“Nothing is ever simple in the Middle East,” retired Ambassador Richard W. Murphy said to a packed Hallock Auditorium Thursday.

Murphy’s presentation, part of the Hallock Lecture Series on International Relations, discussed “Challenges to American Foreign Policy in the Middle East.” Just one day before, President Bush had announced a major shift in the U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Murphy worked for 34 years in the U.S. Foreign Service throughout Africa and the Middle East. In 1971, President Nixon appointed him Ambassador to Mauritainia. He later served as Ambassador to Syria, the Phillipines and Saudi Arabia. From 1983 he served as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs.

His lecture began with a story from a tour of the Middle East he made with Donald Rumsfeld in 1983.

“He said to me that any policy worth having can be summarized in 25 words or less,” Murphy said. “What’s our Middle East policy?”

Murphy recalled telling the future Secretary of Defense that the U.S.’s top three priorities should be the security of Israel, protecting energy resources and keeping the Soviets out of the gulf. According to Murphy, all three of these priorities are no longer critical.

“Israel today is totally secure as a state,” he said. “No combination of forces could overwhelm it.”

The problems Israel faces are still drastic of course.

“The people of Israel feel vulnerable,” he said. “This has motivated them to construct a barrier. Bush has clearly inherited an attitude from the Clinton administration that Arafat cannot be dealt with and Israel has destroyed any operating partner we may have had in the region.”

He remained cautiously optimistic about recent developments in the region.

“If Sharon indeed agrees to give up settlements, this will be a major step,” he said. On the Arab side, Murphy sees progress as well.

“At the 1967 Arab Summit, the message was no recognition, no reconciliation, no peace. The summit last year was a very different message.”

Murphy worried that Bush’s backing of Sharon’s policy yesterday would be seen in the Arab world as a rebuke of the summit.

As for the energy situation, Murphy pointed out that despite all the concern over the energy situation oil output from the Middle East had never been interrupted. He predicted that the oil picture would not change significantly in the coming years.

“Forget looking for salvation from Arab oil,” he said. “Short of switching to alternative energy, we will continue to place a high strategic priority on Mideast oil.”

While the concern over Soviet influence is obviously no longer a factor, Murphy sees parallels in the way that the Bush administration is conducting its war on terror.

“It took 9/11 to elevate terror to a national obsession,” he said. “I think we’ve now gone totally overboard. The war on terror is a misnomer. We won’t defeat it that way.”

He saved his most extreme criticism for the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

“We turned our back on coalitions,” he said. “We’ve been reluctant to listen to moderate voices inside the country, we destroyed an important national institution in the Iraqi army and we were overly reliant on the information provided by exiles because our own intelligence gathering was so poor.”

He also attacked the argument put forth by some conservatives that Israel’s West Bank policy is a model to follow in Iraq.

“It hasn’t worked for the Palestinians, why should it work for the Iraqis?” Murphy asked.

He ended by summing up his position with a quote from Rudyard Kipling.

“And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, / And the epitaph drear: ‘A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.’”