The appointment of Dennis Ross as “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for The Gulf and Southwest Asia” (announcement here) has caused some puzzlement, in part because the geographic focus of his title seems fuzzy. This is especially so for “Southwest Asia.”

On the face of it, “Southwest Asia” looks like a geographic reference, and it has always had a few enthusiasts among geographers. It’s also been favored by those who deem it less Eurocentric than “Middle East” or “Near East.” (Maybe it is, but since Asia as a continent is a European idea, calling any region “Southwest Asia” hardly solves the problem.) Once there was even a maverick academic program, at SUNY Binghamton, called the Program in Southwest Asian and North African Studies (SWANA for short). But “Southwest Asia” got no traction in American academe, and even the SUNY program eventually swapped SWANA for MENA (Middle East and North Africa).

So when did “Southwest Asia” finally get its big break, and begin to turn up in high places as a near-synonym for the Middle East? “From the moment of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979,” wrote U.S. diplomat and strategist John C. Campbell, “Washington began to talk of ‘Southwest Asia’ instead of the Middle East as the area of crisis and of American concern.” Cold War strategists wished to emphasize that the region was crucial not because it was east of us, but because it was immediately southwest of the Soviet Union, which had a plan to push through to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. The sooner Americans started thinking about the region as “Southwest Asia,” the sooner they would grasp the nature of the threat.

National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski effected the shift in labeling. Two days after the Soviet invasion, he warned President Jimmy Carter that “the collapse of the balance of power in Southwest Asia… could produce Soviet presence right down on the edge of the Arabian and Oman Gulfs.” Carter, reeling from the combined effects of the invasion and the Iran hostage crisis, opened a dramatic television address to the nation some days later with these words: “I come to you this evening to discuss important and rapidly changing circumstances in Southwest Asia.” Carter proceeded to warn Americans of “a threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia.” A month later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee jumped on board, and held a series of landmark hearings later published as “U.S. Security Interests and Policies in Southwest Asia.”

“A new name has been devised to cover these counties on which attention has been concentrated during the past 12 months,” wrote the military historian Sir Michael Howard in Foreign Affairs a year later. “Southwest Asia: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and the oil-bearing states bordering what now must tactfully be termed simply ‘the Gulf,’ all constituting a politically seismic zone of incalculable explosive potential.” Campbell later gave a similar definition: “‘Southwest Asia’ includes everything from the eastern fringes of the Arab world to the western limits of the Indian subcontinent.” (Campbell also added that “roughly, it is Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ‘arc of crisis.’” Brzezinski had coined that phrase a year before the Soviet invasion, and it figured prominently in a January 1979 story in TIME magazine, whose cover showed a Soviet bear looming over the Persian Gulf. TIME explained that Brzezinski’s “arc of crisis” consisted of “the nations that stretch across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey, and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa.”)

This “Southwest Asia,” then, wasn’t a geographic reference at all, but a strategic one with a Cold War application. Not surprisingly, both the CIA and the Pentagon quickly picked up the term and ran with it. The CIA established a Southwest Asia Analytic Center, which produced papers like “The Soviets and the Tribes of Southwest Asia.” The Defense Department acted similarly, applying “Southwest Asia” (SWA) to a large area centered in the Gulf, but extending far beyond it. “Southwest Asia” is now the core of CENTCOM’s “Area of Responsibility” (AOR), which runs from Kazakhstan to Kenya.

Which brings us back to the Ross appointment at the State Department. “Southwest Asia” isn’t much used at State, which still prefers “Middle East” and hasn’t even given up entirely on “Near East.” (”Southwest Asia” is regularly used only in the Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, where it includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka.) After the Ross announcement, journalists wanted to know exactly what Ross’s own area of responsibility covered. In particular, did it include Afghanistan and Pakistan, the original entry point to “Southwest Asia” of the Cold War strategists? Hadn’t responsibllity for both countries already been given to Richard Holbrooke, named only a month earlier as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan?

At first, even the acting State Department spokesman, Robert Wood, didn’t know just what “Southwest Asia” included, which made for an embarrassing exchange at the Department’s daily press briefing. (Question: “You guys named an envoy for Southwest Asia. I presume that you know what countries that includes.” Wood: “Yes. Of course, we know. I just—I don’t have the list to run off—you know, right off the top of my head here.”

But the next day, Wood had an answer:

MR. WOOD: Let me give you my best—our best read of this. From our standpoint, the countries that make up areas of the Gulf and Southwest Asia include Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen, and those are the countries.

QUESTION: Not—not Afghanistan and Pakistan?

MR. WOOD: Look, Ambassador Ross will look at the entire region, should he be asked to, including Afghanistan. But this is something that would be worked out. You were—you asked the question yesterday about Ambassador Holbrooke and whether there was going to be some kind of, I don’t know, conflict over who is working in—on that particular issues in that country.

Look, Ambassador Ross and Ambassador Holbrooke will work together where necessary if they need to, if there’s some kind of overlap. But that’s, in essence, the State Department’s geographical breakdown of Southwest Asia.

QUESTION: Okay. So it does not—it is not the same breakdown as the military uses?

MR. WOOD: No, the military uses a different breakdown, but I’d have to refer you to them for their specific breakdown.

QUESTION: So it doesn’t include Jordan? It doesn’t include—

MR. WOOD: I just gave you the breakdown as I—as the State Department breaks it down.

QUESTION: So if Ambassador Ross is special envoy—special advisor for Gulf and Southwest Asia, what is the difference between Gulf and Southwest Asia?

MR. WOOD: Look—

QUESTION: For me, this is Gulf.

MR. WOOD: Well, it may be for you. For others, it may be different. I’d have to—I’ve given you what the Department’s position is with regard to the geographic makeup of the region.

Why did the State Department construe “Southwest Asia” so narrowly—so much so that it really is indistinguishable from “The Gulf”? That’s a matter for speculation. One report says Ross did have Afghanistan and Pakistan on the list of countries he thought belonged in the package. Holbrooke reportedly insisted they both be dropped, and got his way.

But it’s already clear that last week added yet another layer of confusion to the terminology the United States inflicts on the region to suit its own political, diplomatic, and strategic requirements. There is a “Near East” and a “Middle East” and a “Greater Middle East” (GME) and a “Middle East and North Africa” (MENA) and a “Broader Middle East and North Africa” (BMENA). And now, alongside the Defense Department’s greater “Southwest Asia,” we have the lesser “Southwest Asia” of the State Department as scaled down for Ross. (This is not to be confused with the “Southwest Asia” of the State Department’s own Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Not a single country in that bureau’s “Southwest Asia” is identical to Ross’s.) Of course, labels tend to slip and slide across the map over time, depending on circumstance. It’s just remarkable to see them slip and slide at one time, in one building.

