1999 (46 page)

It is hard to understand why India fears Pakistan as an aggressor. India has a population of 800 million; Pakistan has a little over 100 million. India has twice as many combat aircraft as Pakistan and the fourth largest conventional army in the world; Pakistan has the thirteenth. India is concerned about American military assistance to its foe, yet during the past three years the Soviets have supplied
India with twice as many weapons as Pakistan has received from us. India detonated a nuclear device in 1974 and is now vociferously objecting to the Pakistani nuclear program. President Zia has repeatedly proposed signing a nonproliferation treaty; India has refused to do so.

The greatest external threat to South Asia is Soviet expansionism. The Pakistanis know this, and some Indian officials, businessmen, and correspondents have begun to express concern that India's policy of looking to the West but leaning to the north may prove fatal. The Indians can sleep with the bear only so much longer without being mauled.

The greatest internal threat to these two countries is economic stagnation that could undermine their political stability. Poverty feeds the ethnic discord that weakens the Indian nation. Poverty can frustrate Pakistan's transition to democracy. For two of the poorest nations in the world to be spending $8 billion a year for arms to be used against each other is obscene. The time is long past for strong statesmen in both countries to declare peace with each other and declare war on the poverty that plagues both their countries.

The Arab–Israeli conflict is another example of a forty-year war that wastes enormous resources desperately needed for economic development. The conflict would exist even if the Soviet Union played no role in the Mideast, but Kremlin leaders have exploited it at the expense of our interests in the region. At the same time, the Middle East is a part of the Third World in which active U.S. involvement has been indispensable to advancing the cause of stability and peace.

None of the countries directly involved in the Arab–Israeli conflict has achieved a high standard of living for its people, and many are saddled with the twin crises of massive indebtedness and huge population growth. Yet since the partition of Palestine after World War II, the Israelis and the Arabs have fought five full-scale wars—in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982—and have been engaged in endless skirmishes and military incidents. Most countries in the world measure their military expenditures in terms of percentage
of GNP; in the Arab–Israeli wars, military spending of the countries involved could be measured in terms of multiples of their GNPs.

The United States can and should play a constructive role in helping to resolve the conflict in the Mideast. As Henry Kissinger has said, the Soviet Union can help the nations of the Mideast to wage war, while the United States is the only nation that can help them make peace. We have achieved a great deal in the last forty years in the region. Since 1948, we have guaranteed the survival of the state of Israel. We have also been the only force consistently pressing for a just resolution of the conflict. One of the greatest American diplomatic achievements of the postwar period was President Carter's negotiation of the Camp David Accords that established peace between Israel and Egypt in 1978. But we must not rest on our record. If we fail to promote the cause of peace, we will encourage those who want to advance their causes through war.

In the 1973 war, I ordered the massive airlift of equipment and materiel that enabled Israel to stop the two-front advance of Syria and Egypt. In her memoirs, Golda Meir, Israel's Prime Minister during the Yom Kippur War, wrote, “The airlift was invaluable. It not only lifted our spirits, but also served to make America's position clear to the Soviet Union, and it undoubtedly served to make our victory possible.” Our commitment to the survival of Israel runs deep. We are not formal allies, but we are bound together by something much stronger than any piece of paper: a moral commitment. It is a commitment which no President in the past has ever broken and which every future President will faithfully honor. America will never allow the sworn enemies of Israel to achieve their goal of destroying it.

There are strong reasons, other than the moral one, for the United States's support of Israel. It is the only democracy in the Mideast. It is the only nation whose population challenges Japan's as the world's best educated. With virtually no natural resources it has built an industrial economy that competes successfully in the world economy. Its armed forces are among the best in the world. Israel has impressed the world with all it has accomplished during
forty years of war. It will astonish the world with what it can accomplish in forty years of peace.

But our interests and Israel's require more than our unquestioning political support. America needs to renew the active diplomatic role played in the Carter administration. Some observers disagree with this view. They argue that if the United States simply continues its foreign aid to Israel and gives unswerving support to Israel's refusal to negotiate on the question of the West Bank and the Golan Heights, Israeli security will be ensured for the indefinite future.

Their view is misguided for two reasons. First, we cannot afford the present distortion of our foreign-aid budget. Three billion people in the Third World are eligible for U.S. foreign aid. Israel, a country with a population of only two million, receives over one quarter of the entire budget. Our aid to Israel and Egypt totals over half our foreign aid. That policy cannot continue. There are many countries in which the United States has a major strategic stake and which desperately need our aid. We cannot help the Philippines or the struggling democracies of Central America build for peace if we are too strapped from subsidizing war in the Mideast.

