President Reagan and the Middle East - 1 January 1982

At the end of the day, I suppose every trade has its responsibilities at the end of the week, or before the holiday, or a strike, or a lay off.

The bus driver must deliver his bus to its terminus, the cashier tots up the receipts, the steel worker banks the furnaces, the nurse checks the restless patient in room 32 and tucks him in or, if he’s a pest, gives him a knockout drop.

Well, journalists, commentators, recognise at the end of every year a peculiar responsibility. In hundreds of thousands of newspaper offices and television and radio stations around the world, men and women, sat down sometime during this past week and, without a second thought, did what was expected of them.

It’s the "without the second thought" that bothers me. What they are expected to do is to survey the events of the year. This, we say, was what happened, this is the way it added up. We then go home in the satisfaction of a job well done, and settle down to a drink, a meal, a game or, in this day and age, to a gawping vigil before the telly to watch their survey and see how they made it all add up.

What bothers me is not that we may look at things differently, but the assumption we all make that any given year is a complete chapter of human history. After all, it was we, not God, who invented 365 days as a unit of time or history, and history, like God, moves in mysterious ways.

Historians know this better than journalists, and they have developed their own superior form of hindsight. They have a favourite image: it’s that of a mountain range, which forms a watershed for the rivers, the rains, the melting snows, to fall one way or the other. I remember an ambassador posted to Washington. Before he made the leap into diplomacy, he was a university professor. He got the reputation of being a very wise man, because anyone who called on him was told that what happened, last week, was not really important in itself, something that happened nine months or maybe even two years ago, that was the watershed.

I was myself very impressed by this man until I got to know him well and every time I went down to Washington, and called on him, I found that he discovered a new watershed. After some dramatic thing had happened in Washington or Moscow or Greece, or China or wherever, he’d say, this is not really important, the real watershed was Hiroshima.

Remembering this, I look over 1981 and wonder whether the new age of terrorism really began with the attacks on President Reagan and the Pope, or whether it wasn’t announced by the shots that killed the Kennedy brothers, or before. Of one thing only I am pretty sure: the American decision to watch and, if you like, police the Middle East as a region vital to American to Western security, was not made by Mr Reagan, and he shouldn’t be blamed or applauded for it.

Twenty five years ago, on the last day of December 1956, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, Mr John Foster Dulles announced what was to become known as the Eisenhower doctrine. It was headlined everywhere, as a new American policy. This is the gist of what he said: "From now on, the United States will have to accept an increasing responsibility to assist the free nations of the Middle East, to maintain their freedom and develop their welfare, to help prevent the spread of Soviet Imperialism to an area within whose orbit are the shrines of three great religions. The future is not without its dangers from Russia’s rulers, who still seek success in the Middle East, where Soviet propaganda vigorously offers Communism to those who want freedom and wellbeing".

Well, Mr Dulles was accused of sabre rattling, as Mr Reagan is, but people didn’t get scared then about the possibility of war, because, then, America had a tremendous edge in nuclear power, and, we can now see, the idea that the Arabs would deny to us, or could be made to deny to us, the oil that is vital to our industry, to our civilisation, had simply not occurred to anybody, so far as I know.

I had better say that in the middle 1960s I had been in the Middle East, and was amazed at the range and power of Russian penetration by way of technical and military advisors, engineers, radio propaganda in many languages, easily drowning out the BBC’s overseas services. The Chinese, by the way, broadcast there and in Africa in even more languages and dialect than the Russians.

It occurred to me then that if things went along as successfully as they were doing for them, the Russians wouldn’t need their land armies or their navy, not used directly against western Europe. If the day came when the Russians had managed to bestride the Mediterranean and exert a strangling grip on the oilfields of the Middle East, they would be able to say, to Germany, France, Britain, Scandinavia, well now, do you want your daily oil or don’t you, and go on to say, as they did after the second war, to Poland, we’d be obliged to you if you’d get yourselves the kind of government of which we can approve.