Meanwhile, in Iran, there is no confusion, only outrage that the appointment of Ross mentions “The Gulf,” as opposed to the Persian Gulf. Iran has waged a persistent campaign to keep the Persian adjective firmly fastened to the Gulf. But the Iranian government won’t take offense at Iran’s inclusion in “Southwest Asia”—to the contrary. Last year a leading Iranian journalist wrote a column entitled “There Is No Middle East.” The message:

The people of Southwest Asia and North Africa should not use the appellation Middle East to describe their home region because it was coined by European imperialists. The use of such non-indigenous terms only serves to reinforce mental slavery and subjugation…. The vocabulary that we use influences our thought patterns. If Muslims use Eurocentric vocabulary, even when speaking our own languages, it will undermine our sense of identity. A better substitute for the Middle East/North Africa would be Southwest Asia/North Africa, which could be abbreviated as SWANA.

Don’t Persians know that the naming of Asia is owed to… the Greeks?.

••

Below: Jimmy Carter delivers his January 4, 1980 televised address concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (There is a brief preface on the Iran hostages.) His White House diary records this as an “Address to the Nation on the situation in Southwest Asia.” Notice the prop in the opening shot: a globe positioned so as to show the region. Toward the end of this segment, the camera pans across a map. (If you cannot see the embedded clip, or wish to view the entire address, click here.)

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

The Israeli-Hamas ceasefire, signed on June 9, 2008, had long been a porous one. While Hamas, for the most part, until November 2008 did not fire its own rockets at Israel, it permitted other groups, such as the Iranian-supported Islamic Jihad, to do so. These limited rocket attacks, while clear violations of the ceasefire agreement, did not precipitate major Israeli responses, other than periodic limited closures of the border crossings into Gaza, through which Israel supplied food, fuel and other humanitarian aid to Gaza. Whether Israel should have allowed any humanitarian aid into Gaza in the face of the rocket fire is a very open question: Israel was in fact in a state of war with Hamas, an organization pledged to destroy it, and the rockets fired at Israel simply underlined Hamas’ long term objective by demonstrating its “resistance” to the Jewish State. Under these circumstances, a full border closure might have brought home to the people of Gaza, the majority of whom voted for Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, the costs of supporting Hamas.

In any case, fighting between Israel and Hamas intensified in November when Israel found and destroyed a tunnel between Gaza and Israel which the Israeli military thought would be used to kidnap another Israeli soldier, much as Gilad Shalit had been kidnapped in 2006. Ironically, the kidnap attempt was not aimed primarily at Israel, but at the Palestinian rival of Hamas, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority on the West Bank headed by Mahmoud Abbas. The kidnap attempt appeared timed to occur as Hamas and Fatah were jockeying for position before the start of what proved to be abortive Palestinian unity talks in Cairo. Had Hamas been successful in capturing another Israeli soldier, it would have shown that Hamas was demonstrating greater “resistance” against Israel than Fatah, which had been engaged in fruitless peace talks with Israel.

Following the Israeli attack on the tunnel, the number of rockets fired at Israel from Gaza escalated, reaching a new high after Hamas announced it would not extend the ceasefire unless Israel fully opened the border crossings and stopped arresting members of Hamas living on the West Bank—the latter demand not included in the original ceasefire agreement. When Israel refused to agree to the new Hamas demands, Hamas further escalated its firing of rockets, hoping, apparently, to force Israel to accept the new ceasefire terms in return for restoring quiet to southern Israel. Hamas may have also believed that Israel’s ruling Kadima party desperately needed a ceasefire so as to remove the issue of the rocket firing from the ongoing Israeli election campaign. It had been Kadima that had undertaken the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and presumably it did not want to remind the Israeli electorate that the withdrawal had resulted in the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel.

If this was indeed the thinking of Hamas, it was gravely mistaken. Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, as early as November, had called for strong military action against Hamas because of the rocket firing, and she also stated at the time that she was prepared to eliminate the Hamas threat against Israel once and for all. Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, of the Labor party, was taking a more dovish position, resisting the use of force. In initially opposing an attack on Gaza, Barak may have hoped to win votes from the dovish spectrum of the Israeli electorate consisting of the Meretz party and the parties that had broken away from Labor because they were dissatisfied with his leadership. On the other end of the Israeli political spectrum, the right of center Likud party, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, was attacking Barak for his judgement in unilaterally withdrawing from Lebanon in May 2000—a step which had led not to peace, as Barak had hoped, but to rocket fire into Israel from Lebanon, the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, and finally the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006 from which Israel did not emerge victorious. In addition, of course, Netanyahu berated the Kadima party for its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which, as in the case of Lebanon, did not bring peace, but rather rocket firing into Israel in its wake.

Given these circumstances, with Netanyahu’s Likud party leading in the pre-election polls, Livni’s calls for more action against Hamas grew more difficult for Kadima’s lame-duck leader, Ehud Olmert, to resist. For his part, Barak saw his Labor party dropping precipitously in the polls, as his dovish position was not resonating among Israeli voters. The end result of the Israeli deliberations—a major air assault against Hamas bases, missile factories, and arms smuggling tunnels in Gaza—was a compromise between those who wanted a full-scale military assault on Gaza and those, most likely including Olmert, who had been badly burned politically by the 2006 war, and who continued to counsel restraint. The Israeli military action was an effort to show Hamas that not only would the Israeli political leadership not be intimidated by the Hamas rocket attacks into weakening its position on the ceasefire terms, but that Israel too could use force—considerably more force than Hamas was using—and that if Hamas had hoped to use rocket fire to get better ceasefire terms, it was badly mistaken. The military action was also a signal to Hamas that if it still wanted a truce—a very big if—then all rocket fire would have to be halted.

Prior to examining the alternatives available to Hamas after the Israeli military operation, I will now turn to an analysis of the possible repercussions of the Israeli military action in the Middle East, because this will affect how Hamas will respond.

Repercussions

In analyzing the possible effects of the Israeli military operation throughout the Middle East, one has to consider several different Arab and Middle Eastern states which are players in the Arab-Israeli conflict. These include: Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah organization which currently controls the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank; Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab states that have peace treaties with Israel; Syria; Iran; and Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.

• Mahmoud Abbas. With Palestinians being killed by the Israeli attacks, Abbas has no choice but to publicly condemn them, although he has also been critical of Hamas for not agreeing to extend the ceasefire. It should also be noted that many members of Abbas’ Fatah organization have bitter memories of their colleagues in Gaza being murdered by Hamas thugs—some tossed off the rooftops of multi-storied buildings in Gaza—during the Hamas seizure of power in Gaza in June 2006. Consequently, many will greet the Israeli drubbing of Hamas in Gaza with great satisfaction. While there are likely to be riots by Hamas sympathizers on the West Bank, the test of Abbas’ newly strengthened security forces will be how successful they are in containing the rioters. Since Abbas has been systematically cracking down on Hamas operatives in the West Bank since June 2007 (as has Israel) it is not clear how much strength Hamas retains in the region, and the ability of Abbas’ forces to quell the rioters will go a long way toward answering this question.

