Professor Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development

at the University of Maryland; Senior Fellow, Brookings Institute

When you start asking questions about American foreign policy, you will find that the answers are extremely complex. One could say, for example, that the American national interest in the Middle East is oil, which explains, or so it would seem, why the US is willing to put forces in the Gulf and why it was prepared to risk going to war in 1991. On the other hand, the fact that oil is America’s national interest in the Middle East is not so obvious because when you actually look at the military budget, you find that the US spends between US$50-90 billion a year on Gulf defense; clearly, you could afford to have the oil prices doubled and still be better off not having any military presence at all! This means that you have to ask questions about how you came to the conclusion that the need to protect America’s oil supplies requires having forces in the Gulf. So even when you start off with a concept that seems so clear - in this case, the idea that America’s greatest interest since the end of the Cold War has been oil - one should still refrain from rushing to make hasty conclusions. Although Americans believe that oil is the most important commodity, it is not oil that tells them what to do, nor is it oil that tells them to have military forces in the Gulf.

In order to think about how the American political system generates the idea that we are better off having a force in the Gulf, one has to understand how the American political system operates and how it generates such ideas. This is particularly important today, when the US is preparing to go to war against Iraq, even when many of the specialists in the area think that this is a bad idea, even from the American interest point of view. There is not much debate in the US about the pros and cons of going to war, the vast majority of the American public and members of Congress having simply assumed, according to automatic thinking, that it is the best thing to do in the absence of any successful diplomatic efforts. Any debate that does occur is restricted to the level of aggression and the basic objectives, not the question of the rights and wrongs of going to war in the first place; that question was answered very early on.

When studying the political dynamics that lead the government to make decisions that are hard to explain, one soon discovers that it is often not at all obvious why the US is doing what it is doing. Moreover, having developed a sense of the American political system internally where foreign policy is most often domestic politics, particularly since the end of the Cold War, one’s tendency to believe in conspiracy theories gradually disappears. I wish American politicians were clever enough to devise conspiracies; that might not be too bad, given the fact that most of the time, there is no rationale for the policies as they are implemented.

When you look at the American political system as an outsider, it often appears very striking. At the moment, for example, almost all the world is puzzled why the President is being dragged into court because of a supposed sexual advance that he made toward Paula Jones - forget about Lewinski - when he was still only governor; apparently he proposed that they do something and she refused, and that was the end of the matter, but now she is taking him to court, claiming that in her estimation, the fact that she turned down his advances damaged her chances of promotion. The whole thing is unbelievable! A President, who is popular with the people, is being dragged into court with all that this entails emotionally and in terms of taking up the time of the most powerful man in the world, and he is as powerless as any other citizen, the one exception being that he has access to more resources to fight in terms of the legal system. He is being dragged into a court as helpless as the next man and the fact that he is President does not help him because the Supreme Court ruled that his position as President should not preclude his being taken to court. And then we have the Lewinski case, where a Congressional oversight resulted in Congress appointing an independent prosecutor to investigate the President to make sure that he has neither abused his power nor otherwise broken the law. Why? Because what the founding fathers of the American political system feared more than anything else was the abuse of power. They disapproved of the monarchs that prevailed in most of the world and the first thing they wanted to guarantee was that in America, no single man or center of power would be able to dominate the others. They wanted to create a balance between institutional effectiveness and reducing the chance of tyranny, and that was how the American political system was created.

The Constitution was based on four principles that were as important then as they are today. The principles are as follows:

Republicanism: Republicanism is opposed to monarchy and evolved from the idea that the elected representatives of the people should be the ones to make decisions, meaning that ultimately the power is the power of the people through representation. American Republicanism has become more and more dominant in the political system over time; the public has much more input in all branches of government than it ever did before, which explains why the centers of power are looking more and more alike.

Federalism: What was intended was not to create a unitary central government, but to have some devolution of power and a balance between states and local power and central power in the federal government. There is an interesting relationship in the American political system between the power of the individual states and the central federal government, which has authority for some issues in all of the US.

The Principle of Separation of Powers: This particular separation is the one that was designed especially to prevent any single center of power from dominating. The idea behind it was that you should have three different branches of government with different functions:

The legislative branch, i.e., Congress, which has sole responsibility for making federal laws, the making of laws being its only purpose.

The executive branch, which is essentially the Presidency as a chief executor of laws. Its functions were not very clearly articulated except in certain areas. The President was declared commander in chief of the armed forces, making him the highest-ranking person in the military with responsibility for making executive decisions. He also has the power to receive ambassadors, which ultimately means he has the power to recognize states. In this respect one is reminded of the quick presidential decision of President Truman in 1948, whereby he recognized Israel in spite of the opposition of most centers of power around him.

The judicial branch, i.e., the federal court system, which is totally independent from Congress and from the President. Its basic function is to interpret the laws passed by Congress. The courts have the power to invalidate congressional or presidential actions by declaring them contrary to the constitution, federal laws or treaties.

Although the branches have different functions in the system, there is much more power sharing than power separation, which has been the case throughout America’s history. Moreover, all three branches are responsive to public opinion: the President because he is elected directly; members of Congress because they are elected by the public and are therefore affected by public opinion; and the courts because, even though they are supposed to be almost entirely unaffected by public opinion, they are ultimately affected. There are some states where judges are actually elected, and there is an ongoing debate as to whether this should be allowed, taking into account that it could undermine their ability to separate between public opinion and the law. At the federal level, however, the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate appoints them all.

In terms of the way the power has been shared, the most interesting example is the issue of war making. The US Constitution empowers Congress with the sole power to make or declare war, but in practice, this is not the way things have worked out. Presidents have been able to find other ways than declaring war to drag the US into actual war while agreements between the President and Congress and various new laws, such as the 1973 War Powers Act, have in fact given the executive the right to go into battle without first declaring war.

During the Cold War period, i.e., 1948 to 1989, the American political system went through dramatic changes simply because the Soviet Union was perceived by Americans as being a huge threat to the US; that fear was used by different presidents to manipulate the system and build a huge national security bureaucracy to defend their interests and enable them to gain more power at the expense of Congress. Presidents have often used foreign policy crises to draw power away from Congress because when people think they are about to go to war, they become more nationalistic and that draws the power more towards the President. When in 1950, President Truman sent the troops to Korea without declaring war on Korea, he called it a ‘policing action’. Ultimately 30,000 Americans died; war was never declared, and Congressional authorization was not acquired, simply because Truman had decided to call the whole thing a policing action.

An even more striking example is the Vietnam War where the power was passed from Kennedy, to Johnson, to Nixon while hundreds of thousands of American soldiers became causalities in a war - probably the worst in American history - that had never been declared, and which had never received the authorization of Congress. Partly because of Vietnam, 1973 witnessed the passing of a law that demanded that Congress be consulted whenever the government sends a large number of troops into a foreign country. Even then, the President was given the authority to send forces and inform the Congress within a 48-hour period if he thought that this was in the national security of the US. Of course, should this happen, by the end of the 48-hour period and with the troops already on the ground, public opinion will always support the decision. In spite of the fact that this was not the intention, the President does have a tremendous amount of power, and although it was probably intended that only Congress could send forces to fight an offensive war, whereas a President could send forces to fight defensive wars if danger was imminent, the reality is somewhat different.

It is interesting that Bush felt he needed congressional approval to go to war against Iraq. At the time, we witnessed probably the most interesting congressional debate to have occurred in recent years with people asking some very serious questions about whether American troops should be committed or not, and it was a very close vote. Every president, including Bush, has argued that there was not really the need for congressional approval for war, so what Bush in fact was saying was that he would prefer to have congressional approval, even though he felt that he had the right to go ahead without it. Today, President Clinton is saying the same thing, and the reason why we are not likely to see war this week is not because of Kofi Anan going to Baghdad, but because Congress is out this week; I do not think Clinton, in this divided international coalition, is going to go without congressional approval when he is almost certain to get it.

