Tag: US policy

What do the financial crisis and U.S. Middle East policy have in common?

On By Martin Kramer

Behind the financial crisis was a well-practiced mechanism for concealing risk. The risk was there, and it was constantly growing, but it could be disguised, repackaged and renamed, so that in the end it seemed to have disappeared. Much of the debate about foreign policy in the United States is conducted in the same manner: policymakers and pundits, to get what they want, conceal the risks.

In the case of the Middle East, they concealed the risks of bringing Yasser Arafat in from the cold; they concealed the risks of neglecting the growth of Al Qaeda; and they concealed the risks involved in occupying Iraq. It isn’t that the risks weren’t known—to someone. The intelligence was always there. But if you were clever enough, and determined enough, you could find a way to conceal them. But concealed risk doesn’t go away. It accumulates away from sight, until the moment when it surges back to the surface. It did that after Camp David in 2000, when the “peace process” collapsed in blood; it did that on 9/11, when hijackers shattered the skies over New York in Washington; and it happened in Iraq, when an insurgency kicked us back. This tendency to downplay risk may be an American trait: we have seen it in U.S. markets, and we saw it in U.S. election-year politics. In Middle East policy, its outcome has been a string of very unpleasant surprises.

A case in point is radical Islam. One would think that after the Iranian revolution, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the terrorism of Hezbollah, the Rushdie affair, the suicide attacks of Hamas and Al Qaeda, the Danish cartoons, and a host of other “surprises,” that we would not be inclined to ignore the risks posed by radical Islam. And yet there are batteries of interpreters, analysts and pundits whose principal project is to obscure if not conceal the risks. Here are some of the most widespread variations on the theme:

Worried about Ahmadinejad? Pay him no mind. He doesn’t really call the shots in Iran, he’s just a figurehead. And anyway, he didn’t really say what he’s purported to have said, about wiping Israel off the map. What the Iranians really want is to sit down with us and cut a deal. They have a few grievances, some of them are even legitimate, so let’s hear them out and invite them to the table, without preconditions. Iran isn’t all that dangerous; it’s just a small country; and even their own people are tired of the revolution. So pay no attention to Ahmadinejad, and pay no attention to the old slogans of “death to America,” because that’s not the real Iran.

Worried about the Palestinian Hamas? You’ve got it wrong. They merely represent another face of Palestinian nationalism. They aren’t really Islamists at all: Hamas is basically a protest movement against corruption. Given the right incentives, they can be drawn into the peace process. Sure, they say they will never recognize Israel, but that is what the PLO once said, and didn’t they change their tune? Anyway, Hamas controls Gaza, so there can’t be a real peace process—a settlement of the big issues like Jerusalem, refugees, borders—without bringing them into the tent. So let’s sit down and talk to them, figure out what their grievances are—no doubt, some of them are legitimate too. And let’s get the process back on track.

Troubled by Hezbollah? Don’t believe everything they say. They only pretend to be faithful to Iran’s ayatollahs, and all their talk about “onwards to Jerusalem” is rhetoric for domestic consumption. What they really want is to earn the Shiites their rightful place in Lebanon, and improve the lot of their aggrieved sect. Engage them, dangle some carrots, give them a place at the table, and see how quickly they transform themselves from an armed militia into a peaceable political party.

And so on. There is a large industry out there, which has as its sole purpose the systematic downplaying of the risks posed by radical Islam. And in the best American tradition, these risks are repackaged as opportunities, under a new name. It could just as easily be called appeasement, but the public associates appeasement with high risk. So let’s rename it engagement, which sounds low-risk—after all, there’s no harm in talking, right? And once the risk has been minimized, the possible pay-off is then inflated: if we engage with the Islamists, we will reap the reward in the form of a less tumultuous Middle East. Nuclear plans might be shelved, terror might wane, and peace might prevail.

