At a time when the US is at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab and Muslim worlds will look differently upon America and upon an American president who is advancing Middle East peace processes…. It is easier to withdraw from Iraq and to fight bin Laden’s terror when America is taking the lead in a strategic peace process.

So those Arabo-Muslims will “look differently” upon us. And there is more. Just “take the lead,” Mr. President, you needn’t do more just yet, and the Iraqis whose country you now occupy will simmer down enough for you to leave, and the fierce hearts of the Afghans will become easier for you to win. Don’t worry, Mr. President, we’re not talking about the old do-gooder, thankless-task “peace process.” We’re talking about “a strategic peace process.” And did we leave something out? Iran? Of course not:

The dangerous tension between Iran and Israel can also be dispelled by energizing a peace process in the Arab-Israel sector. The day Israel establishes diplomatic relations with a Palestinian state—when Jerusalem is no longer an Israel-Arab or Jewish-Islamic casus belli—the regime in Tehran will have no rationale for threatening to destroy Israel.

Yes, Mr. President, maneuver Olmert and Abbas into signing a document on the White House lawn, have them exchange ambassadors within the walls of Jerusalem, and watch the threats of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei melt away. They’ll have no rationale, and in their famously rational minds, they will see the futility of their pursuit of hegemony and weaponry. Their threatening tongues will be dumb-struck. Jerusalem, Mr. President! Bring it peace and save the world.

What does the present surge of linkage oversell tell us? As Americans increasingly experience the Middle East up close, they learn the region’s complexities, its histories, its many fault lines. And the more they know, the less they believe in the supposed magical power of the “peace process” to help fix anything else. The “peace process” junkies can only hope that an inexperienced president, who knows too little of the world, might give them another shot if he thought it would help to solve other conflicts, where America has troops on the line.

Yes, by all means, the next president should put his shoulder to the wheel to bring Israelis and Palestinians around. But he should not delude himself as to the prospects of success, or the significance of any success in fixing America’s other problems in the Middle East. Linkage is to diplomacy what reflexology is to medicine—unproven, implausible, and positively dangerous if it causes America to neglect all that must be done to protect its strategic interests.

Martin Kramer is a member of MESH.

I think King, King Abdullah [of Jordan] is as savvy an analyst of the region and player in the region as, as there is, one of the points that he made and I think a lot of people made, is that we’ve got to have an overarching strategy recognizing that all these issues are connected. If we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian process, then that will make it easier for Arab states and the Gulf states to support us when it comes to issues like Iraq and Afghanistan.

It will also weaken Iran, which has been using Hamas and Hezbollah as a way to stir up mischief in the region. If we’ve gotten an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, maybe at the same time peeling Syria out of the Iranian orbit, that makes it easier to isolate Iran so that they have a tougher time developing a nuclear weapon.

Thus is the myth of linkage perpetuated from generation unto generation. This same savvy King Abdullah, in a CNN interview the day after 9/11, offered up the ultimate linkage thesis, when asked whether the attacks would have happened if Israelis and Palestinians had reached a peace agreement at Camp David in July 2000:

I don’t believe so, because I think that if you had solved the problems of the Middle East, and obviously the core issue is that between the Israelis and Palestinians, I doubt very much that this incident would have taken place, and again, that was a reminder to all of us and why I think so many of us in the international community have been working so hard to bring a stop to the violence and bring people back to the peace process, because, in a vacuum, you do allow the extremists the upper hand and the chance to try things as what happened yesterday. And they will continue on trying until we can solve the problem once and for all.

Savvy indeed.

Martin Kramer is a member of MESH.

I think the answers are, no and not so much. Malik Mufti notes that Truman’s State Department warned him that supporting the establishment of Israel would alienate the Arabs, but the Soviet Union also immediately recognized the establishment of the Jewish state. While the Soviets started arming the Arabs in 1955, the Americans had already been allied with Riyadh for a decade, were close to Amman, were courting Nasser, and in 1958 would step in to protect the Lebanese government. Although the Soviets provided Israel with weapons in 1948 through the Czechs, the United States did not start to arm Israel in earnest until after the 1967 war, during which Nasser nonetheless claimed that U.S. pilots had flown sorties (even though it was the French who sold Israel Mirage fighter jets)—a fabrication whose effectiveness he could count on, since he as much as anyone had seen to it that the Americans were already hated in the region long before 1967. From Nasser to Nasrallah, the language of anti-Americanism has changed little in the last half century.

