w hy did the U S go to such lengths to keep it out of the Gulf W ar?
Because if Israel had become directly involved, it w ould have
been impossible for the U S to keep the passive support of the major
oil-producing countries in the region, and that’s all Washington w as
really concerned w ith. Certainly they didn’t need Israel’s support to
fight a w ar against a virtually defenseless T hird World country.
After the w ar, the U S reestablished its domination of the region
very strongly and told everybody, “W hat w e say, goes” (as George
[H. W .] Bush put it).
Eqbal Ahmad is rather pessimistic about Israel’s long-term future.
He says that sooner or later the relative w eakness of Arab states
w ill change.
I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to try to make predictions
about the long-term future. You can imagine a future in w hich the
U S is an embattled island, barely able to hold its ow n against the
emerging pow ers of Asia that surround it. But as far as I can see, the
U S has about as much control and domination of the Middle East as
any outside force could hope to maintain.
Our outpost there, Israel, is by far the main military,
technological, industrial and even financial center. T he huge oil
resources of the region (w hich are still going to be needed for
another couple of generations) are mostly in the hands of family
dictatorships, brutal tyrannies that are highly dependent on the U S
and subordinated to its interests.
It’s quite possible that the system w ill break dow n in the long
term—but if you’re talking about, say, tw o centuries from now, the
U S isn’t even going to care about Mideast oil by then. For the kind
of time frame w ithin w hich policy planning makes any sense—w hich
isn’t long—things are w orking out as w ell as U S planners could
possibly have imagined. If it turns out, at some far distant time, that
Israel is no longer necessary for U S purposes, our support for
Israel w ill end.
You’ve held that view for a very long time. You don’t see any reason
to change it?