The engagement package rests upon a key assumption: that these “radical” states, groups, and individuals are motivated by grievances. If only we were able to address or ameliorate those grievances, we could effectively domesticate just about every form of Islamism. Another assumption is that these grievances are finite—that is, by ameliorating them, they will be diminished.

It is precisely here that advocates of “engagement” are concealing the risk. They do so in two ways. First, they distract us from the deep-down dimension of Islamism—from the overarching narrative that drives all forms of Islamism. The narrative goes like this: the enemies of Islam—America, Europe, the Christians, the Jews, Israel—enjoy much more power than the believing Muslims do. But if we Muslims return to the faith, we can restore to ourselves the vast power we exercised in past, when Islam dominated the world as the West dominates it today. The Islamists believe that through faith—exemplified by self-sacrifice and self-martyrdom—they can put history in reverse.

Once this is understood, the second concealment of risk comes into focus. We are told that the demands of Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran are finite. If we give them a concession here, or a foothold there, we will have somehow diminished their demand for more concessions and footholds. But if their purpose is the reversal of history, then our gestures of accommodation, far from enticing them to give up their grand vision, only persuade them to press on. They understand our desire to engage them as a sign of weakness—an attempt to appease them—which is itself an enticement for them to push harder against us and our allies. And since they believe in their narrative of an empowered Islam with the fervency of religious conviction, no amount of insistence by us that we will go only so far and no further will stop them.

Our inability to estimate this risk derives in part from our unwillingness to give credence to religious conviction in politics. We are keen to recast Islamists in secular terms—to see them as political parties, or reform movements, or interest groups. But what if Islamists are none of these things? What if they see themselves as soldiers of God, working his will in the world? How do you deal with someone who believes that a paradise awaits every jihadist “martyr,” and that the existence of this paradise is as real and certain to him as the existence of a Sheraton Hotel in Chicago? Or that at any moment, the mahdi, the awaited one, could make a reappearance and usher in the end of days? How do we calculate that risk?

So what are the real risks posed by Islamic extremism? If I were preparing a prospectus for a potential investor in “engagement,” or a warning label on possible side effects of “engagement,” they would include these warnings:

Iran: The downside risk is that Iran will prolong “engagement” in such a way as to buy time for its nuclear program—perhaps just the amount of time it needs to complete it. At the same time, it will use the fact of “engagement” with the United States to chisel away at the weak coalition of Arab states that the United States has cobbled together to contain Iran. If “engagement” is unconditionally offered, Iran will continue its subversive activities in Iraq and Lebanon until it receives some other massive concession. Indeed, it may even accelerate these activities, so as to demand a higher price for their cessation. If the United States stands its ground and “engagement” fails, many in the Middle East will automatically blame the United States, but by then, military options will be even less appealing than they are today.

Hamas: The downside risk is that “engagement”—even if conducted indirectly through various mediators—will be the nail in the coffin of Mahmoud Abbas, and of any directly negotiated understandings between Israel and the Palestinians. It is true that Israelis and Palestinians aren’t capable today of reaching a final status agreement. But the present situation in the West Bank allows for a degree of stability and cooperation. This is because Israel stands as the guarantor against Hamas subversion of the West Bank. “Engagement” with Hamas would weaken that guarantee, signal to Palestinians once again that terrorism pays, and validate and legitimate the anti-Semitic, racist rhetoric that emanates daily from the leaders and preachers of Hamas. It might do all this without bringing Israeli-Palestinian peace even one inch closer.

Hezbollah: The downside risk is that “engagement” will effectively concede control of Lebanon to an armed militia that constitutes a state within a state. It will undermine America’s pretension to champion civil society and pluralism in the most diverse Arab state. It will constitute the final rout of the beleaguered democracy forces within Lebanon, which have been consistently pro-American. It will compound the unfortunate effects of the 2006 summer war, by seeming to acknowledge Hezbollah as the victor. And it might do all this without bringing about the disarming of a single Hezbollah terrorist, or the removal of a single Iranian-supplied missile from Lebanon.

