VECTORS

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Reagan, Huntington, Netanyahu --
Why Ultra-Conservatives Want to Scare the World

By Franz Schurmann

<fschurmann@pacificnews.org>

Date: 12-16-96

There's growing talk in Israel and the Arab world of an Israeli war with Syria. Such a move will find philosophical resonance in the strategic thinking of ultra-conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Samuel P. Huntington, now the most influential American intellectual in Europe. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, a professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Logic of World Power, reads a wide spectrum of foreign-language news media.

Frightening the world is a strategy ultra-conservatives have long relied on to achieve their goals. President Reagan in the eighties used Star Wars to scare the Soviets into self-dissolution. Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington Jr.'s new book "Clash of Civilizations" is getting even liberal Europeans to view world affairs in terms of "the West against the rest."

Now Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is preparing Israel for a war against Syria -- an increasing possibility that has dominated Arab and Israeli media for weeks. Such a war would finally wreck the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab peace process and quash the first tentative steps towards a Western rapprochement with Iran, Iraq and global Islam.

What Netanyahu and his fellow ultra-conservatives hope will emerge is the formation of a bloc of Western nations working together to resist, not trade with Mideastern enemies, especially Iran. At a recent meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Lisbon, he called for Mideastern security "going from the West to the Persian Gulf."

Ultra-conservatives are not warriors by preference. They want peace to enjoy their wealth and leisure. But they calculate that if their opponents deep down also want peace, the most effective way to achieve security is through resorting to arms. One Arab observer, writing in the Arabic-language As-Sharq al-Ausat, interprets Netanyahu's escalating bombing raids of southern Lebanon this way: "The Israelis' aims in resorting to war is to weaken Syria, get the other Arab nations to knuckle under and force the Palestinians into surrender."

If the Israeli strike comes it could also force a broader policy shift on the part of the Western alliance vis-a-vis Iran and Iraq. When the U.S. won the Gulf War in 1991 the Bush administration, working with European allies and the Soviet Union, was pursuing a policy of punishing Iraq but holding out a discreet olive branch to Iran. Under Clinton this U.S. policy was quickly replaced by a new policy called dual containment of both Iraq and Iran.

That policy remained in effect until a few months ago when the Clinton administration floated a trial balloon. In a speech in the Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Robert Pelletreau suggested that Washington was seeking an opening to both pariah countries.

Reaction has come, especially in Congress where Senator Arlen Specter scheduled questioning of National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, nominated to head up the CIA, on alleged covert U.S. support for letting Iran furnish arms to the Bosnian Muslims. Early on in the Clinton administration Lake had authored an article in Foreign Policy magazine urging a possible dialogue with Iran.

Now that Clinton has re-appointed his old foreign policy team, it looks as if the U.S. is sliding back into its former policy groove -- one more to the liking of Israel's Likud. Given the violent opposition in the German parliament to Chancellor Kohl's cooperation policies with both Iran and China, Western Europe may also be slipping into that same groove.

The role of the ultra-conservative Huntington in this larger power realignment is philosophical. The widely respected Harvard professor has finally given ultra-conservatives a new doctrinal grounding. He argues that what really divides nations is not politics or economics but civilizations (a civilization is just a large-scale culture). In today's world there are only about eight. Of these the main ones are Western (U.S. and Europe), Confucian (East Asia) and Islamic (West Asia).

Huntington is now arguably the most widely read American intellectual in Europe. Many compare him to Oswald Spengler who at the beginning of this century warned about "the decline of the West." A recent writer in Paris' Le Monde suggested a Huntington scenario for the year 2010: What first starts as a limited war between China and Vietnam will degenerate into a world war between the U.S., Europe and Russia on the one side and China, Japan and most Muslim countries on the other.

Ever since World War II, every "limited" war that erupts fuels worries that it could turn into World War III. Reagan's Star Wars fueled that speculation a decade ago just as Huntington's ideas do today. Should Israel strike at Syria, the worries could quickly turn to fears that could become self-fulfilling prophecy.