394 • 19 THE REASSERTION OF ISLAMIC POWERcan only be stopped by curing the conditions that cause it. But it is hard to
deter terrorists when they are backed by so many of the people around
them, when punitive action fails to strike at their source, and when the lives
of innocent hostages are at stake. Reagan and his partisans attacked the
Carter government for its weak handling of the American hostage crisis in
Iran, but his own administration fared even worse in Lebanon and had to
extricate itself from an embarrassing scandal involving the sale of US
weapons to Iran, which had been financing revolutionary groups in Leba¬
non. It was nearly impossible to devise policies to cure the conditions that
cause terrorism, such as the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, the civil war in
Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq War, urbanization, and poverty. The UN had tried
for years to address these issues with little success, in part because the US so
often vetoed its resolutions.
WESTERN POLICY FORMATION AND ISLAMIC POLITYFormulating policies is hard for popularly elected governments, and espe¬
cially for the US, with its power divided between the White House and
Congress. In the 1980s Washington lacked a Middle East policy, and its
susceptibility to both Zionist and oil lobbies made it even harder to for¬
mulate one. It was also a challenge for Israel, which from 1984 to 1988 was
led by a shaky combination of the Labor Party, led by Shim'on Peres, and
the Likud Party, headed after 1983 by Yitzhak Shamir. The two blocs won
nearly equal numbers of seats in the 1984 Knesset elections, and they
agreed to form a coalition cabinet in which Peres was premier until 1986,
whereupon he was succeeded by Shamir for the next two years. The two
men disagreed on their Arab policies: Peres favored and Shamir opposed
an international peace conference that would probably lead to restoring
most of the West Bank to Jordan. Shamir wanted indefinite Israeli control
over the lands captured in the 1967 war. The Palestinians, too, were di¬
vided. Some called for an all-out struggle against the occupation, whereas
others advocated that those who had been under Israel's administration
for two decades should take an active part in Israeli politics, such as the
Jerusalem elections. They also debated how far they could rely on the Arab
governments to help them, but after December 1987 they chose to fight
for their own cause. Policy debates on both sides did not bring peace.
What does it mean to have a policy? A government with a policy on a
particular issue has identified its goals and chooses the means most likely
to reach them. As Iran in the early 1980s hoped to spread Islamic govern¬
ment throughout the Middle East, it formulated a policy of revolutionary