ical parties (Mann, 1990). A highly pluralistic society, the United States has a particularly wide range of organized pressure groups, representing economic, ideological, and ethnic interests, which work in various ways to influence both government policy and public opinion. Finally, as an electoral democracy, the U.S. system imposes on political leaders the need to justify their policies and actions at the polls, so that policy cannot move too far out of step with public opinion. The internal policy environment thus imposes many and sharp restraints on U.S. poliy makers. With respect to the Middle East it is arguable that internal considerations have been a major driver perhaps the main driver of U.S. policy towards the region.
The role of the internal policy environment in shaping U.S. policy can be vividly illustrated by a glance at an area of policy action remote from the Middle East: Central America. The Reagan Administration came into office in 1981 with a strong desire to eliminate the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. The simple and direct way to do this would have been by direct military intervention; Nicaragua is a small and weak country, and there were many precedents for such action. But such action was politically unacceptable at home, so the Reagan Administration never attempted it. Even the "second best" which it did attempt, development of and support for the Contra rebel movement, was continually checked by a hostile Congress and by an indifferent to hostile public opinion that could not be mobilized in favor of the policy even by a popular President. President Reagan and his associates were eventually so frustrated that they encouraged or acquiesced in the illegal "Iran Contra" diversion scheme, which gravely embarrassed and weakened the Reagan Administration in its last two years. Whatever the merits of the Reagan Administration's Nicaragua policy, it dismally failed the test of domestic U.S. p...