by Jim Hoagland
The Wash­ing­ton Post

The United States has no peer in world affairs in under­stand­ing and respond­ing to an urgent chal­lenge painted in black and white. Ger­man invaders, Soviet cos­mo­nauts and Japan­ese exporters learned this les­son the hard way in the last century.

Grays, how­ever, dis­ori­ent Amer­i­can pres­i­dents and leg­is­la­tors as well as the pub­lic. Com­plex sit­u­a­tions such as the Balkans seem to con­firm the Churchillian the­ory that Amer­i­cans will always do the right thing after try­ing all other alter­na­tives. Add the words “yes, but” to a descrip­tion of good guys and bad guys in a for­eign show­down and our minds wander.

This partly — but only partly — explains the dif­fi­cul­ties U.S. gov­ern­ments have in craft­ing coher­ent and effec­tive poli­cies to deal with the Per­sian Gulf coun­tries, which simul­ta­ne­ously con­sti­tute an eco­nomic life­line and a moral quag­mire for Americans.

To pro­tect America’s oil life­line from the gulf, pres­i­dents from Franklin D. Roo­sevelt to George W. Bush have struck implicit Faus­t­ian bar­gains. Amer­i­can sup­port for democ­racy and human rights in Saudi Ara­bia, Qatar and even in Iraq has ranged from nonex­is­tent to tepid.

Access to the oil, and to the kings, emirs and other lead­ers who con­trol it, has not pro­duced great insight into the pol­i­tics of a region that has con­stantly sur­prised Wash­ing­ton. The Arab rulers of the gulf are an insu­lar lot. But Amer­i­cans have a habit of shut­ting out things they do not want to see — if those things con­flict with pre­de­ter­mined poli­cies, needs and opinions.

There was the “senior offi­cial” who told reporters that Saudi Ara­bia would never embargo oil to world mar­kets as Riyadh was prepar­ing to do just that in 1973. Remem­ber Bush the elder’s woo­ing of Sad­dam Hus­sein as a bul­wark of mod­ernism in the region? Or Jimmy Carter’s describ­ing Iran as “an island of sta­bil­ity” shortly before mobs chased the shah from Tehran?

Wash­ing­ton will­ingly blinds itself to keep the gulf bar­gain afloat: The State Depart­ment for­bade its diplo­mats to have con­tact with the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion in Iran as the 1979 rev­o­lu­tion took shape and in Iraq before and dur­ing the 1991 Per­sian Gulf War. The same arrange­ment came into effect in Saudi Ara­bia in 1988 when the Saudis forced the with­drawal of Hume Horan as ambas­sador after Horan met with unap­proved Saudi citizens.

This is the gulf’s great puz­zle: How is it that the United States is so deeply com­mit­ted mil­i­tar­ily and eco­nom­i­cally in a region that it under­stands so shal­lowly? Or is the com­mit­ment so deep pre­cisely because the under­stand­ing is so shallow?

Washington’s spies were sur­prised when Saudi Arabia’s intel­li­gence chief sud­denly resigned last week (appar­ently for fam­ily health rea­sons). Diplo­mats here were per­plexed by a series of unusu­ally omi­nous and high-profile pub­lic warn­ings of a regional explo­sion made by the nor­mally somber for­eign min­is­ter, Saud al-Faisal.

But the biggest and most unpleas­ant shock came when Saudi Defense Min­is­ter Prince Sul­tan can­celed the annual August U.S.-Saudi joint mil­i­tary exer­cise only hours before it was to begin with­out expla­na­tion. A Pen­ta­gon spokesman declined com­ment, telling me the infor­ma­tion was clas­si­fied. Infor­ma­tion on such exer­cises with other nations is rou­tinely pub­li­cized by the Pentagon.

Krem­li­nol­ogy was also a highly imper­fect art. But self-knowledge and a com­mit­ment to change kept Amer­i­can poli­cies and goals steady through­out the Cold War. The United States does not per­mit itself such a moral com­pass east of Suez. The cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion and its pre­de­ces­sors have been unable to artic­u­late any­thing beyond the sta­tus quo for the lands on the Arab side of the gulf.

In the past three decades war, rev­o­lu­tion, assas­si­na­tion and ver­tig­i­nous eco­nomic boom-and-bust cycles have reshaped that region and caught U.S. pol­i­cy­mak­ers flat­footed at each turn. Exag­ger­ated fears of the effect of polit­i­cal change — par­tic­u­larly of the rise of influ­ence of Shi­ite minori­ties in Arab coun­tries — blinker offi­cial Washington.

Human rights and democ­racy have spread exten­sively if not uni­formly through the world since the end of the Cold War — –except in the Arab World. America’s timid­ity in address­ing this sit­u­a­tion is a fac­tor in per­pet­u­at­ing it.

Imme­di­ate needs trump clar­ity and long-term com­mit­ment. In the obscu­rity of the moral con­ces­sions sys­tem­at­i­cally made in the Per­sian Gulf to pre­serve an unpreserv­able sta­tus quo, Wash­ing­ton wears a color that does not suit its tal­ents — gray.