Middle East Plight of the Moderates

By William E. Smith.

It was not exactly a smashing political victory for Ronald Reagan, but at least the President avoided what could have been a foreign policy disaster. As White House officials clustered around TV sets to watch deliberations, which were being televised for the first time last week, the Senate approved by the narrowest possible margin an Administration plan to sell $265 million worth of missiles to Saudi Arabia. Opponents of the proposal had one less than the 67 Senators needed to override a presidential veto.

The Administration saved the day by making the issue a matter of White House prestige. Last year the Saudis asked the U.S. for permission to buy $1.1 billion in weaponry, but the deal was cut to $354 million after several Senators warned that the larger package faced insuperable opposition.

The Senate voted 73 to 22 last month to block the sale, which included Stinger antiaircraft missiles, Sidewinder air-to-air missiles and Harpoon antiship missiles. The House of Representatives also opposed the sale, by a vote of 356 to 62. Reagan vetoed the congressional resolution but cut from the package another $89 million worth of Stingers after opponents charged that the shoulder-fired weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and be used for shooting down airliners. But at that point the President began to lobby hard to turn the vote around. During a White House breakfast for 60 Senators last week, he declared that the sale was a matter of U.S. self-interest, adding "We must retain the trust of the moderate Arab nations."

In the final Senate debate, Administration supporters repeated the familiar arguments: Saudi Arabia is a force for Middle East stability and moderation; it needs to defend itself against the threats of Iranian expansion and Islamic fundamentalism; it has had a security relationship with the U.S. for 40 years. Argued Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who heads the Foreign Relations Committee: "If the Senate were to cut the President off at the knees in today's vote, a very large loser would be Israel." His rationale was that over the long term, Israel benefits from a close U.S. relationship with some Arab states. Lugar also noted that when the U.S. backed away from a sale of advanced military aircraft to the Saudi government of King Fahd last year, the Saudis simply shopped elsewhere, striking a deal that may eventually be worth $20 billion to Britain's defense industry.

Leading the opposition, California Democrat Alan Cranston criticized the Saudis for their unwillingness to make peace with Israel and for subsidizing "terrorists," meaning Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Though he acknowledged that Washington and Riyadh have some mutual interests, Cranston argued, "The Saudi princes don't pump oil or resist Marxism just to do us a favor. They'd do it anyway."

After the vote, Cranston claimed that the arms package had been reduced to about 10% of what the Saudis had originally negotiated. A better estimate would probably be 25%, but he was right in maintaining that the Administration's victory had been a qualified one. The next question is whether, as some have predicted, the President will face another congressional battle over delivery of five AWACS surveillance planes that the U.S. agreed in 1981 to sell the Saudis at a total cost of $5.8 billion.

Now that the Saudi arms sale is set, some Washington officials hope that the Administration will find ways to revive the Middle East peace talks. Lugar told reporters that he wished Secretary of State George Shultz would go ahead with a recently discussed trip to the Middle East. Shultz is conspicuously unenthusiastic about the idea. The last thing he needs is another high-profile failure in that bedeviled region, and he prefers not to make the effort unless he is assured in advance of some probable progress. Last week, even as the White House was saying that a Shultz trip was in "the planning stage," the Secretary was doing his best to discourage it. "You can't force events that aren't there," he said stoutly. "We'd like to push, but we've got to have something to push with."

< The idea for the Shultz mission apparently originated not in Washington but in Jerusalem. In October Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres is supposed to exchange jobs with Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, leader of the Likud bloc; Peres would welcome a political or diplomatic earthquake that would somehow render this agreement with his coalition partners inoperative. For a while, it looked as if Jordanian King Hussein's peace initiative could turn into such an event, but then it fizzled out. At the moment, all the Israelis can suggest to Shultz is that if he makes the trip, he might be able to help them solve the relatively minor but irritating Taba dispute between Israel and Egypt over ownership of a few acres of beachfront on the Red Sea.

For once, most of the moderate Arabs, with the exception of Egypt's Mubarak, did not seem to care one way or the other about a U.S. mission to the Middle East. Hussein, who met last week with French President Francois Mitterrand and Premier Jacques Chirac and is due to pay a private call on Reagan this week, remains bitter about the failure of his 1985 initiative. He condemns Yasser Arafat and the P.L.O. for their refusal to join him, and he blames Washington for giving him such halfhearted backing. Even as he was negotiating with Arafat last year, Hussein learned from Reagan that the President was not going to press Congress on Jordan's $1.9 billion arms request--a move that Hussein felt undermined his position and made Arafat more intractable than ever.

Since then, Hussein has dropped Arafat and re-established contact with the King's, and Arafat's, old enemy, Syrian President Hafez Assad. Hussein's aim is to bring about a reconciliation between Assad and the moderate Arabs over both the Iran--Iraq war and the peace process. The Arabs would like to see Syria break its alliance with non-Arab Iran for practical as well as Arab- nationalist reasons. A reconciliation between Syria and Iraq, if it were to come to pass, would strike a blow against the Iranian war machine and reduce Iran's ability to export and encourage Islamic fundamentalism.

There were reports last week that Assad and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had agreed to name emissaries to talk about common problems, like resuming the pumping of Iraqi oil through Syria to the Lebanese port of Tripoli. In exchange for reopening the pipeline, Iraq would replace Iran as a source of inexpensive oil to Syria. By brokering the deal, King Hussein would gain Iraqi support in his drive to undermine Arafat and isolate the P.L.O. In time, the shifting alliances might also help ease the situation in Lebanon, where fighting last week between Shi'ite Muslims and Palestinians was particularly brutal. The Shi'ites launched the offensive in mid-May in an effort to prevent the P.L.O. from re-establishing the Lebanese power base it lost in 1982.

The Reagan Administration and the moderate Arabs are now generally both pessimistic and wary of each other. The U.S. resents the fact that many of them failed to rally behind King Hussein or even accept the minimum requirement that they acknowledge Israel's right to exist. The Saudis have repeatedly irritated the U.S. by refusing to use their clout when it was most needed, whether to restrain Syrian excesses or pressure Arafat into coming to terms with Jordan. Though they have their own grievances against Muammar Gaddafi, most moderates joined the chorus of denunciation against the U.S. raid on Libyan targets.

On the Arab side, the sense of betrayal is deep. The Arabs feel that Washington has moved closer to Israel than ever before, thus endangering U.S. strategic interests and abandoning claims of being an honest broker. The erosion of the American image of fair-mindedness, says a high-ranking Egyptian official, risks "the destruction of goodwill accumulated over many years." Secondly, though they understand the U.S. reaction to terrorism, the Arabs are shocked that the U.S. appears to blame the outbreak on the entire Arab world. Says Ashraf Ghorbal, a former Egyptian Ambassador to Washington: "Terrorism has become the lens through which the Americans look at the Middle East." The Saudis were particularly offended by the intensity of the arms-sale debate in the Senate, and at one point asked the Administration to forget the whole thing.

It is probably true that despite the mutual disenchantment, moderate Arabs realize that the U.S. remains the only power in a position to exert influence over Israel. Therefore the U.S. and the Arabs still need the help and cooperation of each other. But this is not much comfort at a time of such desperately flagging spirits. Surveying the political landscape last week, a senior British diplomat concluded, "The prospects for a Middle East settlement are worse than they have been for a very long time."

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Johanna McGeary/Washington