There is clearly a separation of power between the presidency and Congress, but there are also checks and balances; the current investigation of President Clinton is a good example, as is the attempt to impeach President Nixon in the 1970s; Congress had the power to ask questions and to investigate, and if he was found to have violated American Law, it had the power to impeach him, i.e., to remove him from office. This has never happened, by the way, and Nixon ultimately resigned. The Judicial Committee in the Congress voted to have him impeached, but there was not a full vote and Nixon decided to resign before the full vote was taken.

Impeachment can also be applied to federal judges who, once appointed by a president and approved by the Senate, become judges for life. Obviously judges can be criminals too. There was a judge, for example, who was convicted of tax evasion but refused to resign, saying I will pay my dues, but it is your duty to keep me as a judge forever, which, according to the law, was correct; there was nothing that said a convicted judge should be removed, so Congress was obliged to obtain a two-third majority vote to impeach him.

Although the President has much more power than Congress, especially with regard to foreign policy, no one is totally independent. The President has the right to appoint a judge, but the Senate has to approve the appointment, and if it does not, the appointment is invalid. It should be noted, however, that the President has the edge because he can say if you turn down my first candidate, I still have another candidate who is a Democrat like me. It is part of politics.

Where it becomes really interesting is at the Supreme Court of the US, which is the highest court of the land. What is decided there cannot be overturned except by the Supreme Court itself. In essence its judges decide the law unless a new law is legislated by Congress to supercede it. The Supreme Court hears about 175 cases a year from the 4,200 presented to it. Most of these cases come to the Court from the federal courts of appeal or to the state courts of last resort. Each case must raise an issue covered under the Constitution, federal laws or treaties. For the cases the Supreme Court refuses to hear lower court decisions stand. Four or more (of the nine) Supreme Court Justices must agree that a case warrants their consideration for it to be placed on their docket. The solicitor general, a presidential appointee and the third-ranking official in the US Department of Justice represents the federal government in suggesting whether cases should be granted or denied reviews. The justices undoubtedly also look for clues in the requests for review that a case is particularly important.

About 15 cases heard by the Supreme Court each year come to it under its ‘original jurisdiction’ or authority to hear before any other court "all cases affecting Ambassadors, other Public Minister and Consuls, and those in which a state shall be a Party" (Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution). The Court's review of all its cases results in about 140 signed opinions a year. Few Supreme Court decisions make national news, as most are not of interest to the general public, but some are so important they cause uproar among those who disagree with them and affect the lives of millions of Americans, such as ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ in which the Supreme Court ruled in 1956 against racial segregation in public schools and in the Roe v. Wade case and related abortion decisions, in which the Supreme Court extended the right to privacy to include a woman's right to an abortion early in pregnancy. The decisions of the Supreme Court became the precedents lower court judges use to rule in similar cases.

For more than 200 years, the Supreme Court has had the power to invalidate federal laws, but has done so only about 100 times. Although their most-publicized rulings are controversial, they rarely depart from majority sentiment. Presidents and Congress know that actions taken for political reasons can be reversed by the Supreme Court, as when President Nixon refused to hand over the Watergate claims after he had been subpoenaed. The Court denied his claim of executive privilege.

We have a case now where Congress and the President got together and decided on new legislation, the so-called ‘Line Item Veto’. The US budget is passed by Congress, but the problem is, every Congressman is trying to protect his or her personal interest or his district’s interest, so they try to make bargains; a Congressman from Illinois who wants a road to be built to a certain town will put that in the US budget whilst promising some kind of an advantage to someone in Ohio, and so they make all these little deals and the system is unable to do anything about it. In order to get out of this mess, it was decided that the President should be given the right to veto specific lines in the budget. The Congress and the President passed that law because it was a sensible thing to do, but other groups took it to the Supreme Court, which decided it was illegal. That is how the system operates in those arenas.

At least building roads is a good cause, but sometimes you find things much worse than building roads brought into these laws, usually because a particular member of Congress has been promised a lot of money by someone with a vested interest in seeing it included. All Representatives do it, which is why they do not want to see things changed. In addition to the big lines, they always hide a couple of extra little things here and there in order to get somebody’s vote or support. A tremendous amount of federal money is wasted on projects that make no sense, but one has to remember that the one priority of each member of Congress is to get reelected; that is what drives them, and it is the most dominant theory in American congressional politics.

Most of the appointments in the judiciary branch are political ones. People are rarely appointed as federal judges unless they are very well known and accomplished lawyers, and there are always political issues involved. Clearly there is a lot of interdependence, and the separation of powers is a myth. A president does not know most of the people appointed to be judges, but simply follows the recommendations of the Justice Department. What really matters most is Supreme Court appointments because these nine judges make the big decisions. Supreme Court judges are chosen for life, and usually they are appointed late in their career. Filling vacancies gives Presidents influence on the legal system long past the end of their own terms. Candidates are subject to intense scrutiny by the Senate and the media.

I will now give a brief description of Congress, the executive branch and the courts. The Congress is an interesting institution that was established through bargaining, which characterizes the rest of American politics. As the Founding Fathers were deciding on a constitution, they were trying to figure out what kind of legislative body they wanted. The small states of the Union wanted every state to have the same number of representatives as the big states whereas the big states wanted proportional representation, so they bargained back and forth until they decided to have two houses: a Senate with an equal number from each state and the House of Representatives, with proportional representation, meaning that today, the Senate has 100 members, two from each of the 50 states. What is really interesting is that the House of Representatives started out with only 65 members or so, making it much smaller than the Senate but as the US grew, the number of members grew until there were 435. Naturally, this undermines their power: if you are one out of 435, you have much less power than you would have if you were one out 65 members. It eventually became very hard to manage such a huge institution, which resulted in a decision being made to limit the number of members to 435. Today, representation is still proportional but recalculations are done based on the national census every ten years. If California becomes bigger and New York becomes relatively smaller, then they simply take away some members from New York and give their places to representatives of California. Each representative is elected by a specific congressional district, in most cases an area within each state, but some states with low populations have at least one representative.

The members of the House of Representatives are elected every two years. The original idea was to allow for a good relationship with the constituency, but that was before it became obvious that the representatives were becoming more reliant on the money constituency than they were on securing the votes of the voting constituency. Each member of Congress is obliged to spend hours and hours on the phone, day and night, speaking to constituents and to people who can bring money in for the campaign. They literally finish one election one day and start working toward the next straight away, thanks to the two-year term. The system is different in the Senate, where every member is elected for a six-year term and elections are staggered so that you have only one third of the members standing for election every two years.

In essence, there really is not that much difference between the House and Senate; laws are passed by both. The House has exclusive right to impeach, i.e., formally charge federal officials such as the President and federal judges with serious crimes, but the Senate acts as the court to try impeachments. The Senate must approve important federal appointments (e.g. judges, ambassadors) and must approve treaties. When the Founding Fathers created the US, they seemed to think that bills, i.e., new laws dealing with money, are important because they have to do with raising funds, so they gave the right to propose such laws only to the House. In fact, this was a meaningless distinction because any law still requires votes by both the House and the Senate. In general, either of them can pass a law, but once it has been passed in one chamber it needs to passed to the other, which means that both chambers have to negotiate the exact terms of the law because they both need to pass it, based on exactly the same wording. Not surprisingly a lot of negotiations take place between the House and the Senate whenever a new bill is proposed, and only when a law is modified by the Senate to the liking of the House will it finally become effective.