One would have to be a relentless pessimist to believe that all the downside risks I have outlined would be realized. But every serious advocate of “engagement” should acknowledge the risks, and explain their strategy for mitigating them. And it isn’t enough to say: don’t worry, we’re going to practice “tough engagement.” Perhaps we might. But most of the risks arise from the very fact of engagement—from the legitimacy it accords to the other party.

In the Middle East, the idea that “there’s no harm in talking” is entirely incomprehensible. It matters whom you talk to, because you legitimize your interlocutors. Hence the Arab refusal to normalize relations with Israel. Remember the scene that unfolded this past summer, when Bashar Asad scrupulously avoided contact with Ehud Olmert on the same reviewing stand at a Mediterranean summit. An Arab head of state will never directly engage Israel before extracting every concession. Only an American would think of doing this at the outset, and in return for nothing: “unconditional talks” is a purely American concept, incomprehensible in the Middle East. There is harm in talking, if your talking legitimates your enemies, and persuades them and those on the sidelines that you have done so from weakness. For only the weak talk “unconditionally,” which is tantamount to accepting the enemy’s conditions. It is widely regarded as the prelude to unconditional surrender.

The United States cannot afford to roll the dice again in the Middle East, in the pious hope of winning it all. Chances are slim to nil that the United States is going to talk the Iranians, Hamas or Hezbollah out of their grand plan. Should that surprise us? We “engaged” before, with Yasser Arafat, and we know how that ended. We downplayed radical rhetoric before, with Osama bin Laden, and we know how that ended. We assumed we could talk people out of their passions in Iraq, and we know how that ended.

It is time to question risk-defying policies in the Middle East. The slogans of peace and democracy misled us. Let’s not let the new slogan of engagement do the same. The United States is going to have to show the resolve and grit to wear and grind down adversaries, with soft power, hard power and will power. Paradoxically, that is the least risky path—because if America persists, it will prevail.

This post originally appeared in the series On Second Thought, published by the Adelson Institute, Shalem Center, Jerusalem.

America’s interests: a bedside briefing

On By Martin Kramer

I’ve already prepared my briefing for the next president. No point in waiting until he calls me at 3 a.m., which he certainly will. Of course, I could leak it then, but Bob Woodward is already working on his next book, so I might as well leak it now. Here we go.

Thank you for the White House invitation, Mr. President. You don’t know how much I appreciate this appointment as your advisor—my talents were wasting away in that think tank. You’ve asked me to give you a ten-minute briefing on our interests in the Middle East, in a way even a community organizer or small-town mayor or U.S. senator can understand. You’ve asked for an unvarnished telling—no lipstick. No problem. Here’s what you need to know.

The primary U.S. interest in the Middle East is the free flow of energy from beneath its soil to the United States and to our partners elsewhere. The United States is the largest consumer of oil in the world—it consumes a quarter of all world production. We consume twice as much per capita as the other industrialized countries, twelve times as much as the rest of the world. We’re the biggest consumers of energy in the history of humankind. The Middle East is home to 60 percent of the world’s remaining oil; the United States has less than 2 percent. Transferring energy from there to here—and elsewhere to people who depend on us—is our primary interest in the Middle East.

And within the Middle East, Mr. President, the epicenter of our interest is the Persian Gulf. The name “Persian Gulf” is a very old one, you’ll find it on every map. But it might as well be called Lake Michigan, so integral is it to the lubrication of American life. This means that the U.S. must secure the Gulf, and can’t allow any part of it to be dominated by any other power, global or regional.

But in the Middle East there are people as well as oil, and they have more than the usual share of pathologies. A prime U.S. objective, then, has been to isolate the energy flow from those pathologies, by deflecting or combatting or alleviating them.

The preferred way—the American way—had been to find allies among the rulers, and to work with them discreetly, from off-shore and over the horizon. This technique worked for many of your predecessors. The American oil companies ran the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, American advisors assisted the Shah of Iran, arms sales kept clients happy, and there was no need to place an American boot on the ground. Almost every shore of the Gulf was friendly.

