Now‘s the Time to Address the Costs of a Golan Deal

(Washington, D.C.): “Premature.” That’s the word Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
and
other Administration officials are using to finesse legitimate questions about the prospective
costs to the United States of Bill Clinton’s latest diplomatic “Hail Mary” pass — his bid to buy a
legacy by promising to help finance Israel’s surrender of the Golan Heights to Syria.

With the bazaar opening Wednesday, in the form of talks between the three nations in
Washington, Congress should immediately put Clinton and Company on notice: Don’t
even
think about presenting the American people with another fait accompli.

Previous Faits

That was, after all, the practical effect of Clinton Administration promises made
without prior
congressional approval to support the so-called Oslo “peace process”
with hundreds of millions
of dollars in cash outlays for Yasser Arafat. A substantial proportion of these funds — intended
to help the Palestinian Authority demonstrate tangible benefits for its people from making peace
with the Israelis — have instead disappeared into bank accounts and slush funds controlled by the
corrupt Arafat and his cronies. The same fate seems in prospect for the additional hundreds of
millions promised by the Clinton team to lubricate the subsequent Hebron and
Wye River deals.

Then there is the longer-term experience with Egypt. Cairo has garnered
billions of dollars in
U.S. foreign aid since it became the first Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with Israel. While
much of this assistance was meant for economic development purposes, the most
notable
impact has been in arming Egypt to the teeth with advanced American weapon
technology.
In recent months, even the Israeli government of Ehud Barak has evinced concern that Egypt
may, thanks to the “peace process,” be reacquiring a war option against the Jewish State. ¹

Now Syria

These past, problematic transactions are likely to pale by comparison — both in quantitative
and
qualitative terms — with what Mr. Clinton appears to be willing to promise to “support” the
Israeli-Syrian entente. Israel’s Finance Minister Avraham Shohat on Sunday
told Israel
Radio, “I have no doubt the Americans know a process of this type that requires
removing
military infrastructure and building new military infrastructure including warning stations
will cost a lot of money.” According to Reuters, “the [Israeli] Yedioth
Ahronoth newspaper
reported treasury officials put the cost at about $18 billion.”

That amount might be the price Israel alone would charge. It is
anybody’s guess at this point
how much Syria would demand to accept Barak’s surrender of the Golan Heights. As
Israeli professor Steven Plaut observed in an essay that appeared in the Middle East
Quarterly
and Wall Street Journal, Hafez Assad has driven the Syrian economy into the
ground:

Although Syria’s ruling Baath party doesn’t call itself communist, its economic
structure makes Syria one of the world’s last surviving communist countries. An all-powerful
central planning bureaucracy fixes prices and owns the bulk of industry in
the country….Syria is finding it increasingly difficult to feed itself. Its agriculture
sector is low-tech and primitive. The World Health Organization estimates that 28%
of Syrian children suffer from stunted growth, in large part due to malnutrition. The
Syrian infrastructure is undeveloped and primitive, with often-unsafe water, few
sewers and an unreliable electricity supply.

‘Show Me the Money’ — and Other Goodies

Hafez Assad is no fool. He clearly understands, just as his friends Slobodan
Milosevic, Kim
Jong Il, Fidel Castro, Jiang Zemin, Boris Yeltsin and Yasser Arafat
have before him, that
Mr. Clinton will gladly obligate the U.S. taxpayer to pay handsomely for the most
insubstantial of expedient diplomatic “successes.” Despite his people’s desperate
economic
plight and the persistent rumors of his own imminent demise, Assad is poised to parlay his
incredibly weak hand into enormous, tangible political, financial and strategic gains.

Indeed, the Syrian despot may already have secured a presidential commitment to remove his
country from the State Department lists of drug-trafficking and terrorist-sponsoring
nations — just for beginning the negotiating process. That could clear the way, in turn,
for infusions of
multilateral and other forms of economic life-support for his faltering regime, even before any
peace agreement has been signed with Israel. It is certainly not “premature” for Congress to
know what inducements have already been offered to get Syria back to the negotiating table.