In order for a law to be passed it needs a two-third majority, but it is also possible to have laws passed with a simple majority in both houses if the President signs the bill. The President, however, has the right to veto the law, in which case Congress has two choices. One choice is to say we do not like your veto, and they say that by having a two-third majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, i.e., they say we override your veto, and the law passes anyway, although it rarely happens that way. What happens usually is that they enter negotiations; they will ask, what will it take for you to support this bill? The President will then say, if you make this change, then I will approve it, and they begin to bargain. In other words, it comes down to power sharing most of the time. The House negotiates with the Senate and then they both negotiate with the President. The whole thing is about bargaining.

Each house is organized into a majority party and minority party, each with its own leadership. Today, we have a Republican majority leadership and a Democratic minority leadership. Each chamber is broken into committees, for example, the Agricultural Committee and the International Affairs Committee, after which come the sub-committees. Typically, a law is first proposed to the sub-committee, after which it goes through the committee in the Senate for vote.

The rules on committees vary. In general, a chairman of a committee used to be able to also chair a sub-committee but this changed recently when the Republicans won the majority, which is one reason why the Sub-Committee on Europe and the Middle East was abolished. One naturally assumes that the sub-committee was erased because it was not needed or for the sake of saving money, but the truth of the matter is that there was a Republican Congressman named Benjamin Gilman who had tremendous interest in the Middle East. Gilman is from New York and he has a very substantial Jewish constituency including an orthodox community that cares a lot about Israel. Because he was chairman of the International Affairs Committee, he could not become chairman of the sub-committee on Europe and the Middle East, so he simply decided to abolish the committee and bring up all the issues of the Middle East in the context of the International Affairs Committee. The fact that one man decided to abolish the entire sub-committee for his personal interest was never questioned because the leadership was perfectly happy to eliminate a committee that was both time-consuming and costly.

It should be noted that although members can be members in more than one committee, they are not allowed to chair more than one committee. In the main committees, there are usually 40-50 members, whereas in the sub-committees the number is usually somewhere between 15 and 20. Some committees are more desirable than others are. One would probably assume that the most desirable committee in Congress is the International Affairs Committee, but actually, no one is really interested in joining because Americans, in general, do not care about foreign affairs. It should be remembered that committees are extremely important for shaping congressional policy.

With regard to the presidency, we think of the presidency mostly as the President, but the President has executive institutions, which are very important. The President is supposedly elected directly by all Americans, unlike the members of Congress who are elected by district. The Senators of course are elected by the state because they represent the state, so if you live in California, you have the right to vote for two senators, but if you are voting for a member of the House of Representatives, you only vote for the one who represents your district because it is a smaller-scale event.

Although Americans vote for the president in a nation-wide election, he is actually elected by what is called an electoral college; the college is proportional, so every state can choose a certain number of electors, which depends on the population of the state, to join an electoral college. Anyone can run for the Electoral College, and once selected, the electors go into a meeting and vote for a President. The original idea was that in theory, the elector would decide which presidential candidate should receive his vote and the community would have enough faith in him, a member of an educated elite, to respect his choice. What happened, however, is that because of increased democracy, the public did not accept the idea of voting for someone without knowing who he was going to vote for, and now everyone running for the electoral college states who he is going to vote for.

The number of electors is somewhere in the hundreds. It is not particularly meaningful because in essence you are voting for the President, and not for the elector. The entire system is nothing but a way of being faithful to the Constitution without being faithful to the Constitution, so to speak.

It should be noted that presidential elections generally coincide with other elections, such as the election of members of Congress, which take place every two years, one third of the senators, and sometimes even a governor of the state, so when you go to the ballot box, you could possibly find six or seven offices to be filled, including, in some instances, a district attorney or local official. Even if you do not know the candidates at the local level, it is easy to find out who is Democrat and who is Republican and make your choice accordingly.

A President can hold office for a maximum two terms. It sometimes happens that a president will not finish his term. Nixon, for example, was forced to resign before the end of his term and to hand over control to his vice president Gerald Ford, who later ran as a Republican candidate and lost to Jimmy Carter. The vice president is elected too (one must vote for the running mate of the presidential candidate one prefers), and if a president serves out his full term, the vice president usually becomes his party's leading candidate in the next presidential election. This means that the American public wants to know who is running for vice president because there is always a good chance that a president might not finish his term and they want to know who will take over. It is clear that the position of vice president is a token position; most of the time, vice presidents are simply waiting for their chance to take over, although they keep very busy, laying the foundations to generate funds for the next elections. Gore, for example, is busy grooming himself for the presidency and attempting to secure greater support.

In general, the President does not govern individually; apart from Congress you have bureaucracies - the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Treasury Department, and so forth. The President does, however, have enormous power because it is he who appoints the heads of all these departments: the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, and every single cabinet secretary. But the Senate has to approve each of the appointments and it occasionally prevents someone from being chosen. The President will almost always appoint somebody from within his own party, although the present Secretary of Defense, William Cohen is actually a Republican who was appointed because the President wanted to have some token Republicans in his cabinet, although this particular appointment was not so ‘token’ because it involves an extremely important position.

Each of these departments is huge. The Defense Department, the Pentagon, is the largest single bureaucracy in the US government with one million employees, excluding the military forces. Health and Human Services, meanwhile, has something like 225,000 people working for it. In contrast, the State Department has a relatively small workforce of some 25,000 people.

As to salaries, they vary from very low to extremely high. You can make US$100,000 in federal jobs. But if you need a new Secretary of the Treasury you want to bring someone with tremendous experience, and it is hard to tell someone in the industry who is making US$2 million per year as a Chairman of the Board of General Motors or something similar that you are going to offer him US$100,000 or US$200,000 a year and that he is forbidden from doing anything on the side because of a conflict of interests.

With regard to the National Security Council, it is a relatively new institution that only really formalized during the Kennedy administration. Every President has had advisors around him separate from the State Department and other departments. Each department has its own bureaucracy. Every bureaucracy includes political appointees. These professional bureaucrats are usually experts in their field, and it is they who give advice to the Secretary, who is usually a person trusted by the President. Generally speaking, most presidents do not fully trust bureaucrats because the bureaucracy consists of one million people and professionals with different party affiliations. Realizing that it is not possible to have control over them, presidents try to have their own appointed staff of just a few people around them, and that is how the idea of the National Security Council emerged. Today, the President has a National Security Advisor and a small staff that advises on certain issues that are important to the US but do not require Congressional approval. Unlike in a bureaucracy, you control money, you have a budget and you run people. As a member of the small White House staff, you are basically a counsel to the President, who makes the decisions as to what to do with your advice. Incidentally, the White House is connected from underneath to a building standing next to it called the Old Executive Building, which is where the staff works.

Professor Shibley Telhami

Who decides in America? What is the American political system really all about? This is best understood by focusing on its republican and pluralist aspects and, to a lesser extent, on Congress and lobbies. Many people have the not totally unjustified impression that much of what happens in the US with regard to the Middle East happens because of the role played by American Jews. Indeed, this is quite true. But what is so puzzling is that American Jews constitute only 2.5 percent of the population. Why, then, do American Jews have a significant influence on Middle East policy when their number is so low?

When discussing the role of domestic politics, i.e., lobbies or organized groups that try to influence congressional decisions, people mention, for example, AIPAC - the American-Israel Political Action Committee - as being extremely important. However, taking into account that the organization’s budget is around US$20 million per annum, it is difficult to understand why the American political system is so responsive to AIPAC and not to organizations such as oil companies, which would think nothing about spending far more than US$20 million if they thought it would affect a decision in Congress. In spite of their access to large sums of money, oil companies could not arrange a deal with Iran, nor could they have policy reversed on certain other issues. Why? If lobbies matter, what is it about lobbies that matters?

