On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> There are three questions you need to ask about money like this
> (probably closer to $6 billion than $3 billion per year):
No, $3 billion -- which is more than enough to need explaining. The $6 billion figure is usually produced by
1) Adding in the roughly billion dollars a year that Jews send to Israel privately. This is not the fruit of government policy.
2) Adding in the 2 billion we send to Egypt annually as a result of the Camp David agreement. This is exactly backwards. We did not give Egypt 2 billion dollars a year to help Israel. Rather we gave Israel 3 billion dollars a year so we could give Egypt 2 billion. (Plus another half billion in remittances that was the direct product of a new visa regime.)
It's funny how people always ask Why do we give Israel 3 billion dollars for nothing? But they never ask Why do we give Egypt 2 billion dollars a year for nothing? Is it an Egyptian conspiracy? Is it because Egypt is such an obvious pillar of the American Empire? No. It's an obsolete strategic policy set in stone.
There was a strategic idea in buying off Egypt. It made Arab Israel wars impossible. Since the 1973 war brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, this was clearly a problem that needed a solution. It was worth paying for. Without it, it is almost certain there would have been another war with us and Russia on opposite sides. That would have been a Bad Thing.
There was also a second idea involved that made sense in theory, but turned out to be completely wrong. And that was that once Israel's security was completely assured -- because joint Arab war against it was now foreclosed -- there was no objective reason preventing it from returning to its former borders. Such a peace would also have been worth paying for. And furthermore the threat of the removal of that of that aid would be a lever. It didn't start on a regular basis until 1982.
Unfortunately that's not at all what happened. Israel, now assured that there couldn't be another Arab Israeli war, immediately launched into a meglomanical adventure in Lebanon. The Reagan administration, inheriting the treaty, saw the area purely in cold war terms. They, like Nixon, thought Israel was a strategic asset because it could kick the ass of countries supplied by the Soviet Union (like Syria) and thereby advertise to countries all over the world that it would be better to join our side than the Russians' because our arms worked better. Stupid, but completely typical of cold war theorizing.
And as far as borders were concerned, Israeli settlements, which didn't begin until after the 1973 war, and were still fighting the government until the first Likud government in 1977, metastasized after Camp David. It wasn't because of Camp David, but Camp David clearly didn't make Israel listen to us and we didn't declare them in violation of it (as we clearly could have). The US's strategic interests would have been much better served by Israel's return to its 1967 borders -- especially if we could have been seen as forcing it. (As Eisenhower forced Israel to disgorge all territory conquered in 1956 -- against Nasser, I might point out, the lodestar of Arab nationalism. That victory is what made him -- and we made it.)
So all the reasoning that this annual subsidy was built on is wrong or outdated. Nuclear confrontation by superpowers who get dragged into a middle eastern proxy war is now an impossibility. However, time has made it sacred, as it almost always does with annual payments, and removing it would now be a huge gesture that everyone shies away from for the same reason that people shy away from removing sugar tariffs: those affected will scream bloody murder while those who will benefit materially will barely notice. The same goes for the money we give to Egypt. Can you tell me what we're getting out them these days that's worth 2 billion a year?
And 3 billion dollars, while it's a huge amount of money on the ground, is a tiny amount in terms of the US budget, especially when half of it is part of the military budget. It's amazing to say that nobody really feels it, but it's true. Certainly nobody feels it materially enough to stick their neck out over it. Especially because it is also tied up with old treaty obligations. Big mess.
It doesn't make good copy, but inertia is an enormous force in explaining why bad and costly policies persist.
Michael