Who Rules the World? (17 page)

Years later, Robert McNamara recognized that Cuba was justified in fearing an attack. “If I were in Cuban or Soviet shoes, I would have thought so, too,” he observed at a major conference on the missile crisis on its fortieth anniversary.
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As for Russia’s “desperate effort to give the USSR the appearance of equality,” to which Stern refers, recall that Kennedy’s very narrow victory in the 1960 election relied heavily on a fabricated “missile gap” concocted to terrify the country and to condemn the Eisenhower administration as soft on national security.
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There was indeed a “missile gap,” but strongly in favor of the United States.

The first “public, unequivocal administration statement” on the true facts, according to strategic analyst Desmond Ball in his authoritative study of the Kennedy missile program, was in October 1961, when Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric informed the Business Council that “the US would have a larger nuclear delivery system left after a surprise attack than the nuclear force which the Soviet Union could employ in its first strike.”
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The Russians, of course, were well aware of their relative weakness and vulnerability. They were also aware of Kennedy’s reaction when Khrushchev offered to sharply reduce offensive military capacity and proceeded to do so unilaterally: the president failed to respond, undertaking instead a huge armaments program.

OWNING THE WORLD, THEN AND NOW

The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are: How did it begin? And how did it end? It began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962. It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a “rational” person, but were unthinkable because they would have undermined the fundamental principle that the United States has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere, aimed at China or Russia or anyone else, even on their borders, and the accompanying principle that Cuba had no right to have missiles for defense against what appeared to be an imminent U.S. invasion. To establish these principles firmly, it was entirely proper to face a high risk of a war of unimaginable destruction and to reject simple and admittedly fair ways to end the threat.

Garthoff observes that “in the United States, there was almost universal approbation for President Kennedy’s handling of the crisis.”
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Dobbs writes, “The relentlessly upbeat tone was established by the court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote that Kennedy had ‘dazzled the world’ through a ‘combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated.’”
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Rather more soberly, Stern partially agrees, noting that Kennedy repeatedly rejected the militant advice of his advisers and associates who called for military force and the dismissal of peaceful options. The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour. Graham Allison joins many others in presenting them as “a guide for how to defuse conflicts, manage great-power relationships, and make sound decisions about foreign policy in general.”
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In a very narrow sense, that judgment seems reasonable. The ExComm tapes reveal that the president stood apart from others, sometimes almost all others, in rejecting premature violence. There is, however, a further question: How should JFK’s relative moderation in the management of the crisis be evaluated against the background of the broader considerations just reviewed? But that question does not arise in a disciplined intellectual and moral culture, which accepts without question the basic principle that the United States effectively owns the world by right and is by definition a force for good despite occasional errors and misunderstandings, a principle in which it is plainly entirely proper for the United States to deploy massive offensive force all over the world while it is an outrage for others (allies and clients apart) to make even the slightest gesture in that direction or even to think of deterring the threatened use of violence by the benign global hegemon.

That doctrine is the primary official charge against Iran today: it might pose a deterrent to U.S. and Israeli force. This was a consideration during the missile crisis as well. In internal discussion, the Kennedy brothers expressed their fears that Cuban missiles might deter a U.S. invasion of Venezuela then under consideration. So “the Bay of Pigs was really right,” JFK concluded.
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These principles still contribute to the constant risk of nuclear war. There has been no shortage of severe dangers since the missile crisis. Ten years later, during the 1973 Israeli-Arab war, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert (DEFCON 3) to warn the Russians to keep their hands off while he was secretly authorizing Israel to violate the cease-fire imposed by the United States and Russia.
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When Ronald Reagan came into office a few years later, the United States launched operations probing Russian defenses and simulating air and naval attacks, while placing Pershing missiles in Germany that had a five- to ten-minute flight time to Russian targets, providing what the CIA called a “super-sudden first strike” capability.
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Naturally this caused great alarm in Russia, which unlike the United States has repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. There have also been hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first strike minutes before launch after automated systems gave false alarms. We don’t have Russian records, but there’s no doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone.

Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the sources of their conflict remain. Both have refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, along with Israel, and have received U.S. support for development of their nuclear weapons programs.

In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands. But we can hardly count on such sanity forever. It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided. There is more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, almost sixty years ago, that we must face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”
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9

The Oslo Accords: Their Context, Their Consequences

In September 1993, President Clinton presided over a handshake between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn—capping off a “day of awe,” as the press described it with reverence.
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The occasion was the announcement of the Declaration of Principles (DOP) for political settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which resulted from secret meetings in Oslo sponsored by the Norwegian government.

Independent negotiations had been underway between Israel and the Palestinians since November 1991, initiated by the United States during the glow of success after the first Iraq war, which established that “what we say goes,” in the triumphant words of President George H. W. Bush.
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The negotiations opened with a brief conference in Madrid and continued under the guiding hand of the United States (and technically, the fading Soviet Union, to provide the illusion of international auspices). The Palestinian delegation, consisting of Palestinians within the Occupied Territories (henceforth the “internal Palestinians”), was led by the dedicated and incorruptible left nationalist Haidar Abdul Shafi, probably the most respected figure in Palestine. The “external Palestinians”—the PLO, based in Tunis and headed by Yasser Arafat—were excluded, though they had an unofficial observer, Faisal Husseini. The huge number of Palestinian refugees were totally excluded, with no regard for their rights, even those accorded them by the UN General Assembly.

