Bush, Johnson, Nixon, and the Middle East [View All]

[Plaid Adder]

My father is big into adult education, and he gets these courses on CD from The Teaching Company which he listens to in the car. He then passes them on to me, whether I want them or not. Since I commute 2 hours a day, I usually figure, what the hell. Last time it was the operas of Mozart. This time, it's a course on the history of American foreign policy in the Middle East, from 1914 to 2001.

The author, Salim Yaqub, teaches history at UC Santa Barbara and has published a book on Eisenhower and Arab nationalism. Anyway, I'm about up to the Carter administration, which is the first one that I really remember. Yaqub is not an electrifying speaker but the writing is very accessible and he does a good job of making it into a narrative that you can follow. Anyway, it's interesting to look back at a time when U.S. policy in the Middle East was not set in stone and see how and why the different U.S. administrations made the decisions that created the situation we're in now. One part of the story that has really dropped out of the current understanding of the situation is the impact of Nasser and Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 60s. A related thing we've all forgotten is how the Cold War basically established the patterns that now govern our relationship with the Arab world.

Anyway, what occurs to me listening to this is that Bush seems to combine the worst elements of Johnson's personality with the worst aspects of Nixon's approach to foreign policy. Yaqub does a little digression about how Johnson was hung up on personal loyalty, and how the Shah of Iran manipulated Johnson's desire for attention and flattery and loyalty by making sure to send him little presents and call him on his birthday and so on in order to help secure American support for his regime no matter how repressive it was. (Of course American support for the Shah's regime was also always about oil, really, but I guess greasing the wheels with a little sucking up doesn't hurt.) Johnson and Nasser also hated each other, partly because Nasser saw Johnson as an uncultured boor who didn't comport himself with the dignity that befitted a world leader (remind us of anyone we know?). Yaqub also says that Kennedy understood that when an Arab leader fired off a load of anti-American rhetoric he was usually playing to his base or to other Arab nations and therefore his words shouldn't be taken as a literal statement of his actual policy or intentions--but Johnson not only took that kind of posturing at face value, he took it personally. (Even though none of these guys had ever tried to kill his daddy.)

Also amusing, in a kind of sick and ironic way, is Yaqub's account of how Johnson handled the beginnings of Israel's nuclear weapons program. Though Israel kept maintaining that their nuclear program was for civilian purposes, the CIA had information which clearly indicated that it wasn't. Israel was prevailed upon to admit weapons inspectors, but was able to stage manage the inspections so that the inspectors never found the right kind of evidence. The CIA kept reporting that Israel was setting up a weapons program. But even though Johnson didn't really want Israel to have nuclear weapons, he also didn't want to mount a major intervention, which was what it would have taken to stop the program. So, says Yaqub, the CIA eventually got the message that Johnson would just prefer not to know all the stuff they were telling him about how that plutonium wasn't for power plants. So their reports about the program got buried, and probably most of them never got passed along to the president, and Israel went merrily onward toward nuclear capability.

Meanwhile, of course, we all know what happened when Iraq *wasn't* developing a nuclear weapons program at a time when Bush really wanted them to be. So I guess the moral of the story is that outside of the US and Russia, weapons of mass destruction exist if and only if the President of the United States wants them to.

Nixon, meanwhile, had the loyalty thing in spades but also added paranoia to it, which made it all so much better...but, and I thought this was interesting, it was Nixon who first set up the administrative model that Bush has obviously using, whereby the Secretary of State is a publicly acceptable figurehead but the *real* authority for making foreign policy is invested in the lower-profile National Security Advisor. Nixon initially appointed Rogers as his sec'y of state and Kissinger as his National Security Advisor, but Kissinger was the one really making all the decisions--except as regarded the middle east, which for a while was the one area where Rogers was allowed to exercise his nominal authority. But as soon as Rogers came out with a plan for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict that Kissinger and Nixon didn't like, Nixon directed Kissinger to sabotage it behind the scenes. So for a while, you had Rogers pushing his peace plan to Israel (at that time, led by Golda Meir) while Kissinger was telling Meir through unofficial channels not to accept it. Yeah, that's productive. Eventually, Nixon promoted Kissinger from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State...just like what happened with Powell and Rice under Bush's regime.

Also depressing is Yaqub's account of why Carter's presidency failed: that he was elected during a brief fit of moral revulsion after Watergate, the Vietnam War, and CIA atrocities--which didn't last. So the American public embraced honesty, human rights, and peace just long enough to get Carter into office, and then the fit passed and they went back to wanting cynical bastards who would do anything to promote America's interests and therefore didn't support most of Carter's agenda. Ah well.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

Yee ha,

The Plaid Adder