Digging in the Sand Pit: America's New Longest War

While it may be hard to believe, our deep political involvement in the Middle East is of fairly recent origin. Prior to World War II, it was practically limited to a few oil wells and a small missionary presence scattered here and there. During the war, planning air routes for the immediate future and long-range needs engaged some policymakers in the Pentagon, while the biggest political question became the issue of a Jewish homeland. For FDR at the end of the war, and for all his successors down to today, how to reconcile the Arab world to the presence of Israel became a permanent dilemma. As the Cold War developed after the Truman Doctrine, the United States began sending arms and military advisers to practically all the countries; and Eisenhower intervened in a major way twice: first, in 1953, to put the Shah of Iran back on his peacock throne, and again in 1957 to force the British and French, with their new ally Israel, to pull back from Egypt.

It can be argued that, with the exodus of the old colonial powers from the scene, the United States essentially took over guardianship of the West's interest in keeping the oil flowing out by building up local constabularies to manage affairs within the various sheikdoms and monarchies. Largely, however, this was a task accomplished from afar, even if it was not always done. There was one small troop landing in Lebanon in 1958; but the American soldiers, welcomed ashore by ice-cream vendors, left soon afterwards.

All that has changed in the last three decades. Today we are engaged in two wars at the same time, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan—and, potentially, a much larger military entanglement in Pakistan. One can gauge the depth of the involvement several ways: by counting the number of new books coming out each year, by counting the number of soldiers and private contractors, or by adding up the square feet of new military bases and the size of the new American embassy in Baghdad, currently planned to be as large as the Vatican or two-thirds of the Washington, D.C. mall. Even after American troops are cut down to 50,000, the embassy will be a well-protected outpost and nerve center for all the various activities required to sustain a constant level of oversight of Iraqi affairs.

How did it all happen so quickly? Scott Kaufman surveys the Carter Administration's foreign policy and comes away with the not-very-surprising conclusion that Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, had a lot to do with it. For "Zbig," the Arc of Crisis, as he liked to call it, which extended from South Asia to the Horn of Africa to the Persian Gulf and above, was a perfect way to enlist the Chinese in his campaign against the overextended Russian Empire, the new sick man of Europe. Brzezinski preached the gospel of linkage, as opposed to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who wished to get on with the business of curbing the nuclear-arms race. At times, President Carter seemed not to grasp what he had allowed to be created within his administration: a Janus-faced foreign policy that confused everyone, friends and foes alike. In his run for the presidency, campaign aides told him that pushing the cause of universal human rights was a no-lose proposition; but that turned out not to be the case at all. He made enemies on both the right and the left, as each side had a favorite country either to include or exclude from the long list of violators. Carter appeared genuinely surprised...