To appreciate the nature and significance of the Oslo Accords and the consequences that flowed from them, it is important to understand the background and the context in which the Madrid and Oslo negotiations took place. I will begin by reviewing highlights of the immediate background that set the context for the negotiations, then turn to the DOP and the consequences of the Oslo process, which extend to the present, and finally add a few words on lessons that should be learned.

The PLO, Israel, and the United States had recently released formal positions on the basic issues that were the topic of the Madrid and Oslo negotiations. The PLO position was presented in a November 1988 declaration of the Palestinian National Council, carrying forward a long series of diplomatic initiatives that had been dismissed. It called for a Palestinian state to be established in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967 and requested the UN Security Council “to formulate and guarantee arrangements for security and peace between all the states concerned in the region, including the Palestinian state” alongside Israel.
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The PNC declaration, which accepted the overwhelming international consensus on a diplomatic settlement, was virtually the same as the two-state resolution brought to the Security Council in January 1976 by the Arab “confrontation states” (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan). It was vetoed by the United States then, and again in 1980. For forty years the United States has blocked the international consensus, and it still does, diplomatic pleasantries aside.

By 1988, Washington’s rejectionist stance was becoming difficult to sustain. By December, the outgoing Reagan administration had become an international laughingstock with its increasingly desperate efforts to pretend that, alone in the world, it could not hear the accommodating proposals of the PLO and the Arab states. Grudgingly, Washington decided to “declare victory,” claiming that at last the PLO had been compelled to utter Secretary of State George Shultz’s “magic words” and express its willingness to pursue diplomacy.
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As Shultz makes clear in his memoirs, the goal was to ensure maximum humiliation of the PLO while admitting that peace offers could no longer be denied. He informed President Reagan that Arafat was saying in one place “‘Unc, unc, unc,’ and in another he was saying, ‘cle, cle, cle,’ but nowhere will he yet bring himself to say ‘Uncle,’” conceding total capitulation in the humble style expected of the lower orders. Low-level discussions with the PLO would therefore be allowed, but on the understanding that they would be meaningless: specifically, it was stipulated that the PLO must abandon its request for an international conference, so that the United States would maintain control.
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In May 1989, Israel’s Likud-Labor coalition government formally responded to Palestinian acceptance of a two-state settlement, declaring that there could be no “additional Palestinian state” between Jordan and Israel (Jordan already being a Palestinian state by Israeli dictate, whatever Jordanians and Palestinians might think), and that “there will be no change in the status of Judea, Samaria and Gaza [the West Bank and Gaza] other than in accordance with the basic guidelines of the [Israeli] Government.”
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Furthermore, Israel would conduct no negotiations with the PLO, though it would permit “free elections” under Israeli military rule, with much of the Palestinian leadership in prison without charge or expelled from Palestine.

In the plan proposed by Secretary of State James A. Baker, the new Bush administration endorsed this proposal without qualifications in December 1989. Those were the three formal positions on the eve of the Madrid negotiations, with Washington mediating as the “honest broker.”

When Arafat went to Washington to take part in the “day of awe” in September 1993, the lead story in the
New York Times
celebrated the handshake as a “dramatic image” that “will transform Mr. Arafat into a statesman and peacemaker” who finally renounced violence under Washington’s tutelage.
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At the extreme critical end of the mainstream,
New York Times
columnist Anthony Lewis wrote that until that moment Palestinians had always “rejected compromise” but now at last they were willing to “make peace possible.”
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Of course, it was the United States and Israel that had rejected diplomacy and the PLO that had been offering compromise for years, but Lewis’s reversal of the facts was quite normal and unchallenged in the mainstream.

There were other crucial developments in the immediate pre-Madrid/pre-Oslo years. In December 1987, the Intifada erupted in Gaza and quickly spread throughout the Occupied Territories.
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This broad-based and remarkably restrained uprising was as much of a surprise to the PLO in Tunis as it was to the occupying Israeli forces with their extensive system of military and paramilitary forces, surveillance, and collaborators. The Intifada was not limited to opposing the occupation. It was also a social revolution within Palestinian society, breaking patterns of subordination of women, authority by notables, and other forms of hierarchy and domination.

Though the timing of the Intifada was a surprise, the uprising itself was not, at least to those who paid any attention to Israel’s U.S.-backed operations within the territories. Something was bound to happen; there is only so much that people can endure. For the preceding twenty years, Palestinians under military occupation had been subjected to harsh repression, brutality, and cruel humiliation while watching what remained of their country disappear before their eyes as Israel conducted its programs of settlement, implemented huge infrastructure developments designed to integrate valuable parts of the territories within Israel, robbed them of resources, and put into place other measures to bar independent development—always with crucial U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support, as well as ideological backing in shaping how the issues were framed.

To take just one of the many cases that elicited no notice or concern in the West: shortly before the outbreak of the Intifada, a Palestinian girl, Intissar al-Atar, was shot and killed in a school yard in Gaza by a resident of a nearby Jewish settlement.
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He was one of the several thousand Israelis who settled in Gaza with substantial state subsidies, protected by a huge army presence as they took over much of the land and the scarce water of the Strip while living “lavishly in twenty-two settlements in the midst of 1.4 million destitute Palestinians,” as the crime is described by Israeli scholar Avi Raz.
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