While Abbas has broken off peace talks with Israel in the name of Palestinian solidarity—he has to be concerned about a sympathy vote for Hamas in the forthcoming Palestinian Legislative Council elections (if they are held,as tentatively scheduled,in April 2009)—-nonetheless if Hamas is badly weakened politically as well as militarily in Gaza by the Israeli attacks (a very big if), then Abbas will gain politically in what has become a zero-sum-game struggle between Hamas and Fatah for leadership of the Palestinian movement.

• Egypt and Jordan. As the two countries which have signed peace treaties with Israel, both Egypt and Jordan face similar problems in responding to the Israeli military operations in Gaza.

The main opposition force, which is represented in parliament in both countries, is the Moslem Brotherhood (in Jordan it takes the name “The Islamic Action Front”), and Hamas itself is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Thus the Palestinian issue has been used by Muslim Brotherhood organizations in both countries to accuse both Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah II of Jordan of not being tough enough against Israel.

Yet while both Mubarak and King Abdullah II must be sensitive to the public opinion in their countries, which the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to stir up against them, they are also aware that the United States, their main supplier of economic aid ($2.2 billion for Egypt and $500 million for Jordan on an annual basis), has been strongly backing Israel during the crisis. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has gone so far as to say: “The United States strongly condemns the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel and holds Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza. The ceasefire should be restored immediately.” Consequently, assuming the Israeli military operations are concluded in a relatively short amount of time, it is doubtful whether either Egypt or Jordan would break diplomatic relations with Israel or even recall their ambassadors as they did during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Indeed, a defeat for Hamas would politically benefit both Arab leaders.

• Syria. The first response of Syria to the Israeli attack on Gaza was to freeze the current low-level peace talks which Syria has been carrying on with Israel under the mediation of Turkey. As the home of one of the most militant branches of Hamas, led by Khalid Mash’al who has just called for a new Palestinian intifada against Israel, Syria has long championed the organization as Damascus has sought to exercise influence over the Palestinian movement. Yet the Syrians have to be careful how they behave during the crisis if they want to preserve the possibility of a peace process with Israel—and the link to improved relations with the United States which they hope to emerge from it. It should be remembered in this context that the initial post-Madrid conference talks between Israel and Syria collapsed in 1996 when Syria not only did not condemn the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel that took place in February-March 1996, but Syrian state radio actually justified them. If Syria chooses to support Hamas during the current conflict in a major way, it may well jeopardize peace talks with the next Israeli leader, be it Livni or Netanyahu. While Syrian leader Bashar Assad may assume that neither Livni nor Netanyahu puts peace with Syria high on their priority lists, strong Syrian support for Hamas may also call into question Syria’s relations with the incoming Obama administration.

• Iran. Iran, like Syria, faces a choice in responding to the Israeli airstrikes. It could urge its ally, the Lebanese–based Hezbollah, to fire rockets into Israel in support of Hamas. Such an action might be problematic, however, for three reasons.

1. There is the question as to whether Hezbollah would wish to jeopardize its rapidly improving political position in Lebanon by launching rocket attacks against Israel, since Israel has threatened to retaliate against all of Lebanon if Hezbollah launches rocket attacks, not just the southern part as it did in 2006, because Hezbollah is now part of the Lebanese government.
2. Such a call by Iran might hasten an Israeli airstrike against Iran’s nuclear installations, a development which Iranian leaders, despite their bluster, have sought to avoid.
3. An action of this type would make it far more difficult for Iran to have an improved relationship with the incoming Obama administration, assuming, of course, the Iranian leadership wants such a rapprochement. Consequently, Iran may limit itself to spinning the Israeli attack, much as it has done with the Israeli siege on Gaza, by claiming that the Arab world has not done enough to aid the besieged Palestinians because the leaders of the Sunni Arab world are the lackeys of the United States.

• Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. In the minds of the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Kuwait,The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman), the main threat in their region is not Israel but Iran. Consequently, if Iranian-allied Hamas suffers a military defeat at the hands of Israel, particularly in a brief conflict before the passions of the so-called “Arab street” are fully ignited, the leaders of the GCC states will not be unhappy. Indeed, for similar reasons they gave tacit support to Israel at first in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, turning against Israel only when the war was prolonged and heavy civilian casualties occurred. If the Israeli military action is relatively limited in time, it is unlikely that the Saudis and the other Gulf states will take strong diplomatic action against Israel, such as removing the Arab Peace Plan from the diplomatic negotiating table.

The Future

In looking to the aftermath of the Israeli military action, there are several possibilities and they both depend on how Hamas reacts to the Israeli attacks. First, if Hamas follows through on its threat to restart suicide bombings and continues to launch rocket attacks of Israel, then additional airstrikes against Hamas can be expected, along with additional “targeted assassinations” of Hamas leaders, and possibly a full-scale military invasion as well. If, on the other hand, the Hamas leadership decides that the airstrikes and the real threat of an Israeli ground invasion may jeopardize its hold on Gaza before it has consolidated its power there, then it may agree, if only tacitly, to another ceasefire by stopping its rocket attacks on the expectation that Israel would reciprocate by stopping its attacks, in an agreement possibly mediated by Turkey. Were this to occur, Israel would certainly emerge as the victor in the conflict with Hamas, Iran and Syria the losers.

Consequently, one might expect that Iran, and possibly Syria, will urge Hamas to continue its “resistance” against Israel, much as Hezbollah did in 2006, and wait for pressure from the “Arab street,” Europe, Russia, the United Nations, and possibly (if the fighting last sufficiently long) the United States to salvage the situation. Whether Hamas will be in a position to do so, however, remains to be seen, and its fate may resemble more the PLO which was besieged in Beirut in 1982 and forced into exile, than Hezbollah in 2006.

In looking at the impact of the Israeli military action on the February 10 Israeli elections, there are also several possibilities. Since Livni had openly been calling for strong military action against Hamas, and that action was in fact taken, it is likely that Livni’s Kadima party will have an improved position in the polls and in the election, now little more than a month away. This will be the case especially if Hamas agrees to the tacit truce, as mentioned above. Similarly, if the military action proves successful, Barak may cement his position as the indispensable Defense Minister, no matter who wins the election.

On the other hand, if rockets continue to fly into Israel from Gaza, Livni may be blamed, along with Barak, for their inability to stop the missiles. Under these circumstances, Livni and Barak may well urge a full-scale invasion of Gaza. Assuming that the Israeli Army is now better prepared for ground combat than it was in the 2006 war with Hezbollah, and Hamas does not have the weaponry possessed by Hezbollah in 2006, and the invasion is preceded by heavy artillery barrages as well as continued air strikes, a softened-up Hamas may not be a major threat to the IDF, no matter how many tunnels it may have dug. Once Gaza is recaptured, and any surviving Hamas cadres imprisoned, the Gaza Strip can be turned over to Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah organization, and then genuine peace talks, now covering both the West Bank and Gaza, can take place. Whether such an optimistic scenario will actually take place, however, remains an open question.

