The U.S. and the Persian Gulf: The Logic of Intervention

This is the first installment of the political page, a new feature of the Crimson. The political page will contain long, analytical pieces on national, international and Harvard affairs and will appear as a second editorial page on occasional Thursday.

The following article has been specially condensed for the Crimson by David Caploe from a piece he wrote with Eqbal Ahmad entitled "The Logic of Intervention" in the January issue of Race and Class, a quarterly organ of Third World Affairs published by the Institute of Race Relations (London) and the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam), on The US and the Arab World.

I. The Advocates of Intervention in the Press

SINCE the autumn of 1974, Americans have been treated to spate of articles advocating US military intervention in the Middle East. They have appeared in such influential Journals as Harper's The New Leader, US News and World Report, New York Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and above all Commentary, the monthly organ of the American Jewish Committee.

The last has particularly taken the lead in advancing the notion that the survival of Western Civilization is threatened by the recent insistence of the raw material producing countries in upsetting western capitalism's long-cherished rules of marketing and exchange, and that only force is likely to avert the otherwise inevitable decline of the West.

According to those advancing this line of argument, the postwar global order, dominated by overwhelming US military and economic power, has been severely shaken by the Arab oil boycott and the OPEC price hikes which followed it. More importantly, these events indicated a quest by the formerly colonized producing countries for equality, and this trend threatens the inequitable balance of power which the advocates of intervention view as being necessary to the survival of civilization.

FOR THE FIRST time, producer states demanded and received the price they wanted, instead of accepting the dictates of western companies backed up by the power of western states. As such they are believed to have demonstrated that the global economic system created by imperialism could be used against the will and interests of its creators. The advocates of US intervention in the Middle East emphasize this as the primary lesson of 1973, notwithstanding the fact that the petrodollars found their way back into the western economies (particularly America's), that the oil price hikes heightened the profits of corporations and that they gained as much if not more from the oil boycott than did the Arabs.

The traditional Third World dependence on the West was perceived as being reversed, if admittedly only partially. Until alternative energy sources are developed, the West will remain dependent on exported OPEC oil. And even if alternative sources of energy can ever become economically competitive, the disappearance of cheap energy for the western economic machine throws into question the likelihood of maintaining a continual-growth economy. In that case, with all the potential political and social dislocation it implies, the price of social peace in the metropolitan countries is likely to become a great deal higher. For the West, at least, Johns Hopkins Professor of International Relations Robert Tucker's assessment in Commentary appears correct: the OPEC revolt represents "the latest manifestations of an egalitarianism which, if permitted to run its logical course, is likely to result first in chaos then in an international system far harsher than today's or even yesterday's system."

Given the clear and present danger presented by the producer countries asserting their rights, what remedies are possible? The interventionists question the validity of the economic plans for interlocking ties with the oil-producing countries favored by some Democratic party leaders in the US, by European governments and by some corporations with expanding interests in the region. The primary objection of the "hawks" to such liberal advocacy of increasing the oil producer's interests in the global capitalist system is that it does not envisage reinforcing economic incentives with military muscle. They argue that liberal economists make the fundamental mistake of assuming a world or rational men acting within the framwork of well-defined social and political assumptions. In the situation created by the energy crisis such assumptions simply cannot be made. When so much is at stake and the old assumptions about the international order no longer hold, "the only feasible countervailing power to OPEC's control of oil power is power itself--military power," in the immortal wordes of "Miles Ignotus" (Latin for unknown soldier), described by Harper's as a "Washington-based professor and defense consultant with intimate links to high-level US policy makers" and rumored to be the pseudonym for Edward Luttwak, a well-known conservative "defense" intellectual close to Washinton's defense and "intelligence community."

HEY argue that a successful intervention will break the back of the Arab oil monopoly, slash oil prices and thereby put an end to the current depression ravaging the world economy. Sactimonious protests aside, both the developed and Third World countries will accept this result with great--if covert--gratitude. Because, argues Tucker,

it defies belief that the developing nations, like the developed nations, would view with anything but relief, however disguised, a break in the petroleum price structure that followed a successful military intervention on the Persian Gulf...developed and underdeveloped would deplore the action--through in considerably varying degree--while accepting with alacrity the benefits flowin from it.

US public opinion would likewise accept such a result. Unlike Vietnam, where "the American people instinctively felt that the national interest was not at stake" (Miles Ignotus), the national gain here would be clear. A surgically-neat military operation would avoid the quagmire syndrome which bogged down the US debacle in Indochina. Thus the world will be saved from economic and political chaos, and US hegemony will be re-established, dissolving once and for all the bitter aftertaste of the defeat in Vietnam.

