America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

According to a perverse law of international politics, hard-liners on opposing sides tend to reinforce each other's stubbornness and influence, especially in times of tension. Consider the interaction between Baghdad and Jerusalem. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's Likud government is hoping that Iraq's conquest of Kuwait will make it easier for Israel to retain possession of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Before the crisis broke, Shamir's Foreign Minister, David Levy, intended to visit Washington last week for what had promised to be a tough session. Secretary of State James Baker was prepared to bear down hard on the need to jump-start the peace process that Shamir let stall last spring. Both Bush and Congress have grown impatient with the Likud's ingenuity in finding excuses not to negotiate with the Palestinians.

Levy's trip has now been postponed until early next month. Thanks to Saddam, Levy will probably find his American hosts less insistent on Israeli concessions. A full-scale confrontation in the Middle East makes this an inauspicious time for the U.S. to be pressuring its closest ally in the area. Besides, the Iraqi dictator's well-publicized embraces last week of Palestine ) Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat and the Precarious Little King of Jordan make it all the easier for hawkish Israelis to say: You expect us to deal with these people?

The American answer to that question ought still to be yes. The Likud is using the current upheaval to underscore one reason for the Arab-Israeli conflict -- the bellicosity and treacherousness of its radical neighbors -- while obscuring another -- Israeli intransigence and expansionism. As long as Israel refuses to budge from any of the occupied territory and as long as it continues to repress the Palestinians who live there, Israeli policy will be a source of instability; and the U.S., as Israel's friend and guardian, will pay a price in its ability to deal with Arabs of all stripes, moderates as well as radicals.

Iraq's aggression has inflicted another, more subtle kind of collateral damage on the prospects for peace between Israel and the Arabs. No sooner had word of the attack reached the outside world than politicians, pundits and editorial cartoonists in the U.S. and Europe, including Germany -- and particularly in Israel -- were identifying Saddam with Adolf Hitler, and Kuwait in 1990 with Czechoslovakia in 1938. One purveyor of this parallel even found historical prototypes for King Hussein (Benito Mussolini) and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (Neville Chamberlain).

In the case of Saddam, the name-calling is far from preposterous. He has unleashed a blitzkrieg against a weak country on his border and committed mass murder -- using poison gas, no less -- on Iraq's Kurdish minority. But there is nonetheless something pernicious about the analogy. Regardless of how those making the comparison try to qualify its implications, there is a danger that many of their readers and listeners will, at least subliminally, take the point to its invidious extreme: Saddam equals Hitler, ergo Arabs equal Nazis. As a brutalizing corollary, the forces fighting the Jewish state, from P.L.O. commandos to the child warriors of the intifadeh, can too easily appear as agents of a new Holocaust.

Saddam has done enough on his own to make the Middle East a more dangerous place than it was two weeks ago. His critics, in their justifiable outrage, should be careful not to feed, however inadvertently, the tendency that already exists on all sides in that region to demonize adversaries.