Western Policy Formation and Islamic Polity ••• 395subversion to undermine established governments in Muslim states by ap¬
pealing to their mostazafan (literally "dispossessed," the people who felt
alienated by the Middle East's westernization) and imbuing them with a
zeal for self-sacrifice to combat their oppressors. This policy worked for
a while in Lebanon, but it foundered on harsh economic realities in the
war against Iraq, and eventually the Ayatollah Khomeini had to admit that
Iran could no longer afford to fight Iraq and finance revolutionary Shi'i
groups in Lebanon. Economic recovery became Iran's goal, and other
means became more expedient. If Israel in the 1980s wanted to ensure its
survival in a hostile Arab world, it assumed that its best policy was to cow
its enemies so thoroughly that no one would attack it. But this means
could not ensure security, because the Lebanese Shi'is and Palestinians re¬
fused to be intimidated and stepped up their attacks on Israel.
If the Reagan administration wanted a friendly Middle East, it initially
thought that it could build a strategic consensus of governments opposed
to the USSR, but this was a misguided policy, for most Middle Eastern gov¬
ernments feared Israel, one another, or internal revolutions more than they
dreaded a Soviet invasion. Later, Reagan would seek peace between Israel
and the Arabs and among contending factions in Lebanon based on com¬
promises that ignored the true aims of both sides. Even later, he would try
to soothe the American public, condemning hostage-taking in Lebanon
and other acts of terrorism, yet selling arms to bargain, indirectly, with ter¬
rorist captors for the release of American hostages. Reagan used a feel-good
approach; his was not a policy of ends and means.
To be blunt, policymaking was defective throughout the Khomeini
decade. The Islamic Republic of Iran managed to survive all attempts—
internal, Iraqi, and US—to topple it, and it even repaid a $7 billion debt in¬
herited from the shah; but it nearly ruined its economy and hastened the
exodus of its richest and best-educated citizens. It persuaded no other
country to become an Islamic republic. It claimed that it could reestablish
the Shari'a as the law of the land, but Iranians still evaded its bans on
women's cosmetics, drug abuse (opium use soared in Iran), and rock mu¬
sic. The Arab states continued to pursue policies that caused them to quar¬
rel among themselves. Israeli policies demoralized the country and did not
enhance its security. The US government did not know how to deal with
Middle Eastern fundamentalism, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian,
and its attempts at repressing terrorism by bombarding Lebanese villages
in 1983 and the Libyan capital in 1986 enraged peoples who might once
have supported its interests. Khomeini's Islamic republic, Menachem Be-
gin's and Yitzhak Shamir's Greater Israel, Yasir Arafat's equivocation, and
Ronald Reagan's patriotism all failed to illumine their policies.