presumably could keep those forces in check. A note from Moscow advised Washington that the Russians had no intention of intervening in Jordan and were trying to discourage others, including the Syrians, from such action. When the intelligence reports turned out to be premature, and Jordanian troops seemed to be handling the commandos well, much of Washington relaxed. Not Nixon. He told Kissinger not to take the Soviet assurances too seriously. "Take it easy," he said. "We've had that sort of thing before."

The Syrians Attack

The mood turned to alarm on Sunday morning, Sept. 20, when Syrian tanks rolled southward to relieve pressure on the commandos. Israeli troops began massing along the Jordanian border to the west. Nixon asked Secretary of State William Rogers to warn the Russians again. He did so, in the sternest note that the Nixon Administration has yet sent to Moscow. It threatened the "gravest consequences" if the Syrians did not withdraw.

Now there was no need to project a crisis atmosphere; Washington's concern was real. Rogers decided to spend the night on a cot in his office. Meeting followed meeting as news of the Syrian assault came in. At one point Nixon told Kissinger: "Let's you and me war-game this&#quot; and they worked the plans over to see, as Nixon put it, "where the weak points might be."

One Sunday night meeting had just broken up when news came that the Syrians had overrun Irbid in northern Jordan. Kissinger's deputy, Brigadier General Alexander Haig, ran outside, called the Action Group members back to the situation room. They recommended putting N.C., the on 82nd alert--another Airborne at move Fort Bragg, designed mainly to influence Moscow.

The news grew worse last Monday morning as Syrian armor continued to roll. Kissinger got Nixon out of bed again at 3 a.m. to keep him advised. The President asked for a new reading on what should be done, called Kissinger back in just three minutes to get a report. Next day, Nixon created a new crisis group, dubbed &#quot;the principals&#quot; consisting of Kissinger, Laird, Rogers, Moorer and Packard. They worked over each recommendation of the Action Group for Nixon's benefit.

Nixon Unpredictable

Through it all, the Administration never once said publicly that it might intervene in Jordan with troops to back up Hussein. It spoke only of a possible rescue mission to get Americans and hostages out of the embattled country. But Nixon's private talk to Chicago editors, the air of urgency in Washington, the alerting of troops, all had their intended effect. No one could be sure that a rescue attempt would not be used as pretext for intervention. The President's unexpected dispatch of U.S. troops into Cambodia last spring made his actions now unpredictable.

Actually, the possibility of a U.S. invasion never became really imminent. It was considered--and promptly rejected in any situation short of unspecified "dire circumstances" or as a "last resort." One reason was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff adamantly opposed such a move. Their opposition was so emphatic that they even offered political objections. If ordered to execute such an operation they would, of course, have done so, but most reluctantly.

One general who sits regularly in the Pentagon "tank," where the Chiefs meet, explained his colleagues' attitude: "They stood 100% behind a rescue of American people. But if that operation turned into support for Hussein, they were saying, 'Look, we have been burned on Viet Nam, and before we get out there on the sand we want a much more detailed foreign policy scenario than we have got now.' " The real question, said another general, was: "How could we have got out of there in any possible way with any good?"

The Chiefs questioned the political wisdom of intervening in what they considered an Arab civil war and reasoned that the cost to the U.S. in terms of Arab enmity would not justify trying to save Hussein. On military grounds, they considered landlocked Jordan a logistical nightmare. Moreover, at the height of the crisis, the Sixth Fleet had no way of transporting Marines into Jordan by helicopter; Guam and its choppers were still five days to the west. Militarily, however, the Chiefs had little objection to providing Hussein's troops with carrier-based tactical air support.

Armed intervention was also overwhelmingly opposed in the State Department as being far more diplomatically damaging than the shoring up of Hussein would have been worth. Hussein's own role as a moderating influence in the Arab world would have been fatally impaired if he could be sustained only at the point of U.S. bayonets. The U.S. too would have lost its capacity for any kind of mediating role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Reaction at home would have been overwhelmingly adverse. As Nixon told a White House visitor on Tuesday: "The American people do not have the heart to go into another war." Finally, an armed expedition could have resulted in the execution of the hijack hostages and reprisals against other Americans in Jordan.

