This is the first installment of the political page, a new feature of the Crimson. The political page will contain long, analytical pieces on national, international and Harvard affairs and will appear as a second editorial page on occasional Thursday.

The following article has been specially condensed for the Crimson by David Caploe from a piece he wrote with Eqbal Ahmad entitled "The Logic of Intervention" in the January issue of Race and Class, a quarterly organ of Third World Affairs published by the Institute of Race Relations (London) and the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam), on The US and the Arab World.

I. The Advocates of Intervention in the Press

SINCE the autumn of 1974, Americans have been treated to spate of articles advocating US military intervention in the Middle East. They have appeared in such influential Journals as Harper's The New Leader, US News and World Report, New York Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and above all Commentary, the monthly organ of the American Jewish Committee.

The last has particularly taken the lead in advancing the notion that the survival of Western Civilization is threatened by the recent insistence of the raw material producing countries in upsetting western capitalism's long-cherished rules of marketing and exchange, and that only force is likely to avert the otherwise inevitable decline of the West.

According to those advancing this line of argument, the postwar global order, dominated by overwhelming US military and economic power, has been severely shaken by the Arab oil boycott and the OPEC price hikes which followed it. More importantly, these events indicated a quest by the formerly colonized producing countries for equality, and this trend threatens the inequitable balance of power which the advocates of intervention view as being necessary to the survival of civilization.

FOR THE FIRST time, producer states demanded and received the price they wanted, instead of accepting the dictates of western companies backed up by the power of western states. As such they are believed to have demonstrated that the global economic system created by imperialism could be used against the will and interests of its creators. The advocates of US intervention in the Middle East emphasize this as the primary lesson of 1973, notwithstanding the fact that the petrodollars found their way back into the western economies (particularly America's), that the oil price hikes heightened the profits of corporations and that they gained as much if not more from the oil boycott than did the Arabs.

The traditional Third World dependence on the West was perceived as being reversed, if admittedly only partially. Until alternative energy sources are developed, the West will remain dependent on exported OPEC oil. And even if alternative sources of energy can ever become economically competitive, the disappearance of cheap energy for the western economic machine throws into question the likelihood of maintaining a continual-growth economy. In that case, with all the potential political and social dislocation it implies, the price of social peace in the metropolitan countries is likely to become a great deal higher. For the West, at least, Johns Hopkins Professor of International Relations Robert Tucker's assessment in Commentary appears correct: the OPEC revolt represents "the latest manifestations of an egalitarianism which, if permitted to run its logical course, is likely to result first in chaos then in an international system far harsher than today's or even yesterday's system."

Given the clear and present danger presented by the producer countries asserting their rights, what remedies are possible? The interventionists question the validity of the economic plans for interlocking ties with the oil-producing countries favored by some Democratic party leaders in the US, by European governments and by some corporations with expanding interests in the region. The primary objection of the "hawks" to such liberal advocacy of increasing the oil producer's interests in the global capitalist system is that it does not envisage reinforcing economic incentives with military muscle. They argue that liberal economists make the fundamental mistake of assuming a world or rational men acting within the framwork of well-defined social and political assumptions. In the situation created by the energy crisis such assumptions simply cannot be made. When so much is at stake and the old assumptions about the international order no longer hold, "the only feasible countervailing power to OPEC's control of oil power is power itself--military power," in the immortal wordes of "Miles Ignotus" (Latin for unknown soldier), described by Harper's as a "Washington-based professor and defense consultant with intimate links to high-level US policy makers" and rumored to be the pseudonym for Edward Luttwak, a well-known conservative "defense" intellectual close to Washinton's defense and "intelligence community."

HEY argue that a successful intervention will break the back of the Arab oil monopoly, slash oil prices and thereby put an end to the current depression ravaging the world economy. Sactimonious protests aside, both the developed and Third World countries will accept this result with great--if covert--gratitude. Because, argues Tucker,

it defies belief that the developing nations, like the developed nations, would view with anything but relief, however disguised, a break in the petroleum price structure that followed a successful military intervention on the Persian Gulf...developed and underdeveloped would deplore the action--through in considerably varying degree--while accepting with alacrity the benefits flowin from it.

US public opinion would likewise accept such a result. Unlike Vietnam, where "the American people instinctively felt that the national interest was not at stake" (Miles Ignotus), the national gain here would be clear. A surgically-neat military operation would avoid the quagmire syndrome which bogged down the US debacle in Indochina. Thus the world will be saved from economic and political chaos, and US hegemony will be re-established, dissolving once and for all the bitter aftertaste of the defeat in Vietnam.

II. Military Planning for Intervention

THE ABOVE are clearly not the spokesmen of the American military or political establishment, and one would normally dismiss their proposals as insignificant. There are, however, compelling reasons to take them seriously. Not only has the Pentagon been emphasizing preparations for intervention in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean regions over the past few years, but the intervention option has been regularly invoked by the highest US officials in terms obviously aimed at legitimizing it.

First-line combat outfits have been preparing for desert warfare for some time. In the summer of 1973, there was public admission of at least a run-through for a desert style operation, nicknamed Operation Alkali Canyon 73, in Time and US News and World Report. this was followed by Operation Petrolandia, involving the First Infantry and Fourth Cavalry Divisions as well as the First Air Force Squadron. And unlike the limited press reports which had marked Alkali Canyon, Petrolandia was fully described in Solider, the journal of the US armed forces. According to USN&WR the "Army's crack 82nd Airborne Division...spearhead of any such (Middle East) operation...regularly practices parachute drops over the desert around For Bliss, Texas, and annually trains for long distance operations with troop, drops in Greece, Turkey, and South Korea."