Nation: Mission to the Middle East

Rarely had Cyrus Vance been so ebullient. In the hours after his Boeing 707 took off from Washington for the Middle East last week, the Secretary of State was still basking in the glow of the Camp David summit. After 20 months on the job, Vance had finally helped score an important foreign policy achievement for the U.S., and he was justifiably proud. Wearing a sweater and slacks, he sat in the aisle talking to reporters for more than an hour. But as the plane flew eastward into the night the mood began to fade. And by the time the Vance mission ended some six days, three countries and 14,000 miles later, it was obvious that despite Camp David's great accomplishments, some major questions remained unanswered. What kind of peace was possible? Would the moderate Arabs eventually accept the summit proposals? How much trouble could radical Arabs cause?

The first difficulties came from Israel's Premier Menachem Begin, who almost immediately began raising objections to what Vance had thought was an agreed-upon moratorium on new Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Next, both Jordan and Saudi Arabia, whose support is crucial to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, openly criticized the Camp David agreements. Other protests arose like a sandstorm, not only from such radical states as Libya, South Yemen and Algeria, and, of course, the Palestine Liberation Organization, but also from Syria and such moderate and normally friendly states as Bahrain, Qatar, North Yemen, Kuwait and Lebanon.

While Egypt's President Anwar Sadat broke his homeward journey in Morocco to see one of his closest Arab allies, King Hassan II, and Jimmy Carter conferred with Sudanese President Gaafar Mohamed Nimeiri, four hard-line Arab states and an assortment of Palestinian liberation groups assembled in Damascus for the third so-called Steadfast Summit. The theme: Fight Sadat—and topple him if possible.

Two of the hardliners, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and P.L.O. Boss Yasser Arafat, even undertook a sudden trip to Jordan to try to persuade their longtime enemy, King Hussein, to boycott the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations. It was an extraordinary idea—Hussein and Arafat had not met on Jordanian soil since 1970, the year that the P.L.O. virtually seized control of Amman until the King attacked and expelled them. Hussein quickly rejected the new ploy. "The King," said a Jordanian official, "will not respond to any appeals or pressures, and his moderate stance remains the same."

Even so, the effort served to prolong the already drawn-out and heated Damascus meeting. Finally, late in the week, Syrian President Hafez Assad asked Vance to delay his scheduled arrival in Syria by 24 hours, until after the hardline Arabs had gone home.

Despite all this turmoil in the Arab world, one of the two Camp David agreements, the "framework" setting forth a timetable for a peace settlement between Israel and Egypt, was proceeding on schedule. The loose end, recognized but unresolved at Camp David because Begin said he did not want to be the one to "sell out the settlers," is the question of whether the Israelis will dismantle their 17 settlements in the Sinai, as demanded by Egypt. Begin cautiously left that for the Knesset to decide.