As the crisis unfolded, Nixon made no attempt to seek the advice of Congressmen on what to do. He did brief legislators in the course of previously scheduled meetings, but refused comment on his plans. Nevertheless, all came away convinced that he was not going to throw troops into Jordan. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright had some rare kind words for the Administration. "I have been very encouraged," he said. "They are trying to do the right thing."

Fruitless Wrangling

Publicly, however, the Administration continued to sound belligerent and to apply diplomatic pressure as the Syrian armor found the Jordanian resistance brutally tough but did not pull back. At the U.N., the U.S. shunned a British and French effort to seek a four-power declaration urging an end to the fighting, fearing that it would only lead to fruitless wrangling.

In Washington, Yuly M. Vorontsov, the charge d'affaires of the Russian embassy, was a frequent visitor in the office of State's Sisco. Their exchange amounted, in essence, to the U.S.'s urging the Russians to get the Syrians to withdraw their tanks, while the U.S.S.R. warned the U.S. to stay out and to keep Israel out. Kissinger even attended an official Egyptian social affair on Tuesday night, where Vorontsov loudly demanded to know why the U.S. had not responded to the Soviet note. While enthralled guests stared, Kissinger was overheard to say that there was no need for a reply because "our friends haven't done anything." Would the U.S. be satisfied if the Syrian tanks stopped advancing? No, replied Kissinger; they must withdraw.

They did turn back on the very next day, though U.S. pressure was probably not the major reason. The most significant cause seemed to be the devastating counterattack launched by the Jordanian troops and aircraft (see THE WORLD). The threat of a flanking Israeli attack also worried the Syrians. The failure of Iraq to join them hurt too. Yet it was also likely, as one White House official claimed, that "the threat of intervention helped to stabilize the situation."

It probably did, although there was considerable bluff in all of the saber-rattling, and that game is risky. At best, it can rarely work more than once. At worst, it can be called. If Hussein's army had been beaten and the U.S. had not intervened, the show of force would have been revealed as only a show--and the U.S. would have looked far weaker than before.

The precise role of the Russians was difficult to define. It seemed impossible that Moscow, which has advisers throughout the Syrian army, was unaware of Damascus' intention to invade. The Russians may not have known the extent of the thrust, however, Moscow made every public pose of trying to check the fighting. Yet some U.S. analysts speculated that the Russians might have been playing a clever double role: instructing their advisers with the Syrian army to let the tanks roll, but to appear as the peace saver by pulling them back if they failed. It was not necessarily that the Soviets wanted Hussein to fall, but rather that they did not want the guerrillas crushed. It appeared that the Russians in the end became more concerned with restoring a measure of stability than making minor gains in influence at the expense of the pro-Western King.

Nixon thinks in less kindly terms about the two superpowers' roles in the Middle East. He is known to believe that while the U.S. seeks peace there, Russia wants control. But there is a common interest--preventing the smaller countries from pulling Moscow and Washington into a major confrontation. His tactic throughout the hair-raising week, he said, was to "show great power but also to show great restraint."

With a display of muscle, a guarding of his options and, in the end, a shunning of any actual application of force, Nixon had managed to preserve at least some hope of peacemaking in the Middle East and elsewhere. Hussein was temporarily sustained as his troops routed the Syrians and inflicted heavy casualties on the commandos. Yet those very casualties only inflamed the bitterness of the commandos. To shore up his military position, the U.S. now plans to resume military assistance to Amman. Desperately trying for a measure of stability in the area, the U.S. feels that Hussein is far preferable to a radical guerrilla regime in Jordan.

Negotiation Prospects

What happens next in the larger Arab-Israeli deadlock is the top priority question now preoccupying Washington. Despite all of the new tensions--or perhaps because of them--the Rogers peace initiative is still alive--barely. While it seemed to founder on the failure of the U.S. to prevent Soviet duplicity in Egypt, it is now a matter of even more urgency. The plan has at least led to a cease-fire along the Suez. Both sides have agreed at least in principle to renewed talks.