II. Military Planning for Intervention

THE ABOVE are clearly not the spokesmen of the American military or political establishment, and one would normally dismiss their proposals as insignificant. There are, however, compelling reasons to take them seriously. Not only has the Pentagon been emphasizing preparations for intervention in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean regions over the past few years, but the intervention option has been regularly invoked by the highest US officials in terms obviously aimed at legitimizing it.

First-line combat outfits have been preparing for desert warfare for some time. In the summer of 1973, there was public admission of at least a run-through for a desert style operation, nicknamed Operation Alkali Canyon 73, in Time and US News and World Report. this was followed by Operation Petrolandia, involving the First Infantry and Fourth Cavalry Divisions as well as the First Air Force Squadron. And unlike the limited press reports which had marked Alkali Canyon, Petrolandia was fully described in Solider, the journal of the US armed forces. According to USN&WR the "Army's crack 82nd Airborne Division...spearhead of any such (Middle East) operation...regularly practices parachute drops over the desert around For Bliss, Texas, and annually trains for long distance operations with troop, drops in Greece, Turkey, and South Korea."

The Navy has also been moving in the Persian Gulf area. O November 25, 1974, the American aircraft carrier Constellation sailed into the Persian Gulf on what was officially described as a "familiarization" mission. This journey marked a definite break with the Navy's 26-year-old convention of keeping warships out of the Gulf-proper. The Christian Science Monitor noted that the voyage was designed, to show that Washington "will not accept any threat to, or interruption of the supply of oil from Persian Gulf States." Two weeks later, 2,000 Marines form the US Sixth Fleet landed in Sardinia in a mock invasion of Arab oil lands. Vice-Admiral Turner told reporters: "We don't want to invade (the Middle East) but we are prepared."

On January 19, 1975, the Sunday Times of London reported that the Pentagon had asked Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman--a trusted friend and ally of the British and the Shah of Iran--for full rights at the British air base on the Omani island of Masirah, a request subsequently granted. For hundred miles south-east of the Straits of Hormuz, the entrance to the Gulf, Masirah sits right on the main sea lanes joining the Persian Gulf to the industrialized world--a perfect take off and refueling point only. Despite Congressional strictures against it the US has continued to construct a base on the strategically located Indian Ocean British island of Diego Garcia.

III. Administration Endorsement of Intervention

IN A DIFFERENT front and even more ominously, the intervention arguments have been invested with legitimacy by statements of the highest officials in the government: President Gerald Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissenger, and former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger.

Ford began the process by noting in a speech in September, 1974 that "throughout history nations have gone to war over natural resources"--a hint quickly perceived by the Arab states as a thinly-veiled threat to intervene in case of another boycott of substantial price increase. The same day, Kissinger sounded the same theme in tones later described to newsmen as "Doomsday language."

In early January 1975, Kissinger stated in an interview in Business Week that the US "would consider using military force in the Middle East under circumstances of grave emergency--if say, the industrialized world became threatened with economic strangulation." US News and World Report later noted that "to make clear that this (Kissinger) statement was neither accidental nor casual but rather a deliberate declaration of American policy, the State Department distributed the interview in advance under its own imprimatur. And the white House subsequently announced that Mr. Kissinger was reflecting the views of Mr. Ford."

In May 1975, Schlesinger this time took the lead, warning that "America would be 'less tolerant' of a new oil embargo and is reserving military force as one possible response," according to The Daily Telegraph of May 20, 1975. The Arab states once again protested and the by-now usual disclaimers were issued--this time by Ford and Kissinger, the proponents of intervention in the first place.

But by this time, the world-bending denials were largely ignored, and the pros and cons of intervention were being openly discussed, by large portions of the American press and public, as technical problems of a legitimate and rational option of US foreign policy.

IV. Intervention and the Logic of U.S. Foreign Policy.

THERE ARE thus compelling reasons to believe that an American intervention in the Middle East is possible and is treated by Washington as a serious option. In fact, there are deep compulsions within the basic structure of US foreign policy would could lead to a Persian Gulf intervention, especially since US policy-makers view the main threats to their hegemony as converging in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean regions. They perceive Russian influence as expanding in the region from Mozambique and Angola to Somalia and Iraq. Similarly, the growth of independent economic ties between western Europe and the region which holds the World's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources is regarded with apprehension in Washington. Finally, here more than South Asia, West Africa or Latin America, the national liberation movements are seen as making progress and winning victories--from Angola and Eritea to Oman and Palestine.

If the US contained the expanding Russian influence in that region then the USSR would remain second to the US in a basically bipolar balance of power. If Washington could ensure its paramountcy in the region, control the access to its raw materials and be the watchman of its waterways, then it would have maintained a powerful leverage over western Europe and Japan. The "stability" of the international order depends on the containment of the liberation movements and the preservation of pro-US regimes in this strategic area more than in any other. Finally, a successful Persian Gulf intervention appears as the master-stroke that can reconstitute the Vietnam-torn fabric of the bipartisan domestic consensus on foreign policy.