But beginning thirty years ago, the Gulf began to heat up. Vast oil wealth began to feed delusions of grandeur and hatred of America, in three forms. Let’s call them, for short, Khomeinism in Iran, Saddamism in Iraq, and Bin Ladenism in Saudi Arabia. Iran’s revolution, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and 9/11, were all Gulf-generated push-back against our primacy. Sometimes they cancelled each other out—as in the Iran-Iraq war—but by 2003, our grip on the Gulf was loosening. We had two of the three big states, Iran and Iraq, under a weak “dual containment,” and the third, Saudi Arabia, was being pressured by jihadists to get us out. When the United States finally invaded Iraq in 2003, we were in search of a foothold. Instead, we almost sank into quicksand. But we’ve pulled ourselves out, and you should be careful not to fritter away our advantage in Iraq. There aren’t many alternative platforms.

Mr. President, our problem in the Gulf remains acute. Oil is a finite resource, demand for it is growing, and we’ll continue to have to expend energy to get energy. Unfortunately, our Gulf allies are really dependencies, and can’t do the fighting for us. In Iraq, we’ve destroyed Saddamism and dealt a blow to Bin Ladenism. But Khomeinism lives, and all those who resent us in the region are rallying to Iran, which promises to succeed where others have failed, by acquiring a nuclear weapon.

The thing to remember about Iran, Mr. President, is that it was once an empire. The classical authors and early European mapmakers called it the “Persian Gulf” for a reason. What we face now is an Iran that’s determined to erode our position in the Gulf, so that we’ll disappear, just as Britain did before us. This is the most formidable of the three challenges we’ve faced in the Gulf. If Iran does acquire nuclear weapons, the Gulf waters will become almost impossible to chart, the oil states (and Israel) will be unnerved, and our primary interest will be at risk. History may not forgive you, so keep all your options on the table.

Mr. President, you ask how much attention should be devoted to Israel and the Palestinians. Once upon a time, it was thought that Israel versus Arabs was the source of all instability in the Middle East. Israel fought against Arab states in every decade, and in 1973, one of those wars actually harmed our primary interest: the Arabs imposed an oil embargo. The United States since then has worked hard, and successfully, to meliorate that conflict. We did it by upping our support for Israel, thus dissuading Arab states from more war, and bringing Egypt and Jordan to make peace with Israel. For the last thirty-five years, there have been no state-to-state wars involving Israel.

True, there have been a couple of Palestinian “uprisings,” and Israel has chased the PLO and Hezbollah across Lebanon. But these skirmishes never rose to a level that would disrupt our primary interest, the energy flow. Fostering an Israeli-Palestinian deal would be a good deed, but its contribution to our overall interests would be marginal, and an attempt to negotiate one would be all-consuming. It could overload your bandwidth, pushing everything else out. In present circumstances, any problem that can be managed without our troops isn’t that urgent. Show interest, but don’t waste time.

Afghanistan is another perpetual crisis that’s resistant to all attempts at resolution. The country itself is of little intrinsic importance, but it does export misery, from drugs to jihadists. Amelioration and containment are probably the best strategies—isolating its pathologies from spreading to Arab countries or Pakistan. But be careful not to portray this as the “good war,” because we won’t ever deploy enough troops to win it decisively, and we can achieve our limited goals short of that anyway.

One last warning, Mr. President. On the edges of the Middle East, we’ve relied heavily on two regimes which have been our most consistent partners in hunting jihadists: Musharraf’s Pakistan and Mubarak’s Egypt. Musharraf is gone, and Mubarak is quite likely to be gone before you leave this office. Pakistan and Egypt aren’t as central to our core interests as the Persian Gulf. But if extremists succeed in taking either, temperatures at the core of the Middle East will rise dramatically. (This will be so even if we disarm Pakistan’s nukes before the country goes under.) It’s difficult to judge the likelihood of such a debacle. But to hedge against the consequences, be prepared to upgrade security ties with Israel and India, which we’ll need to absorb and deflect the shock.

