Lean Straight

SOMETIMES it's easy to forget that the bloodiest and most ominous Mideast war is recent history has been raging for over two years. Israel hasn't been directly involved in the Iran/Iraq conflict. No U.S. forces have been directly committed, unlike in Lebanon. And yet the ferocity and scale of this war have been great, and if Iran wins the worldwide repercussions will be severe. Iran has fielded a half-million man army. Casualty estimates run into the tens of thousands. Iraq now seems to be using deadly mustard gas on a large scale. And a victory for the fundamentalist regime of Ayatolah Khomeini would directly threaten the oil-rich kingdoms of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Such an Iranian victory would certainly appear to represent the worst possible outcome. The prospect of holy war sweeping down on the relatively stable Persian Gulf regimes should strike fear into the hearts of all the Middle Eastern people particularly, and in general of all the people around the world hurt by the oil shocks of the 1970s (which means everyone) Iran has reserved to itself the right to close the critical Straits of Hormuz, through which 60 percent of the West's oil flows. The fanatic ideologues behind the revolutionary Iranian regime would not be averse to a hobbling of the industrial world, especially if such action sent the price of crude through the roof and actually increased Iran's total revenue from the reduced amount of oil that would no doubt slip through.

None of these outcomes are expected if Iraq "wins." A victory for the Iraqi regime at this point would merely mean an armistice at the old boundaries. Iraq is far smaller than Iran, does not enjoy Iran's strategic position near the Straits, and does not consider the West to be a collectivity of "Great Satans."

Nevertheless, the United States should not "tilt" toward Iraq, as we recently did toward Jordan in our offer of weapons to King Hussein. Iraq is not even one of the so-called moderate Arab states. The minority-supported regime in Iraq practices some of the most brutal and oppressive internal policies of any country in the world--a claim supported by their use of mustard gas, which was outlawed after World War I in a treaty ratified by Iraq.

The simple reality of this bloody desert war of attrition is that neither side has any real justification for what it is doing, and victory for either would have terrible world consequences. A good case can be made that an Iranian victory would be the greater evil, but this gives no weight to any argument that our government should support Iraq. U.S. policy should seek to defuse the crisis as much as possible with the limited diplomatic tools available, but this must no include aid for either side.