Lyndon B. Johnson and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel

In the Shadow of the Hawk

Abraham Ben-Zvi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135755737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Lyndon B. Johnson and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel seeks to reconstruct and elucidate the processes behind the decisions made by the Johnson Administration during the years 1965-68 to sell Israel M-48 tanks, A-4 Skyhawk planes and F-4 Phantom planes. This examination is based on a distinction between three factions which competed for influence within Washington's high-policy elite: the traditionalists (whose major representative was Secretary of State Dean Rusk); the pragmatists (whose most outspoken representative was Robert Komer of the National Security Council); and the domestically oriented policymakers (the central decision-maker who quintessentially exemplifies this category being President Johnson). This book is a sequel to: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel, which examined the first arms deal between the US and Israel.

1

Introduction Lyndon B.Johnson and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel: In the Shadow of the Hawk

A preliminary reconstruction of the American-Israeli relations as they unfolded during the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson points to an innate paradox. On the one hand, viewing the Middle Eastern strategic landscape exclusively through the lens of the omnivorous, all-encompassing superpower confrontation, President Johnson—from the very inception of his administration—depicted Israel as a strategic ally of the United States and as a reliable bulwark against the recalcitrant and radical forces of pan-Arab nationalism. Perceiving Israel as a power capable of safeguarding and promoting a broad range of American security interests in the region, the President was relentless in his efforts to broaden, consolidate and institutionalize the largely ad hoc and highlyconstrained forms of strategic and political cooperation between Washington and Jerusalem, which had been established during John F. Kennedy's last year in the White House.¹

At the same time, contrary to his predecessor's initial desire to improve relations with Egypt by vastly increasing the level (and improving the terms) of economic assistance to Cairo,² American relations with Egypt and its leader, President Gamal Abdel Nasser, remained permeated with tension and mistrust and fraught with incessant crises during most of Johnson's tenure as president. Perceiving the Egyptian leader ‘as an instrument of the Kremlin,’³ President Johnson was uninhibited and outspoken in his criticism of Egypt's global and regional modus operandi over a variety of issues and events ranging from its continued military intervention in Yemen; its unabated support of the rebels in the Congo in defiance of the American position; and the equally relentless Egyptian drive to liquidate Western military presence in Oman, Aden, Cyprus and the strategically important Wheelus airfield in Libya. The President also criticized the burning of the American library and cultural center in Cairo (which was perpetrated by African students, on Thanksgiving Day 1964, protesting the American posture in the Congo); as well as the downing, shortly thereafter, of a civilian American plane which mistakenly entered Egypt's airspace; and the seizing —by the Egyptian Government—of the assets of the Ford Motor Company in November 1966 following a dispute with the firm over customs duties.⁴

Notwithstanding the fact that American—Egyptian relations remained charged with suspicion and friction during most of the Johnson era (with President Nasser's strong opposition to the Vietnam War further aggravating an already highly-charged, emotion-laden dyad), and notwithstanding the growing American perception of Israel as a major regional asset to Washington's strategic interests in the region (which was manifested most clearly in June 1967), there remained an occasional gap— within the bounds of the American-Israeli framework—between the conceptual and the tangible or between the psychological and the operational relationship.

In other words—and here lies the core of the paradox—the fact that President Johnson ‘was very anti-Nasser’ and sought to disengage himself completely from the accommodative posture of ‘trying to do business with Nasser’,⁵ which had characterized American diplomacy during the early part of Kennedy's tenure as president, while viewing Israel as a major pro-Western stronghold in the region, could not in itself guarantee that American policy in the Egyptian-Israeli sphere would invariably and quintessentially reflect these presidential predispositions and preferences. Clearly, the inherent irreconcilability—as perceived by the President— between Israel and Egypt in terms of their respective patterns of foreign policy behavior on both the regional and global levels (with Egypt supporting a broad range of anti-American and anti-British causes from Cyprus to Puerto Rico and Vietnam, and with Israel repeatedly demonstrating a willingness to support most of his policies ⁶), did not always precipitate dichotomous and irreconcilable policies within the Egyptian-Israeli zone.

Specifically, despite the fact that President Johnson's initial attitude toward Israel was closely and irrevocably patterned on the basic premises of the ‘Special Relationship’ paradigm,⁷ and was thus permeated with sympathy, empathy and goodwill (for example, such enterprises as ‘the Israeli conversion of the barren [Negev] desert into a fertile agricultural land [reminding] him of projects he had sponsored along the Pedernales’⁸), the actual formation of American policy toward Israel during the Johnson Presidency—particularly in the field of arms sales—was not always directly and inextricably linked to, or derived from, the cluster of sentiments, feelings and beliefs which comprised the core of the ‘Special Relationship’ orientation.

