Posted on 06/07/2004 11:29:06 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
The joke goes something like this. When an aide used to wake president Ronald Reagan in the middle of the night and say, "Sir, something has happened in the Middle East," Reagan would reply anxiously, "What has happened to Israel?"
When the first president George Bush was awakened with news of a fresh Middle East crisis, he would grumble, "What has Israel done now?"
The joke draws laughs among American Jewish supporters of Israel who delighted at most of Reagan's policies towards Israel and lamented most of the elder Bush's.
Reagan's death from pneumonia at age 93 on Saturday, after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer's disease, has predictably sparked an outpouring of reflection on his legacy, particularly as it relates to the development of American conservatism and the end of the Cold War.
But his death also serves as a remarkably interesting mo-ment to reflect on his Middle East policies, specifically his approach toward Israel, terrorism, and the belief in the power of US military might to transform nations (in his case in Lebanon), especially in light of President George W. Bush's embrace of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and his current drive to inspire democracy in the Middle East and to rebuild Iraq.
The parallels are perhaps not surprising given Bush's emulation of Reagan in so many aspects of his presidency.
Reagan is remembered as a strong supporter of Israel. His strident anti-communism led him to see Israel as a "unique strategic asset" in a sea of Middle Eastern Soviet satellites. "Reagan's passion for Israel was clear. He clearly saw Israel as a friend," said Aaron Miller, president of Seeds of Peace and a Middle East adviser to several secretaries of state.
His connection was also personal. "He had many Jewish friends. It was initially the Hollywood connection," Miller said. "He seemed to be like George W. Bush – ideologically and emotionally predisposed to supporting Israel."
That backing led to a series of milestones in the US-Israel relationship during the Reagan administration, including the designation of Israel as a non-NATO ally, the signing of strategic cooperation agreements that led eventually to unprecedented intelligence-sharing and military sales to Israel, and a free trade agreement.
Reagan, influenced by nonconservative Yale law professor Eugene Rostow, shifted US policy on settlements, abandoning the rhetoric that said they were "illegal," and saying simply that they were an "obstacle to peace."
Similarly, George W. Bush implicitly endorsed Israel's idea of retaining some settlements in Judea and Samaria during a very public embrace of Sharon in April.
During the Reagan administration, the "permissive American attitude certainly encouraged the determined settlement policy of [prime minister Yitzhak] Shamir and Sharon," wrote William Quandt in his 1993 book Peace Process on American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Interestingly, Reagan died on the eve of a vote by Sharon's cabinet to endorse the dismantlement of settlements, showing how far the discussion on the issue has come.
Reagan's honeymoon with Israel was preceded, however, by a rocky relationship early in his first term. After Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, the White House took the unprecedented step of suspending delivery of already purchased F-16s to Israel, and backed a condemnation of Israel at the UN Security Council. The US sold AWACS to Saudi Arabia despite Israel's protests and those of its lobbyists in Washington.
Israel's invasion of Lebanon was backed ideologically by many in the Reagan administration. But Israel's unilateral, messy actions there at times drew even Reagan's personal rebuke. Defense secretary Caspar Weinberger was reluctant to implement the signed strategic cooperation agreements, and in fact, as academic Steven Spiegel recounts in his 1985 book The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, Making America's Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan, Weinberger once would not allow photographers to cover a signing of a memorandum of understanding with Israel for fear of aggravating the Arabs.
Indeed, in one significant reversal, while Pentagon officials today are often cited as Israel's greatest champions in Washington, the Pentagon then was the most hostile branch of government to the Jewish state.
On September 1, 1982, sensing an opportunity on the Israeli-Palestinian front after Israel's invasion of Lebanon a few months earlier, Reagan delivered his only major speech on the Arab-Israeli conflict, what became known as the Reagan Plan.
The initiative called for "self-government by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan" as the best chance for a durable, just, and lasting peace. It also called for a settlement freeze. And while there was a clause, inserted personally by Reagan at the last minute, saying that Israel should not be expected to return to the narrow and indefensible borders it had endured during the 19 years before 1967 – a commentary on borders similar to Bush's April endorsement of Israel holding on to parts of Judea and Samaria in a final peace deal – prime minister Menachem Begin sharply rejected the plan and it never gained traction.
