Middle East Strategy at Harvard

In November 2002, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked a number of scholars this question: “What will the world be like five years after a war with Iraq?” To mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, MESH asked all of the respondents to revisit their predictions. This week, MESH is posting the responses it has received.

Tamara Cofman Wittes is a member of MESH. In 2002, she wrote: “If the Iraqi threat is eliminated, the Arab-Israeli conflict will again loom large…. The long-term interests of the United States demand a successful peace process; that is why, five years after a war with Iraq, its long-term and short-term interests are likely to align to push aggressively for a stable and equitable settlement to this century-old conflict.” (Read the full prediction here.)

From Tamara Cofman Wittes

On the whole, my in-five-years predictions for the state of play in the Arab-Israeli conflict hold up pretty well. The prolonged U.S. military presence in Iraq did sour (further) regional opinion of the United States, and did lend greater strength to those regional forces that feed on the concepts of “occupation” and “resistance.” The crisis of post-Arafat Palestinian leadership has indeed dragged on, and dragged down the prospects for peace. The Bush Administration, despite its intentions to the contrary, did indeed find itself pulled (by the escalating violence and by pleas from Arab allies) into a new effort at Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution.

What I didn’t forsee was the Beirut spring that ousted Syria from Lebanon and added a new complexity to regional diplomacy. The 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war clarified the rise of resistance-based Islamist militancy as a significant threat, not only to Israel and America, but also to Arab regimes. Today, most Arab states are boycotting the planned Arab League summit in Damascus, and Washington pushes against new Syrian-Israeli negotiations in order to preserve its interest in Lebanese sovereignty. That’s an American priority I don’t think anyone would have predicted in 2002.

But, Lebanon aside, I think I called it pretty well—and not because I’ve got a crystal ball. In point of fact, the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict were then, and remain today, fairly independent of the American engagement with Iraq. That’s why my predictions were safe to make five years ago.