The Third World War - The Untold Story

by Sir John Hackett

  ‘It is believed among my members that the US is now confronted by both a great danger and a great opportunity. The danger is that the US, free from the limitations previously imposed by Soviet power, may try to encroach upon the independent policies of other American countries. The opportunity is that of creating a united Latin American front, including a tamed Cuba, willing to play a more assertive role in world affairs.’

  Hardliners in the US, as General Irving’s memoirs* show, were far from pleased by this message. The President and his close advisers wisely accepted the advice it contained.

  * Much use has been made in the preceding few pages of material to be found in Lieutenant General Henry J. Irving’s memoirs, entitled Line of Duty (Grosset and Dunlop, New York 1986), see particularly pp. 263, 264-5, 271, 279. We have not been able wholly to endorse General Irving’s approach but are grateful for the source material his book so freely makes available.

  A decisive influence was that of Brazil, now one of the principal promoters of Latin American unity. This country - together with Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela - soon began to play a significant role in providing the food and oil urgently required on the other side of the Atlantic, which gave Latin America leverage with a US Government facing a situation of unprecedented international change and turmoil. The US agreed to suspend the blockade against Cuba on the condition that all the few remaining Cuban troops in Central America surrendered, and that Cuba stopped all military and political activities in support of subversion in Latin America. This was quickly accepted. As this book is being written, Cuba is already moving towards far-reaching reforms in its internal policies.

  The crucial new factor is Latin America’s unity and its will to preserve its freedom of action in the international arena. The US has survived a war against the Soviet empire, but this has not solved the structural problems of Latin America, still less has it done anything to reduce social and political unrest.

  At the inter-state level, a new situation is being created, in which, Latin American governments are acting on the basis of common policies towards the US. Cuba is being incorporated into this new grouping, on the understanding that its foreign and internal policies will profoundly change. The domination of the communist party in Cuba is about to disappear in fact as well as in name. The end of the Third World War, however, did not bring an end to crisis in Latin America, and the situation there may yet turn into another period of what will be called anti-colonialist confrontation with the advanced, triumphant Western powers. We believe this will not happen, for there is evidence of a truly profound change in attitudes in the US towards Latin America.

  We have dealt at some length with the struggles with which the US freed itself from the trap into which the Soviets wished it to fall because of the importance of what has been a profoundly educational and sobering process, whose consequences will be felt far outside the-Americas. In its perceptions, orientation, judgment and method the foreign policy of the United States is unlikely, after the experiences in Central America and the Caribbean in the first half of the 1980s, ever to be the same again. This looks like being particularly relevant to US relations with other countries in the Americas. It will probably become more and more apparent in US policies in other regions too, in ASEAN for instance, and in South-West Asia, and in the Third World generally. The world is likely, whatever else may happen, to become on that account alone in some degree a safer place.

  Chapter 17: The Middle East

  In the Middle East, not unfittingly for a region where violence and conflict had so long been the order of the day, it was first the threat of general war and then that war itself which at length brought about peace. Indeed, had it not been for strong, effective action by the United Nations in the summer of 1984, the Third World War might well have started a year earlier, and started moreover in the Middle East itself. As we look back from this year 1987, only two years after the brief but cataclysmic clash between the superpowers, we may recall that during the early 1980s events in Arabia, in South-West Asia and in Africa too, moved along lines which brought closer the very circumstances and confrontations that the Western nations had been seeking to diminish or avoid. Among such events might be included the fighting in Afghanistan, Iran’s agony, the Gulf war, Libya’s expansionism, Israeli strikes against Iraq and Lebanon together with colonization of the West Bank and annexation of Golan, South Africa’s action in Namibia and Angola, and a worrying disparity of view between the United States and Western Europe. At the same time, other events made for further stability and international understanding, such as UN and EEC initiatives on Palestine and Namibia, the relatively harmonious developments in Zimbabwe, US and Soviet attempts to discuss arms control, the general urge to relieve Third World poverty and the workings of the Gulf Council for Co-operation.

  These developments, whether disruptive or otherwise, had in common not only the areas in which they took place. They also illustrated a cardinal point of both Soviet and US policy, that whereas their struggle for influence and gain in the Middle East and Africa could be and was waged by proxy, they did not wish themselves as the two principals to become directly and personally engaged in confrontation and conflict. This policy was easier to realize in southern Africa than it was in the Middle East, for although these two areas shared many features in common, there was one very important difference.

  Both areas contained a nation at bay, people fiercely dedicated to their own survival, striking out against those neighbours who threatened their destruction, withstanding the pressure of United Nations Security Council resolutions which called upon them to surrender territory in order to move towards peaceful solutions. Both areas were and are of great strategic moment, both were fertile markets for arms dealers, both provoked Soviet troublemaking and Western ambivalence. In neither was the Soviet Union or the United States content to allow the other to gain an upper hand. Indeed it seemed as if the two superpowers looked then on the Middle East and southern Africa as arenas, not for co-operation, but for competition. This last similarity underlined the crucial difference. Whereas in southern Africa the prospects of a direct Soviet-American confrontation seemed small, in the Middle East they had been growing more likely and more dangerous month by month. There were clear reasons for this - the greater strategic prizes of the Middle East, its close vicinity to vital areas of military power already deployed or readily deployable by the two rivals and, perhaps most marked of all, the immense complexity of the Middle East problem.

