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While the U.S. has been fighting a ground war, the Israeli leader has been preparing for a diplomatic one. "There will be an effort to use political means to snatch from Israel what could not be snatched from us by force," Shamir told his party, adding that nothing would shake his refusal to cede land for peace. The Palestinians' feverish support for Saddam made any compromise over the West Bank and Gaza far more unlikely. And Shamir feels that the restraint he displayed in the face of the Scud barrage entitles Israel to freedom from Washington's heavy hand.
Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat rendered Shamir's obstructionist policy all the more workable by alienating the West, his Arab bankrollers and the Israeli peaceniks. "The Palestinian path no longer goes through Arafat," says a senior U.S. diplomat. Some of the chairman's supporters suggest he may have to step down to restore the Palestinians' shattered credibility. Even that might not help. Though the Arab regimes pay lip service to their cause, blind attachment to Saddam has cost the Palestinians respect and sympathy everywhere. At the same time, the war has intensified the naked hatred between Palestinians and Israelis, making any mutual accommodation harder still.
Money and Democracy. Perhaps the rosiest of postwar propositions is that the oil-rich gulf states will share their treasure more generously with the oil- less poor ones. The idea would be to reduce the envy of, and the enmity toward, the rich while alleviating the poverty that is a constant source of instability.
It is a noble but naive notion. The Arab haves, which were threatened by Saddam, are not especially happy with most of the have-nots -- Jordan, Yemen, the Palestinians and the Sudan, all of whom cheered the Iraqi invader. The exceptions are Egypt and Syria, which are likely to receive rewards -- for their help in defeating Saddam, not for the misfortune of being impoverished.
With war costs to pay off and with low oil prices, the victorious gulf states are not much interested in sharing their wealth. At a recent meeting in Cairo, they asserted the necessity of "respecting the sovereignty of each Arab country over its own natural resources." Translation: Don't covet your neighbor's oil. The statement was evidence of just how worn the ideal of Arab unity is -- the notion that all Arabs are one nation so the gulf oil belongs to all.
Nor is democracy likely to follow in the wake of the war as a means of strengthening Arab societies against radicalism. The hope was that the new Kuwait would lead the way, but the royal family appears less keen about liberalization now than it did when it was courting international support from exile. For their part, Saudi Arabia's King Fahd and the Sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said, have promised to create only consultative councils, not parliaments. The U.S. is unlikely to push democratization, knowing fundamentalists are best organized to take advantage of it.