This request, or ultimatum, whichever you want to call it, caused the first terrific row at the United Nations which was just then being born in San Francisco. The Polish delegation chosen to represent Poland at San Francisco was abandoned and a puppet delegation, approved of by the Russians, arrived. Ever since, Poland has been, as we all know, a Russian satellite. So maybe the 1945 row over the Lublin government, which the Russians won, was the fatal day, the watershed for Poland, against which the tragic heroics of Lech Walesa and Solidarity 35 years later were a doomed protest.

At any rate, the Reagan doctrine is not just a repeat performance of the Eisenhower doctrine. The oil we live by is the new and accursed issue, and our dire need of it is what makes the present American administration reassert its concern for the Middle East. My seven-year-old nightmare is ever-present, to the men and women on the Middle Eastern desk, of the State Department,. It’s not a vision of Soviet armies pouring across Europe to the English Channel and beyond, it's the thought of the Soviet Union being able to convert western Europe into a satellite without a shot being fired.

Well, I have been reading through exhaustive summaries in several American magazines and newspapers of the events, foreign and domestic, of 1981, and I am not going to go into them for the simple reason that when you put them all together, what you have created is not the truth about 1981 but what amounts to a patchwork only parts of which will mean much to any one of us.

In my favourite bed book, the nine volumes of James Agate’s diaries called Ego, he makes what seems to me to be an essential distinction. When the volume that covered the first year of the Second World War was published, Agate was criticised – more, he was abused – by his scandalised colleagues for putting down in his diary his complaints about his asthma or a bad performance of Macbeth when he ought to have been writing about Hitler’s broadcasts, or the evacuation from Dunkirk.

He defended himself by writing later that Hitler and the evacuation from Dunkirk were vital to all of us, but not important to him. And when the great day came of victory in Europe, Agate didn’t join the crowds cheering outside Buckingham Palace, he wrote a furious letter to The Times, protesting against the triviality of the music being played on the radio. It was a time, he wrote, when we ought to have transmitted, on VE Day, a magnificent blast of Beethoven and Bach, the best of Germany, in the moment that we saw the worst go grovelling in the dust.

I am sure he was right in this, at least in this distinction between what is vital and what is important to any one of us. I suppose if I were challenged to do it, I could sit down and write a 20,000-word essay, a summary of the main progress of the Second World War, which I read about, and covered, and lived through. But, if you were to ask me now, what I remember instantly what was most vivid, I should have to say, the memory of the head of the British military mission in Washington, a very able general, who, when America came in and instituted petrol rationing, went to the appropriate board to be issued a proper ration.

America did not conduct her rationing through ad hoc local boards, it got out an elaborate but inflexible list of requirements for anyone who claimed more than a minimum ration. The general was asked, are you a doctor, do you carry coal or ice? Do you deliver children to school, are you disabled? He was, he did, none of these things. Application denied. It required the intervention of Winston Churchill to get him his petrol.

Or the night in Seattle when I ran into a clutch of happy munitions workers, the women with orchids pinned to their blouses, sitting up at a bar, and living it up on high war-workers wages. Well, said one of them, didn’t Roosevelt say he wanted Americans to enjoy the more abundant life?

Or the terrible dilemma of a sailor I ran into in Pittsburgh who was going off to the Pacific and wanted to marry his girl. His family was Polish, hers was Czech. And in Pittsburgh in those days, Poles did not marry Czechs. This terrible family feud was far more important to him than the vital need to beat the Japanese in the Pacific.

And it is surely so for any and all of us. For all of us this is the sad year, of the Pope, and President Sadat, and Lech Walesa, and the happy festival year of the Prince and Princess of Wales. But to you, it’s the year you lost your wife, or met your girl, or lost a job, or got a job.

So let me wish you, in 1982, less grief and more contentment, the things that are most important to most of us, and leave you only with one bit of advice. If you are old enough to retire, and are about to do so, don’t do it. Men, especially men who retire, keel over, or they go hard in the arteries, and soft in the head, and become a nuisance around the house.

So I wish you most a healthy and active and restless and inquisitive new year. Happiness will follow.

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