In a Policy Watch of The Washington Institute that ran today, I reflect on yet another Bush Administration initiative that has been left to crawl forward weakly without sustained U.S. leadership: the G-8’s Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) Initiative. Like a man dying of thirst in a hot desert, it won’t have to crawl much farther.

Back in the distant past—four years ago—the Initiative was something the Administration just had to have: a multi-lateral framework that would work to create and support a common reform agenda for the Broader Middle East. It was novel in many ways, and a re-read of its founding documents makes interesting reading, if you’re into that sort of stuff. Its chief innovation was to involve business and civil society actors in the deliberations with governments and ask them to help inform reform priorities. For some groups, it is their only chance to meet face to face with their governments at any level.

For five years now an ever-expanding network of activists and reformers has been meeting and making recommendations to their governments on a whole slew of topics. Policy recommendations have flooded into capitals on everything from vocational training and media reform to election monitoring and women’s empowerment. Annually the groups come together at something clumsily called the Parallel Forum at the Forum for the Future, to summarize their recent meetings and to finalize a set of recommendations to make to ministers when they meet one or two days later. In 2005 in Rabat there were just five such activists, all of whom were hard-core human rights activists. Today in Dubai, there are hundreds representing hundreds more in all sectors.

Over the course of the past two days I’ve been listening in on their conversations and deliberations as an invited delegate at this year’s gathering, and have a number of quick impressions to share.

First, these folks are seriously interested in partnering with governments to stimulate change. These are not wild-eyed revolutionaries of either the secular or the Islamist sort. They are people who want to see their governments and their societies thrive. Not because the United States or anyone else wants them to but because they believe it profoundly themselves. They recognize the failings of their governments but they also fear militant Islam and believe they can help compete with it, if governments would only let them.

Second, and this should encourage Michelle Dunne, they all still want to have elections. When I walked into a discussion on how to improve election monitoring, I asked with shocked incredulity if they were still hoping for and encouraging elections. They looked at me strangely and said of course. Elections are poorly run in this part of the world but they do take place and they should be freer and fairer they said. I agree with them.

The other big take-away from this meeting is that governments—aside from bits of our own—don’t care about this process. No government officials were allowed by the UAE government to participate in this year’s sessions, a sharp break with past practice that allowed government observers. So there was no one to hear the delegates offer constructive criticisms, truly thoughtful ideas or truly bad ones. Moreover, the Emirati government is thinking of curtailing civil society participation at the ministerial altogether, a huge step backwards if it happens. Typically, elected delegations from the parallel session and various meetings that take place over the course of a year make short presentations at the Forum. Apart from Rabat where the NGOs were inadvertently kicked out of the session by the foreign minister (they were later brought back in after the FM called them on their cell phones to apologize) and in Bahrain, where a member of a local human rights organization was not allowed to participate despite having been selected, an ever-larger group of civil society activists has been allowed in the room for the entire ministerial.

So why the change? In part it has to do with the fact that in the Emirates there is no real civil society and so they are unaccustomed to having to deal with it. But in part it also has to do with Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s last minute announcement that she’s not coming to the Forum. Again. The government is clearly embarrassed that she would cancel, knowing that others will now downgrade their participation. Why should they risk being embarrassed further by activists who just might say or do anything? Or perhaps they are trying to force the activists to protest the event giving them a pre-text to cancel it altogether?Last year after Secretary Rice canceled her trip the Yemeni government canceled the Forum—without a pretext.

What is strangely encouraging about all of this is what I heard most of all from the delegates with whom I spoke. They are frustrated the G-8 is not taking the process seriously enough and upset at their own governments’ blindness to the hand that’s being offered, but they want the process to continue. As one of them put it to me, “It’s arrogant and even outrageous that the G-8 would invent this initiative and then abandon it but I hope we can continue to have this sort of meeting. Even without ministers. What do foreign ministers know about privatization or election law anyway? If we could routinely have senior officials from relevant ministries dialogue with us it would be a huge step forward.”

It’s not a whole lot to ask, frankly. But unless attitudes towards the initiative change within the G-8 and the governments of the region, even that may be a bridge too far. Fairly diversified funding for the initiative has all but dried up and most activities are supported now by the United States. With the next Administration even that slim trickle of support could dry up and then the BMENA Initiative would be yet another quickly forgotten grand scheme.

As I write in my piece today, no one will likely mourn its passing, but it truly was a missed opportunity. It occurred to me after reading Tamara Cofman Wittes’s post that this would be one way of partnering with the countries of the region and representatives of their societies to challenge the revisionists of Iran and their proxies. By seriously addressing reform issues and perhaps adding security to the mix, a broad consensus and partnership could emerge to confront the extremist narrative. But it’s late here in Dubai and I’m jet-lagged out of my mind. Perhaps I’m already dreaming.

There is so much blame to go around in the wake of the financial crisis that there is no wonder OPEC’s name shows up high in the list of culprits. After all, soaring oil prices and loss of wealth in 2008 to the tune of $1.2-$1.9 billion each and every working day, depending on the price of crude, not only helped pop the U.S. mortgage bubble but have also helped create the economic conditions that brought the U.S. economy to its current dire straits.

I don’t like the oil cartel and have even been called “the most hated man in Riyadh.” My positions on OPEC and its methodical price manipulation and looting of the world’s poor are well documented. But alleging that OPEC by some grand design brought America to the abyss and then pushed her over the cliff or, worse, concocted a vast conspiracy to impoverish millions of middle-class Americans seems like one bridge too far, especially in light of the fact that OPEC countries themselves are among the biggest casualties of the crisis. Oil prices have already fallen to $88 from their record $147 in July.

Since the beginning of the crisis, the Saudi stock market, the largest in the Arab world, lost more than 17 percent of its value. Qatar lost 19 percent, and Dubai’s exchange shed a quarter of its value in just four days of trading. Due to their relative insulation, Iranian and Venezuelan stocks were almost unscathed by the meltdown, but make no mistake: Iran and Venezuela are likely to suffer greatly from the current downturn. The IMF recently determined that oil prices must remain at $90-$95 for Iran and Venezuela to be able to balance their books. If the price of oil falls to $75-$80 a barrel, Caracas and Tehran will have to cut government subsidies and shave government spending. At such price levels the Iranian economy alone will lose $50 billion a year, which amounts to a per capita loss of $700-$800.

Furthermore, sovereign wealth funds owned by Persian Gulf governments are heavily invested in crumbling financial institutions, and their losses are monumental. Only last July, Abu Dhabi Investment Council caused a stir when it bought the Chrysler building in New York City for $800 million. Considering the desolation of New York’s financial district and the slumping U.S. real estate sector, this no longer looks like such a great deal.

