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Dealing with Iraq
| Article
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23363 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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4 / 1991 |
1,677 Words |
| Author
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Marvin Gordon
Marvin Gordon is emeritus professor of geography and regional
science at George Washington University. |
Horace Walpole once observed that it was easier to conquer Asia than to know what to do with it. In area-specific terms, the United States will soon be faced with this dilemma in the southwest corner of Asia, as it decides what should be done with Iraq after it is defeated. Our foreign policy, as it relates to the Persian/Arab Gulf area over the last few decades, can serve as a guide.
The strategic options open to the United States are conditioned and constrained by two factors. First, and foremost, is the fact that the Gulf possesses huge reserves of petroleum. The Western powers and Japan are becoming increasingly dependent on this oil since the economies of these countries are symbiotically linked in many ways. Significant events that adversely affect the financial situation in one country can often have a deleterious impact on the others. Gulf oil thus serves as an important linchpin upon which a major part of the foreign policy of the United States is secured.
Second, the United States must rely on a balance of power in the region to help stabilize what is clearly a vitally important yet endemically volatile political area. The United States cannot maintain a large military force in the Gulf due to the costs involved and to the fact that public opinion in the Middle East would not countenance our presence over an extended period of time. Nor could an Arab coalition force or a UN peacekeeping contingent, if the past serves as a guide, always be relied upon to stabilize a situation should a crisis occur.
The dilemma of how best to maintain a political equilibrium in the Gulf has confronted the United States for some time. When the British withdrew from the area in the 1960s, a political vacuum was created. The United States sought a surrogate and found it in the regime of the Shah of Iran.
When he in turn was evicted by a virulently anti-American revolutionary government, the United States turned to Saudi Arabia. That country, despite its great wealth and brokering skills, did not have a critical demographic mass large enough to give it credence as a regional power. Instead, the United States was forced to rely on the historic ethnic and political antagonism between Iran and Iraq to maintain a precarious balance of power in the Gulf.
Preserving Iraq
It is to help maintain a balance that the United States must now seek to preserve the political
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