Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • barack obama
dat) who made peace with Israel, leading to his assassination; and it was another
dictator (Hosni Mubarak) who kept that peace, however cold, for the
past 30 years. As part of that initial bargain and successive agreements, the
United States has paid in excess of $60 billion to the government of Egypt
and an amount approaching $100 billion to Israel. The investment may be
huge, but since the Camp David agreement negotiated by President Jimmy
Carter in 1978 there has been no new Arab-Israel war.
Some may quibble with the crude implication of a payoff or the collapsing
of several generations of politics in the Middle East into this simple
formula. But it has some validity. Here is how Vice President Joe Biden answered
when PBS anchor Jim Lehrer asked him whether Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak was a dictator:
“Look, Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he’s
been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interests in the region:
Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing
the relationship with Israel.
“And I think that it would be—I would not refer to him as a dictator.”
Leslie Gelb, a former senior U.S. government official and president emeritus
of the Council on Foreign Relations, put it this way:
“The stakes are sky high. Egypt is the linchpin to peace in the Middle
East. So long as Egypt refrains from warring against Israel, other Arab states
cannot take military action by themselves.”
So in some minds, the issue is primarily about Israel. As far as I can tell,
the government of Israel has yet to declare itself on the wave of uprisings in
the Arab world. But if this is an Israeli issue, then it is not just a U.S. foreignpolicy
problem but also a domestic one, especially in the run-up to a presidential
election year. The stakes, indeed, could be very high.
It is often forgotten, but there was a major Israeli dimension to the 1978-
1979 Iranian Revolution of as well. The Shah of Iran was Israel’s best friend
in the Muslim world, an essential part of Israel’s doctrine of the periphery.
Israel not only cultivated nations just outside the core Arab center, but in
the case of Iran received a substantial portion of its energy supplies via covert
oil deliveries to Eilat from the Persian Gulf. Israel and Iran also collaborated
on joint development and testing of a ballistic missile system capable
of delivering a nuclear warhead.
176