So if OPEC indeed has a grand economic warfare plan, as of this writing it proves to be a spectacular failure. No doubt most OPEC governments do not have America’s best interests in mind, but their correlation of interest does not imply causality. The problem with laying the blame for our economic calamity on OPEC is that it hides the plain truth that this crisis is about our greed, not theirs. Any attempt to masquerade this inconvenient truth will only obstruct our lesson-learning process and therefore undermine our road to recovery. As Pogo once said “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

From W. Taylor Fain

During the United States’ first war against Saddam Hussein in 1991, I was a Department of State historian in Washington. The Office of the Historian was charged with providing historical background information on the Gulf crisis to Department policy makers, and one of the tasks I was given was to write a classified analysis and chronology of Iraq’s historical claims to Kuwait and the United States’ response to them. I had been a student of European security issues and arms control, and this was my introduction to Persian Gulf affairs. Baghdad’s periodically asserted claims to its neighbor were new to me, and I was fascinated to learn how deeply Great Britain had been involved in Kuwait and in the Persian Gulf since the era of the Napoleonic Wars. I was convinced that Britain’s imperial legacy in the Gulf played a role in shaping American policy in the area in ways that contemporary U.S. policy makers did not fully appreciate. This proved to be the germ of American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region.

Essentially, my research examines the origins of the United States’ current embroilment in the Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula… and Iraq. What I have underscored is that it is impossible to understand America’s current predicament in the region without understanding the process of Britain’s imperial retreat from the area and the ways the United States attempted to come to grips with it. It was the inability of U.S. foreign policy makers to deal successfully with Britain’s retreat from the region, their inability to establish viable surrogates for British power in the area, or, alternatively, to recast or re-imagine American interests in the Gulf after 1971 that led the United States, by the end of the 1970s, to assume the large-scale, direct political and military obligations it has in the Gulf.

Some historians have argued, unpersuasively in my opinion, that Britain’s imperial moment in the Middle East ended with the 1956 Suez debacle. In fact, Britain continued to be a key actor in the region for another decade and a half. It clung like grim death to what the Foreign Office called the “hard kernel” of its Middle Eastern interests in the Persian Gulf and southern Arabia, until a combination of economic crisis and political turmoil at home forced Harold Wilson’s Labour government to relinquish its position in the Gulf region.

The Anglo-American relationship was particularly fraught in the Persian Gulf, and my research underscores the very different interests, priorities and perceptions of threat the United States and Britain defined for themselves in the Middle East. While the United States worked to integrate the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula into the larger architecture of its Cold War containment policy, Britain struggled to secure its more parochial economic and imperial interests in the region. The United States attempted to ensure the flow of reasonably priced Persian Gulf oil to the West in order to support the economies and governments of its European and Japanese allies during the Cold War. At the same time, officials in London attempted to safeguard the supply of Gulf oil produced by British companies and defend its military assets in the Gulf region and its colony in Aden. It worked to secure the lines of communication through the Gulf region to its allies and Commonwealth partners in Southeast Asia and Australia, and to defend the interests of its Gulf region client states.

It’s clear that both U.S. and British officials appreciated the close relationship between their interests in the Persian Gulf and throughout the Arabian Peninsula but comprehended that they were not identical. The British government had only mixed success in winning American approval for its policies in the Gulf region. Successive American administrations believed that a British presence in the Gulf could help secure Western interests, but they were uneasy about the efficacy of Britain’s military guarantee of Gulf security. They feared that heavy-handed British military action during a crisis could provoke a violent nationalist reaction against Western interests. This unease prevented American policy makers from giving Britain the unequivocal support it sought in the Gulf region. Frequently, British officials expressed their frustration and even anger over American reluctance to back their Gulf policies wholeheartedly.

So, the Anglo-American “special relationship” in the Persian Gulf region had very real limits. Sentiment alone wasn’t enough to keep U.S. and British policies aligned in the Middle East or elsewhere during the Cold War. The alliance functioned fully only where the interests of both members coincided fully. In Europe, both Washington and London certainly agreed on the need to contain Soviet power and to oppose communism. But elsewhere, for example in the Gulf region, U.S. and British policies moved out of step.

When I began my research, I expected to tell a rather straightforward story of the “changing of the guard” or “passing of the torch” from Britain to the United States in the Persian Gulf. What I found was something altogether more complicated and more interesting. I found a story of successive British governments’ determination not to cede Britain’s position in the Gulf until the last possible moment, and of the United States’ equal determination not to assume expensive new commitments.

What historians have left largely unaddressed is that while the United States and Britain pursued their interests in the Persian Gulf region, the peoples of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula worked just as hard to determine their own destinies. Deeply entrenched conflicts and ambitions shaped the environment in which U.S. and British statesmen attempted to work. Iraqi designs on Kuwait, Yemeni claims to Aden, and political competition between Baghdad and Cairo—unrelated to the Cold War era concerns of Washington and London—complicated the efforts of the U.S. and British governments to fashion workable foreign policies in the region. Frequently the smaller nations of the Persian Gulf and Arabia attempted to co-opt the power and influence of the United States and Britain for their own ends.

I hope that my study leaves the reader with an appreciation that the record of U.S.-British diplomacy in the Persian Gulf region is a complex and often troubled one. It’s marked by tension and littered with important failures as frequently as it is characterized by lasting successes. But it rewards close examination. It underscores the formidable difficulties even the closest allies confront in establishing cooperative policies, and I hope it illuminates an important chapter in the history of Western diplomacy on the Cold War’s periphery during the era of European imperial retreat.

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From Marc J. O’Reilly

Unexceptional started as a Ph.D. dissertation. As a graduate student in political science and history in the late 1990s, I wanted to write on a U.S. foreign policy topic with contemporary relevance and historical antecedents. I had read some works on empire—a fascinating, albeit maligned, subject—and wondered if American behavior in the Middle East could be considered imperial, rather than simply hegemonic. In those pre-9/11 days, very few political scientists and historians were writing on the issue of U.S. empire. Yet, given America’s imposing military presence (especially in the Persian Gulf), vested interest in Gulf hydrocarbons, and political role in the Middle East, I thought the case could be made that the country had created and evolved a regional imperium comparable to the British, Ottoman, and other previous empires. Historian Doug Little, with whom I discussed the matter, thought so as well, but only if I confined my case to the Persian Gulf. With his advice in mind, I spent three years researching and writing on the U.S. experience in the Gulf since 1941.

The United States never intended to reprise the British role in the Middle East, especially in the Gulf. But global and regional events, as well as developing geopolitical and economic interests, prompted Washington to intensify its involvement in that part of the world. The American role proved modest initially, as administrations mostly sought to assist London to maintain regional authority. As British power receded in the late 1960s in the wake of two exhausting global wars, and with Cold War imperatives preoccupying U.S. policymakers, Washington graduated to a new status in the early 1970s.

