A Test of Patience & Resolve

The U.S., with welcome support from Britain, gambled against time last week in hopes of settling the Arab-Israeli crisis before it engulfed the Middle East--and perhaps the great powers as well. The object, as British Foreign Secretary George Brown told a hushed House of Commons, was "to prevent confrontation from bursting into conflagration." But whether the gamble would succeed depended on which would be exhausted first--the diplomatic alternatives to war or the patience of the edgy antagonists. "Time," said Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson after an urgent meeting in Washington with Lyndon Johnson, "is not on our side."

Coiled Spring. Taking advantage of the crisis, ten Soviet warships began steaming through the Dardanelles to join a score of others already on the prowl in the Mediterranean. Allied vessels bracketed the crisis zone, with the 50-ship U.S. Sixth Fleet on alert in the Mediterranean, and at least half a dozen British vessels, including the 23,000-ton aircraft carrier Hermes, ready to move into the Red Sea from Aden. The U.S. carrier Intrepid, ostensibly bound for Viet Nam, transited the Suez Canal as anti-American demonstrators waved their shoes at the ship in the Egyptian equivalent of a Bronx cheer. An eleven-unit U.S. antisubmarine group headed toward the Mideast; the British commando carrier Albion broke off maneuvers in the North Sea and made for an undisclosed destination.

The inflamed rhetoric emanating from Mideast capitals heightened the air of unreality that had cloaked the impasse from the outset. "There is no going back," cried the United Arab Republic's Gamal Abdel Nasser. "War is inevitable," echoed the editor of his tame newspaper, Al Ahram. Israel, warned Foreign Minister Abba Eban, "is like a coiled spring," and could only consider Nasser's blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba as a direct threat to "the kind of national interest for which a nation stakes all that it has."

Second Thoughts. Nevertheless, there was hope that--barring miscalculation --the crisis would not pass from the shouting stage to the shooting stage for a while. Nasser has achieved what he set out to win. He has mended his shredded prestige among fellow Arabs, forced Jordan's King Hussein into a humiliating acknowledgment of his strength, and successfully challenged the Israelis--so far. In fact, Cairo's--and the world's--greatest fear is that he will be unable to restrain his more volatile allies, notably Syria and the fanatic Palestine Liberation Organization.

The Russians, having helped egg Nasser on by publicly condemning the Israelis, may now be having second thoughts. In a note to Lyndon Johnson, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin is reported to have urged backstage action by the superpowers to damp down the situation.

What may be giving the Russians pause is the fact that their support of Nasser's closing the Tiran Strait could backfire on them. The Turks, for example, might some day close the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, or the Scandinavians seal off the Baltic by blockading the Skagerrak and the Strait of Kattegat. Further, after implicitly endorsing Nasser's denial of the freedom of navigation, the Russians found themselves in the position of protesting that the U.S. had been guilty of the very same thing. Complaining that American planes had bombed a Russian ship berthed in a North Vietnamese port 50 miles up the coast from Haiphong--a charge denied by the Defense Department--Moscow formally accused the U.S. of "flagrant violation of the freedom of navigation."

Israel, facing yet another climactic point in her 19-year struggle for survival (see cover), remains the biggest imponderable. Last week Premier Levi Eshkol indicated that he would defer an immediate riposte to Nasser's challenge, saying that he had decided on the "continuation of political activity in the international sphere." But he is under heavy domestic pressure to act, and the point may soon come when he will be forced to choose between political oblivion and a move against the Arabs.

Chickens of the Sea. Delaying that decision for as long as possible is the chief object of U.S. diplomacy. "The White House position is to pursue the Middle East matter as thoroughly as possible in the United Nations," said Presidential Press Secretary George Christian. But the U.N. has performed ineptly, particularly in what Britain's Wilson described as the "precipitous and regrettable" withdrawal of the peacekeeping force from the Egyptian-Israeli border. New York Times Columnist C. L. Sulzberger was even harsher in his judgment. In meekly pulling out the U.N. force, he wrote, Secretary-General U Thant "used his international prestige with the objectivity of a spurned lover and the dynamism of a noodle."