The idea that American democracy means that a majority prevails is an absolute myth. The American political system was not designed to be about majority rule, but about a system of pluralism, whereby a majority of people prevail on issues they consider important. It is not about the majority of Americans being questioned on every single issue of foreign policy, but about the issues with which they are most concerned. The Chicago Council for Foreign Relations Survey confirmed that if you ask the vast majority of Americans what countries are most important to the US, Israel is not among the top five countries. But their answers mean very little, because most Americans simply do not care about foreign policy, or about the majority of issues. What you have to do, therefore, is to find out who cares in the American political system about political issues and why they care.

In order to do this, I looked at various surveys in which Americans were asked to express their opinions on the Arab-Israeli conflict. I found, for example, that according to the polls, the majority of Americans were sympathetic to the idea of a Palestinian state, which has been the case ever since the ’80s. So why was it that American policy did not reflect this support?

Along with John Krosnik, I designed a public opinion poll in order to discover how deeply Americans care about such issues, taking into account that in the American political system, Americans are only going to make a difference when it comes to issues they care about. We asked: “How important is the Arab-Israeli conflict to you personally? Is it among the top three issues? The top five issues? Or is it not among the top five issues?” We soon discovered that the majority of Americans claim to care about the issue and have opinions on the issue. If you ask people “Would you like to see a Palestinian state?” many will answer yes, whereas, if you ask them, “Is this an issue that matters to you?” they will answer no, so I went one step further and asked, “Is this an issue that you take into consideration when you vote for a candidate?” to which the vast majority replied “no,” as they did to other important questions, such as “Is this an issue that would encourage you to give money to a political candidate because of his/her position?” or “Is this an issue that would cause you to write to your Congressman/ the editor of a newspaper to express your views?” or “Is this an issue that you would call a radio chat show to discuss?” The answer was always ‘no’, which means that the majority of people do not have a reaction: they have opinions, and they listen, but they do not really care - in other words, they are irrelevant.

In general, then, politicians do not care about the majority of Americans, whereas they care very deeply about those who say, yes, this is an issue that we care about a great deal, an issue we vote on, an issue that would encourage us to make campaign contributions to candidates because of their position. This is the segment of the public that politicians care about, and when they are deciding what position to adopt on the Middle East, for example, they first look around to see what segments of the public are interested. In the US, the group that cares most deeply about the Arab-Israeli conflict is American Jews.

One of the most common misconceptions when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict is the idea that it is really one group, the American Jews, that controls in America. The fact is that there are other groups who also have influence. One good example concerns the decision to expand NATO. The vast majority of European and foreign policy experts say that NATO expansion is not a very good idea, yet the government decided to go with the expansion because most of the public does not really care, but certain segments care a lot, especially the Americans of Polish and eastern European extraction, and it was much more important for the government to be responsive to them. It is clear, therefore, that domestic political calculations are not made on the basis of majority views, and all the public opinion polling that we have done reveals that there is a difference between the opinions of those people who care a lot about an issue and the opinion of the majority. Moreover, there is a huge difference between the behavior of the people who care about the issue and the behavior of the majority, so by and large, the American political system is responsive to those people who care. This applies, of course, not only to foreign issues, but also to domestic issues: the agricultural lobby in America, for example, exerts substantial control over agricultural policy.

One could say that the fact that the American political system is responsive only to those people who care goes against the basic principles of democracy, but it all depends on what one means by democracy. A majority rule is not a democracy. If, on the other hand, one thinks a democracy is respectful of pluralism, that according to this system not everybody gets what they want, but most people get what they want most dearly and minorities are not discriminated against, that is not necessarily a bad system.

There are of course issues about which most Americans care. Most Americans care when it comes to war and the possibility of Americans losing their lives. They care about economic issues too; the reason Clinton is popular now despite the Lewinsky affair is that the economy is doing so well and people vote on economic confidence. It is quite natural for people not to care about every single issue. How many Palestinians, for example, follow what is happening in Rwanda and Pakistan, and even if they care, how many are going to vote for the members of the Palestinian Legislative Council on the basis of what they think about Rwanda? How many are willing to write a check for human rights in Haiti? Why should the Middle East be the most important issue for Americans?

Basically, the American political system is all about bargaining: the Poles get what they want, the Cubans get what they want, and the Jews get what they want, and there is always somebody who pays some price. This is the way the system works even at the popular level and ultimately every power, including the power of Congress and the power of lobbies, depends on this basic rule at the popular level because it is a combination of pluralism and republicanism and because ultimately, members of Congress need people to vote for them. AIPAC does not just deliver US$20 million a year, it also delivers votes.

At this point I want to take a look at how a mobilized community can matter in the American political system. First, people talk about the percentage of American Jews being only 2.5 percent but American Jews are very involved in American politics. Whereas approximately 50 percent of all Americans do not vote in the elections - and the percentage is even lower at the primary level - the American Jewish voting percentage is double that of the general population. This means that essentially the 2.5 percent of the population become closer to 5 percent of the actual voting constituency, so at the grassroots level, first of all, the electoral power is bigger than it seems.

Second, the Jewish community is not spread all over America, but clustered in key states, i.e., the larger states; all the presidential candidates, when calculating where they are going to have to win to make it, first look at the big states, and California, for example, is the home of 45 members of the House of Representatives, which indicates how important it is in terms of size. New York is the second largest state and here, as in California and the other key states, you find a large Jewish population.

Third, the American Jewish community is one of the most philanthropic communities in the US. In the American political system, no one gives more than the American Jewish community. I am not just talking about giving to political causes, but also to libraries, art museums, social organizations and charities, which is one reason why Americans perceive them as being good Americans, aside from the Arab-Israeli conflict. They are also involved with politics and they give huge amounts of money to politics that are far in excess of what one would expect from only 2.5 percent, or even five percent, of the population.

One reason they give so much is that they learned from their experience as a minority that was persecuted throughout the 20th Century. The other reason is demographic. Looking at the percentage of Jews among the total population is sometimes meaningless; you need to look at the extremely high percentage of American Jews who belong to the educated upper income elite, because they are the ones who are active in politics, who make huge financial contributions, and who run for office. If one looks at the American legal profession, for example, which provides America with a large proportion of its political candidates, you will find that a very large percentage of American Jews are lawyers while a very large percentage of lawyers are American Jews. That is the demographic reality. So in spite of the fact that American Jews represent only a tiny proportion of the total population, this is not reflected when it comes to their level of effectiveness.

As to the level of individual contributions above US$1,000 to the National Democratic Party and to the National Republican Party, over 40 percent of such contributions come from American Jews. In fact, in the last election, the percentage for the Democratic Party was over 50 percent. American Jews are very involved in the political life in America, which explains the high level of contributions and the fact that so many of them run for office.

In 1950, over four percent of the American population was Jewish, but due to a gradual decline the figure is now like somewhere between 2-2.5 percent. However, in the 1950s the Jewish community was not of the same class; it was not involved in politics and probably only about 1.5-2 percent of the members of the House of Representatives were American Jews. By 1990, however, the percentage of Congressmen who were Jewish had risen to ten percent. In short, one should not put too much emphasis on this grassroots percentage of 2-2.5 percent as being very important.

In order to understand how things work in Congress, one has to take into account the fact that congressional business is done mostly through committees, which are extremely important, because it is through committees that laws are generated. A committee is the forum where policy is discussed and where expert witnesses or policy makers are questioned. Thanks to the media, the public sees the transaction that takes place within the committee and that becomes the core focus of policy. But how do committees work? Who becomes a member of a committee? Who selects? In the old days of Congress, it was the leadership of Congress that was mainly responsible for deciding who should join the various committees. That still applies today to a certain extent, especially with regard to committees where there is much competition for membership. Take, for example, the Appropriations Committee; everybody wanted to be a member and the leadership had to decide whom to appoint because there was so much competition. Other committees, however, witness very little competition. The Foreign Affairs Committee has been one of the least popular, at least since the end of the Vietnam War; either members have to have a personal interest in foreign affairs or they have a constituency that cares a lot about foreign affairs. Most members do not want to sit on it. Another committee, the Agricultural Committee, has about 45 members, all of whom are farmers or from a farming district, which is not particularly surprising; after all, who else is going to become a member of a farming committee? In general, one can tell the leadership that one would rather be on a certain committee and most of the time, assuming there is not much competition, it will approve the appointment.