Again, Mr. President, it’s an honor. I know we’ll be seeing a lot of each other. At 3 a.m. Goodnight, sir. Shall I tuck you in?

Martin Kramer made these remarks at a symposium on “After Bush: America’s Agenda in the Middle East,” convened by Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH) at Harvard University on September 23.

The myth of linkage

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer presented a version of this post in the Director’s Series at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies on October 24. First posted at Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH) on June 12.

Last September, when I arrived in Cambridge for my fall stay at Harvard, I opened the Boston Globe and saw this headline over an editorial: “The Other Middle East Conflict.” I immediately said to myself: well, I know what the Middle East conflict is—that’s the Israelis and the Palestinians. So what is the other Middle East conflict? But as I read through the first sentence, it became clear that I was totally wrong. The editorialist, or the headline writer, assumed that most readers would understand “the Middle East conflict” to be the war in Iraq. By the “other Middle East conflict,” it turned out, they meant the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which was the subject of the editorial.

I began to wonder whether typical students, in a classroom, would know what I was talking about if I started discussing “the Middle East conflict” without defining it. And if I defined it as Israel and the Palestinians, would I be showing my age?

It also reminded me of something else that had surprised me: a 2005 National Geographic survey of 18-to-24-year-olds, asking them to look at a blank map of the Middle East and locate Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. I would have guessed that Israel would have loomed largest on the mental maps of young Americans today.

I would have been wrong. 37 percent can identify Iraq and 37 percent can find Saudi Arabia—not high percentages overall. But even fewer, 26 percent, can identify Iran, and still fewer, 25 percent, can find Israel on a blank map. Perhaps it isn’t surprising when one recalls that war has cycled well over a million Americans through Iraq and Afghanistan—as soldiers, administrators, and contractors. It was Ambrose Bierce who once said, “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Thanks to war, the Middle East of early 21st-century America has been re-centered—away from Israel and toward the Persian Gulf. That is where conflict commands American attention.

But not everyone thinks it should. The last time I counted papers at the Middle East Studies Association annual conference, about two years ago, there were 85 papers on Palestine-Israel, 30 on Iraq, 27 on Iran, and only 4 on Saudi Arabia. Here, too, the skewing is conflict-driven—that is, the judgment that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians should command American attention.

And it isn’t just the specialists. They would be seconded by Jimmy Carter, who was recently asked: “Is the Israel-Palestine conflict still the key to peace in the whole region? Is the linkage policy right?” Carter’s answer: “I don’t think it’s about a linkage policy, but a linkage fact…. Without doubt, the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem.” Likewise, Zbigniew Brzezinski: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the single most combustible and galvanizing issue in the Arab world.”

This is obviously meaningless unless one has weighed all the other issues. Is it more combustible than the Kurdish question? Is it more galvanizing than Sunni-Shiite animosity? How would Brzezinski know if it were? I have broken down all Middle Eastern conflicts into nine clusters, and have appended them below. You decide.

But the bottom line is this: given so long a list, it is obvious that conflict involving Israel is not the longest, or the bloodiest, or the most widespread of the region’s conflicts. In large part, these many conflicts are symptoms of the same malaise: the absence of a Middle Eastern order, to replace the old Islamic and European empires. But they are independent symptoms; one conflict does not cause another, and its “resolution” cannot resolve another.

So the more interesting question is this: why is the idea of “linkage” so persistent in some quarters? Why are there still people who see one particular conflict as “the Middle East conflict,” and who believe that in seeking to resolve it, they are pursuing “the Middle East peace process”?