Reagan, with his affection toward Israel, surprised people by opening a dialogue with the PLO in 1988. Bush, also perceived today as enormously supportive of a Likud-led government, surprised by becoming the first American president to call for the creation of a Palestinian state.
Bush, like Reagan, has made speeches the cornerstone of his engagement on the Middle East peace process. His June 24, 2002, Rose Garden speech in which he dumped Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat as a negotiating partner and urged Palestinians to elect a new leadership not corrupted by terrorism remains the administration's key reference point on the issue. Neither Reagan, nor Bush to date, many analysts say, invested significant resources or personal capital in Middle East peacemaking.
Quandt described Reagan's September 1982 speech as "one of the most carefully crafted speeches ever on American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict." "But if Reagan was unexcelled as a speech-maker, he and his aides failed to devise a strategy for translating words into practical steps," he wrote.
Reagan was disengaged from the details, a claim frequently made about Bush. According to Quandt, Reagan was unconcerned about the implications of his fresh characterization of settlements, for example, "because he was essentially uninvolved in the details of trying to advance the peace process."
There was a dearth of creative diplomacy, he wrote, adding, "He had no sense of strategy for dealing with Arabs and Israelis, except to make the Israelis feel secure and the Arabs almost desperate."
Similarly, so far the Bush administration has failed to capitalize on the principles in the June 24 speech or to make progress on the road map it spawned. A 2005 deadline for Palestinian statehood, Bush has said, is unlikely to be achieved. Reagan's pursuit of Middle East peace, "like the current administration, was very half-hearted," Miller said.
Besides an affinity for Israel and a de-prioritization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the Reagan administration's approach to the Middle East one also sees the antecedents of Bush's efforts to transform the Middle East and also of the US-led war on terrorism.
The Lebanon War, Miller said, "was based on the flawed assumptions about the transformative effect of Israel's invasion of Lebanon... that reflected a very simplistic, very ideological vision of the Middle East."
The US was sympathetic to Israel's plan to rid Lebanon of PLO terrorists and to ally with the Phalangist government there. And the Reagan administration also believed, similar to the Bush administration now in Iraq, in the "transformative effect of American military power," he added.
With current US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as special Middle East envoy at the time, "Lebanon was wrongly turned into a test of American credibility, not only in terms of stopping the Russians... but somehow the notion that we could transform Lebanon into a different kind of place. And of course... none of these assumptions proved correct."
The bombing of the US Marines' barracks and of the US Embassy in Lebanon led to the abrupt evacuation of US troops, a move that many terrorism analysts say today, dangerously illustrated to terrorists that the US would cut and run when attacked. By the mid-1980s, however, as Quandt writes, "the Reagan administration had become obsessed with the battle against terrorism, especially the state-sponsored variety."
But reprisals were the exception, not the rule. In fact, the sole, serious US military response to a terrorist attack on a Western target came on April 14, 1986, when US jets struck Tripoli, and nearly killed Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, in retaliation for a bombing of a Berlin discotheque in which two Americans died.
Rather than deal stiffly with Iran after the taking of hostages in Lebanon, the US secretly approved arms sales to Iran, with Israel's help, to try to win the hostages' release, and Reagan was criticized for negotiating with terrorists. The Iran-Contra affair became the administration's greatest scandal.
Bush has taken Reagan's rhetorical commitment to fighting state sponsors of terrorism and made it a cornerstone of his overall foreign policy. Reagan's uneven approach to terrorism was in some ways reflective of a mixed policy overall toward Israel and in the way he saw America's role in the Middle East.
"He presided over periods of Israeli-American tensions unusual even in the checkered history of relations between Jerusalem and Washington, and yet later approved new levels of assistance to Israel," Spiegel wrote.
"His approach to the Middle East," he said, "was a combination of emotion, ideology, lack of knowledge, and instinctive political acumen that made him so difficult for analysts to comprehend."
Ping
Heh. :)
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