The formula, as U.S. diplomats read it, is still sound. It demands that Israel give up some or most of its occupied territories, that Arabs respect Israel's legitimacy and frontiers; that Israel be able to count on the ability of the Arab governments to live up to agreements, as well as on the commitment of the U.S. to guarantee them. Israel must also be able to believe that Russia will no longer connive with Arabs in a way that endangers Israeli security. What happened in Jordan and along the Suez makes such trust more difficult than ever to establish.

U.S. officials are candidly baffled by the Soviet conduct in the past two months, especially in the Middle East. Moscow not only advanced its missiles in Egypt, but even after all of the fuss that created, it is still strengthening Nasser's air defenses in violation of the agreement, knowing full well that U.S. and Israeli intelligence detect every move. "This is deliberate--it is not clandestine," observes one Soviet expert in the U.S. Kremlin strategy raises all the old doubts about Moscow's intentions of abiding by any pact it enters.

Analysts are more worried now about the prospects for a nuclear arms limitations agreement with the Russians in the resumed SALT sessions at Helsinki next month. Yet if the Kremlin operates as realistically on its assessment of self-interest as in the past, Soviet behavior at Suez need not inevitably parallel Soviet behavior elsewhere. The U.S.S.R., after all, had flatly lied to President John Kennedy about its strategic missiles in Cuba in 1962, claiming that there were none and touching off a superpower confrontation. Yet a year later, the two nations were able to agree on a limited nuclear testing pact that apparently has not been violated.

Oldest Axiom

The Soviet Union genuinely needs to cut down its spending on strategic arms, which accounts for its continued interest in SALT. It is genuinely interested in some accommodation with Western Europe so that it will be free to cope with the Chinese menace on its Far Eastern borders, which at least partly explained Moscow's readiness to sign a nonaggression pact with West Germany. In the Middle East, on the other hand, it is relatively cheap to keep things tense as long as a major conflict with the U.S. can be avoided. As Columbia University Sovietologist Severyn Bialer says, Moscow knows that "a state of crisis is the only guarantee of a continued Soviet influence among the Arab states."

In short, one of the oldest of axioms about Soviet Russia remains very much in force: Moscow will move in anywhere it can find an opening, provided the risks are not too great. Showing symptoms of an alarmist view of Soviet intentions, the U.S. reacted strongly last week to the possible establishment of a Soviet submarine-servicing base in Cuba, a development that has been watched for months. A White House official said that the U.S. views the base "with utmost seriousness" and "at the right moment will take the action that seems indicated." Such tough language seemed to be dictated more by a desire not to appear compliant than by a real threat in Cuba. Yet there is no doubt that Soviet power is extending its reach around the globe (see THE WORLD). Moreover, it is doing so at a time when the Nixon Administration has moved sharply to reduce its commitments abroad.

The Nixon Doctrine, first enunciated in July of 1969 on Guam, warned that friends of the U.S. must wage their own local fights with their own manpower. In most cases, the U.S. will back them only with arms and money. Nixon's plan to channel most foreign aid through international agencies rather than as funds dangling at the end of U.S. -held strings, is a similarly realistic relinquishing of power. The Nixon Administration has also proposed a more drastic curtailment of its worldwide defense establishment than is generally realized. In addition to the substantial withdrawals from Viet Nam, it has already begun to cut one-third of its 64,000 troops in South Korea. Reductions in the 285,000-man force stationed with NATO, mainly in West Germany, are in the offing. In a concession to Japan, the U.S. decided last week to stop using Okinawa as a B-52 base. It is withdrawing about 10,000 of its 39,000 military personnel, mostly airmen, from Thailand. The active-duty strength of the U.S. Army will be reduced by three divisions next June. The Navy is in the process of decommissioning hundreds of ships.

There are, of course, risks--psychological and physical--in such retrenchment while the other superpower, Russia, and the budding power, Communist China, continue to build up. Yet if Nixon can be faulted, it is not for enunciating his much-needed and perhaps belated doctrine, but for his failure to heed it consistently. Though rationalized as a defensive measure, his decision to order U.S. troops into Cambodia seemed to violate his own policy. Whatever its limited military advantages to the U.S. in Viet Nam, the Cambodian intervention was billed by the President in apocalyptic terms. Almost always when he speaks of Southeast Asia, he seems to be defending an ideology, a way of life, or an almost mystical concept of na tional honor.