Some would answer this question by pointing to the world’s fascination with Israel. Unlike, say, the future of the Kurds, the future of Israel (and the Palestinians) fascinates the world. A conflict involving Jews, set in the Holy Land of Christianity and in a place of high significance to Islam, is destined to received more than its share of attention. There is also an illusion of familiarity with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No one beyond the specialists can spell out the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, or understand why the (Muslim) Sudanese government is persecuting the (Muslim) people of Darfur. But many people believe (usually wrongly) that they understand the core of the issue between Israel and the Palestinians.

Others might point to the West’s self-imposed obligation to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Europe, but to some extent also in America and even Israel, there is a perceived sense of guilt at having caused the conflict in the first place. There may be other conflicts that are more dangerous, but foreigners did not create the Arab-Persian or Shiite-Sunni conflicts, whereas the international community facilitated the creation of Israel and legitimated it by a U.N. resolution, along with a Palestinian state. Thus, many believe, the world has a special obligation to employ all means to bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians, by creating that Palestinian state.

Others might point to the fact that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and the leftover Israeli-Syrian conflict) still lies just around the corner, because it was once so tantalizingly close. All of the conflicts’ protagonists were regular guests in the White House and frequent guests of a succession of Secretaries of State. No one knows what it would take to end other conflicts, but there are “parameters” for ending this one. The United States theoretically has enough leverage on Israelis, Palestinians, and Syrians, and if only it were prepared to use it, this conflict could be ended, along predictable lines.

All of these beliefs are widespread, and they explain why so much attention and effort have been lavished on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they do not explain the belief in linkage. It is possible to be fascinated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, feel obligated to resolve it, and think it is relatively easy to resolve, and still not believe in linkage—that is, that the success of your efforts will bring a greater reward across the Middle East, or that an absence of progress will have grave consequences across the region.

The concept of linkage requires another belief: that the Middle East is a system, like Europe, and that its conflicts are related to one another.

Europe in modern times became a complex, interlocking system in which an event in one corner could set off a chain reaction. In Europe, local conflicts could escalate very rapidly into European conflicts (and ultimately, given Europe’s world dominance, into global conflicts). And Europe had a core problem: the conflict between Germany and France. Resolving it was a precondition for bringing peace to the entire continent. Churchill put his finger on this in 1946: “The first step in the re-creation of the European Family,” he said, “must be a partnership between France and Germany.”

Linkage, I propose—and this is my original thesis—is a projection of this memory of Europe’s re-creation onto the Middle East. The pacification of Europe was the signal achievement of the United States and its allies in the middle of the 20th century. It then became the prism through which the United States and Europe came to view the Middle East. From NATO to the European Union, from the reconstruction of Germany to Benelux, Europe’s experience has provided the template for visions of the future Middle East.

It was this mindset that led analysts and diplomats, for about three decades after the creation of Israel, to interpret Israel’s conflict with its neighbors as “the Middle East conflict.” Like the conflict between France and Germany, the Arab-Israeli conflict was understood to be the prime cause of general instability throughout the region, as evidenced by repeated Arab-Israeli wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973.

The flaws in the analogy only began to appear after Egypt and Israel achieved peace in 1979. From that point onward, the Arab-Israeli conflict moved in fits and starts toward resolution. Yet other conflicts in the region intensified. Large-scale wars erupted—not between Israel and its neighbors, but in the Persian Gulf, where a revolution in Iran, and the belligerence of Iraq, exacted a horrendous toll and required repeated U.S. interventions.

By any objective reading, the reality should have been clear: the Middle East is not analogous to Europe, it has multiple sources of conflict, and even as one conflict moves to resolution, another may be inflamed. This is because the Middle East is not a single system of interlocking parts. It is made up of smaller systems and distinct pieces, that function independently of one another.

The myth of “linkage” persists, then, because many observers cannot shed the analogy of the Middle East with Europe. A good case is Brzezinski, a man who did play a role in reconstructing Europe, and who has said: “The problems of the Middle East are conflated, and certainly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq are interactive. That’s absolutely a fundamental truth.” This is no more than a profession of faith, mere habit and analogy substituting for analysis. In what way are these problems conflated? How are they interactive? Brzezinski offers no substantiation at all.

