Bush, Johnson, Nixon, and the Middle East

[Plaid Adder]

My father is big into adult education, and he gets these courses on CD from The Teaching Company which he listens to in the car. He then passes them on to me, whether I want them or not. Since I commute 2 hours a day, I usually figure, what the hell. Last time it was the operas of Mozart. This time, it's a course on the history of American foreign policy in the Middle East, from 1914 to 2001.

The author, Salim Yaqub, teaches history at UC Santa Barbara and has published a book on Eisenhower and Arab nationalism. Anyway, I'm about up to the Carter administration, which is the first one that I really remember. Yaqub is not an electrifying speaker but the writing is very accessible and he does a good job of making it into a narrative that you can follow. Anyway, it's interesting to look back at a time when U.S. policy in the Middle East was not set in stone and see how and why the different U.S. administrations made the decisions that created the situation we're in now. One part of the story that has really dropped out of the current understanding of the situation is the impact of Nasser and Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 60s. A related thing we've all forgotten is how the Cold War basically established the patterns that now govern our relationship with the Arab world.

Anyway, what occurs to me listening to this is that Bush seems to combine the worst elements of Johnson's personality with the worst aspects of Nixon's approach to foreign policy. Yaqub does a little digression about how Johnson was hung up on personal loyalty, and how the Shah of Iran manipulated Johnson's desire for attention and flattery and loyalty by making sure to send him little presents and call him on his birthday and so on in order to help secure American support for his regime no matter how repressive it was. (Of course American support for the Shah's regime was also always about oil, really, but I guess greasing the wheels with a little sucking up doesn't hurt.) Johnson and Nasser also hated each other, partly because Nasser saw Johnson as an uncultured boor who didn't comport himself with the dignity that befitted a world leader (remind us of anyone we know?). Yaqub also says that Kennedy understood that when an Arab leader fired off a load of anti-American rhetoric he was usually playing to his base or to other Arab nations and therefore his words shouldn't be taken as a literal statement of his actual policy or intentions--but Johnson not only took that kind of posturing at face value, he took it personally. (Even though none of these guys had ever tried to kill his daddy.)

Also amusing, in a kind of sick and ironic way, is Yaqub's account of how Johnson handled the beginnings of Israel's nuclear weapons program. Though Israel kept maintaining that their nuclear program was for civilian purposes, the CIA had information which clearly indicated that it wasn't. Israel was prevailed upon to admit weapons inspectors, but was able to stage manage the inspections so that the inspectors never found the right kind of evidence. The CIA kept reporting that Israel was setting up a weapons program. But even though Johnson didn't really want Israel to have nuclear weapons, he also didn't want to mount a major intervention, which was what it would have taken to stop the program. So, says Yaqub, the CIA eventually got the message that Johnson would just prefer not to know all the stuff they were telling him about how that plutonium wasn't for power plants. So their reports about the program got buried, and probably most of them never got passed along to the president, and Israel went merrily onward toward nuclear capability.

Meanwhile, of course, we all know what happened when Iraq *wasn't* developing a nuclear weapons program at a time when Bush really wanted them to be. So I guess the moral of the story is that outside of the US and Russia, weapons of mass destruction exist if and only if the President of the United States wants them to.

Nixon, meanwhile, had the loyalty thing in spades but also added paranoia to it, which made it all so much better...but, and I thought this was interesting, it was Nixon who first set up the administrative model that Bush has obviously using, whereby the Secretary of State is a publicly acceptable figurehead but the *real* authority for making foreign policy is invested in the lower-profile National Security Advisor. Nixon initially appointed Rogers as his sec'y of state and Kissinger as his National Security Advisor, but Kissinger was the one really making all the decisions--except as regarded the middle east, which for a while was the one area where Rogers was allowed to exercise his nominal authority. But as soon as Rogers came out with a plan for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict that Kissinger and Nixon didn't like, Nixon directed Kissinger to sabotage it behind the scenes. So for a while, you had Rogers pushing his peace plan to Israel (at that time, led by Golda Meir) while Kissinger was telling Meir through unofficial channels not to accept it. Yeah, that's productive. Eventually, Nixon promoted Kissinger from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State...just like what happened with Powell and Rice under Bush's regime.

