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The Key to Peace and Stability
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# : |
11895 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
3,692 Words |
| Author
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Leonard Binder
Leonard Binder is professor of political science at the
University of California in Los Angeles. |
None of the major events in recent Middle Eastern history - the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Iranian revolution, the Iraqi attack on southern Iran, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon - was the doing of the great powers. Each of these events, and may of lesser significance, was undertaken by Middle Eastern governments or by nongovernmental political entities, in defiance of great power preferences and even with a view to forcing the hand of one or another great power.
There is, in fact, little or no precedent for the kind of arrangement that is foreseen in an international conference dedicated to finding a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The idea of an accommodative arrangement between the great powers that might dispose of Middle Eastern conflicts and neutralize the region in the Cold War was a product of the Glassboro, New Jersey, meeting in 1967 after the Six Day War, between Soviet and American leaders, and of the slowly developing concept of détente. The idea grew out of the belief that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union sought the 1967 war. Each had sought to prevent that war, but each was powerless to control its Middle East allies, and each was compelled to pursue an "imbalanced" regional policy in order to counter the position of the other.
The diametric confrontation of the United States and the Soviet Union during the War of Attrition between Egypt and Israel in 1969-1970, in which each superpower was firmly allied to a single client state, was an arrangement that neither desired and that each persisted in as a means of pressuring the other side for a compromise. Indeed, the only reason not to
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