Congressman Lee Hamilton was the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and yet he comes from Indiana, a state where, supposedly, people do not care about foreign policy. Joining the committee had not been his choice: he had originally asked the leadership to put him on the Appropriations Committee, but they told him in no uncertain terms that there was no way in the world they would do that because of his relatively young age and so they ’stuck’ him on the Foreign Affairs Committee instead. Eventually, he discovered he actually liked it and people thought that he was good at his job, which gave him some clout at the national level and encouraged him to stay. Most people are not like that and therefore, because of the self-selection, a fourth of the Foreign Affairs Committee members are Jews who mostly come from Jewish districts. Indeed, you suddenly find that the 2.5 percent of the population that is Jewish has 25 percent representation, or about 45 members, in the Foreign Affairs Committee. On the other hand, of the three or four members of the House of Representatives who are of Arab origin, none are members of the committee.

With regard to the few Congressmen of Arab origin, Senator Spencer Abraham from Michigan, which has a fairly large Arab district, is interested in foreign policy and appears to make a difference. At the same time, Nick Khayat, another Arab American representative in the House, has also tried to be outspoken on Arab-Israeli issues.

I once conducted a survey among members of the House of Representatives asking how much they, their voting constituency and their fundraising constituency cared about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Those who cared deeply about such issues were far more likely to be members of committees that dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict. For example, the Representatives who did care represented 25 percent of the Foreign Affairs Committee and close to 40 percent of the sub-committee on Europe and the Middle East, which was the sub-committee of the Foreign Affairs Committee in 1990. I then went one step further and, bearing in mind that it is not membership alone that indicates interest, it is also who attends meetings and speaks, I examined Congressional hearings over a period of a few years and counted every single sentence that every single member spoke to see who spoke the most. Those people who ranked the Middle East issue highly in their priorities were the ones to speak the most, and so what was originally a very small percentage was responsible for 60 percent of the total content of the speech produced by a hearing. The American political system is about the groups that care most deeply about an issue and American Jews are not an exception to the rule (which goes against the general belief in the Middle East that they are).

Most members of Congress first and foremost want to be reelected. In this respect it is interesting to note that the vast majority of members get reelected no matter how badly they do. Public opinion polls show that the vast majority of Americans do not respect members of Congress and see them as the ’pits’ of the political system and yet 90 percent of the members get reelected. Because of this, members know that the rest of the public is not all that important as long as they get certain groups to vote on issues with which they are involved.

When it comes to the question of whether, for example, we should move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, one has to take into account that a Congressman, if he wants to be reelected, must decide upon both the benefits and costs of that decision. He will think to himself, if I vote for it, people will vote for me and I will have a good chance of getting some campaign contributions, whereas if I do not vote for it, not only will I lose out on votes and contributions, but I will pay a cost. What is the logic of voting against it?

I actually interviewed Lee Hamilton, who was one of only 30 members out of a total of 435 who voted against moving the embassy and asked him what kind of logic he used and why other people did not use the same kind of logic. Before even answering my question, he told me that his decision had cost him around US$100,000 in terms of campaign contributions; remember, he gained no one’s vote. So why did he do it? “Because,’’ he said, “I thought it was in the national interest.’’ When I asked him what he thought the national interest was, he told me that he had talked to State Department professionals, Defense Department professionals, the intelligence community and the President and had made up his mind on the basis of what he heard from them. “Their conclusion is that it is a bad idea,” said Hamilton, “and having thought about it, I see that it is a bad idea and I am willing to pay the price.” Hamilton, who had neither American Jews nor American Arabs in his community, was a very secure member who had been elected by landslide after landslide and was not affected by his decision. He did mention, however, that he would be forced to explain himself to the churches - his is a very low income, religious community - because as churches they would undoubtedly approve of the idea of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

When trying to understand the relative ineffectiveness of the Arab American community in the American political process, it can't simply be attributed to the fact that theirs is an ineffective lobby; a lobby is not able to deliver votes and a lobby is not able to ultimately affect elections. AIPAC is effective because it has grassroots support; a US$20 million budget does not buy elections, and a win or defeat could be guaranteed by the oil companies at any time if that was the only issue. You must have grassroots politics. At the institutional level, there are Arab American organizations that are doing reasonably well given their limitations, such as the National Association of Arab Americans, the Arab American Institute, and the Anti-Discrimination Committee, etc., all of which are well-organized and increasingly in-tune with the political scene in America, even though this was not always the case. They know Congressional politics, they know public opinion, and they speak as Americans, which again was not always the case. One of the problems that Arab-Americans had over the years was that they continued to think of themselves as Arabs living in America as opposed to Americans of Arab origin and so they did not speak the language of America; they kept speaking in terms of ‘us Arabs versus you Americans’, which certainly did not help their cause. Whereas an American Jew understands very well that he or she is an American and has the right as an American to speak as an American and to be a Jew in America, Arab Americans have only just begun to learn that not being American enough is part of their problem.

At the institutional level, however, Arab Americans are more American and they are able to speak the language of America. The problem is at the grassroots level, and it is very complicated. One part is demographic: Arab Americans have lower income than American Jews and lower income people tend to vote less, contribute less, and participate in political life less; they are not part of the politically active elite, so that is clearly a problem statistically. There is also a cultural problem. Perhaps because Arab Americans come from non-democratic traditions, some, but certainly not all, do not recognize that they have the capacity to affect politics. In the Arab World, by and large, there are no democratic traditions of consequence that will allow people to think that they can make a difference, and there is tremendous apathy. And then, of course, there is the problem of contributions. When Arab Americans first arrived in America, particularly the first generation, they did not contribute to politicians much, and the same could be said of Arab Americans today. In fact, they have a very poor record of contributions, and not only with regard to this or that member of Congress. The Arab American Institute will tell you, for example, that it has a really hard time getting even its dues from members! Most organizations have to resort to foreign countries for funding, and it is clearly preferable to get funding from Arab Americans than to receive money from industrialized oil countries, e.g., Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, or another foreign country.

The bottom line is that Arab Americans are not yet a force, although it is clearly only a question of time because we know that these things are generational. Irish Americans, for example, were also irrelevant at some point in American politics whereas they now play a very important role. Acceptance and a voice are things that American Jews earned over time and things that Arab Americans could also earn over time, but it is going to take time and effort.

Another problem is that Arabs are not united. They do not have the same issues; Lebanese Americans do not necessarily have the same agenda as Palestinian Americans and so forth. American Jews, on the other hand, in spite of their religious backgrounds, are culturally and ethnically Jewish, which lessens the damage that could be caused by the fact that they are not totally united. They do not all feel the same way about issues: some are on the left, some are on the right, the majority are Democrats but others are Republicans and so forth. They do not even agree on the various issues surrounding the peace process, but they have institutional mechanisms for organization. The synagogue is the cultural institution where they get together - even the non-religious community attends during the holidays - and there they share not only their culture but also information. In fact, in the survey that we did on public opinion, we discovered that by and large, people who care a lot about an issue do not get their information from the media, but by being members of a certain political or religious organization, which makes institutional mechanisms extremely important. In that sense the American Jewish community is extremely organized at the grassroots level. Arab Americans, on the other hand, many of whom do not attend uniform mosques or churches on a regular or even irregular basis, do not have that kind of mechanism for political mobilization at the grassroots level.

