What Is Right Is in U.S. Interests

Discussing what role the United States should play in the Middle East in an ideal world is difficult because the Middle East is probably further from an ideal world than any other region on the planet. Nevertheless, evaluating what has and has not worked--and examining some powerful myths about U.S. involvement in the area--helps show what a relatively optimal policy would be.

Fundamentally, the United States can best play a role in the region by properly pursuing its own interests, which are generally reasonable and basically beneficial to the Middle East. These broad interests include promoting a stable peace and avoiding war, rejecting extremism, fighting terrorism, encouraging democracy and human rights, helping allies, promoting economic development, and seeking to maintain a high level of U.S. influence. In an area where so many forces seek to promote war, instability, and violence, these goals are very relevant.

At the same time, however, doing the right thing--one might say, doing the necessary thing--does not make the United States popular. Ironically, in the Middle East many countries want the United States to behave as it currently does--and benefit from those policies themselves--yet they seek domestic and regional gain by endlessly criticizing these U.S. policies.

To cite one of the most important examples of this system, Persian Gulf Arab monarchies enjoy U.S. protection from Iran and Iraq while often distancing themselves from U.S. policy stances. Egypt, the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid ($2 billion annually), usually attacks and rarely helps promote U.S. efforts in the Middle East, where trying, and often succeeding, to have one's cake and eat it too is a normal state of affairs.

The public reaction to U.S. policies should not be the yardstick for measuring these strategies' correctness or even the actual local attitudes toward them. Three anecdotes from Iran make this point. In 1946, a U.S. diplomat asked an Iranian newspaper editor why he always attacked U.S., and never Russian, policies. "The Russians kill people [who criticize them]," he responded. In other words, speaking ill of U.S. policy is safe and profitable while criticizing one's own government, that of other Arab states, or that of more vengeful foreigners is dangerous.

On the eve of the seizure of the U.S. embassy by Islamic militants after the 1979 revolution, the U.S. chief of mission wrote in an official dispatch that he had just finished a typical meeting with the new government's officials. They spent the first hour berating the United States and then asked for visas for their relatives.

Finally, a security officer who was held hostage told me that he concluded that the long lines of people waiting to visit the embassy convinced Iranian leaders that the bilateral relationship had to be destroyed, lest many of the revolt's key participants turn to the United States for help in gaining power for themselves. In short, to those in authority, the potential popularity of the United States--including its cultural invasion--is frightening.

Another example can be seen on the other side of the Gulf. For years, Kuwait and other Gulf monarchies harshly criticized the United States and said they opposed any U.S. involvement in the region. Yet, when the spillover of violence from the Iran-Iraq War threatened them in the late 1980s, they did not hesitate to ask the United States to put U.S. flags on their oil tankers and then to protect them from Iraq when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Once the crisis was over, however, and the United States had saved them, they reverted--publicly at least--to traditional attitudes. Nevertheless, they always know that the United States is waiting just over the horizon to rescue them again if the need arises.

Ideology might trump interests when rhetoric is involved, but this truism does not apply to the actual behavior inspired...