Nation: Carter's Mideast Muddle

A tribute to Young gives the U.S. a U.N. victory—for now

"It doesn't make a damn bit of difference where the President is, the White House or the banks of the Mississippi," Press Secretary Jody Powell snapped last week. But there was no way of avoiding the contrasting images. On the Mississippi, Jimmy Carter drifted downstream in an imitation 19th century steamboat, waving, dancing and playing a calliope, stepping ashore periodically to shake hands, dandle babies and try to sell his energy program. Back east his top foreign policy aides were engaged in public disputes over who was in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East and over what that policy should be. The disputes set off dangerous waves. Leaders of black and Jewish organizations, still at odds over the resignation of Andrew Young as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., held a series of meetings that ended in mutual recriminations.

Who is in charge? shipbound reporters asked Carter. "Ask the Vice President," Carter flippantly replied. The next day Carter pointedly corrected himself and said that the man in charge was "the President." But he added that the disarray in his Administration was "no serious thing," merely "little transient squabbles."

The immediate problem confronting Washington was an Arab move, first made in June, to get the U.N. Security Council to endorse the Palestinians' right to self-determination. The Israelis saw this as a deadly threat to their security and demanded that the U.S. honor its pledge to veto any such action. In trying, successfully as it turned out, to get a July Security Council meeting postponed for a month, Young had met with the U.N. representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Israel had protested that this violated a U.S. commitment not to negotiate with or recognize the P.L.O. unless that organization recognized the right of Israel to exist as a state or at least accepted U.N. Resolution 242, which implicitly affirms this right. Because of the resulting uproar over his meeting with the P.L.O. and over the misleading account of it that he gave the State Department, Young had to resign.

In the meantime, the Security Council meeting on the Palestinians had been rescheduled for last week. To avert a showdown there, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had devised a plan to offer the U.N. a more moderate U.S. resolution that would speak of the Palestinians' human rights but not their right to an independent state. They sent Special Envoy Robert Strauss flying off to the Middle East, under strict, sealed instructions signed by Carter, to explain this plan to Israel's Premier Menachem Begin and Egypt's President Anwar Sadat. Finding them both strongly opposed, Strauss then flew home and convinced Vance and Brzezinski that the U.S. should abandon the resolution.