As the prospects of effective U.N. intervention receded, the U.S. and Britain teamed up to chart a different course of action, final details of which were approved when Wilson arrived for his one-day visit. Under the Anglo-American plan, a declaration would be circulated among the world's maritime nations affirming that 1) the Gulf of Aqaba is an international waterway, and 2) all signatories are entitled to exercise the right of "free and innocent passage."

Washington and London found most of the maritime powers more than willing to affirm the gulf's international status. Getting them to back up the principle with force was another matter. Aside from the U.S., Britain and perhaps The Netherlands, the rest, like so many chickens of the sea, clucked with concern. Japan, after all, does a lot of business with the Arabs. So does West Germany. Charles de Gaulle refused to sign the proposed declaration or even acknowledge the validity of the 1950 Tripartite Declaration by which France, Britain and the U.S. pledged to protect Israel's territorial integrity. Any nation resorting to arms, he declared with Olympian loftiness, would have "neither the approval nor support" of France--though, considering his country's impotence in the situation, neither would be worth much.

Back to the '30s. As historic seafarers--and unabashed supporters of the Israelis--the British were most impatient to put the plan into operation, even without multilateral backing. One high official, resorting to undiplomatic language, urged "ramming a ship up Nasser's channel." In the upper house of Parliament, Lord Avon--the former Anthony Eden, who resigned as Britain's Foreign Minister in protest against Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement and in 1956 joined France and Israel in the Suez invasion--even raised the specter of Munich. "I do not feel myself back ten years ago--I feel myself very much in the 1930s at the present time," said Avon. "I should be willing to support whatever action the Government and the U.S., and I hope some other maritime powers, thought necessary to insure that freedom of navigation is restored."

But the U.S., despite a solemn pledge to Israel in 1957 that there would be free access to the Gulf of Aqaba, was still intent on lining up a few other nations before threatening to test the blockade. Should diplomacy or threats fail to solve the impasse, Lyndon Johnson is bound to become the target of heavy fire unless he actually does challenge Nasser. Nor would such criticism be unjustified, since failure to act would amount to a dismal retreat from a clear-cut commitment.

One of the oddities of the situation, however, is that many of those who are attacking Johnson for not having resorted to force at once in the Mideast are those who also attack him most bitterly for having used force at all in Viet Nam. Jean-Paul Sartre, fresh from the Swedish kangaroo court where he helped indict the U.S. for "war crimes" in Viet Nam, demanded a blockade-busting effort to aid Israel--and promptly had his books banned throughout the Arab world as a result. A covey of Democratic doves in the Senate called for swift action to reopen the Tiran Strait.

Double Standard. The clearest enunciation of this curious double standard came from Pulitzer Prizewinning Historian (The Guns of August) Barbara Tuchman, a critic of the Administration on Viet Nam. In a letter to the Washington Post and the New York Times, she declared that the way to cope with the Mideast crisis was "not by futile fiddling in the U.N. but by straightforward independent action, the only kind that can be effective." The kind, she might have added--but did not--that has earned the Administration brick bats when it comes to Viet Nam. Tuchman concluded with what sounded remarkably like a Middle Eastern version of the "domino theory" that is so derisively scorned by Administration critics when applied to Asia. "Aqaba is the test from which the Arab nations, and behind them all the nations of Asia and Africa, will take their cue," she wrote. "If we fail to act to confirm the principle of freedom of navigation, every person in every one of these countries will take note."

Days or Weeks. That point could hardly have been lost on Johnson, who has repeatedly emphasized the damage to U.S. prestige that would result from a U.S. withdrawal in Viet Nam. If diplomacy fails to settle the Arab-Israeli impasse, and if the other seagoing nations continue to shrink from the idea of backing their principles with some punch, the U.S. and Britain may have to act on their own. Otherwise, Israel surely will move to break the blockade--not in a matter of months or years but, as Eban warned, days or weeks. And once Israel moves, as Harold Wilson said in Washington, "a much wider conflagration might be only a matter of hours."

Lyndon Johnson seemed keenly aware of that danger as well. Toasting Wilson during a White House dinner, he quoted G. K. Chesterton as saying: "I do not believe in a fate which strikes men however they act. But I do believe in a fate which strikes men unless they act." Added the President: "Tonight, together, we are ready to support our common purposes, our mutual hopes for peace--with deeds."

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