By Franz Schurmann

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Prediction #11 for Tuesday, April 27th,1999

Piecemeal Peace Coming to the Middle East.

• Introduction:
  

  In the Conan-Doyle mystery, "The Hound of the Baskervilles," Sherlock Holmes suddenly says to Watson: Eureka! I've found the key clue to the murder. Watson is baffled because they were sitting through the dead of night out in the cold without a single perceptible event occurring. Holmes quickly relieves Watson of his bafflement and says: The dogs didn't bark.

  From the time the State of Israel was founded in 1948 there was hardly a day that dozens --- even hundreds --- of fierce barks weren't heard from all over the Middle East. Earlier this year, not long before the Kosovo war, they faded away. There still are sounds but now much quieter, sometimes hopeful.

  What happened? Historians know many times in history bloody wars suddenly turned into promising peace. There is no consensus of answers among scholars as to why. Some say peoples and rulers just got tired of so much bloodshed.

  Consider the following reports from the Middle East, most of them from the past week:

  • After letting them harass Syria for years Jordan finally told Syrian Muslim Brethren who had found refuge in Jordan to stop. Two decades ago Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad killed thousands of them when crushing a revolt in the city of Hama.

  • Reports keep coming out of Israel that Netanyahu has secretly agreed to pull Israeli forces out of their southern Lebanese security zone and return the Golan Heights to Syria.

  • It's been reported in the Arab world that President Clinton is urging Israel, Jordan and Palestine to consider setting up a common market.

  • When Canadian journalist Robin Shulman vanished in Beirut Lebanese worried the Beirut of kidnappings and car bombings was returning. Not so. She simply re-appeared.

  • Three big Middle Eastern/African/Islamic countries recently held democratic elections: Nigeria a month back and more recently Algeria and Turkey. All three had been ruled by military regimes and all three are now moving towards civilian rule.

  • Anti-Arafat HAMAS leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin has accepted Yaser Arafat's invitation to join talks on setting up an independent Palestinian state.

  • Britain has unfrozen Libyan funds as a prelude to the first talks in decades between American ally Britain and formerly demonized Libya.

  • Turkey and Iran have concluded a mutual security pact similar to the one Turkey earlier concluded with Syria that led to the explusion from Syria of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan now in Turkish detention. Their two militaries will collaborate to control Kurdish rebels.

  • Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Iran have improved their relations. And the Taliban have relinquished a major Shi'ite Hazara town, Bamiyan, to the pro-Iranian Shi'ite opposition.

  These and many other signs suggest that a piecemeal peace is coming about from West Africa through the Middle East into Central Asia.

• Prediction:
  A piecemeal but nevertheless real peace process is finally coming about not only to Israel and its neighbors but to much of the Islamic world.

• Outcome:
  Prediction #11 will be evaluated on Tuesday, November 30, 1999.

Yesterday, April 26, President Clinton called for a three-sided summit with Israeli and Palestinan leaders within six months after the Israeli elections of May 17. White House press secretary Joe Lockhart called for both Israelis and Palestinians to develop a framework for reviving and completing peace talks which will build on the Wye River agreements and Oslo accords.

Six months from now means sometime in October or November this year. This explains the evaluation date of November 30, 1999.

In my view the main basis for predicting the coming of peace not just between Israel and its close-by Arab enemies but the Middle East in general is the dramatic rise in world oil prices. That rise was brought about by agreements between OPEC and non-OPEC countries to radically cut back the amount of oil they were lifting out of the ground.

In my book, "The Foreign Politics of Richard Nixon" (Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, 1987) most of Chapter VI deals with the emergence of OPEC in 1974 as the prime new force determining world oil prices. The main point of my analysis is that while Saudi Arabia and Iran were the main up-front players on the oil scene the author of the play was America or, more specifically, the Nixon White House.

Few if any elements in the price picture of the global economy are so important as oil prices. That is because oil, like food, is an indispensible commodity for everyone in the world. Everyone eats and everyone drives or is driven in an oil-powered vehicle.

If oil prices rise without provoking inflationary effects then some people will gain great windfalls. This time, as a quarter century ago, big beneficiaries will be --- aside from the mainly Anglo-American oil companies --- the oil-producing Middle Eastern countries. If peace should now come to reign in the Middle East then those countries will invest a good part of their windfalls in the region. That will have the same stimulating effect on economies as did the post-WW II Marshall Plan.

I believe this Marshall Plan has become the main goad Washington is offering all the Mideastern countries as an incentive to get on board the peace train.

• Israel needs a promising Mideastern economy to replace its dependence on external aid.

• Palestine needs it because it now has little land and no economy.

• Jordan needs it because its erstwhile economic links to Iraq are now gone.

• Syria needs it because its economy is stagnant

• Iran needs it because its economy is too limited to maintain its hugely growing population (birth rates in Islamic countries are high).

• Turkey needs it because its currently booming economy has no future in Europe but a promising one in the Middle East.

• Afghanistan needs a Marshall Plan to heal its terrible war wounds and create an economy.

• The same applies to the war-ravaged Sudan, conflict-ridden Nigeria and Algeria where political massacres have become the norm.

Clinton has been spreading the good news of his new vision for peace, prosperity and freedom all over the world. At the same time he is sternly showing the world two examples of what can happen to countries that spurn the new Pax Americana's magnanimity: Iraq and Serbia. In both America has been systematically destroying their infrastructures. Under the best of circumstances it will take years, even decades, for them to return to ground zero.

Clinton knows that America is now more than the world's Solo Superpower. It is a reincarnation of the Roman Empire. The Pax America's domain is quite similar to that of the Pax Romana: Europe, West Asia and Africa. Having realized this, Clinton sees no reason for the American lion to fear the several smaller animals of the global forest which are challenging it. Also in the last part of his presidency he has come up with world-embracing ambitions which recall those of Rome's first emperor, Octavian Augustus.