‘DENNIS: LET THE GOLAN DEPLOYMENT STUDY GO!’ CONGRESS ENTITLED TO 7-MONTH OLD RAND STUDY CALLED ‘PREMATURE’

Congress is being denied access to a classified study that may shed important light on the strategic implications and prospective costs of commitments the Clinton Administration appears ready to make to close an Israeli-Syrian deal. If Members of Congress permit this sandbagging to continue, they could shortly find themselves party to an unsustainable peace built on foundations of sand.

The Response to One Unraveling Agreement — Sign Some More

As the Israeli people come to grips with the first — but surely not the last — instance of Palestinian "police" firing upon Israeli soldiers in territory newly surrendered to the PLO, the future of the first Rabin-Peres peace agreement with enemies of the Jewish State is becoming more clouded than ever. The Israeli government appears determined to treat this ominous development as it has all the previous ones,(1) namely by redoubling its efforts to secure still more, and ever more ambitious, agreements with other Arabs.

Thus, the effort to forge a peace treaty with Jordan will see this week the first public meetings in the region between the Israeli and Jordanian foreign ministers. These will be followed by a summit meeting on 25 July in Washington between Prime Minister Rabin and King Hussein and, in all likelihood, the initialling of some sort of document that promises an end to the state of war between the two parties — and earns Jordan a cool $1 billion in U.S. debt forgiveness and military upgrades.

So, too, will the frantic efforts to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Syria resume this week under the personal auspices of Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Given the desperation being exhibited by both the U.S. and Israeli governments to do a deal with the Syrians, Hafez Assad — one of the world’s great political poker players — may just be willing to accept Israel’s surrender of the Golan Heights and pocket Jordanian-style financial and military assistance from the United States, to boot. (Ironically, the latter may be arranged through the Russians, who would be only too happy to arm their erstwhile client at American expense.) It goes without saying, presumably, that Assad could expect to receive in addition the same sort of legal rehabilitation Arafat secured from Washington simply for doing a deal with Israel, i.e., removing Syria from the list of drug-dealing and terrorist-sponsoring nations.

So Much for ‘Prematurity’

Of course, the evidence that official hopes are rising for an imminent "breakthrough" in the negotiations between Israel and Syria makes a mockery of assertions heard in recent weeks from the U.S. State Department, the Israeli embassy in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and various Members of Congress. The party line has been that it is "premature" to consider what such a deal might imply or require of the United States. In fact, the prospect that the Clinton Administration will seek in the very near future to facilitate the completion of an Israeli-Syrian deal by pledging that American troops will serve as peacekeepers on the Golan Heights makes the need to analyze the prudence of such an idea anything but premature.

For this reason, Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-WY) on 1 July 1994 offered an amendment to the FY1995 Defense authorization bill that would have directed the Pentagon to perform a study of the key aspects of a possible U.S. deployment on the Golan, including: the possible risks, strategic implications, expected costs, duration and planned exit strategy that would be associated with any such deployment.(2) Importantly, the Wallop amendment would also have given the Congress thirty days to consider the results of the Department of Defense study prior to any presidential commitment to position American forces between Israel and Syria.

Regrettably, the Wallop amendment was not approved(3); the attached column by the Center for Security Policy’s director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., from the 12 July 1994 edition of the Washington Times suggests that the repercussions of the Senate’s failure even to debate the merits of this initiative could prove fully as portentous as a similar failure nearly twenty years ago to consider rigorously the Tonkin Gulf resolution.

What About the RAND Study?

Be that as it may, it seems reasonable to expect that — had Senators known that a study of precisely these issues (and other, less dangerous, ways in which the United States might contribute to the success of an Israeli-Syrian accord) already existed — they would at a minimum have supported an effort to ensure that it was briefed to the Congress. In fact, thanks to a tasking to the RAND Corporation initiated by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Fred Smith in the Spring of 1993, an analysis of just such questions was supplied by RAND to the Pentagon fully seven months ago. Entitled "Possible U.S. Roles in a Middle East Peace Settlement," this study would be a valuable point of departure for the sort of debate Sen. Wallop (and quite a number of others, both in and outside of the American Jewish community) believe is in order at this time.(4)

The Center for Security Policy has learned that RAND has been denied authority to brief congressional offices that are seeking to learn the contents of its study about a prospective U.S. deployment on the Golan Heights — a study that was made possible by the use of congressionally authorized and appropriated funds. According to informed sources, the official responsible for keeping the RAND study under wraps is none other than Dennis Ross, the Clinton Administration’s Special Coordinator for the Middle East. Mr. Ross is at the same time pursuing a deal that will likely be constructed upon a commitment of American forces to a Golan "peacekeeping" mission.

The Bottom Line

The Center urges responsible Members of Congress to seek, at a minimum, access to the RAND study. Ideally, they would also insist upon an opportunity to debate and perhaps act upon its conclusions prior to the point at which preemptive action by Mr. Ross and his colleagues make such action, as a practical matter, impossible. But at the very least, the Congress should have some sense of what the Clinton Administration’s latest dalliance with U.S. involvement in international peacekeeping ventures is likely to entail, cost and precipitate.

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1. These include such provocations as: continuing attacks on Israeli citizens and their defense forces; Yasser Arafat’s declaration of a jihad against Israel; the inclusion of terrorists wanted for crimes against Israel in his official party as he travelled to take up residence in Gaza; evidence of a modus vivendi between Hamas and the PLO; and Arafat’s repeated public pronouncements concerning his plan to achieve a Palestinian state that incorporates all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and has Jerusalem as its capital.

2. For more on the sorts of risks that might be involved with such a deployment — with implications for the sorts of forces and equipment utilized, attendant costs, strategic repercussions and exit strategies — see the Center for Security Policy’s 25 April 1994 Decision Brief entitled, Reckless Abandon: Can Either the U.S. or Israel Afford Rabin’s Bid to Bet the (Golan) Farm?, (No. 94-D 42).

3. For an analysis of the vote on the Wallop Amendment and its meaning see the Center’s recent Decision Brief entitled, Mazeltov, Sen.Wallop Forces First Vote on Golan Deployment; Vote Will Prove a Pyrrhic Victory for AIPAC, (No. 94-69, 2 July 1994) and the attached column.

4. Of course, the existence of such a study also knocks the pegs out from under the argument served up by AIPAC in a letter to the New York Times published on 8 July 1994. It contended, in part:

"We do not believe that the costs and benefits for the United States [of a Golan deployment] can be assessed meaningfully without knowing the…critical parameters [defined by a specific agreement]…Nor do we believe that a Defense Department study of risks could be meaningful without precise knowledge of the details of an Israel-Syria agreement….Risk analysis is certainly not a hard science…even with known parameters, estimates are often unreliable. Without them, estimation becomes an exercise in pure imagination." (Emphasis added.)

As noted in a Center analysis entitled, Is AIPAC Being Too Clever by Half? Study of U.S. Golan Contingency Can be Done Now! (No. 94-D 66, 29 June 1994), "such contingency studies are done virtually every day by uniformed and civilian officials of the Department of Defense." It might have been added, they are also frequently commissioned by Pentagon officials to supporting organizations like RAND.