Middle East: Progess or Lost Opportunity?

An optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity; a pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity.

--Winston Churchill

Three wars dominated events in the Middle East, the Gulf and Southwest Asia in 1982. In Afghanistan, the conflict between Soviet occupying forces and the freedom-fighting Mujahedeen continued without resolution. To the west, the sputtering war between Iraq and Iran saw a succession of gains for Iran that pushed virtually all Iraqi forces from its territory; but by the end of the year the prospect of any decisive military breakthrough had faded. And in Lebanon the Israeli invasion in June led to the eviction of the headquarters and principal military apparatus of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and left Lebanon faced with the problem of withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian forces and wrestling anew to establish itself as a coherent national entity.

In the first two of these wars, U.S. influence and leverage were limited, although there were substantial consequences for U.S. relations with the nations on the fringe of the hostilities. But in the Lebanon War the United States played a critical role in bringing an end to the organized fighting, and in early September launched a dramatic new attempt to move toward resolution of the Palestinian issue that lay at the core of the war. On that front at least, more than ever the main roads led to the United States as the indispensable third party, in a situation where U.S.-Israel relations had become more difficult than at any time since 1956 and where certain parts of the Arab side were slowly seeming to come to terms with the changed circumstances in the aftermath of Lebanon. The war had created new opportunities to address the Palestinian phase of the peace process, under the aegis of the United States. Hopefully, 1983 augurs less violence and renewed diplomacy in an altered regional setting. The picture is mixed and uncertain, but not without promise.