  In southern Africa the situation could be measured in simple terms, in terms, as it might be put, of black and white. The early 1980s in the Middle East told a very different story. There we saw not just the aspirations of developing countries against a background of superpower rivalry attempting to influence policies and events. We saw an Islamic world divided against itself in spite of the strongest possible motive for unity - a shared hostility to Zionism. Some events threw a strong light on this central issue, particularly Israel’s policy of procrastinating over Sinai, colonizing the West Bank, annexing the Golan and surrounding Jerusalem with high concrete buildings. Other events obscured it: Iran and Iraq at war; Syria and Libya supporting Iran, not for sympathy with the ayatollahs, but out of enmity towards other Arab nations; Jordan dangerously linked to Iraq and beginning to lean, like Syria, towards the USSR; Egypt trying to reconcile the irreconcilable by aiming to be on good terms with Israel, the USA and the moderate Arab states; Saudi Arabia, Oman and the smaller Gulf states seeking to pursue policies of moderation in an environment largely given over to extremism; the PLO divided in its leadership and in no mood for compromise; the two Yemens keeping an eye, with Soviet interest in the background, on the main chance. Yet many of these other events arose from the apparent inability of any power, super or not, to get to grips with the central Middle Eastern issue itself, the deadlock over Palestine. Meanwhile the USA seemed to stick firmly to three aims - a Camp David peace, the exclusion of the Soviet Union and an uninterrupted flow
of oil. The Soviet Union seemed equally prepared to interfere with these aims.

  In short, the very dangers of a world war between the superpowers, because either might miscalculate the other’s intentions and actions in the Middle East, were heightened. Indeed the new phase of peacemaking which began in 1982 did bring the USSR and the USA to the brink of war. At times their very rivalry seemed to impede, rather than advance, their policies. Some of the United States’ activities that were designed to keep Soviet influence away from the Middle East had precisely the opposite effect. The US-Israel strategic agreement, unstable though it was, drew even the moderate Arab states into closer association with the Soviet Union, so that in the end it was the fact of US and Soviet involvement in Arabian affairs that narrowed their respective interests into a common one, the promotion of peace and stability in the region.

  It was in 1982 that real progress towards breaking the Palestinian deadlock began to be made. Up to this time the status quo had been maintained, not because it was generally desirable, but because of what seemed to be immovable obstacles to any change. If these obstacles could be weakened or removed, however, a way forward from stalemate might be found. The conditions that had produced this deadlock were many, but they could perhaps be distilled into four major ones. First, no matter what other strategic interests the United States might have had in Middle Eastern, particularly Arab, countries, its continued military and economic support for Israel - as illustrated by intermittent strategic agreement between them - had been such that Israel’s military superiority over the Arab confrontation states had been more or less guaranteed. Second, Israel’s determination to annex the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as East Jerusalem and Golan, was always likely to be totally unacceptable to Arabs and the Moslem world. Third, persistent Arab disunity, notably among those countries that neighboured Israel, simply meant that there was no local threat to Israel, nor would there be until they did unite. In this connection Egypt’s obsession with getting back all of Sinai delayed moves towards unity and (at that time) made negotiations for Palestinian autonomy something of a fraud. Fourth, the PLO’s unwillingness to play what was commonly called its ‘last card’ -that is, recognition of Israel’s right to exist - ruled out the possibility of negotiation between Palestinian leaders whether from the PLO or its National Council, and Israel. These were some of the main obstacles. Weaken or remove them and different circumstances would prevail. It was precisely this process which began in 1982 and led in 1986 to the emergence of the autonomous state of Palestine and a new status for Jerusalem.

  It had been nineteen years earlier, in 1967, that the UN Security Council had agreed Resolution 242. It will be remembered that from the principle of ‘the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war’ the Resolution had called for ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict... to secure and recognized boundaries’ and had stressed the necessity to guarantee ‘the territorial inviolability and political independence of every State in the area’. There were, of course, other matters concerning refugees, demilitarized zones, and freedom of navigation through international waterways, but the Resolution’s architect, Lord Caradon, summarized the two crucial requirements: Israel must be secure and the Palestinians must be free. In the early 1980s certain variations on the theme gathered momentum, in particular Crown Prince Fahd’s eight-point plan. This was put forward in 1981 but was rejected at the Fez summit in the same year. It envisaged:

  (1) Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories occupied in 1967.

  (2) Establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

  (3) UN control of the West Bank and Gaza in the transitional period, which would last only a few months.