Thus the origins of anti-Americanism in the Muslim Middle East are probably dated more accurately by Suez, when, after handing Nasser his only foreign policy success in a career of adventurist disasters, Eisenhower wondered why the Arabs hated the United States. Of course, after helping to ruin the French and the British position in the region, the United States was the only Western power left to hate. And so why the United States is hated has maybe a little to do with Israel, a little to do with American support for certain Arab regimes, and a lot to do with the fact that it is the far enemy ‘other’ that helps define Arabism.

Anti-Americanism issues from the same social, political and cultural milieu that gave rise to the idea of linkage: Arab nationalism. Mufti writes that “linkage is real,” but perhaps it is more accurate to say that many people believe it is real. Whether it is or not in fact, the regimes used it to consolidate domestic support (as it aided oppositionists in the same fashion), while it allowed them to project power in the region. That U.S. policymakers catered to the demands of Arab regimes from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea is partly attributable to clientitis, but is mostly a function of American regional interests, like securing energy resources, and, up until the 1990s, fighting the Cold War.

Perhaps this helps explain why, as Michael Young rightly observes, Washington is so obsessed with being loved in the region: It is not just narcissism, but schizophrenia insofar as the Americans for half a century have understood their regional interests through an ideological prism that also held them to be the enemy of the Arabs. Both linkage and anti-Americanism issue from Arab nationalism, with Palestine and anti-Americanism sealing the Arab nationalist covenant that ostensibly binds the Arabs together while it obscures the other, deeper, inter-regional conflicts that have defined the Middle East for over a thousand years.

The invasion of Iraq changed the balance of power in the Middle East and thus also the nature of American interests there. Since Iraq has exposed some of the other regional conflicts, described by Martin Kramer above, it is no longer makes sense for the United States to operate in accordance with a view of the region that puts Palestine first.

Martin has shown elsewhere that the advantage of the Arab-Israeli peace process was to bolster the Pax Americana by compelling the Arabs to petition Washington if they wanted any concessions from Israel. But it is now difficult to imagine an Israeli government capable of giving up anything at this point, especially since it would be to the immediate benefit of Iran and its regional assets, which are also U.S. rivals or enemies. However, there are plenty of other points of conflict where the United States might strengthen its hand by exacting concessions from its allies—of course, after forcing supplicants to their knees. Indeed, given the amount of conflict in the region, and the number of players who have good reason to be scared of their neighbors, it is possible to argue that the American position as power-broker, gate-keeper, unmoved mover, etc., has never been stronger. Unfortunately, the Bush administration’s Annapolis process shows that Washington does not yet understand what it has wrought in the region, some of it all to the good.

Lee Smith is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute.

I’m not sure if Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski are “serious” (I think they are, which is often the problem), but I’m afraid that this linear linkage is precisely what many who think about the Middle East, including Carter and Brzezinski, mean when they seek to make a priority of a resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Linkage, even “magical” linkage, is in fact not a straw-man to many people, whichever side of the ideological divide they stand on. For example in the Brzezinski piece Martin links to, the former national security advisor draws a direct relation between Iraq and Palestine when he writes: “Without significant progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace, post-occupation Iraq will be both anti-American and anti-Israel.”

If such direct linkages are considered legitimate by observers, then it is fair to submit them to the critical analysis that Martin and others do, and that Malik to an extent seeks to avoid by refocusing our attention on how American treatment of the various regional conflicts has affected its own national interests.