Moslem Americans are more likely to be a political force than Arab Americans, partly because of their numbers. The Moslem community in America is growing rapidly and will probably outnumber the Jewish American community in a very short period of time. There is, however, a problem, inasmuch as whereas the Arab American community is diverse, the Moslem American community is even more diverse, being mostly non-Arab and comprised mainly of Pakistanis, Indian Moslems and Black Moslems. It is a community that rarely shares the same view, except when it comes to issues pertaining to discrimination. It should be noted that we are still talking about the same demographic factors in terms of the low income and diffusion and division that apply to the overall Arab community.

Moving on to the ability of Arab Americans to influence foreign affairs, the first thing that one has to take into account is that Arab Americans constitute a smaller percentage of the population than Jewish Americans. However, even if the numbers were equal, the bottom line for a politician would not be whether the voters were Arab or Jewish, but whether they were going to give him their votes and get him reelected. You have to be part of the political game; if you are not, nobody is going to pay attention to you. Native Americans, for example, do not have a significant share in the political system, again, because they are not using the system properly and because their socio-economic status makes it difficult for them to be effective. They have some legal autonomy in various places in different states, but they do not play a big role at the level of national politics.

Congress is not the only factor or even the most important factor in foreign policy: there is also the Executive Branch. The President is elected and has to worry about being reelected like every member of Congress, but the bureaucracies, which have established traditions, are primarily professional and outlive presidents; their job has been to define the national interest, which the President will advocate in a bargain with Congress. It is not, therefore, that Congress prevails, but that the wishes of Congress are taken into account in a national bargain with the Executive Branch. The problem has been that in the past 20 years, i.e., since the epoch of the end of the Cold War, the Executive Branch of the American Government has become much more responsive to the same kind of forces that operate on Congress than it was before, which could eventually lead to some very serious problems.

In the short term, here is what it has meant: When you ask a scholar on American foreign policy “What is the American national interest?” he will ask the same question of the State Department. Most professionals have the same views as the State Department, the National Security Council and the Defense Department. They have the power to define what American national interests are. There was a time when people thought that these wise men and women - mostly men for a long time, now increasingly women - had the absolute right to determine the American national interest, partly because people thought that there was something objective about the national interest, that if you were smart enough, you could simply sit back and think, oh yes, America’s national interest is so and so. That was the case during the Cold War because everything was structured - we had certain parameters that nobody could cross and people accepted that containing the Soviet Union was important - but when the Cold War ended people discovered that it is not easy to decide what the national interest is because even all the wise men and women in Washington were having trouble deciding. And of course, they are still having trouble today.

So who ultimately decides? Now, the accepted norm was for the bureaucracies to decide together with the President, and that is what we see today. In fact, during the Cold War, the bureaucracies were given semi-autonomy; they were insulated from the political process, and it was not legitimate for interest groups to lobby them directly. They were given freedom to write, discuss and come up with ideas for good or for bad; that is what emerged. What has happened in the increasing pluralization of the American political system is that once the Soviet threat diminished, people realized that the autonomy was only temporary, that always in the history of the US bureaucracies they were not autonomous in areas that did not pertain to national security, which was something interest groups could not interfere with because of its secretive nature.

What has actually happened in the past couple of decades is that people have come to realize that individuals matter, that who is in the State Department matters a lot for the political process because people have different views; there is no such thing as an objective national interest. So what happened was that lobbies began working with presidents to demand having individuals they liked in the political system and presidents responded by appointing personnel from outside the bureaucracies to lead them, not only at the levels of the Cabinet and the Secretaries and not only at the level of the Undersecretary, but in the lower echelons too. At the same time, the lobbies began taking great care to ensure that their men and women were appointed to those positions. As a result, the way the bureaucracies now work is much more responsive to political demands, partly because it also became legitimate for lobbies to meet with bureaucrats, to share their opinions directly, to meet with the Assistant Secretary of State and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and tell them “We would like you to do this and that.”

Clearly, the changes mentioned above have diminished the friction between the Executive and the Legislative on foreign policy issues, although there is still autonomy today in the executive branch. Clinton, for example, still recommended against moving the Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in spite of the fact that he is seen to be very friendly to the State of Israel. When the Executive branch attempted to justify the President’s decision, the argument used was that to move the embassy would be bad for the US because it would have repercussions in the Arab and Moslem World, which would have a negative effect on the American interest. Members of Congress did not say, “We are going against the national interest,” but they did say, “You are wrong; it would not have these repercussions. You are just exaggerating, you do not know the facts.” And of course, they found experts to testify that what they were saying was true.

To conclude, a little should be said about the think tanks in America. Think tanks are institutes that market ideas and they are very important in the political process because they help define the national interest and they help define the debates. It used to be the case that you had very few dominant think tanks like the Carnegie Institute in Dartmouth, the Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution and the Council of Foreign Relations, all of which were comprised mainly of professional journalists who did not depend on the political system in any way. In many ways the think tanks were like exclusive clubs, where membership depended on success, career and money; they did not depend on contributions to any great extent because they had substantial funding from endowments, which allowed them freedom to think independently from the political process. In recent years members of Congress and others discovered that they needed people to market their own ideas; that kind of demand led to the proliferation of political think tanks: ideological think tanks, which are issue-specific and focus on one issue at a time, such as Middle East policy and economic issues, and which depend heavily on contributions from constituents who care about these issues. As a result, the ideas that are in the marketplace have become increasingly more diverse and increasingly more responsive to the political process.

The bottom line, however, remains the same, namely, that it all starts with grassroots politics and with the public. One must always remember that small numbers at the bottom could be big numbers at the top assuming they care enough; that is why the American system works.

Professor Shibley Telhami

In examining American foreign policy in the Middle East and the relationship between America’s domestic components and its international interests, I would like to pay particular attention to two major issues, namely, the current US position toward Iraq and the American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.

First, however, it should be clear that all American foreign policy is motivated by domestic politics. Although domestic politics represents an important component of American foreign policy, it is certainly not the only one. In fact, the dominant theories of foreign policy during the Cold War were international and not domestic theories. The school of thought that has dominated American academic ideas about international relations for almost 50 years has been the Realist school, which involves an assumption that states have objective interests that result from the relative position of the state in the international community. The assumption begins with the idea of the world as an ’anarchic world’ without a single central authority, in which each state must depend on itself or create alliances to protect its interests. Against such a background, power is the most important commodity in international relations, and there is a general belief that powerful states get away with a lot, while weak states do not.

Most followers of the Realist school of thought believe that all states behave in a way that is conducive to the formation of balances of power, according to which no single state will allow another to become too powerful. They also argue that after World War II, it was natural to have competition between the US and the Soviet Union as there was no way the latter was going to allow the former to dominate. Indeed, no state is going to be comfortable as long as there is a dominant state in the competition for power, and in that sense the balance of power is a very important component in the foreign policies of countries, especially the major powers.

In this context, I would like to recall a speech made by Saddam Hussein before the Arab Cooperation Council consisting of Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen in Amman, Jordan in February 1990, which was several months before Iraq invaded Kuwait. It was an interesting period because people were not yet referring to it as the end of the Cold War, even though it was and there was a lot of frustration in the Arab World because with the Soviet Union going through a period of decline, people were concerned that America would become too powerful and there would be no other power capable of balancing it in the Middle East. Also during this period, a large number of Soviet Jews were coming here, which was creating fears that the Jordanian option was going to be implemented and large numbers of Palestinians would be sent to Jordan. Saddam’s speech reflected a totally realist point of view; in fact, it looks to anyone reading it as if he had just read a textbook on international relations.