The myth of linkage also persists because, paradoxically, the neo-conservatives embraced it. They, too, made extravagant claims about the likely effects of Iraq’s “liberation” from Saddam’s regime, which they understood as directly analogous to the destruction of Hitler’s dictatorship. Former CIA director James Woolsey, before the war, used precisely this analogy: “This could be a golden opportunity to begin to change the face of the Arab world. Just as what we did in Germany changed the face of Central and Eastern Europe, here we have got a golden chance.” But it may have been a realist, Henry Kissinger, who first claimed that “the road to Jerusalem will lead through Baghdad”—that victory over Iraq would produce a peace dividend for Israel. Saddam’s fall hasn’t had any such effect, but such claims have tended to validate the idea of linkage as a principle—that roads from here lead to there.

Finally, there is the deliberate effort by Iran, Al Qaeda, and others, to create linkage, or at least the illusion of it. In a bid for the sympathy of the fabled “Arab street,” they seek to portray the conflict with Israel as a supra-conflict between Islam and evil. The globalized Arab media such as Al Jazeera effectively do the same. Then various Pew and Zogby polls pick up the reverberations, and spread the message to Western elites that nothing interests the “Arab street” so much as Israeli misdeeds and American support for them.

Take, for example, this statement by Jimmy Carter:

There is no doubt: The heart and mind of every Muslim is affected by whether or not the Israel-Palestine issue is dealt with fairly. Even among the populations of our former close friends in the region, Egypt and Jordan, less than 5 percent look favorably on the United States today. That’s not because we invaded Iraq; they hated Saddam. It is because we don’t do anything about the Palestinian plight.

Carter, of course, has no idea what is in the “heart and mind of every Muslim.” He simply picks up sound bites from pollsters and so-called experts on Arab opinion. He then avoids the inconvenient fact that while the United States has been accused for decades of doing nothing for the Palestinians, its popularity in places like Jordan and Egypt has only plummeted since the Iraq invasion—military action that removed a ruler, Saddam Hussein, who was beloved by the “Arab street” and Arab intellectuals.

I have called linkage a myth, both in past and present. It is a myth because the Middle East is not a single region. But is it destined to remain so?

I still believe Middle East is less integrated than Europe, but it does share one feature with early 20th-century Europe. Until now, the Middle East has had more geography than military power. States have been unable to project power very far beyond their borders. But the spread of missiles and, possibly, nuclear weapons, could change that, leaving states with too little geography and too much power. In these conditions, conflicts that have been localized could become regionalized. In this case, it would not be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would occupy the place of France and Germany. It would be the conflict between Iran and Israel, and between Iran and the moderate Arab states. Such a conflict could configure the Middle East as one region, collapse the distance between the Levant and the Gulf, produce arms races, spur nuclear proliferation and proxy wars, create tightly-integrated alliances—in short, make the Middle East very much like Europe in its darkest days.

Whether the United States will act to affirm the pax Americana, by checking Iran’s rise, remains to be seen. Whether or not it does, but especially if it does not, the common understanding of “the Middle East conflict” seems destined to shift again. We may then look back with nostalgia to a time when the grandiose title of “the Middle East conflict” belonged to Israelis and Palestinians. The next Middle East conflict could be very different.