Also depressing is Yaqub's account of why Carter's presidency failed: that he was elected during a brief fit of moral revulsion after Watergate, the Vietnam War, and CIA atrocities--which didn't last. So the American public embraced honesty, human rights, and peace just long enough to get Carter into office, and then the fit passed and they went back to wanting cynical bastards who would do anything to promote America's interests and therefore didn't support most of Carter's agenda. Ah well.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

Yee ha,

The Plaid Adder

[blogslut]

1. Did the author mention

...any impact to Carter IE: the Iran hostage crisis, or are you there yet?

[Plaid Adder]

4. No, I'm still at the very beginning of Carter's administration.

And unfortunately, this one disk is scratched and keeps skipping. Ah well.

The Plaid Adder

[question everything]

6. And the stagflation and the long gas lines? (nt)

[H2O Man]

2. You might enjoy

Taylor Branch's "At Canaan's Edge." In chapter 35 (Splinters) which covers May-June of 1967, he documents how the "Six Day War spawned lasting shock in world politics." It damaged the alliance that had been the progressive Civil Rights Movement, and knocked the wind out of the teachings of non-violence that King advocated. And it led to the formation of a core group that socialist leader Michael Harrington coined the word "neoconservative" to describe. In the early '70s, the core group would unite with Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's supporters, to create the movement that brings us fellows like Perle, Wolfowitz, and Libby.

[thoughttheater]

3. George Bush: Shades of Richard Nixon

Read an article that analyzes the similarities between Richard Nixon and George Bush in their thinking and the actions of their administrations...here:

www.thoughttheater.com

[tocqueville]

5. very interesting article about Carter here

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Drifting down the path to perdition

Part 2 of Tom Engelhardt's interview Andrew Bacevich, a former military man and now a vocal critic of US foreign policy

Tomdispatch: I'd like to turn to the issue of oil wars, energy wars. That seems to be what holds all this incoherent stuff together - minds focused on a world of energy flows. Recently, I reread Carter's 1979 energy speech. Isn't it ironic that he got laughed out of the room for his sweater and for urging a future of alternative fuels on us, while we latched on to his Rapid Deployment Force for the Persian Gulf? As you argue in your book, The New American Militarism, this essentially starts us on what you call "World War IV".

Andrew Bacevich: I remember the Carter speech. I was a relatively young man at the time. In general, I have voted for Republicans, although not this Republican in 2004 . But I did vote for Carter because I was utterly disenchanted with Nixon and Kissinger. Ford seemed weak, incompetent. And I remember being dismayed by the Carter speech because it seemed so out of sync with the American spirit. It wasn't optimistic; it did not promise that we would have more tomorrow than we have today, that the future would be bigger and better. Carter essentially said: If we are serious about freedom, we must really think about what freedom means - and it ought to mean something more than acquisition and conspicuous consumption. And if we're going to preserve our freedom, we have to start living within our means.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HE27Aa01.html

[ptolle]

11. I, too

I too voted for Carter as he seemed to actually be everything that chimperor's handlers would like us to believe the chimp is- honest, decent, moral, and concerned with the plight of his fellow man.I suspect that those qualities along with his intelligence were just too much for the murcan electorate, too much of a reminder of what we preach but do not practice and too much of an unspoken admonishment to those who cannot deal with their faults and foibles.
In addition to the above recommendations I'd like to add the book Devil's Game by Robert Dreyfuss subtitled How the United States helped unleash fundamentalist islam.

[greiner3]

7. Don't forget the help;

Lawerence of Arabia gave to all parties during and after WWI.

[pnorman]

8. The Teaching Company is a great source,

although the prices are usually pretty steep. But at frequent intervals, they run sales on selected titles deeply discounted. here's the website: http://theteachingcompany.com/teach12.asp?ai=20871 Check it out. A recent innovation was for some of the audible courses to be available as MP3 downloads. That one ("United States and the Middle East: 1914 to 9/11") is on sale at present for $35 for an MP3 download. The standard price is $130!

pnorman

[blackspade]

9. Thanks!

I already new some of this, but some of the details were unknown to me.
I have always enjoyed your articles and found them very informative.

Thanks again!

[Joe Chi Minh]

10. Yee ha? I wish you wouldn't peddle Bush's foreign policy!

(I know it's not original, but it bears plagiarising!)

[KoKo]

12. Interesting overview...thanks Plaid! n/t