As the primary extra-regional power in the region, the United States adopted a number of imperial strategies (which I dub proxy, alliance, and unilateral) in an effort to achieve its national-security objectives. Some of those strategies, which pre-dated the Nixon Doctrine, worked well; others disappointed or failed. The history of empires recounted many similar episodes, yet many scholars I encountered at conferences dismissed the comparison. I finished my dissertation in August 2001 still convinced that an “informal” U.S. empire existed in the Persian Gulf, but cognizant that my conclusion invited much academic skepticism.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the bungled occupation that followed rekindled the empire debate in the United States, essentially dormant since the Vietnam War. In short order, many scholars, journalists, and policymakers were enthusiastically addressing the formerly taboo issue of American empire. A plethora of books and articles, many of them insightful, examined this controversial subject. These works provided valuable additions to my literature review on empires and the U.S. variant and enabled me to rethink my manuscript.

I inferred, for example, that the American empire possessed both classical and liberal features. From International Relations scholar John Ikenberry, I realized that the United States could proceed hegemonically in Europe, a zone of peace that emphasizes economic competition via well-established institutions, but imperially in the Persian Gulf, a zone of conflict where violence (or the threat of it) could still carry the day. America’s classical-liberal hybrid was well suited to a post-colonial world but, like all empires, subject to setbacks and defeats. My students may typically think of an empire as omnipotent and therefore always successful, but imperial history belies such thinking.

Although much literature emphasizes the supposedly inevitable “rise and fall” of empires, I argue in my book that imperial trajectories tend to mimic the dramatic lines on a seismogram during an earthquake. For me, such a sequence of apexes and nadirs called to mind the spectrum of U.S. experiences in the Gulf since 1941. Each of the stages I discuss in my book (1941-47, 1948-58, 1959-72, 1973-89, 1990-2000, 2001-7) highlights parts of the sequence. In 1957, for example, the United States achieved a post-World War Two peak following the Suez crisis. However, from 1958, the year of the Iraq coup, until the 1979 Iranian revolution, American influence steadily declined. Following the hostage crisis, Washington started to reassert itself. Its success culminated in April 2003, when its position in the Gulf seemed unassailable. Yet four years later, America seemed ensnared in a familiar imperial conundrum in Iraq. As Washington pondered what to do, its influence within the region ebbed and popularity plummeted. Ironically, its “formal” empire in Iraq was undermining its informal imperium (what Chalmers Johnson calls the “empire of bases”) in the Gulf Cooperation Council area.

The juxtaposition of formal and informal empire in the Gulf underscores two issues. First, achieving successful formal empire in the twenty-first century seems near impossible and therefore not worth the considerable military, economic, and political efforts necessary. Second, informal empire can work, especially if you do not call it that. This variant has not guaranteed perpetual U.S. success in the Gulf, but it has secured American objectives better than any alternative.

Several scholars disagree with that assertion, but at least they admit to the existence of an American empire, both in the Gulf and worldwide. Although Michael Mann and others consider the global U.S. empire a failure, Bradley Thayer considers it exceptional. My analysis contradicted his assertion, however, so I edited my introduction to reflect the new impetus of my work. If the U.S. empire qualifies as exceptional, then its behavior ought to be easily distinguishable from that of previous empires. Yet my case study underscores that, in the Persian Gulf, the United States proceeded in a manner similar, if not identical, to the British, Ottoman, and other imperia. Thus, I characterize the American empire in the Gulf as unexceptional.

My hope is that Unexceptional contextualizes the current U.S. occupation of Iraq and the overall American position in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. experience in that region is not new, nor is it particularly innovative. Americans may not recognize it as imperial, but as Walter Lippmann wrote in 1927, they do not know how empire should feel. Does that mean that, like most imperia, the U.S. empire in the Gulf is doomed to an ignominious end? Not necessarily. But the history of empires should be instructive as Washington considers how to proceed in the coming years, if not decades, especially if the price of oil remains high and the threat of transnational Islamic terrorism continues.

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The extension of American nuclear guarantees in the Middle East has been posed as a question of American guarantees to Israel. This is understandable given the intense hostility to Israel expressed by the Iranian regime. However, there is a broader objective that may be served by U.S. nuclear guarantees in the region. If the United States is not able to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, its goal must be to prevent this development from destabilizing the region as a whole, and to prevent Iran from gaining any political advantage from its new capabilities. These twin aims are served by the extension of the American deterrent umbrella to a full range of U.S. allies.

The question of how Iran will use its new strategic capabilities, or how Iran’s behavior will be affected by the possession of a nuclear arsenal, has already elicited a range of expert opinions. At one end of the spectrum is the view that Iran’s religious elites would order an offensive nuclear attack against the United States or U.S. forces or Israel, despite the certainty of suffering a catastrophic response, because they would be willing to die to eliminate Iran’s infidel enemies. (Some critics of the Bush administration accuse it of adopting this eschatological understanding of Iran’s strategic calculus.) It is difficult to envision any effective U.S. deterrent to a nuclear Iran if this view is accurate.

At the other end of the spectrum is a view that a nuclear-armed Iran would not behave much differently from how Iran behaves now. This might be reassuring or distressing, depending on one’s view of Iran’s current foreign policy aims, and how Iran might seek to advance them under a nuclear umbrella.

Closer to that end of the spectrum, one can envision two possible courses of action by a nuclear-armed Iran that would be of concern to the United States, because they extrapolate current Iranian policies already designed to intimidate and weaken U.S. allies and protégés.

1. Gulf coercion. Projecting out from current Iranian efforts to maximize revenues from natural resources, Iran may try to use nuclear threats to coerce the non-nuclear oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf into transferring oil-producing territories, oil revenues, or maritime rights to Iran. Those nuclear threats might involve mobilization of nuclear forces, demonstrative test launches of missiles into disputed areas, military violations of the air and sea frontiers of Arab Gulf states, and nuclear weapons tests, in ways analogous to the behavior of the Soviet Union in the 1956 Suez crisis.

It is difficult to imagine how the Arab Gulf states could independently resist coercion by a nuclear-armed Iran. But the United States has a clear interest in neutralizing the impact of such Iranian efforts. American nuclear guarantees to its non-nuclear allies in the region, perhaps supported by the deployment of American submarines armed with nuclear cruise and ballistic missiles, could serve this interest. This class of guarantees could include Israel, but need not, since Israel has a perfectly adequate nuclear deterrent force of its own.

2. Proliferating to proxies. Iran may transfer nuclear weapons technology to proxy groups. Every state except India that has developed nuclear weapons technology has transferred valuable know-how to others. The United States shared technology with the United Kingdom; France shared reactor technology with Israel; Israel shared technology with Taiwan and probably with South Africa; China shared warhead technology with Pakistan, and so on. Iran would not be doing anything unprecedented if it clandestinely transferred nuclear weapons technology, not bombs, to others. This might, however, result in nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Syria and then Hezbollah. (In the past, Iran and Syria transferred missiles of a kind never before deployed by a sub-state actor, into the hands of Hezbollah.) An anonymous terrorist use of a nuclear weapon against Israel, perhaps detonated on a ship off shore from Israel, is, therefore, a real worry.