Rotten Apples

Those arguments had more validity in the two World Wars and in the darkest days of the cold war. The U.S. emerged in 1945 as the world's strongest power, both economically and militarily. It used its economic strength magnificently to help rebuild Western Europe, and idealistically hoped to forge another superpower out of a unification of much of that continent. Soon the State Department's Dean Acheson was pushing the decision to aid Greece and Turkey against Communist subversion as part of the Truman Doctrine. U.S. failure to combat Communism there, he proclaimed, could "open three continents to Soviet penetration--like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe."

The Acheson rotten apples were converted to falling dominoes by Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Dean Rusk embraced the theory throughout Kennedy and Johnson presidencies and Nixon dragged them forcefully to the fore when antiwar dissent rose. The rotten apple and domino visions of the world struggle could be defended in their time, but realities have changed, notably America's relative power vis-`a-vis the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union's own role in the Communist movement. In the heady days after the war, Americans felt, as French Journalist Andre Fontaine says, "that they were the best, most capable and most qualified to act as disinterested policemen in a world destined to remain imperfect." Since then, the police metaphor has become a cliche and the feeling less valid than ever.

The trouble with much Nixonian rhetoric about Southeast Asia is that it portrays a challenge to the U.S. by anyone anywhere as a blow to America's vitals. Because it is an unfillable prescription for intervention anywhere, it invites charges of hypocrisy. No world diplomat, even in the U.S., really believes that South Viet Nam is as vital to world stability as is Berlin, or that Laos is as crucial as the Middle East. Observes a White House official: "Politicians go for the cosmic explanation. But they should have learned that the credibility gap follows the cosmic explanation like night follows day." To be credible, a superpower can only exercise its might when its survival or its stabilizing influence against an opposing superpower is really at stake, or when its action is clearly within the major nation's orbit. In short, the U.S. is faced with the increasingly difficult problem of how to use its power, and of knowing when not to use it.

The U.S. never had the stomach to be an empire--in fact, it can be argued that any democracy in which the voters must be sold periodically on the need to maintain a world role cannot possibly be an empire today. But the U.S. has legitimate quasi-imperial needs and obligations in the sense of helping to maintain (as distinct from dictating) stability in wide areas. How to do this in today's world is the dilemma behind the Middle East conflict.

The implied threat of nuclear superiority no longer works in most situations, because the Russians have achieved virtual nuclear parity with the U.S. The old way of achieving political goals through economic aid is still important but increasingly ineffective in countries stirred up to a new nationalist pitch. Precise and quick military intervention (as in Lebanon in 1958 and the Dominican Republic in 1965) can never be ruled out, but is much harder to bring off now largely because of the fears stirred by Viet Nam.

Where Washington Can Help

In today's world, the U.S. has discovered that it cannot control the government it so massively finances and protects in Saigon. Neither the Soviet Union nor Communist China can control Hanoi. At least for a brief time, no one could control either the Syrians or the fedayeen in the Jordanian desert last week. There is, in fact, no way to check the long-term forces for change in most of the world's developing nations. When those changes promise a better life for more people, the U.S. might do well to support those forces, regardless of ideology. In fact, America's chief ideology today should be modernization. "The Americans have the confused idea that any social revolution is Communist--and have thereby handed over the concept of social revolution to the Communists," contends Singapore's Foreign Minister Rajaratnam. Adds a veteran American diplomat in the Far East: "We should start off with great modesty about what we can do."

That is a difficult formula to translate into specific action. Eras do not end with the finality of a third-act curtain; they dissolve gradually like a motion-picture fadeout, blending into the next scene. Nixon, like his recent predecessors, dreams of being the architect of a tranquil future for the entire world. Before leaving for Europe, he was again musing about the distinction between ending specific conflicts and achieving really durable peace. Nixon's burden, and the world's, is that the second cannot come without the first, that the passions and ambitions of dozens of countries conflict with each other, the peacemaker, no matter how intentioned and astute, often risks hurt for his efforts. It is a hazard which and his nation must face.

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