One might think that reacquiring every square inch of the Golan Heights lost to Israel in
1967
(the terms upon which Assad has long insisted and now apparently has secured) would be reward
enough for that patient and relentless nationalist. After all, as anyone who has visited the sliver
of high ground in question — or been exposed to the history of Israeli security with and without
the strategic depth it provides — can attest, return of the Heights will restore Syria’s war option
against the Jewish State.

Unintended Consequences: Re-establishing Syria’s War Option?

This danger can only be intensified if, as Assad obviously expects, the Syrian military gets
the
sort of help from the U.S. government and its defense contractors that has greatly increased the
ability of other Arab armies to conduct offensive operations, including against Israel if they
should so choose. Maintaining access to early warning information from the intelligence assets
on the Height’s Mount Harmon, constructing expensive new military facilities in the Israeli
plains below the Golan and even the presence on the high ground of American monitors will not
alter a harsh reality: A rearmed Syria under the control of the likes of Hafez Assad and
an
Israel bereft of its strategic depth is a formula for instability and conflict, “peace
agreements” notwithstanding.

Israel’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’?

The decision about whether to relinquish territory critically important to the safety of the
State of
Israel is a decision that only that country’s government can make. It must do so with its eyes
wide open about not only the military risks. Jerusalem must also be under no illusions about the
dangers associated with surrendering control over the thirty percent of Israel’s water resources
that emanates from the Golan watershed. Ditto the inadvisability of “contracting out”
responsibility for Israel’s security interests in Lebanon to its Syrian occupiers.

Most importantly, Israel cannot responsibly make that decision on the basis of
promises
about American financial or technical assistance, the emplacement of U.S. personnel on the
Golan Heights, security guarantees or any similar inducements without certainty that they
will be honored. Such confidence, in turn, cannot be justified unless it enjoys
steadfast
congressional support, as well as that of the Clinton Administration.

The Bottom Line

It would be a serious mistake for either Mr. Clinton or the parties to an Israeli-Syrian accord
to
mistake legislators’ overwhelming desire to promote real peace in the Middle East for a
willingness to pick up whatever tab the Administration runs up and submits without prior
consultation. Far from being “premature,” Congress and its constituents are entitled to
know now the nature, extent and duration of Mr. Clinton’s latest round of “peace
process”
promises.

The same principle applies to such promises as that enunciated in 1994 by eleven
high-ranking,
former U.S. national security officials — including three members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ² —
in urging deliberation and debate about any deployment of U.S. forces on the Golan Heights long
before a deal predicated upon such a commitment was completed: “If the subject is debated now
and Congress and the executive branch decide to oppose a deployment of U.S. troops on the
Golan, Israel and Syria could take this into account in their negotiations and devise alternative
security arrangements accordingly. Such a decision would be far less disruptive if made
now
than if deferred until after a Syrian-Israeli deal is concluded.”

The Center for Security Policy commends the Chairman of the House International Relations
Committee Rep. Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) for publicly announcing last week
that he expects
“the administration will not make any promises regarding foreign assistance to either of the
parties without prior, extensive consultations with Congress.” This shot-across-the bow should
be but the opening salvo in the debate that should precede, not follow, the imminent
Israeli-Syrian negotiations.

¹ See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Are U.S. ‘Investments’ in the Mideast ‘Peace
Process’ Giving the Arabs a New War Option? (No.
99-D 126, 28 October 1999).

² The participants in the study, entitled href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=00-Golan94″>U.S. Forces on the Golan Heights: An Assessment of
Benefits and Costs are: General John Foss, Commanding General,
U.S. Army Training and
Doctrine Command (who had responsibility for U.S. forces in the Sinai). General Al Gray,
Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps. Lieutenant General John Pustay (USAF, Ret.) Assistant to the
Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; President, National Defense University. General Bernard
Schriever, Commander, U.S. Air Force Systems Command. Admiral Carl Trost, Chief of Naval
Operations. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr., Chief of Naval Operations. Douglas J. Feith, Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense; Middle East specialist, National Security Council; Frank
Gaffney, Jr., Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Policy); Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense. Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense (International
Security Policy). Eugene Rostow, Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency;
Under Secretary of State (Political Affairs). Henry S. Rowen, former Assistant Secretary of
Defense (International Security Affairs); Chairman, National Intelligence Council, Central
Intelligence Agency.