Clusters of Conflict

  • First, the Arab-Persian conflict (with its origins in earlier Ottoman-Persian conflict). This manifested itself in our time most destructively in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, and it continues to inflame post-Saddam Iraq and other parts of the Arab/Persian Gulf (even the name of which is the subject of dispute). This is probably one of the oldest rivalries in the history of the world. It has been exacerbated by the bid of Iran, under the Shah and now under the Islamic regime, to restore lost imperial greatness and achieve hegemonic dominance over the Gulf and beyond.
  • Second, the Shiite-Sunni conflict, which goes back in various forms for fourteen centuries, and which the struggle for Iraq has greatly inflamed, both within that country and beyond. There is some overlap here with Arab-Persian conflict, but the Shiite-Sunni conflict also divides Arabs against each other, in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Gulf countries. The ruthless violence between the sects in Iraq suggested the savage potential of this sectarianism, which has some potential to spread to other places in the Middle East where Shiites and Sunnis contest power and privilege.
  • Third, the Kurdish awakening, which involves a large national group experiencing a political revival in the territory of several existing states. Over the past two decades, violent conflict generated by Kurdish aspirations has torn at the fabric of Turkey and Iraq. Kurdish groups have used terrorism, and states have used scorched-earth repression and chemical weapons against Kurds. Now that Iraqi Kurds have established a de facto state in northern Iraq, there is every prospect that the Kurdish awakening will generate more conflict, and that it will spill over borders, possibly involving Turkey, Iran, and Syria.
  • Fourth, the inter-Arab conflict among Arab states over primacy, influence, and borders—the result of disputes created by the post-Ottoman partition of the Arab lands by Britain and France. In some places, these disputes are exacerbated by the inequities in nature’s apportioning of oil resources. The most destructive example of such a conflict in our times was Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait—the attempted erasure of one Arab state by another. Other examples include Nasser’s invasion of Yemen and Syria’s occupation of Lebanon.
  • Fifth, conflicts over the political aspirations of compact Christian groups with strong historic ties to the West. Foreign Christian minorities were turned out of the region decades ago, but the Maronites of Lebanon and the Greeks of Cyprus have held their ground. In the 1970s, wars were launched to deprive them of their political standing, leading in Cyprus to de facto partition between Greek and Turkish areas, and in Lebanon to a quasi-cantonization. These conflicts have defied all attempts at final resolution.
  • Sixth, conflicts that arise from the quest of Arab states to preserve or restore parts of their pre-colonial African empires. The most significant conflicts in this category are the long-running war in Sudan, which has descended into genocide in Darfur, and the festering contest over Western Sahara.
  • Seventh, the nationalist-Islamist conflicts within states, which are the result of failed modernization and the disappointed expectations of independence. The costliest of these conflicts in our time were the Iranian revolution in the 1970s (Islamists prevailed), the Islamist uprising in Syria in the 1980s (nationalists won), and the civil war that ravaged Algeria for much of the 1990s (nationalists triumphed). Smaller-scale conflict has occurred in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and is now afflicting the Palestinian territories.
  • Eighth, numerous conflicts, centered in the Persian Gulf, generated by the addiction of the industrialized West to the vast oil resources of the region, and the need of the United States to maintain its hegemony over the world’s single largest reservoir of energy. The United States essentially keeps the Gulf as an American lake, using aggressive diplomacy, arms sales to clients, and its own massive force to keep oil flowing at reasonable prices. This has put the United States in direct conflict with regional opponents—Islamic Iran, Saddam’s Iraq, and a non-state actor, Al Qaeda—who have seen its dominance as disguised imperialism. In particular, U.S.-Iranian conflict for regional hegemony has escalated over the last thirty years, and is now being exacerbated by Iran’s nuclear ambitions and pursuit of regional power status.
  • Ninth, there is conflict involving Israel, on three planes: Arab-Israeli (that is, Israel versus Arab states), Palestinian-Israeli, and Iranian-Israeli. The Arab-Israeli conflict produced a series of four inter-state wars in each of the four decades beginning in 1948. But since Egypt’s peace with Israel, three decades ago, there have been no general Arab-Israeli wars, and Israel has negotiated formal or de facto agreements or understandings with neighboring states. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict periodically erupts and subsides (most dramatically in two intifadas), and continues to defy resolution, but hasn’t led to a regional conflagration. The brewing Iranian-Israeli conflict isn’t about the Palestinians; it is an extension of the contest between the U.S. and Iran for regional dominance. So far, this conflict has manifested itself in short but sharp contests between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.