Gore's grasp on Mideast issue shaky

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): If this were a Victorian melodrama or a Russian novel, we would now have reached the point where one of the fallen hero's closest friends (Al Gore?) walks in, places a loaded revolver on the table, and tells him to do 'the honorable thing'. But even if Bill Clinton resigns, will it make much difference to the world?

It would give President Gore three years to establish himself in his own right before seeking re-election in November 2000. He could not achieve much in domestic policy because he would still face a hostile Congress (unless there is a miracle in this year's Congressional elections), but foreign policy would be wide open.

Right now, the White House's political influence abroad is at a fifty-year low. Post-Cold War Europe has less need of American help, and Asia, in the midst of a terrifying financial crisis, pays more attention to American moneymen than American politicians. Washington's own short attention span for African and Latin American issues (about ten minutes) limits its role there.

But the Middle East is different. It is less important than any of the other regions in terms of population, wealth, and resources, but the close American links to Israel plus the long- running psychodramas with Iraq and Iran give the Middle East a huge emotional importance in domestic American politics. This is where Gore could make a real splash.

At the end of the Gulf War in 1991, the United States was the sole and undisputed great power in the whole region, with huge influence in every state except Iran. The steep fall in American influence since then is mostly due to Clinton's paralysis on the core issue of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. If Gore were to take a different line on that, it could all come back very fast.

Gore's first post-Clinton decision would not be on Arab- Israeli affairs, however, but on Iraq.

At the moment it's all still bluff and bluster: "There'll be one final round of diplomacy, and then an ultimatum, and then we act," said a U.S. National Security Council official on Jan. 24, predicting an early military strike against Iraq. Getting into the spirit of the occasion, the Iraqi newspaper Babel (owned by Saddam Hussein's son Uday) replied: "To turn attention away from his personal scandal, it is not farfetched that Clinton would undertake a military stupidity against Iraq."

And sure enough, there was Bill Clinton on television two weeks ago warning Americans: "Think how many people can be killed by just a tiny bit of anthrax...It's not just that Saddam might put it on a Scud and send it to the city he wants to destroy. Think about all the terrorists and other bad actors who could parade through Baghdad and pick up their stores if we don't take action."

If you can't win the argument, change the subject. But an attack on Iraq is now such an obvious diversion, so heavily discounted in advance, that it unlikely to happen under Clinton: 'Zippergate' protects Saddam Hussein. Whereas Al Gore could order the same strikes against Iraq and reap enormous political credit domestically. Nor would he necessarily pay a big price elsewhere.

At the moment, a U.S. strike against Saddam Hussein's 'presidential compounds', the eight sites containing hundreds of buildings that Saddam has declared off-limits to United Nations inspection teams seeking his biological weapons production and storage facilities, would meet with almost universal condemnation.

China, Russia and France would far rather end sanctions against Iraq and do lucrative business deals with the Iraqi regime; they have consistently argued against using military force against Saddam on the UN Security Council. The Arab world is so frustrated by America's failure to hold Israel to its commitments under the Oslo peace accords that it would erupt in fury if U.S. forces attacked a fellow Arab state, even deeply unloved Iraq.

But if a newly elevated Al Gore ordered the same strikes, and accompanied them with hints of a harder line against Israel and a softer one on Iran, the reaction in the Middle East would be very different. Nobody in the region really loves Saddam Hussein.

Could a Gore administration take the risk of reconciliation with Iran? The door is open, in the sense that Iranian President Mohammed Khatemi, elected last year by a landslide vote, has already made the initial overtures in public. It has been almost 20 years since the hostage incident at the American embassy in Tehran, and it is probably politically safe to close the books on it now.

More importantly, could Gore do what Clinton never dared, and bring real political pressure on Israel to honor its agreement with the Palestinians? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is so brazenly contemptuous of Clinton that he spent most of his recent visit to the U.S. patronizing extreme right-wing talks shows that have made a career of slandering the beleaguered president, but it was never clear if Clinton's timidity was wholly rational.

Most American Jews vote, and most of them vote Democratic, so it is certainly important for a Democratic presidential candidate not to alienate them. Increasingly, the Political Action Committees and other fund-raising bodies within the Jewish community have come under the influence of hard-line ultra- Zionists who back Netanyahu all the way, and they scared the pants off Clinton.

But there is a gulf between these PACs and mainstream opinion among American Jews, which is deeply concerned about where Netanyahu's militant policies are taking Israel. An adroit political operator could exploit that gulf to fashion a new American strategy in the Middle East, and build himself an impressive reputation as a peacemaker in the process.

There is some doubt whether Al Gore could be that man: 'adroit political operator' is not the phrase that springs to mind when his name comes up. But Bill Clinton's early departure from the scene would change everything in the Middle East -- and the first person to feel the effect of the change would certainly be Saddam Hussein.