Israel recognizes this potential, and sees the credibility of its deterrent as being eroded by the difficulty of establishing responsibility for such an attack in ways that would seem undeniable to world opinion. This uncertainty increases the likelihood that Israel might act unilaterally to reduce the danger posed to it by Iran’s arsenal. A strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would risk inflaming the whole region and would be seen by Jerusalem as providing, at best, temporary relief. But it is not clear what other choice Israel would have.

Israel’s compulsion toward a unilateral attack that could destabilize the region might be mitigated by a U.S. statement that it regarded a terrorist nuclear explosion directed against any American ally in the Middle East as an Iranian attack on the United States, to be met by the full force of an American nuclear response. To be sure, such a guarantee might lead Israel to take greater military risks in dealing with Iran. Such a guarantee, then, would have to be part of a formal alliance and a quid pro quo in which Israel did agree to coordinate its actions with the United States.

Israel might refuse such a deal. But the offer would not be unreasonable. It would follow the precedent of earlier efforts of the United States in the 1950s and ’60s to coordinate nuclear deterrent doctrines with NATO, and it might be the basis of a new international doctrine for dealing with terrorist nuclear threats.

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From Steve A. Yetiv

I have always been interested in the interplay between theory and empirics and have been curious about the extent to which our prominent theories offer useful guides to understanding reality. Given my empirical work in American foreign policy and international security, I’ve become especially interested in theory as it relates to great powers. To what extent do great powers pursue grand strategies, chief among them balance of power policy and hegemonic design?

The Absence of Grand Strategy reflects this ongoing interest in theory and empirics, with a focus on the United States. It is an intellectual outgrowth of my earlier book, Explaining Foreign Policy (2004). In writing that book, it became clear (at least to me) that we should be cautious about assuming that states act in line with the assumptions of the rational actor model. In particular, I tried to show that we would be misled if we assumed that the United States made decisions in line with the rational actor model during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis. I developed an integrated approach for using multiple models and showed how and explained why it was important to draw upon them, including the rational actor model, for understanding how states make decisions.

The Absence of Grand Strategy has emerged from this work. It follows a similar metatheoretical theme, but with a very different goal. Unlike my earlier book, this new book is not about decision-making models, but rather about foreign policy actions beliefs and actions. The book cautions against assuming that states use single, grand strategies and suggests that they may not use any grand strategy at all. In this sense, they do not pursue and employ consistent and cohesive policies over time in trying to promote their interests in regions of the world.

I hope that The Absence of Grand Strategy can contribute in several ways. It seeks to illuminate the evolution of U.S. foreign policy in the Persian Gulf, by analyzing ten cases from the policies of the Nixon administration to George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. In so doing, it paints a picture in sharp contrast to that of a state pursuing grand strategy. Rather, it reveals that the United States clearly exhibited significantly shifting, improvised, and reactive policies that were responses to unanticipated and unpredictable events and threats.

While the book finds that the United States did not practice grand strategy in the Persian Gulf, it does not claim that grand strategies are not at play elsewhere (although it holds out that prospect). Nor does it intend to impugn the study of grand strategy. Such study is vital. It frames the big questions; it forces us to assess and examine the larger picture; it sketches cause and effect; it may help use see things that we otherwise would have overlooked, and it serves as a foil for weighing how states do behave. In addition, understanding different grand strategies puts multiple tools in one’s intellectual kit. These tools can then be used as cuts on reality. In doing so, we may draw on aspects of different grand strategies to paint more accurate pictures of how states behave.

However, The Absence of Grand Strategy does put forth a different conception of how the United States behaved in the Gulf, which I call “reactive engagement,” and which may apply elsewhere. At a minimum, I hope that thinkers consider “reactive engagement” against the precepts of grand strategic theorizing in thinking about how best to explain international outcomes. It may well be that the best explanation of foreign policy actions results from using multiple approaches.

At the end of the day, however, my sneaking suspicion is that randomness all too often parades as design and serendipity belies control. The behavior of states, even great powers, seems to be a messy affair. It is shaped not only by a mesmerizing mix of complex factors within the “black box” of decision-making, but also by behavior that often reflects a lack of careful preparation, inconsistency (even in key beliefs), and reactivity. It may be that while all great powers have an appetite for grand ideas, they end up with a mouthful of reality.

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I’m in Doha for the 5th Annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum—my fourth year at this annual confab (organized by my fine colleagues in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution) that brings together Americans with Muslims from Nigeria to Malaysia and everywhere in between. This year we’ve included a number of prominent faith leaders, such as Amr Khaled, Egypt’s massively popular TV preacher, and Bob Roberts of the Texas megachurch, Northwood. Despite the diversity of the conference’s participants, though, the U.S.-Arab relationship usually sets the tone of the proceedings—and for the past four years, that tone has been bitter indeed. This year is different.

In previous years, our opening session has featured senior Arab voices lambasting American interventionism in Iraq and abandonment of Israeli-Palestinian peace, alongside provocative (and often tone-deaf) defenses of U.S. policy by Americans like Karen Hughes and Philip Zelikow. This year, the opening keynote was instead delivered by President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who argued that Muslims in Afghanistan and Bosnia were right to expect and accept American military intervention to relieve their suffering, and America was just in coming to their aid.

After his speech, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan, and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad seemed to echo Karzai’s themes: common interests between Muslims and the West in fighting terrorism, improving regional stability, and building the foundations for prosperity and freedom. Karzai pointed to the global contributions to Afghanistan’s reconstruction as a symbol of Western-Islamic world cooperation; Babacan proudly referred to the Turkish accession talks with the European Union as evidence that the values of the Union are not essentially Western but rather universal in their appeal.

The lack of a fire-breathing Amr Moussa or Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi on the program certainly made a difference. But changes in the region and in U.S. policy also help explain the slackening of the resentment that has accompanied our past years’ discussions on America’s role in the Muslim Middle East. Violence in Iraq is down, there’s new (if fragile) hope for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and pushy rhetoric from the White House, once directed at autocratic Arab allies, is now reserved for Iran, which Americans and Arabs both perceive as threatening. A cynical colleague of mine here argued that the positive tone from the regional leaders at the conference reflects age-old realities of international politics: when America is weak, he said, everyone loves to beat up on us—but when America is stronger, everyone wants to be on our side. That’s great—as long as the current lull in Iraqi violence lasts.

Quite honestly, though, I don’t think the relative love-fest at this year’s meeting is all ascribable either to regional shifts or to the conference organizers’ choice of speakers. The most powerful explanation for the change is evident in the overwhelming fact that all anyone at this conference really wants to talk about is Barack Obama.

A friend from the Gulf tells me her young relative was so excited about the Democratic candidate that he tried to donate money over the Internet, as he’d heard so many young Americans were doing. Then he found out he had to be a U.S. citizen to do so. Another young woman, visiting from next-door Saudi Arabia, said that all her friends in Riyadh are “for Obama.” The symbolism of a major American presidential candidate with the middle name of Hussein, who went to elementary school in Indonesia, certainly speaks to Muslims abroad.