The speech went like this; “States will never allow a single state to dominate. At the present time, the Soviet Union is in decline, and the US is the only power, a hegemonic power, which is bad for the whole world, not just for us. And now we must wait until there is a new balance of power.’’ Saddam predicted in that speech that it would take five to seven years for other states to come together to balance American power, and he even went so far as to suggest that those states would be European states and Japan. He clearly believed that Europe and Japan had conflicting interests with the US but had been hiding them because of their fear of the Soviet Union, and that now that the Soviet threat was gone, they would come to balance the American power. He also believed that Russia could possibly return as a balance once the Russians had realized how stupid they had been to pull out from the balance of power system. Saddam’s way of thinking, which is not different from that of many theorists in international relations, was therefore not unusual. What happened, of course, is that since the end of the Cold War and the Gulf War, the US has remained the most dominant power in the world and in the Middle East and no one state has yet emerged to balance American power.

In spite of its unique status, America continues to pay a great deal of attention to what goes on in other parts of the world. There are a couple of things that the American political elites always keep in mind: one thing in particular, which resulted from the Cold War era, still dominates the strategic thinking of American elites across the board, and that is the importance of the so-called deterrent, i.e., the strategy of making an example of anybody who challenges American power in order to diminish the chance of this power being challenged. The logic of the Cuba example during the Cold War for example was not so much that the US gained directly from isolating Cuba - in fact, in some ways it lost because it cost the US resources to isolate Cuba and Castro still remained in power, and the US lost a lot of business with Cuba through the enforcement of sanctions without making any apparent gains - but that the US was making Cuba an example so that other Latin American countries would not consider becoming another Cuba. It was logic based on the idea of deterrence.

The reason for America’s extremely negative position regarding Iraq since 1990/’91 is that it feels it was totally betrayed by Saddam Hussein. One has to take into account the fact that the Bush administration and many American bureaucrats spent much of their leverage during the ’89/’90 period after the Iran-Iraq war defending Iraq in front of Congress, mainly because they were seeking to protect the relationship that they had developed with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. When Saddam Hussein betrayed them by invading Kuwait, he effectively challenged the most vital American interests as they are viewed by elites, and it cost the US dearly, considering that half a million troops were deployed. As a result, America decided that Saddam should be taught a lesson that he would never forget. It also decided to make an example of Saddam in order to show anyone who dares challenge America in the future what kind of price they are going to have to pay. The American tendency to go for deterrence is a kind of instinctive reaction that has remained well-engrained in the American political system since the end of the Cold War, and I think that when it is wedded with domestic political interests - which it is, in this case, not least of all because of widespread American support for Israel - one is left with a powerful momentum that is unstoppable.

No one in America actually believed that Iraq would invade Kuwait, and it was against that background that the American Ambassador in Iraq was busy conveying to Saddam Hussein the message that she wanted the border issue to be resolved peacefully through Arab mediation efforts. When Iraq invaded, the US soon realized that it was in a very difficult position; quite frankly, had it not been for an unbelievable set of circumstances that enabled the US to get together with the international community and Arab governments to allow American forces on Arab soil, it would have been very difficult if not impossible for the US to reverse Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Moreover, if Saddam had gone to Saudi Arabia and taken the oil fields on the eastern side, no one would have been able to stop him.

At the time, there was nothing to indicate that Saddam was about to invade Kuwait. The thing one has to remember is that in the 1980s, no one had believed that Iraq was going to win the war with Iran. The only reason why the US tilted toward Iraq was that there was a strategic assessment in Washington that Iran was going to win. Once Iraq had invaded Kuwait and it was clear that the CIA had really messed up, the President went to all the intelligence agencies and asked, “What are the chances that he is going to invade Saudi Arabia now that he has invaded Kuwait?’’ Most of them had to say that there was a chance because they would have looked inept if they had said there was not and then he invaded, especially in light of their failure to predict his invasion of Kuwait.

If you look back at the situation during that era, the only issue that appeared to have the potential for confrontation was the Arab-Israeli issue, due to the fact that the threats being made against Israel were potentially dangerous from a political point of view. The theory that prevailed in Washington was that Saddam was using the threat of displaying his military capability at a time when the political process had failed because he was nearly bankrupt and keen to extract money from the Gulf states, and it was this threat that led to fears about a possible Israeli-Iraqi confrontation.

When Senator Robert Dole traveled to Baghdad in 1990, he had absolutely no idea about the extent to which there was a lot of sympathy with Iraq because it appeared to have been targeted. In order to get an idea about this sympathy, one only has to take a look at the Kuwaiti, Egyptian, and Saudi newspapers of May and June 1990; the Kuwaiti press, for example, was saying that the pro-Zionist US was targeting Iraq, a ‘brotherly’ state that was just emerging from a war, and that it was the duty of every Arab to confront the American enemy.

Certainly, the US does not want any country to be in a position to threaten Israel because American politicians are unable to ignore any conflict in which Israel is involved, so it has made every effort to prevent conflicts from developing. The American policy in the Gulf throughout the Iran-Iraq War was to maintain a balance of power between the two countries; it did not want either state to be more powerful than the other. Nevertheless, the war ended very suddenly and Iraq emerged to be more powerful and invaded Kuwait. At that point, the major American objectives were to make Iraq withdraw from Kuwait and to reduce its military capabilities. I am personally not aware of any American scenarios for reducing the military power of Iraq prior to the invasion of Kuwait because at that stage, America still did not think of Iraq as a threat. Even when the Iraqis sent a private message to Israel in 1990 saying that if Israel were to contemplate attacking Iraq, Iraq had the capacity to retaliate, the Israelis were not that concerned and it was more a political issue in Washington.

Does the US worry about Arab public opinion? Take the May 1998 crisis with Iraq: Were American leaders ignorant of the possible consequences of further military action against Iraq? If one looks at public opinion, one finds that in every Arab state, the public is entirely opposed to the war whilst the majority of Arab leaders also feel the same. Americans should remember that when Saddam Hussein first challenged the sanctions regime and the US started making noises about going to war, the Russians clinched a deal with the Iraqis, which was essentially an unconditional Iraqi agreement to comply with the UN resolutions. This of course was regarded in Washington as a defeat for the US because it was seen to be a case where Saddam challenged, was not punished and then asserted himself, got attention, and created closer relations with allies like Russia at the expense of the US. That was the interpretation in Washington.

Occasionally someone will write an article in the newspaper and say, if America goes to war with Saddam Hussein it is going to be a mess for X, Y and Z. The author might even mention the human suffering of the Iraqis, but people do not listen. They do heed the warnings, however, for two basic reasons:

There is a tendency for the American government to run on automatic pilot; in other words, it wants to do it and as long as it thinks it can do it cheaply and it will not be costly in terms of human life because of our technological resources, it will go ahead and do it.

America thinks that not taking action will allow Saddam to win, which would be a disaster in terms of the American deterrence policy that I have already mentioned. As a result, America views the idea of not doing anything as having far worse potential consequences than those to be expected by hitting Saddam/Iraq.

The vast majority of Americans do not know or do not want to know about Iraqi human suffering. Remember in 1991 how many people said Arab public opinion would be on the side of Iraq if it was attacked by the allies, only to turn around later and say, ’’You know why the Arab street did nothing? Because we are the only game in town: Mubarak needs us, King Fahd needs us and Abu Ammar needs us, so even if we attack, what is going to happen? They can go with us, or they can go against us, but if they go against us Mubarak is going to lose his two billion dollars a year, Syria will be vulnerable to an Israeli attack, and King Fahd will always be worried. On the other hand, if they go with us, all they have to worry about is public opinion, which they can easily control by justifying what we did whilst making Saddam out to be the bad guy.’’ Most Americans assume that public opinion will not erupt because in these countries the governments control the media and the security forces and ultimately, everybody is going to have to come on board. The Bahrainis now, for example, are unable to take a position in support of the States, but after the attack, when there is already an American naval fleet there, what is going to be easier for them: to order the American fleet out of Bahrain or to try to persuade the public that the US did the right thing?