Thus a development which is officially perceived as being decisively unfavorable of US interests may produce a military intervention; and the prospects of such a development occurring are fair.

THE APPARENT failure of the Kissinger diplomatic offensive in the Middle East will certainly renew and probably enhance Russia's eclipsed role in the region. The leftist forces may also emerge stronger from the debacle, especially if the radical Arab groups can discredit Sadat's and Saudi Arabia's policy while avoiding the appearance of being responsible for its failure. When confronted with such developments. US officials may be attracted to the intervention option as a way of recouping militarily diplomatic and political losses.

Since the Middle East belongs in the an-tagonistic half of detente, a successful intervention would present the Soviets with a fait accompli difficult to undo or even challenge without bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Politically, Russian credibility would take a severe beating. Not only would Russian allies, Syria and Iraq, be sandwiched by the Israelis on one side and the Americans on the other, but the value of a Russian connection would be thrown into doubt throughout the region. According to this view, a decisive show of force in the Gulf would go a long way towards undercutting Soviet prestige, and thus keep the Soviet prestige, and thus keep the Soviet penetration into the Middle East tentative and unsure.

An intervention would also give the US the power to regulate the pricing and marketing of oil to its restive allies. And while this crude threat is not to be overestimated--after all, it is not very likely that the US will threaten to turn off the taps to Japan, or even France--the point would be underlined that American leadership of the capitalist world cannot be questioned without serious hardship for the questioner. Implicit though it may remain, the message would be impossible to misread.

TO A military establishment anxious to restore its credibility after its astounding failure in Indo-China, a Persian Gulf intervention would appear to offer a unique opportunity to redeem past failures by satisfying the compulsion to find and fight a conventional enemy according to conventional ground rules.

Furthermore, in the arid desert terrain of Arabia all the military excuses for the Vietnam disaster are missing: there is no jungle for the enemy to hide in; no demographic sea for the "guerilla" fish to swim in; and no safe sanctuaries protected from destruction by fear of world opinion. Instead of a long, protracted war fought for no clear reason, the planning here calls for a quick, surgical operation with minimal loss of American life against a popularly-understood threat to the "American way of life"--a swift and decisive move which will unite the nation, rather than divide it with unending shame and recrimination.

For the task of constructing a new domestic concensus on foreign policy in place of the Vietnam-shattered doctrine of limited wars, a Persian Gulf may appear as a vital tool. The restoration of that consensus necessitates what Kissinger has aptly termed a "legitimizing principle of social repression": an ideological justification which would ensure the support of the American people and Congress for an aggressive policy abroad. The language of realpolitik offers a poor basis for popular support for a corporate ideology. Hence, modern myths have been a mixture of destiny and demonology: the British "white man's burden" and the French "Mission Civilizatrice," for example.

The Vietnam war put an end to the simple, powerful imperatives of the cold war. Detente accelerated the end of the old consensus. By juxtaposing enmity and alliance, confrontation and camaraderie, diplomatic sell-outs and revolutionary solidarity, the policy of detente ended the certainties which had defined the cold war consensus in the US. Hence a new mission and a new demon have to be invented as a substitute for the old. Intervention may be a part of the process.

THE demon, of course, is the fat, rapacious Arab sheikh whose grosslyextravagant pleasures are financed by the hard-earned money of the western people. Miles Ignotus is quite explicit in this respect, including not only the Arabs, but other Third World peoples as well: "military dictators and megalomaniacal kings of OPEC," "narrow self-appointed ruling groups (elections have become a rarity in Asia and Africa) fond of shiny black cars and numbered Swiss accounts," not to mention the by-now infamous "OPEC extortionists" and "Arab blackmailers."

The imagery of these rich greasy Arabs (oil is of their very essence) with voracious sexual and sensual appetites, indulged at the expense of the sweat and toil of others, is calculated to set off a series of racist associations, all of which point to one conclusion: the threat posed to western civilization by the profligates of OPEC.

With this new demonology is born a new American mission: the saving of western civilization from the clutches of the sheikhs through the forcible destruction of OPEC. The whole question of a military intervention in the Persian Gulf thus moves from the mundane level of politics to the metaphysical level of national salvation. A US intervention is transformed from a desperate act of a declining imperial power into a courageous and disinterested gesture by the American people, undertaken in order to save the West and all it stands for from its otherwise imminent demise at the hands of the "extortionists" and "blackmailers."

David Caploe '73, a former Crimson editor, is working on a book on ideology and strategy in Israel. Eqbal Ahmad is completing, with Michael Klare, a study of the Kissinger foreign policy, entitled "Time Bombs: A Citizen's Guide to US Foreign Policy in the 70s." Both are Fellows of the Third World project of the Transnational Institute.