But more important is just the prospect of a refreshing shift in the the breeze off the Potomac. More than the changes in the region, it seems to be anticipated changes in Washington that are drawing the eyes of my Arab counterparts and giving the conference its unusually forward-looking tone. We’ll see how long the honeymoon lasts!

MESH Update, February 18: AFP reports that Obama “won overwhelming support in a mock election by more than 200 American and Muslim delegates at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in the Qatari capital [on Monday]. His Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and Republican candidates won only a handful of votes.”

Update from Tamara Cofman Wittes, February 22: I did not witness a straw poll like that described by AFP in any of the conference sessions I attended, nor did my research assistant. I’d love to hear the specifics from the AFP correspondent to back up this story.

Martin Kramer made these remarks at the 8th Herzliya Conference on January 21.

Lately it has been said that the Arabs are in a panic over the growing power of Iran. We are told that Arab rulers so fear the rise of Iran that this fear has eclipsed all others—it’s the sum of all fears. And it’s making a new Middle East

That is what David Brooks, New York Times columnist, wrote last November: “Iran has done what decades of peace proposals have not done—brought Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Palestinians and the U.S. together. You can go to Jerusalem or to some Arab capitals and the diagnosis of the situation is the same: Iran is gaining hegemonic strength over the region.” Martin Indyk of the Saban Center used the same language in a November interview. Iran, he said, was making “a bid for hegemony in the region.”

The Sunni Arab states, and…Israel, suddenly found that they were on the same side against the Iranians. And so that created a strategic opportunity which the [Bush] administration has finally come to recognize, and that’s, more than anything else, what’s fueling the move to Annapolis.

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Just last month, Iran’s President Ahmadinejad was invited to attend the summit of Arab Gulf rulers (the Gulf Cooperation Council) in Qatar. That was the first time an Iranian president had ever attended a GCC summit. Two weeks later, Ahmadinejad arrived Mecca, for the haj pilgrimage, at the invitation of Saudi King Abdullah. It was the first pilgrimage by an Iranian president since Iran’s revolution. And as any travel log of Arab and Iranian ministers will show, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

What game are the Gulf Arabs playing? Pretend for a moment that you are ruler of a mythical state called Gulfistan, and I am your national security adviser. You have asked me to prepare a memo on our strategic situation. Page one:

• Your Majesty, these are good times, thanks be to God. With oil at $100 a barrel, you are awash in cash. You have built mega-projects, you have bought new weapons, you have put us on the map. An American university and a French museum have opened branches here. Our skyline flashes glitz and prosperity. And there is no end in sight to the strong demand for our oil. The developed countries are addicted, and China and India need us more every day.
• We are enjoying this boom under the protection of the greatest power on earth. The United States has built a front line of bases right through the Gulf, and not far from your palace. The Americans are here to protect the oil, and as long as we keep it flowing, we need not fear any enemy.
• But Your Majesty doesn’t reward me with a mansion in Aspen to tell you only good news. True, it never rains in Gulfistan, but you wish to know if I see clouds on the horizon.
• I see two clouds. There is President Bush, who thinks God has placed him on earth to make peace in the “Holy Land,” and bring so-called democracy to the Arabs; and there is President Ahmadinejad, who believes God has put him here to spread his Shiite perversion, and who wants nuclear weapons to turn Persia into a great power.
• These are dangerous men who threaten our security. Your Majesty, wisdom dictates that we not chose sides in their quarrel. We need good relations with the Americans: they are our biggest customers, they will defend us against any foreign enemy, and the weapons they sell us make us look stronger than we are. But we need good relations with the Iranians too. Iran is so close, we can feel its breath on our faces, from OPEC to Iraq. Were Iran to subvert us, by inciting our Shiite minority or encouraging terror, it could burst our bubble.
• Your Majesty, a nuclear Iran is undesirable. The Persians are pushy; nuclear weapons would only make them more arrogant. For a moment, we thought the Americans would bomb them to stop them. A few of us privately urged them to do that. But the Americans can’t make up their minds. Some think Iran should be bombed. Some think Iran has no weapons program. Others share the view of General Abizaid, the former U.S. commander here. “Iran is not a suicidal nation,” he’s said. “Nuclear deterrence would work with Iran.” The Americans would destroy Iran if it touched our oil, which is ultimately their oil. But if Iran is careful, it might get the bomb.
• In this uncertain situation, we should balance America and Iran. On the one hand, let us reassure Iran that we are good neighbors. Tell the Iranians we will oppose aggression against them, and we won’t boycott their business or freeze their assets. On the other hand, let us reassure the Americans that we are good allies. Tell them we will stabilize oil prices and let them build their big bases off in the desert. We must keep Washington and Tehran equally close—and equally distant.
• Your Majesty, the Americans want you to shake the hands of Jews and give a hand to Palestinians, to support the so-called “peace process.” We are fortunate: God gave us all the oil and no Jews. He gave the Palestinians no oil and all the Jews. If you join the “peace process,” the Jew will be at your door, demanding “normalization,” and the Palestinian, as usual, will repay generosity with ingratitude. The wise course is to keep this an American problem. Say you will help, but set impossible conditions; come to their “peace conferences” but make no commitments. True, many of your people are moved by the plight of the Palestinians. But this won’t weigh on us, so long as they blame only the Jews and the Americans. If we avoid commitment, the blame will never fall on us.
• If we are wise, we can keep up this game until Bush and Ahmadinejad fade into history. I, your humble servant, will continue to act as your adviser in these sensitive matters. Perhaps, then, I might be rewarded with that small estate outside London? My youngest wife very much fancies it…

Now obviously I’ve simplified things here. There is no typical Arab Gulf state like Gulfistan—different Gulf states have different interests and different policies. That is why we have Gulf experts.

But this isn’t the place to explore what distinguishes, say, Kuwait from Saudi Arabia. The point I want to make is this:

We all know how little fuel there is right here to keep the Annapolis process going. At this point, Israelis and Palestinians are running on fumes. That’s why Martin Indyk said that most of the fuel for Annapolis would have to come from a grand anti-Iran coalition. But the reality is that the coalition never formed, and now even its premises have disintegrated. Assembling this coalition was bound to be difficult; after the NIE, it has become impossible.

We have been here before. Every few years, a prophet arises to proclaim a new Middle East, including Israel. In the 1990s, peace between Israel and the Palestinians was supposed to turn the Middle East into a zone of economic cooperation—including Israel. Then we were told that Iraq’s liberation would turn the Middle East into a zone of democracy—including Israel. A few months ago, we were told that the Iranian threat would turn the Middle East into a zone of political and military alliance—including Israel.

This latest new Middle East has had the shortest life of them all. Apparently, new Middle Easts just aren’t what they used to be.