The real aim couldn't be to destroy Iraqi capabilities because frankly, Iraq does not have incredible capabilities right now. The American dilemma is on the one hand, the US wants Iraq to comply with the UN resolutions, whilst on the other, it wants to undermine the Iraqi government. Consequently, every time there is an improvement in the Iraqi position, America views it as a defeat, which is why it behaves the way it does.

When I write articles, I can say that military attacks are wrong, damage American interests and hurt people unnecessarily. It is my prerogative as an American to tell my government through the media that a military attack is a bad idea and to try to persuade people that there will be repercussions. It is my responsibility to write to engage Americans in the debate in a democratic manner and to bring in issues that are not on the table, in order to give an idea about the humanitarian suffering of the Iraqi people, but I understand that not everyone is going to listen. I have to understand where people are coming from and I have to understand what their assumptions are if I want them to listen. All this talk about a conspiracy theory is useless; in my opinion, this particular theory is the worst form of escapism in the world, which sort of comes with the territory of not having control.

Immediately after Iraq invaded Kuwait, any talk of democracy in the American political agenda disappeared in favor of discussion of what was seen to be a larger interest. If one looks at the history of public opinion in the US before the crisis, there was rarely any support for military options. Public opinion polls showed that 50 percent of the population supported the government, which is the highest pre-crisis support in history. Other polls, meanwhile, put support at much more than 50 percent. It all depends on the question: if you ask, “Would you still support military action if the US is going to go it alone?” you will get a different answer than if you ask, "…if the US goes with other nations?” etc. It is a mistake for the President to think that there is deep support; there is broad support, but it is not deep, by which I mean the public is supportive only to the extent that they assume there will be no cost. When they finally awake and find Saddam still in power, they are going to turn around and say that the President really messed up. Moreover, it is very unlikely that the congressional opposition is going to turn around and say to the President, “Thank you for listening to us and invading”; it is far more likely to say, “You did not do enough.”

Conventional wisdom dictates that before the US government enters a war, its politicians should prepare the public by selling their decision domestically and then internationally. Looking at the past tells us that in every single instance, including instances where there is no prior support, the minute the conflict begins support rises to maximum, simply because people wave the American flag when American lives are in question. But, when the crisis is over, people always start asking questions.

One document that was prepared and presented was the work of a State Department official, Steven Grummon, and a professor at Ohio State University, Richard Herrmann Both were in policy planning as midlevel people specializing in Iran and Iraq. They gave the paper to Dennis Ross in early 1990 when he was the Head of the Policy Planning Department at the State Department. The paper challenged conventional wisdom on Iraq, which said more or less not so much that Iraq was going to threaten Kuwait, but that Saddam Hussein is not a nice man and that Iran in fact may be even friendlier if you consider the strategic interest of the US. The two men made it clear that the US should rethink its relations with Iraq and Iran. Ross insists that he gave the paper to James Baker to read, although Baker claims he never saw it.

Right now, Saddam Hussein’s calculations are predictable. He assumes that the US aims to get him, not to have him comply and he assumes that the US is never going to be satisfied no matter what he does, which means the sanctions will never be lifted. As a result, he is also assuming that the only way that he can get himself out of this mess is by taking some risks whilst trying to highlight the contradictions in American policy and trying to undermine the coalition around him. There has to be a decision at the coalition level that clarifies the fact that when Saddam complies, there will be a lifting of the economic sanctions. However, American foreign policy is defined in terms of never allowing Saddam Hussein to improve his situation. Imagine if he complied and the sanctions were lifted; wouldn’t this enable him to start collecting money and gain strength? That is the dilemma from an American point of view.

Regarding the position of Europe, both France and Russia are against the US, but the bottom line is this: Is Russia going to sacrifice all its economic relations with the US for the sake of Saddam Hussein? Is France going to sacrifice its relations with the US for the sake of Saddam Hussein? The answer is no. If the US goes ahead and does what it wants to do, which it probably will, what are these countries going to do?

If Iraq is weakened further, the US will eventually look around and say, ’‘My God, Iran is now too powerful.’’ The difference between the balance of power policy and dual containment policy is that the balance of power will arm Iran and Iraq equally while dual containment will disarm them equally. There are just too many differences that run far too deep for any serious strategic relationship to exist between Iran and Iraq. Some countries in the Arab World, particularly Egypt, have been thinking about relations with Iran as possibly counteracting the Turkish-Israeli relationship and Syria is trying to bridge the gap between Egypt and Iran on that issue, but that would presuppose a worsening of the US-Egyptian relationship, which I think is unlikely to happen in the short term.

If the US attacks Iraq, it will not help the Palestinian issue. Presidents who are trying to distract attention from personal and domestic problems usually engage in popular foreign policy activities, not unpopular foreign policy activities, and putting any effort into the Arab-Israeli conflict is not a popular activity. Having said that, once the war is over we could end up with a far more active peace process because the US is going to have to try to revive the public opinion issue like after the Gulf War, when we had the Madrid Process. The administration does not appear capable - certainly now - of pressing the Israeli government in a serious way. The domestic political environment will not allow it, nor does the US consider there are major strategic benefits to be reaped from pressing Netanyahu.

There is a segment within the political system that supports the idea of a unilateral American position regarding the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, that is, the US would announce its preferences in an American plan. Ideally, America would state outright that the aim of negotiations would be ultimately to reconcile a Palestinian state with Israeli security, and there is a segment of the bureaucracy that supports the idea of stating that outright, even though it is understood that a lot of people will disagree.

The US has sort of been aiming at the Israeli political system in order to weaken Netanyahu domestically. Of course it would never admit this to be true because it is not supposed to do such things, but look at the way it helped bring down the Shamir government. Certainly the US would like to see the collapse of the Israeli government and the election of a different kind of government. That is the only arena where they can actually work, there being no arena where they can work to achieve an agreement with the limitations that exist within Israel today.

The interesting thing is that this is now a mainstream idea. Five years ago, it would have sounded outlandish. The Council of Foreign Relations, which is the dominant American think tank, is as mainstream as you can get, and the report of the Council, which consists mainly of American Jews, recommends very clearly that the US support the creation of a Palestinian state. Over the past year, there have been three independent editorials in The Washington Post, which is one of the most important newspapers in America in terms of the elite, who have encouraged US support for a Palestinian state. Now, that is a huge change.

The Council on Foreign Relations report said the following: “There should be a demilitarized Palestinian state in the majority of the West Bank and Gaza with contiguous territories.” It was noted that if, for example, 90 percent of the settlers live on ten percent of the land, this would mean that even if you carve out ten percent of the land, you are keeping out 90 percent of the settlers. The suggestion was along the lines of the agreement between Abu Mazen and Beilin. One must remember that this is a mainstream American organization and that there are a lot of mainstream American Jews supporting this position, which is what makes it important.

With regard to Jerusalem, it turned out to be the most intensely debated issue of all. The bottom line was that we agreed that the Jerusalem issue should be resolved in the next stage, it being clearly understood that the interests of both Arabs and Jews would have to be taken into account and that we need to meet the national aspirations of both in Jerusalem. So, the issue of Jerusalem was not resolved, but at least it was agreed that it would eventually be discussed.

This report actually focused on the people because it said that any solution must guarantee Palestinian residency in Jerusalem, even in the parts that remain under Israeli sovereignty. As far as America is concerned, our position at present is that we support the establishment of a Palestinian state but Jerusalem will have to be resolved by the Israelis and Palestinians; it is wrong for us to take any other kind of position at the current time. In short, the solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not in the hands of the US.