Where I agree with Malik is when he asks: “Was America’s popularity really so high in the Arab and Muslim worlds prior to the Iraq invasion?” America often seems so obsessed with whether it is liked in the Middle East, that achieving that result has become a vital aim of U.S. foreign policy. Being liked is doubtless important for a state’s “soft power,” but it should not be the be-all and end-all of American political behavior. Effectiveness is far more important to a state (or “being feared” to use Machiavelli’s term), and that was the real problem the Bush administration faced once it got bogged down in Iraq. Suddenly it looked disoriented, inviting scorn, particularly after the high ambitions voiced by the administration prior to the invasion.

But if American popularity was not so high even before Iraq, as Malik affirms, then what amount of interest by Washington in helping resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will ever be enough to “win hearts and minds” in the Arab world? After all, few administrations will ever expend more political capital and time than the Clinton administration did between 1992 and 2000 on the Palestinian-Israeli track, all to no avail. Despite that, Malik admits this effort failed to win the United States very many plaudits in the region.

What disturbs me about the discussion on how America can win Arab hearts and minds is not that it is unimportant; it is just terribly insular, focused entirely on America. Suddenly the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been reduced to a matter of U.S. public relations, even as we ignore the very real structural obstacles to a settlement due to the actions and attitudes of the parties directly involved. That’s why I tend to side with skeptics like Martin on linkages. The region is caught up in very different and separate disputes that have structures, a momentum, and a logic of their own.

At the same time, I must say I feel Martin overstates things when he writes “one conflict does not cause another, and its ‘resolution’ cannot resolve another.” Perhaps he’s right when it comes to causes and resolutions, but conflicts can impact on others in less absolute ways. I read Martin’s final section in his essay, where he questions whether the myth of linkage will remain so in the future as a sign that he perhaps shares some of my doubts.

Michael Young is a member of MESH.

Less thoughtful challengers of this truism set up a straw-man when they argue that defusing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict won’t magically solve all the region’s other problems—does anyone serious suggest that it would? The thrust of Kramer’s more nuanced argument, as I understand it, is that there is not enough linkage to warrant even the claim that resolving the conflict will have an appreciably positive impact on the region’s other disputes. Looked at from the perspective of those other disputes themselves—Arab-Persian, Sunni-Shi’a, Muslim-Christian, Kurdish-Arab/Turkish/Iranian, etc., etc.—Kramer is surely right: none of those was caused by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Looked at from the perspective of the United States, however, Kramer is wrong.

He says, for example, that even though the United States has been blamed for the plight of the Palestinians for decades, its regional popularity “has only plummeted since the Iraq invasion.” But does this really suffice to dispel the linkage thesis? Was America’s popularity really so high in the Arab and Muslim worlds prior to the Iraq invasion? Didn’t that pre-existing alienation have anything to do with U.S. policies toward Israel? In fact, couldn’t it plausibly be argued that a major reason for the failure of the United States to sell its vision for Iraq regionally, was precisely that so many people were already predisposed to see it as an attempt to enhance Israel’s strategic position? This last observation points to where the linkage really lies—not in the intrinsic dynamic of the Near East’s various disputes, but in the ability of the United States to address those disputes in a manner that advances its own national interests. American foreign policy is the missing link.

Fairly or unfairly, the Near East will continue to be of vital geopolitical importance to the United States for the foreseeable future, and winning the hearts and minds of as many of its inhabitants as possible will therefore remain an important U.S. objective. Fairly or unfairly, Palestine will continue to matter a great deal to Arabs and Muslims in the region and beyond—indeed, all the more so as globalized media technologies accelerate the homogenization of attitudes around the Muslim world.

Kramer dismisses “sound bites from pollsters and so-called experts on Arab opinion” in this regard. But the opponents of the United States harbor no such doubts, and view Arab and Muslim sentiments about Israel as a gift that keeps on giving. The historical record supports their view. Examples are myriad, but among the most recent and dramatic is the Hezbollah-Israel clash in the summer of 2006, which diverted intensifying American pressure on Syria and Iran and left both regimes in significantly stronger positions.

Neither Assad and Ahmadinejad, nor Kissinger and Brzezinski, err in seeing a linkage between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the success of American endeavors throughout this vital region. Successive U.S. administrations of the last six decades have not been simply misguided or foolish for taking it into account. The linkage will vary in salience, but it is real, and will therefore continue to inform U.S. policy as it always has.

