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Martin Kramer: The myth of linkage
...It was Ambrose Bierce who once said, War is Gods way of teaching Americans geography. Thanks to war, the Middle East of early 21st-century America has been re-centeredaway from Israel and toward the Persian Gulf. That is where conflict commands American attention.But not everyone thinks it should. The last time I counted papers at the Middle East Studies Association annual conference, about two years ago, there were 85 papers on Palestine-Israel, 30 on Iraq, 27 on Iran, and only 4 on Saudi Arabia. Here, too, the skewing is conflict-driventhat is, the judgment that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians should command American attention. And it isnt just the specialists. They would be seconded by Jimmy Carter, who was recently asked: Is the Israel-Palestine conflict still the key to peace in the whole region? Is the linkage policy right? Carters answer: I dont think its about a linkage policy, but a linkage fact . Without doubt, the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem. Likewise, Zbigniew Brzezinski: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the single most combustible and galvanizing issue in the Arab world. This is obviously meaningless unless one has weighed all the other issues. Is it more combustible than the Kurdish question? Is it more galvanizing than Sunni-Shiite animosity? How would Brzezinski know if it were? I have broken down all Middle Eastern conflicts into nine clusters, and have appended them below. You decide. But the bottom line is this: given so long a list, it is obvious that conflict involving Israel is not the longest, or the bloodiest, or the most widespread of the regions conflicts. In large part, these many conflicts are symptoms of the same malaise: the absence of a Middle Eastern order, to replace the old Islamic and European empires. But they are independent symptoms; one conflict does not cause another, and its resolution cannot resolve another. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2008-06-15 |
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