The National Interest
Spring 2002

The Karine-A Affair and the War on Terrorism

by Robert Satloff

 

. . . Despite the early friendship between Arafat and the ayatollahs, mutual antagonism has long been a fixture of the accepted analytical framework for U.S. Middle East policy. This flowed in part from Arafat’s long-term alignment with Saddam, even when it cost the Palestinian leader substantial goodwill in the West. But as Palestinian Islamist organizations grew in popularity and brazenness, it was taken for granted, too, that Arafat would want to keep the patron of his leading political competitors at arm’s length.

This assumption of PLO-Iranian antagonism has long been reflected in U.S. policy. The imposition of the U.S. trade embargo on Iran (1995) and the passage of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (1996) were largely prompted by the danger to the peace process posed by Iranian-backed terrorism. In all these developments, Israel and the Palestinian Authority were both viewed as targets of Iranian-backed terrorism. Indeed, American, Israeli and even some Arab leaders argued throughout the 1990s that pursuit of the peace process was one of the best defenses against the spread of Iranian-supported religious fundamentalism throughout the Arab world.

All these assumptions have been called into question by the Karine-A affair. The biggest unanswered question is "why?" . . .

Just as Gamal Abdel Nasser turned to the Soviet Union for arms in 1955 after exhausting efforts to wring political, military and economic concessions from Britain and the United States, so too may Arafat have turned to Iran for arms because he concluded that the "peace strategy" that had animated Palestinian politics since at least the Madrid conference had outlived its usefulness. Specifically, he may have determined that the "peace process" had effectively run its course, in the sense that an Israel traumatized first by the rejection of Ehud Barak’s magnanimous Camp David offer and then by months of uprising, terrorism and violence would never again willingly turn over more territory to the Palestinians. He may have reasoned that the warm ties between the Bush Administration and the Sharon government, coming in the wake of the failed (and, in some circles, embarrassing) effort of President Clinton to broker a late-inning peace deal, meant that the United States was no longer useful in helping Arafat achieve his territorial objectives. And, based on Mubarak’s public rejection of lending military assistance to the Palestinians, complemented by the insouciance toward the Palestinian cause evinced by many Arab kings, potentates and emirs, Arafat may have concluded that the Arab states would never be enlisted in any operational sense in support of the Palestinians. . . .