As the world watches and waits for a resolution of the Persian Gulf crisis, hopefully without war, old myths about the Middle East are being discarded and new realities acknowledged. The myths include: immutable Arab unity, fundamentalist Iran as the most dangerous threat, and an inexorable Soviet drive for power and influence in the region. The realities include: a splintered Arab world, secular Iraq as the most abiding danger, and a Soviet willingness to support an international consensus against the Iraqi aggression.
What Winston Churchill said about Russia can as easily be said about the Middle East, at least for most Americans: "It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.'' But Saddam Hussein's brutal annexation of Kuwait and the real possibility of a prolonged conflict is forcing policymakers in the United States and elsewhere to try harder to solve the riddle of this strife-ridden part of the world.
In this month's Special Report, Professor Rashid I. Khalidi of the University of Chicago argues that widespread Arab mistrust of foreign, that is, American, forces in the Middle East is part historical (colonial powers created the present Arab "nations" after World War I), part religious (Saudi Arabia is the site of two of the three holiest places in Islam), and part political (the United States is seen as always tilting toward Israel in the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict). Arabs fault the United States, says Khalidi, for galvanizing the UN Security Council into taking stringent action against Iraq while preventing the Council from "imposing sanctions on Israel."
In the post-Cold War era, suggests Leon T. Hadar of American University, Israel must face the new reality that it is no longer the strategic asset in the Middle East it once was. He quotes a leading Israeli analyst that "when push comes to shove, the United States is not ready or willing to use Israeli services in order to solve crises in the area." Both hawks and doves in Israel are deeply concerned, says Hadar, about any diplomatic solution of the crisis that would leave Saddam's military arsenal intact and therefore make him a major threat, not only to Israel, but to "moderate Arab regimes."
The U.S.-UN-Iraq standoff in the gulf has created a "political oil crisis" with far-reaching economic implications, Cyrus Bina of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies points out. The elimination of nearly five million barrels of oil daily from the market - the combined supply of Iraqi and Kuwait oil - has encouraged speculation in future oil markets and affected spot markets around the world. He warns that if the oilfields in Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are "substantially damaged," the Price of oil will go as high as $60 a barrel and remain at that level "perhaps permanently."
The Persian Gulf crisis has revealed another crisis in the region: one of leadership. According to Professor Fouad Moughrabi of the University of Tennessee, Arab elites have allowed "contradictions to go unresolved" for so long that "the whole area has become a political volcano." He argues that "myopic" Arab leaders have ignored agricultural development and favored investment in Western rather than Arab nations, which would have created jobs and "reduced reliance on the West." Moughrabi asserts that nearly all leaders in the region lack legitimacy, because their leadership rests "on a very narrow social base" and is maintained through coercion and power. These
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