Puzzling Policy

There are some good reasons for the U.S. Navy to be in the Persian Gulf at this time, but good reasons by themselves don’t necessarily make for sound policy, and the Reagan Administration’s policy in placing 28 ships in a war zone continues to puzzle and disturb both as to the extent of its means and the clarity of its purposes.

It’s all very well to talk as the Administration has for the last year about defending freedom of navigation and keeping oil supplies flowing, but surely before taking on those commitments the most careful attention ought to have been given to figuring out just what all this might require and what it might lead to, not only in terms of elementary military needs--remember the minesweepers that weren’t there?-- but also in its immediate and long-term political consequences. We don’t see any signs that this was done. Instead, policy evolved largely piecemeal and largely in reaction to the initiatives of others. It still is, and thanks to that the United States seems to be losing whatever control it once might have hoped to have.

From the beginning the biggest fault in the U.S. interventionist policy has been that it destroyed the claim to be neutral in the Iran-Iraq War. All the talk about securing freedom of the seas has turned out in practice to mean only freedom from attacks by Iran, not Iraq. The activities of Iraq, which started the war nearly eight years ago and which has been both more belligerent and more effective than Iran in shooting up third-country merchant ships, have largely escaped U.S. diplomatic criticism and have completely escaped U.S. military reaction. This is in keeping with the pronounced tilt toward Iraq that among other things has seen the United States provide the Baghdad regime with satellite intelligence that helped turn the tide against attacking Iranian forces.

The tilt was prompted by the worry, assiduously encouraged by more or less friendly gulf states, that an Iranian victory would inevitably spread Iran’s Islamic revolution throughout the region, jeopardizing the survival of the traditionalist Arab regimes whose oil revenues have largely underwritten the Iraqi war effort. An Iranian victory certainly would be a bad thing. But American policy-makers should also have been able to figure out that a stalemate--the most likely outcome to the conflict--that was seen to have been aided by anti-Iran U.S. intervention would also be a bad thing, intensifying the enmity of a country whose size and resources make it a regional power that, like it or not, must be dealt with.

Administration officials, trying to sound firm in the aftermath of the shoot-down of the Iranian airliner, now suggest that the Navy will remain an active presence in the gulf so long as friendly states there seem to be threatened. That can be taken as a commitment that appears to be not only open-ended in duration but, more troubling, open-ended in its implied readiness to intervene militarily against the only non-Arab state in the region if it’s decided that this is needed. Again we have a sense of a policy that has been wandered into rather than thought through, that is based more on slogans than on a careful assessment of how long-term U.S. interests would best be served.

There are a number of things that Washington could be doing now in an effort to set its policy right. Re-establishing U.S. neutrality is the most important; where Iraq deserves condemnation, as it does for its attacks on shipping and its use of poison gas on land, American displeasure and condemnation should be made unmistakably clear. The United States should also be considering whether its profile in the Persian Gulf is higher than it need be. Other Western nations have quietly boosted their naval presence there; can this country now reduce its forces? Even though the U.S.-supported diplomatic effort to force the war to a negotiated end has been frustrated by the non-cooperation of China and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, Washington should continue pushing strongly and visibly for a reasonable political solution.

A year or so ago, for what at the time might have seemed valid and even compelling reasons, the United States succumbed to the easy political temptation to curry favor by taking sides in the gulf war, forgetting that its major long-term interest--restoring peace and stability to the area--requires that it have influence in all camps. That interest can still be seen through the smoke of battle and the fog of propaganda. It’s time to make it paramount again.