YANKEE STAY HOME

To the Editors of The Crimson.

I found Professor Walzer's remarks on the need for a long-run U.S. presence in the Middle East rather curious, partly because he used the phrase "learn[ing] the right lessons from the Vietnam War." This is a variant of the phrase "learning the wrong lessons [from the Vietnam war]" which happened to be the title of an editorial by the new editors of The New Republic (Feb. 1st) in which a tortuous argument is offered in defense of the irresponsible proposal by Prof. Robert Tucker of Johns Hopkins University for a U.S. military seizure of the Arabian oilfields. (See Commentary, January 1975).

The problem with Prof. Walzer's advice to the liberals and leftists who opposed the brutal Vietnam war is that it is much too ambiguous. His conception of "some sort of longterm [U.S.] military presence" in the Middle East leaves too many crucial questions unanswered. Even his reference to the need for a "credible guarantee of [Israeli] borders" is not enough, for he must know that longterm peace between Arabs and Israel is connected with the fundamental character of the Israeli state. Support for binationalism in Israel should accompany any U.S. guarantee of the territorial and demilitarizing dimensions of longterm peace between Arabs and Israel. Without a binational Israel--fully accessible to Jew and Palestinian alike--a longterm peace is illusory.

Finally, I thought Assistant Professor Stephen Krasner's proposal that the U.S. restrict Arab use of petro-dollars in our markets a fossilized form of jingoistic economic nationalism that sophisticated American and especially Harvard theorists in international politics had laid to rest over a generation ago. Krasner no doubt has some very pressing reasons--political and ideological--for wanting to refossilize out thinking in this crucial area of international politics. It seems a new season for opportunists, thoroughly Machiavellian, has alas already commenced. Martin Kilson   Professor of Government