By Sean Malloy
The US pressed for a peace agreement between Israel and the PLO as part of consolidating its own interests in the Middle East, argues Joe Stork, editor of Middle East Report. In an interview with Green Left Weekly, Stork explained his view of the global political factors that pushed the agreement to the fore.
The end of an era of two rival superpowers with the collapse of the Soviet Union "is one factor that has affected the Middle East and particular states that have been adversaries of Israel, affected the PLO and constituent forces within the PLO", says Stork.
"The other factor that has affected the Arab environment is the economic factor. This is partly related to the end of the Cold War, but not entirely. It is also related to the failure of economic managers of the Arab states to take advantage of a period of relative wealth, relative liquidity, in terms of oil revenues, in constructing viable productive economic systems.
"The region as a whole is every bit as impoverished as it was 20 to 25 years ago in many respects."
Stork says that since 1986, Arab countries have been experiencing a sharp decline of standards of living and GNP.
"This certainly has had an impact on the residents of the occupied territories and the Palestinian communities in general."
Stork sees the agreement between the PLO and Israel in the context of the United States project of consolidating its interests in the Middle East at a time of world recession and new economic rivalries.
"The US sees the Persian Gulf region as an area that it absolutely must continue to control and have immediate access to economically and militarily in terms of constituting a world power and its ability to compete with Japan and Europe."
However, the US has to deal with "very fragile political structures in the Persian Gulf region", says Stork. It confronts "the emergence of regimes in Iran and Iraq which over the last 10 years have proved perfectly capable, at a certain level, of challenging US power or at least causing complications for US exercise of power.
"I think the US expects that the Persian Gulf will be an area of military conflict over the course of the next decade. If you look at the redeployment of US military forces over the last three or four years, you see withdrawal from every part of the globe except the Middle East, where we see something like a 30% increase in US troops, military equipment, naval forces and so on.
"If that conflict arises, they don't want to have the relationship with the Saudis, with the Jordanians, with the smaller Gulf states, complicated by a festering Israeli-Palestinian problem."
Up to the time of the Gulf War, says Stork, the US wasn't really interested in an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the Gulf War, however, the US push for an agreement was real.
"They got serious after the Gulf War because, although Saddam Hussein and Iraq were pretty easy to deal with in military terms, the political challenge that Saddam Hussein represented, the appeal that Saddam Hussein had amongst Palestinians and amongst Arabs and throughout the third world, was something that took the US aback.
"Amongst Palestinians and other Arabs, there was broad disagreement and condemnation of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, but support for Iraq in its confrontation in the US. This had its impact on US policy makers and strategists.
"The process of getting [Yitzhak] Shamir and the Likud government to Madrid brought up the whole issue of the loan guarantees, allowed the US to fairly openly manipulate and strong-arm the Israeli government. In effect, it helped bring about a change of government in Israel from Likud to Labour, a government that was much more amenable to the new US agenda."
Stork sees a continuity of foreign policy between the Bush and Clinton administrations.
"The US is going to continue to make its weight felt in the negotiations that will go on under the auspices of this agreement. I see no reason for the US to change its extremely pro-Israel approach in terms of how it mediates in these discussions."
[The Middle East Report is the journal of the Middle East Research & Information Project (MERIP), based in Washington, DC, USA.]