TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082090/0820014.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.8 KB | 83 lines

                                                                                THE GULF, Page 36

AMERICA ABROAD

The Dangers of Demonization


By Strobe Talbott


    According to a perverse law of international politics,
hard-liners on opposing sides tend to reinforce each other's
stubbornness and influence, especially in times of tension.
Consider the interaction between Baghdad and Jerusalem. Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir's Likud government is hoping that
Iraq's conquest of Kuwait will make it easier for Israel to
retain possession of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

    Before the crisis broke, Shamir's Foreign Minister, David
Levy, intended to visit Washington last week for what had
promised to be a tough session. Secretary of State James Baker
was prepared to bear down hard on the need to jump-start the
peace process that Shamir let stall last spring. Both Bush and
Congress have grown impatient with the Likud's ingenuity in
finding excuses not to negotiate with the Palestinians.

    Levy's trip has now been postponed until early next month.
Thanks to Saddam, Levy will probably find his American hosts
less insistent on Israeli concessions. A full-scale
confrontation in the Middle East makes this an inauspicious
time for the U.S. to be pressuring its closest ally in the
area. Besides, the Iraqi dictator's well-publicized embraces
last week of Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser
Arafat and the Precarious Little King of Jordan make it all the
easier for hawkish Israelis to say: You expect us to deal with
these people?

    The American answer to that question ought still to be yes.
The Likud is using the current upheaval to underscore one
reason for the Arab-Israeli conflict -- the bellicosity and
treacherousness of its radical neighbors -- while obscuring
another -- Israeli intransigence and expansionism. As long as
Israel refuses to budge from any of the occupied territory and
as long as it continues to repress the Palestinians who live
there, Israeli policy will be a source of instability; and the
U.S., as Israel's friend and guardian, will pay a price in its
ability to deal with Arabs of all stripes, moderates as well
as radicals.

    Iraq's aggression has inflicted another, more subtle kind
of collateral damage on the prospects for peace between Israel
and the Arabs. No sooner had word of the attack reached the
outside world than politicians, pundits and editorial
cartoonists in the U.S. and Europe, including Germany -- and
particularly in Israel -- were identifying Saddam with Adolf
Hitler, and Kuwait in 1990 with Czechoslovakia in 1938. One
purveyor of this parallel even found historical prototypes for
King Hussein (Benito Mussolini) and President Hosni Mubarak
of Egypt (Neville Chamberlain).

    In the case of Saddam, the name-calling is far from
preposterous. He has unleashed a blitzkrieg against a weak
country on his border and committed mass murder -- using poison
gas, no less -- on Iraq's Kurdish minority. But there is
nonetheless something pernicious about the analogy. Regardless
of how those making the comparison try to qualify its
implications, there is a danger that many of their readers and
listeners will, at least subliminally, take the point to its
invidious extreme: Saddam equals Hitler, ergo Arabs equal Nazis.
As a brutalizing corollary, the forces fighting the Jewish
state, from P.L.O. commandos to the child warriors of the
intifadeh, can too easily appear as agents of a new Holocaust.

    Saddam has done enough on his own to make the Middle East
a more dangerous place than it was two weeks ago. His critics,
in their justifiable outrage, should be careful not to feed,
however inadvertently, the tendency that already exists on all
sides in that region to demonize adversaries.