Second, a policy of complacency puts American and Israeli interests at risk. Many Israelis are content with a diplomatic stalemate. While it might serve their interests in the short run, it will lead to disaster in the long run. Israel has won the last five wars and will win the next one. But with each round of violence it loses more men, and the prospect of a stable peace recedes still further. Moreover, just as the Koreans and the Vietnamese learned to fight, so will the Arabs. Israel's interests lie in negotiating peace now, when it is stronger than its adversaries, rather than waiting until their growing strength forces Israel to do so. Despite our friendship, Israel cannot survive forever as an island in a sea of hatred.

A continued stalemate also undermines moderate Arab governments that are willing to negotiate with Israel. Many supporters of Israel believe that the peace process should stop now that Egypt has opted out of the conflict. In their view, the United States should conclude a strategic alliance with Israel and keep all other
Arab states at arm's length. That serves the interests of neither the United States nor Israel.

We should ask ourselves some fundamental questions. How long can the moderate governments of Jordan and of Egypt, which was once described by Napoleon as the most important country in the world, survive against the twin threats of radicalism and fundamentalism in the absence of progress in the peace process? How long will these governments be willing to pursue their present pro-Western policies if pressure from pro-Israeli groups prevents the United States from using its leverage to advance the peace process and even from selling arms to a deserving state like Jordan? Israel must accept that its own interests require the United States to establish close ties with the moderate Arab states—and that those states will remain stable partners in peace only if the diplomatic process advances toward a wider peace instead of miring down in a stalemate.

Time has never been on the side of peace in the Middle East. An Arab–Israeli war has broken out every decade in the postwar period because a political stalemate was permitted to form in peacetime. The United States should therefore adopt a more realistic policy in the Middle East. It should seek good relations with moderate Arab states, particularly Jordan, Eygpt, and Saudi Arabia. It should also actively press forward with the peace process. Sending the Secretary of State on semiannual tours to consult with the leaders of the region will never succeed in advancing productive negotiations. Just as Kissinger did in his shuttle diplomacy in 1973–74 and President Carter did at Camp David in 1978, America must use its leverage to bring the parties together and to create incentives for settlement.

The next step in the peace process must focus on the future of the West Bank and the riot-torn Gaza Strip. An observation made by David Ben-Gurion should guide our policy. He said that the “extremists,” who advocated the absorption of Arab lands, would deprive Israel of its mission: “If they succeed, Israel will be neither Jewish nor democratic. The Arabs will outnumber us, and undemocratic, repressive measures will be needed to keep them under control.” Israel's interests require a peace settlement for the land occupied in 1967. If Israel annexes these lands, it will become
a binational garrison state, with disenfranchised Arabs composing about half its population. Moreover, given the high birth rates of the Palestinian people, Jewish people will soon be a minority in the Jewish state. If it continues its military occupation and gradual colonization of these territories, it will eventually bring about a united Arab world hostile to Israel, with greater opportunities for Moscow to enter the region than ever before.

President Eisenhower kept the Soviet Union out of the Mideast in 1956 and 1958. I did so in 1973. But now that the United States no longer has nuclear superiority it will be virtually impossible to keep the Soviets out if there is another Mideast war.

It is time for honest, open debate on the future of the peace process. All sides must cool their rhetoric. Those who deviate from the hard line of some of Israel's more extreme supporters should not automatically be labeled anti-Israel. That happened to me and other friends of Israel when we supported the Reagan administration's sale of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia in 1981 and its plan to provide fighter aircraft to Jordan in 1986. Everyone must understand that being a friend of Israel's neighbors does not make one an enemy of Israel. American and Israeli interests require that the United States have friendly relations with the moderate Arab states. Improving those relations will be impossible if America fails to use its leverage and influence to press forward with the peace process.

Independence was always proclaimed as the first step toward healthier and more secure Third World societies. But the sad historical fact is that independence did not guarantee prosperity. Most of Latin America fell into an abyss following its independence more than 150 years ago. Most of Africa was dragged into a black hole of negative growth since its independence in the last two generations.

The hearts of the West go out to Africa. So does its money. In 1985 and 1986 tens of thousands of generous Americans and Europeans reached into their pockets for famine relief for Ethiopia. They were pouring food into a political sinkhole, not into hungry mouths. Western governments have been doing the same for decades.
Between 1965 and 1984 the United States and other industrial countries provided over $200 billion in aid and investment for Africa. But the people still starve, and Africa's gross domestic product in 1983 was 4 percent lower than thirteen years before. The stark fact is that despite aid, despite all the kind thoughts and good intentions the world has to offer, the average African is poorer than he was in 1960.

The reason is terrible governments. Most of them practice some form of socialism. Most are corrupt. Most are dictatorships. In communist Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Angola, human misery is caused by coldly calculated national policy. But except for countries such as Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia in North Africa and a few sub-Saharan nations such as Botswana, Senegal, Cameroon, Malawi, Mauritius, the Ivory Coast, and Kenya, Africa has abysmal leadership. Africa's lesson for the twenty-first century is that all the foreign aid on earth will not improve the lives of the people of the Third World if it is spent by governments that have bad policies.