An aimless foreign policy
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington The Sadat obsequies lacked a few final perfecting touches. More sincerely mourned in Washington than in Cairo, President Reagan might have gone a step further than ordering flags in America to be flown at half-mast and offered to have the murdered Egyptian flown here to be buried in the Arlington national cemetery. He was, if we are to believe the spouting from the electronic faces on our television tubes, a Great American.
The consensus along the banks of the Potomac was that the people living on the banks of the Nile don't know a good thing when they have one. The Egyptians, indifferent to being on camera live via satellite on all three networks, perversely refused to weep, tear and emit moving Moslem ululations. The dense formations of journalists flown to the Middle East to cover the last rites did not fail to note that the only water flowing was in the Nile and not out of the natives' eyes. `Ah effendi,' quoth the translators to the journalists, not one of whom, we can assume, could speak Arabic, 'They are too shocked and horrified to cry. They weep later. When you guys send aid?'
The hypothesis that they were too traumatised to cry was later confirmed by the Nobel prize winning Arabist, Henry Kissinger, who also assured an anxious America that the new chap, Mr Mubarak, is staunch, obedient and stable, three attributes our politicians prize over wise, just and good.
Nothing daunted by the murder of our last strong leader, the call is out to send Egypt more guns and associated tolls of lethal intent, although you would have thought that experience in handing out cutlasses and sabres might have taught us caution. It hasn't been so long since we sat at our television sets and saw the magnificently equipped Iranian army shoot down fellow Iranians to save the Shah; now it appears that elements in the Egyptian army which we are outfitting in the latest in large-bore mayhem connived at the death of its commander-in-chief.
The misgivings about what America is bumping and groping its way into are not shared by the men in the White House. Sadat's murder has had the same effect on them as pressing a sharp point against the sole of an infant's foot: an undifferentiated spasmatic thrust of all limbs and organs in all directions accompanied by ear-splitting shrieks. President Reagan, after having previously become himself entangled in a new 'strategic relationship' with Israel which nobody (and I daresay that includes himself) understands, has reacted by saying he wasn't going to let the same thing hap pen in Saudi Arabia as happened in Iran. In short order, Libya's dreadful Gaddafi was put on notice that there was to be no intervention in the Sudan and that we just might, if we have a mind to, ship rifles and bullets to push Gaddafi's boys out of Chad. All of this is transpiring in front of a chorus that is singing admonitory dirges about Islamic extremism, Moslem religious fanatics, Russian penetration and PLO terrorism.
But you can't whip up war hysteria, or even support for your policies, if you bewilder the people whom you are supposed to be leading. In the supermarkets you can hear the mothers sigh and say, 'I guess there's going to be a war,' but the same ladies couldn't tell you against whom. Is it the communists, the religious fanatics, 'the hard-line Arab states', or yet another set of villains?
As the days have worn on, the Administration's policies have begun to take on the appearance of aimless decisiveness, of bold purposelessness and forceful confusion. Every statement is uttered with strength and conviction but, as the statements pile up, one on top of another, they show themselves to be the product of the helter-skelter rushing around of men who would do the audaciously courageous thing if only someone would tell them what it is.
In the last few days this skipping from crisis to crisis and crucial country to crucial country has started people wondering how the Administration arrives at its foreign policy decisions. The belief is gaining circulation that the State Department and Alexander Haig are being cut out of the major decision. The White House apparently isn't reading the little packets of information prepared by the State Department's experts who, in theory anyway, have the background information that saves a president from looking silly. The National Security Council, which Kissinger and Brzezinski used to build power and control, is also being ignored because the men around the President don't want its director, Richard Allen, to have the kind of influence which his predecessors had. The famous 'crisis management committee', which Secretary Haig wanted so much to be chairman of, only to see the Vice-President get the job, hasn't met at all.
The group determining policies is supposed to consist of Ed Meese, Reagan's chief associate in the White House, plus two or three top staff people whose background is in domestic politics. They seem to work together in harmony, but with only feeble contact with the outside world. The trouble the Administration is having in getting Congress to approve the sale of the radar planes to Saudi Arabia is blamed on poor White House staff work. It is said that, after Mr Meese and his ad hoc buddies have finished putting their feet on the desk and deciding what to do tomorrow, they forget to tell the troops who are milling around without marching orders. Thus, the story goes that Menachem Begin was supposed to be told that the price of his new strategic relationship with the United States was his lessening his opposition to Awacs, the acronym for the radar planes. Only nobody told him.
It has become so bad that Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter, an improbable couple if there ever was one, have got together to coach Mr Reagan in the foreign affairs department. In the timidest possible way, they have suggested that, sooner or later, some white man is going to have to sit down and try to make a deal with the PLO.
What is the point of the Israelis and the Egyptians, who aren't fighting each other, forever negotiating the terms to end a war which they aren't in? The answer to that question is the beginning of an American policy in the region, or could be. As Edgar Bronfman, the multi-billion dollar Canadian businessman who is also president of the World Jewish Congress, recently said, . . . President Sadat did not and could not represent the Palestinians on the West Bank, in Gaza or scattered throughout the whole region. Somehow Prime Minister Begin must find a way to include Palestinians in the peace process . .
This week President Reagan and President Mitterrand are marking the 200th anniversary of the Franco-American victory at Yorktown. It is a fitting moment for an American statesman to ask himself what would have happened after Yorktown if Benjamin Franklin and the Americans had been excluded from the bargaining table and the ministers of Louis XVI and George III had worked out the future of this continent? George Washington and his fellow terrorists would have kept up their criminal activities. Of course, with their perukes, their silk breeches and their lacy fronts, they cut a rather more pleasing picture than PLO persons. Perhaps, as a goodwill gesture, Mr Arafat might keep his revolver hidden when appearing on TV, buy a decent-looking suit and get a shave.
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