In seeking to elucidate the origins of this discrepancy between belief and actual behavior, which was repeatedly and forcefully manifested in the incessant difficulties that surrounded all Israeli efforts to secure arms from the Johnson Administration, it is clear that the process by which American policy in the Middle East in general, and the administration's arms sales posture toward Israel in particular, was shaped and delineated, did not even marginally approximate the logic and basic premises of the ‘rational choice’ model of decision. Far from being ‘a calculated solution to a strategic problem,’ reached by a unitary actor on the basis of a scrupulous assessment of the expected outcome of several well-defined, mutually exclusive policy alternatives,⁹ this process incorporated divergent perspectives and dimensions which reflected the different (and occasionally the incompatible) bureaucratic, organizational and domestic priorities, interests and preferences of the various individuals and organizations involved in the formation of the administration's arms sales policy toward Israel. These individuals and organizations did not pursue a single consensual set of strategic objectives, nor did they share the same vision of the world or of the region. Rather, they were predisposed to see ‘different faces of [the] issues’¹⁰ as a result of their different belief systems and organizational affiliations and were continuously engaged in fierce competition with one another for power and influence, maneuvering into ad hoc coalitions and alliances, each trying to capture the attention and support of the central decision-maker.¹¹

Thus, in seeking to build a ‘majority coalition’¹² which would enable them to carry out their preferred arms sales strategy toward Israel, the members of Washington's high-policy elite involved in the process (who were arranged hierarchically within the national decision-making apparatus), can be thought of as partisan actors, constantly engaged in a number of sectorial and competitive bargaining games rather than as a cohesive group of players pursuing a single homogeneous good as stipulated by proponents of the ‘rational choice’ approach to state behavior and its origins.¹³

Turning now from the basic organizational, bureaucratic and domestic parameters of the process by which American arms sales policy toward Israel during the Johnson era was made, to the actual dynamics of this process— namely, to the specific composition and relative power of the forces striving to influence the decision-making process—an effort will be made not only to identify the main individuals and organizations involved in the bargaining over American arms sales policy toward Israel, but to expose and analyze the lessons which some of the participants drew from their involvement (while serving in the Kennedy Administration) in the first instance in which an advance weapon (the Hawk anti-aircraft, short-range missile) was sold to Israel. It is assumed that although the basic attitudes and positions of some of the players in this bargaining game (particularly within the Department of State) remained essentially unchanged throughout the Kennedy and Johnson periods, other actors—primarily Robert Komer, who played a significant role in the process while serving initially as the leading expert on Middle Eastern issues at the National Security Council (NSC) in both administrations and later as Deputy Assistant to President Johnson for National Security Affairs—did modify or revise some of their recommended strategies and tactics as a result of the Hawk sale and its perceived short-range ramifications.

In other words, whereas the specific positions advocated by most officials in the Department of State during the Johnson era who were involved in the formulation of the American arms sales policy toward Israel (including Secretary of State, Dean Rusk; Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs until September 1965, Phillips Talbot; Under-Secretary of State until September 1966, George W.Ball; and members of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs and the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs) were invariably patterned on their preconceived and fixed background images or basic visions of the region,¹⁴ other actors (particularly within the NSC) were not as strongly committed to a single set of pre-existing beliefs and views, being occasionally prepared to set aside their background images of the Middle East for the sake of taking advantage of the opportunities inherent in a highly dynamic and fluctuating regional landscape.

Based upon this distinction in terms of the structure (as well as the specific content) of the dominant beliefs and preferred strategies adhered to and supported by the various participants in the process, three divergent groups can be identified: the traditionalists, the pragmatists and the domestically oriented policy-makers and bureaucrats.

The traditionalist group, whose core comprised the Middle Eastern experts of the Department of State, strongly supported Washington's traditional arms sales policy, which was based upon the innate reluctance of successive administrations to become major arms suppliers to the Middle East.¹⁵ Policy-makers who belonged to this category (and who reflected deeply-held departmental convictions, beliefs and legacies) feared that ‘any unilateral action in Israel's favor [in the field of arms sales] would be liable to aid Soviet expansion among the Arab states,’¹⁶ and that the supply of American arms to Israel was bound to have serious repercussions across the Arab world and thus jeopardize vital American security interests in the region. They remained adamantly and irreconcilably opposed—throughout the 1950s and part of the 1960s—both to the possibility that the US would become an arms supplier to Israel and, more broadly, that it would predicate its posture within the American-Israeli framework upon the premises of the ‘Special Relationship’ paradigm. In their thinking, the wish that American diplomacy could maintain ‘an appearance of impartiality’ in the Arab-Israeli sphere¹⁷ converged with, and was further reinforced by, considerations related to regional stability and to the perceived need to prevent a highly dangerous ‘arms race between Israel and the Arab states.’¹⁸

Fully committed to the logic and basic premises of the ‘spiral model,’¹⁹ proponents of this foreign policy orientation—who were inherently riskaverse—remained convinced that the supply, by the US, of advanced weapons systems to Israel would not only ‘link us closely to Israel's security at the expense of our relations with the rest of the Ara...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction Lyndon B.Johnson and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel: In the Shadow of the Hawk
• 2 The Road to the M-48A Patton Tank
• 3 The Road to the A-4E Skyhawk Fighter-Bomber
• 4 Beyond the F-4 Phantom Fighter-Bomber: The Changing Dynamics of the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel
• Selected Bibliography
• Index