  (4) Recognition of the right of Palestinians to repatriation, with compensation for those who did not wish to return.

  (5) Removal of all Israeli settlements established in Arab territory since 1967.

  (6) Guarantee of any agreement by the UN or some of its members.

  (7) Guarantee for all religions to worship freely in the Holy Land.

  (8) Guarantee of the right of all states in the region to live in peace.

  While there were those who dissented from the idea of East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, hoping that a different solution for Jerusalem would emerge, and while the practicability of compensation for non-repatriated Palestinians was questioned, Prince Fahd’s proposals received such substantial and varied support, including that of the authors of the EEC Venice Declaration and of Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan, that they acquired a kind of mantle of authority which led to their general acceptance as a blueprint for peace in the Middle East. This general acceptance had been made easier by concurrent progress on a plan for Lebanon’s future, which was designed to allow Lebanon itself to take over responsibility for its security and to re-establish its political identity. First, the Christian Phalangists by abandoning their association with Israel would be enabled to reinforce the idea of Lebanese nationalist autonomy. At the same time, Palestinian military forces would evacuate the whole of South Lebanon, as would Israeli forces too. Their place would be taken by the UN Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Beirut itself, formerly garrisoned by both Palestinian and Syrian forces, would also be looked after by the newly constituted Lebanese Army. All this would enable the Syrian Army to evacuate Lebanon completely except for the El Bekaa valley bordering Syria itself.

  These processes of military readjustment were intended to assist political realignments so that a central and national Lebanese government, incorporating all parties except Palestinians, could be established. Saudi Arabia’s commitment to and sponsoring of this idea continued to advance its general political position in the Arab world, while it was hoped that Syria’s dependence on the Soviet Union and its former hostility to the Fahd eight-point plan would be further reduced. If there appeared to be little of value in these various comings and goings for the Palestinians themselves, they could at least console themselves with the thought that the inter-relationship between the Saudi and Lebanese plan could lead to more general support for their own national aspirations.

  All this sounded admirable in theory. But it was still theory, and there still had to be found some means of getting once again under way those international initiatives without which there could be no breaking of the deadlock. The key to finding these means lay in Egypt.

  In 1981 and 1982, as had been expected, the newly appointed Egyptian President continued with the Camp David peace process in order to regain the whole of Sinai, yet he tried to reconcile this process, which required the co-operation of the United States and Israel, with a move back into the moderate Arab camp. At the same time, Israel itself had been tempted to slow down the hand-over of Sinai in order to gain time to judge further influences and policies. Such temptations, however, were removed by intense pressure from both the United States and Western Europe. Indeed the United States, which had already given some indication of future intentions by further military assistance to Saudi Arabia following the AWACS deal in 1981, made it clear that the balance of military aid could switch away from Israel to Arabia if the Sinai were not handed back on time. There was not yet any progress from Camp David to a proper re-assessment of how both the PLO and Israel could be persuaded to acknowledge each other’s rights in order to pave the way for negotiations on the lines of Prince Fahd’s plan. Once all the Sinai had been handed back to Egypt, however, and a peacekeeping force, which included Third World, American and European troops, had been established, a new set of circumstances emerged.

  In 1982, with the Sinai back in Egyptian hands and the so-called normalization of Egyptian-Israeli relations still proceeding, the Saudi Arabian Sheikh Faisal Abdullah, who had long been working for a rapprochement between Egypt and his own country, succeeded in arranging a meeting between the Crown Prince and the President of Egypt. It took place in Geneva and was to set in train a series of events which, unlik
e all previous initiatives, began to break the Palestinian deadlock. In essence the policy they agreed upon was that Arab unity would as far as possible be restored. Disruptive movements, such as Moslem fundamentalism or adventurism in the Sahara, would be controlled by friendly, or if this failed, unfriendly persuasion. Given a degree of Arab unity, irresistible pressure should be brought to bear in two quarters: first on Israel, through the United States, to make the Israelis sit down and negotiate the future of an autonomous Palestine; secondly on the PLO, to oblige it to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and thus also sit down at the negotiating table. The weapon to be used against the United States and thus its Western allies would, of course, be oil. In simple terms, the bargaining would be: no Palestine, no oil. This position had to be taken seriously and a settlement based on it did in the end come about. But the voices of those not present at the Geneva meeting still had to be heard. The principal voices, both demanding and entitled to be heard, were those of the United States, Israel, Libya, Jordan, Syria and the Soviet Union.

  During the remaining months of 1982 and the early ones of the following year these voices made themselves heard in various bilateral and multilateral meetings, and in doing so helped to shape the final outcome. We must shortly consider the way in which the United States was persuaded to sponsor a formula for peace, broadly acceptable to the bulk of the Arab nations and to which Israel could be obliged to submit. We must also examine how the Soviet Union took a hand in the game which all but brought the superpowers to a direct clash in the very area they were seeking to pacify. But first, we must clear out of the way two other obstacles which were impeding solution to the central problem. The first was Libya, the second Iran.