On Sat, 14 Jul 2001, Brad DeLong wrote:
> But what does the U.S. get from this $3 billion a year, besides a more
> difficult and prickly relationship with the Gulf states where the oil
> is?
It only seems mysterious if you consider that half alone. The other half is the $2.1 billion a year we pay Egypt. Both payments are enshrined in the Camp David accords of 1978, and essentially started (on a smaller scale) just after the Yom Kippur war of 1973. And a good case can be made that the annual payment to Egypt (which could never be made without a larger one to Israel) bought the end of general war in the middle east and made the Middle East a one-superpower zone. We essentially bought condominium. Syria was only a booby prize.
People forget that the 1973 Yom Kippur war was a draw. In fact, Egypt was initially on top, and it could have gone either way. Sadat emerged from it a military hero -- which was why the cries of betrayal against him were so bitter when he decided to make peace instead of prepare for another war.
But although this money made us arbiter of the region; and avoided a general war in which we might have to get involved directly; and where we could face the Soviet Union directly -- our worst nightmare -- it paradoxically made Israel less tractable rather than more. By removing Egypt from the equation, these payments are what initiated Israel's functional invulnerability. And it was against this new assumption -- that general war could not happen -- that the invasion of Lebanon was possible.
Remember that by '82, Sadat had been assasinated. W/out these payments sidelining Egypt (amounting then to over 10% of its GNP, and supplemented by a generous visa regime that resulted in a billion more of remittances home from Egyptian workers in the US), another general war was completely conceivable, as well as the consequent return of Egypt to the Soviet camp. When you add that to the enormous amount of money sloshing around in the backline states that wasn't there 10 years earlier, it is also conceivable in this alternate universe that Israel could lose -- or that the US and the Soviet Union could get sucked in. All of that was foreclosed by the continuous stream of Camp David payments that have constituted half of our entire foreign aid budget ever since. It is in some ways remarkable how much abuse and isolation Egypt was willing to take for the money. The Lebanon invasion was quite a provocation. But that's a lot of money.
> Other people (like Alexander Haig) think that Israel somehow served
> the interest of the United States by winning proxy wars against
> Russian clients during the Cold War
What cold warriors believed was that Israel showed the entire world of potential proxy states that in a head to head contest, US weapons would beat Soviet weapons, and that all of them would therefore prefer to be on our side and have their enemy on the other. There is some evidence that many states did in fact believe this -- even though, in fact, Soviet weapons and training actually performed quite well in the 1973 war, and the spectacular bust of the '67 war was largely inflicted by French arms. Cold-war thinking was a little like bubble-market thinking that way. If everyone believed something that didn't conform to the facts, it became a fact. But unlike market over-pricing, cold war assumptions didn't have to return to reality. Weird assumptions were transformed into new military and alliance realities that made it harder to go back rather than easier.
Of course, like all military aid, much of the momentum for the Camp David payments comes from the fact that it is made of credits that are then spent buying US military goods. So the military industrial complex lobbies for it tirelessly, and everyone in its force field is induced to join it in thinking of it as a good in itself, which is perhaps why they are induced to bleat about other goods in themselves, like democracy and loyal allies. For the military industrial complex, Israel (and its doppelganger Egypt) is a godsend. I don't believe there is any other state through which they can funnel so much money to themselves so easily. And this is because of its reputation among the US public as western, democratic, our ally, and under mortal threat -- a unique combination. So it's an illusion they have billions of dollars of interest in supporting.
They are aided in this by Jewish (and Christian) lobbies. But under it all are the original treaty commitments and the cold war thinking they embodied.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com