TO A military establishment anxious to restore its credibility after its astounding failure in Indo-China, a Persian Gulf intervention would appear to offer a unique opportunity to redeem past failures by satisfying the compulsion to find and fight a conventional enemy according to conventional ground rules.

Furthermore, in the arid desert terrain of Arabia all the military excuses for the Vietnam disaster are missing: there is no jungle for the enemy to hide in; no demographic sea for the "guerilla" fish to swim in; and no safe sanctuaries protected from destruction by fear of world opinion. Instead of a long, protracted war fought for no clear reason, the planning here calls for a quick, surgical operation with minimal loss of American life against a popularly-understood threat to the "American way of life"--a swift and decisive move which will unite the nation, rather than divide it with unending shame and recrimination.

For the task of constructing a new domestic concensus on foreign policy in place of the Vietnam-shattered doctrine of limited wars, a Persian Gulf may appear as a vital tool. The restoration of that consensus necessitates what Kissinger has aptly termed a "legitimizing principle of social repression": an ideological justification which would ensure the support of the American people and Congress for an aggressive policy abroad. The language of realpolitik offers a poor basis for popular support for a corporate ideology. Hence, modern myths have been a mixture of destiny and demonology: the British "white man's burden" and the French "Mission Civilizatrice," for example.

The Vietnam war put an end to the simple, powerful imperatives of the cold war. Detente accelerated the end of the old consensus. By juxtaposing enmity and alliance, confrontation and camaraderie, diplomatic sell-outs and revolutionary solidarity, the policy of detente ended the certainties which had defined the cold war consensus in the US. Hence a new mission and a new demon have to be invented as a substitute for the old. Intervention may be a part of the process.

THE demon, of course, is the fat, rapacious Arab sheikh whose grosslyextravagant pleasures are financed by the hard-earned money of the western people. Miles Ignotus is quite explicit in this respect, including not only the Arabs, but other Third World peoples as well: "military dictators and megalomaniacal kings of OPEC," "narrow self-appointed ruling groups (elections have become a rarity in Asia and Africa) fond of shiny black cars and numbered Swiss accounts," not to mention the by-now infamous "OPEC extortionists" and "Arab blackmailers."

The imagery of these rich greasy Arabs (oil is of their very essence) with voracious sexual and sensual appetites, indulged at the expense of the sweat and toil of others, is calculated to set off a series of racist associations, all of which point to one conclusion: the threat posed to western civilization by the profligates of OPEC.

With this new demonology is born a new American mission: the saving of western civilization from the clutches of the sheikhs through the forcible destruction of OPEC. The whole question of a military intervention in the Persian Gulf thus moves from the mundane level of politics to the metaphysical level of national salvation. A US intervention is transformed from a desperate act of a declining imperial power into a courageous and disinterested gesture by the American people, undertaken in order to save the West and all it stands for from its otherwise imminent demise at the hands of the "extortionists" and "blackmailers."

David Caploe '73, a former Crimson editor, is working on a book on ideology and strategy in Israel. Eqbal Ahmad is completing, with Michael Klare, a study of the Kissinger foreign policy, entitled "Time Bombs: A Citizen's Guide to US Foreign Policy in the 70s." Both are Fellows of the Third World project of the Transnational Institute.