Egypt’s Displeasure With U.S. Is Growing

CAIRO —  The eighth anniversary of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel passed last week with barely a murmur in Cairo, and that is bad news for the Reagan Administration. Many Egyptians, in and out of government, are still sore about the price that they paid to get the Sinai back from Israel. They blame the United States for ignoring the peace process, for not controlling Israel, for not giving Egypt a sufficient “peace dividend”--for, instead, loading the country with debt--and for showing contempt for Egyptian feelings. The U.S.-Egyptian honeymoon is over, and America’s primacy in the region is no longer assured.

These harsh judgments are seldom heard in Washington. But they are expressed here frequently and intensely, even by the most pro-American Egyptians.

Some of the criticisms have a long history and must be placed in perspective. A constant theme, that Israel has undue influence on the United States, is exaggerated. It is also easier to cite Israel’s failings than to chastise fellow Arabs for lack of courage and initiative in trying to break the Middle East logjam. There is, however, substance to Egypt’s indictment of the United States for failing to take an active role in peacemaking in the region during most of the last six years.

It is not only that the United States has failed to help redeem the moral debt that Egypt incurred to other Arabs by making a separate peace with Israel. There is also the practical fact of Egypt’s continuing political and economic isolation in the Arab world, although some Arab states have begun to relent because of the need to have Egypt in the balance against Iran.

The economic pinch is particularly acute because of the fall in oil prices. Remittances sent home by Egyptian workers in the Persian Gulf area have dropped, several hundred thousand workers have returned to Egypt and unemployment, and Suez Canal revenues are down. Terrorism, meanwhile, has cost Egypt critical tourism dollars.

In Egypt’s view, reward has turned to burden, the euphoria of making peace has turned to dust. Cairo is now pressing Washington to reduce the crippling debt incurred when U.S. economic and military aid shot up in the wake of the peace treaty. But, under Gramm-Rudman restraints, Washington reached its limit just as Egypt was making new demands.

The last straw for the Egyptians was discovering the insensitivity of their new-found American friends. No one here has forgotten that the United States forced down an Egyptian airliner carrying the Achille Lauro hijackers. Egypt expected to be thanked for ending the hostage crisis aboard the cruise ship; instead, it was humiliated for U.S. domestic reasons. More recently, the sale of U.S. arms to Iran undercut Egyptian faith in U.S. probity. Last week, Egypt’s foreign minister, Esmat Abdel Meguid, took the diplomatically unusual step of expressing satisfaction that John M. Poindexter and Oliver L. North have been replaced by more able officials.

Much of the Egyptian grumbling can be put down to the development of a relationship with the United States that is close enough to focus on talk about problems rather then ritualistic confessions of friendship. And leaders in Washington can argue that Egypt has nowhere else to go. They are right, in the sense that no one here wants Egypt again to be a client of the Soviet Union. But they are wrong in believing that Egypt can be taken for granted or its frustrations ignored.

Now there are two ominous portents. The United States is deeply dependent on the use of Egyptian military bases to move forces, if need be, to the Persian Gulf area. Officials in Cairo are making pointed statements about national sovereignty, and are suggesting that military facilities might not always be available.

More important, Egypt is pressing for an international conference on the Arab-Israel conflict. On the surface the conference is represented as a way to break the diplomatic stand-off. Egypt is working with Israel’s Labor Party and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres against the Likud bloc and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, for whom such a conference is anathema.

Washington represents the conference as a cosmetic cover for direct talks between Israel and both Jordan and the Palestinians. By that theory, the Syrians and the Soviets would be invited to the opening ceremonies and then quietly shunted aside. A senior Egyptian official is much more candid: The conference is designed precisely to bring the Soviet Union back into the Arab-Israeli diplomatic game. Egypt’s reasoning is simple. The United States has had eight years to follow up on the peace treaty, and has failed to do so. For Cairo to try playing the superpowers against one another probably would not work the way it did in the 1950s and ‘60s, but being in the embrace of the United States has certainly proved stifling.

Perhaps the Reagan Administration is comfortable with Moscow’s being invited to the Middle East bargaining table. Perhaps it sees Mikhail S. Gorbachev as committed to helping resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Perhaps it will prove able to manage the complex diplomatic maneuvering that would attend an international peace conference. Perhaps.

More likely, the Administration is waking up to what its six years of neglecting the pursuit of peace in the Middle East have done to the United States’ long-term interests in the region.