Malik Mufti is a member of MESH.

It’s certainly true that such “linkage” isn’t the only misconception that needs to be fixed with regard to the Middle East. But it’s an important fix. Aaron would be right in responding that “linkage isn’t the problem” if Martin did indeed claim that it’s the only problem in understanding the strategic situation in the Middle East. But Martin doesn’t make that claim. And “linkage” is an endemic problem among academics, journalists and U.S. government officials who deal with the Middle East, which is why I believe that debunking this fallacious idea is an important act of intellectual hygiene.

Walter Reich is a member of MESH.

(1) preventing another attack on the continental United States (if you can’t protect your homeland, you don’t need a foreign policy);

(2) extricating the United States from the trillion-dollar social science experiment called Iraq in a way that protects our interests and credibility;

(3) figuring out how to deal with Iran—a country right now that sits at the nexus of the things we do care about in this region: nuclear proliferation; Iraq; and the Arab-Israeli issue;

(4) finally, treating the sixty-year headache called the Arab-Israeli issue, for which there is no conflict-ending solution right now.

We need to pursue all of these in a way that’s smart and tough, in an effort to repair our image. We have stumbled for eight years under Bill Clinton over how to help make peace; and stumbled galactically for the past eight years under George W. Bush over how to make war. We are a great power in name only; we’re neither liked, feared nor respected in a region increasingly critical to our national security. We need a serious strategy that incorporates the four noted above. All are long movies, but we need to find a serious approach for dealing with them.

Aaron David Miller is currently a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and author of A Much Too Promised Land. He served at the Department of State as an adviser to six Secretaries of State.

There’s a constant conflation of the many conflicts going on in the Middle East, and an abiding tendency to link them all. And they’re linked because they serve many purposes for many people and many causes.

First of all, they fulfill the needs most of us have to simplify matters in all spheres, whether they have to do with international affairs or anything else in life. The simpler the explanation (or “narrative,” as some academics like to put it) of something, the easier it is to remember, and the better we feel about having accounted for a lot of problems all at once and having stored that accounting away in one of our cognitive drawers.

And they fulfill the needs of various parties.

If you’re a Palestinian, and you want your cause to not be forgotten, you say that every problem in the Middle East is linked to it, so everyone had better pay attention to your cause and solve it in the way you’d like it solved, because if it’s not solved, all of these other problems will not be solved.

If you’re Osama bin Laden, then you point to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as he did in a recent pronouncement, in large measure because it makes sense to Western minds, which were left puzzled by the old reasons you used to dwell on in your declarations, which focused more on the miserable and ungodly regime in Saudi Arabia or the need to reform Islam or the war by the West on Islam or the pollution of the Islamic world by Western influences or the need to restore Islam to its rightful historical role and power. These latter sins sound strange if not bizarre to Western ears, while the sin of supporting Israel or of not supporting the Palestinians immediately makes sense.

If you’re an academic or ex-academic or ex-National Security Advisor or ex-President or journalist and have developed a theory or taken up a cause that sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as underlying and inextricably linked to all other Middle East conflicts, then nothing—not logic or even new information—will dislodge that theory or cause from your thinking. For you—as Don Quixote said—facts are the enemy of truth. Nothing will change your mind.

I understand the common human tendency to grasp simple explanations that seem to explain everything. Most of us are drawn to a quick explanation that, if correct, could provide a quick fix. And most of us are, at least at times, a little lazy and prefer simplicity to complexity, which can give one a headache.

I don’t blame Palestinians, of course, for wanting their conflict to be seen as being linked to, and underlying, all other conflicts; it helps in their struggle.

But I don’t think we have an obligation to believe academics or ex-government officials or preaching moralists or journalists who latch onto and never let go of a theory about the linkage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to every other conflict in the Middle East. That theory constitutes “stinkin’ thinkin’.” And Martin Kramer’s post, as a corrective, offers a fine dose of intellectual hygiene.

Alas, it’s a corrective that not all of the parties mentioned above, who so strongly need it, will either see as being in their interest or bother taking it to heart.

Which is too bad.

Walter Reich is a member of MESH.