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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Martin Kramer: The myth of linkage |
| 2008-06-15 |
| ...It was Ambrose Bierce who once said, “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Thanks to war, the Middle East of early 21st-century America has been re-centered—away from Israel and toward the Persian Gulf. That is where conflict commands American attention. But not everyone thinks it should. The last time I counted papers at the Middle East Studies Association annual conference, about two years ago, there were 85 papers on Palestine-Israel, 30 on Iraq, 27 on Iran, and only 4 on Saudi Arabia. Here, too, the skewing is conflict-driven—that is, the judgment that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians should command American attention. And it isn’t just the specialists. They would be seconded by Jimmy Carter, who was recently asked: “Is the Israel-Palestine conflict still the key to peace in the whole region? Is the linkage policy right?” Carter’s answer: “I don’t think it’s about a linkage policy, but a linkage fact…. Without doubt, the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem.” Likewise, Zbigniew Brzezinski: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the single most combustible and galvanizing issue in the Arab world.” This is obviously meaningless unless one has weighed all the other issues. Is it more combustible than the Kurdish question? Is it more galvanizing than Sunni-Shiite animosity? How would Brzezinski know if it were? I have broken down all Middle Eastern conflicts into nine clusters, and have appended them below. You decide. But the bottom line is this: given so long a list, it is obvious that conflict involving Israel is not the longest, or the bloodiest, or the most widespread of the region’s conflicts. In large part, these many conflicts are symptoms of the same malaise: the absence of a Middle Eastern order, to replace the old Islamic and European empires. But they are independent symptoms; one conflict does not cause another, and its “resolution” cannot resolve another. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #2 Actually, linkage goes back a lot farther than that, Professor. More like fifty-plus years. It used to be termed the 'Middle East problem', as if the Middle East ended at Jordan's eastern border. But the philosophy you mentioned is essentially correct. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2008-06-15 12:30 |
| #1 Actually, "linkage" is a concept invented by H.W. Bush, and dimwits like Carter and Brzezinski have no clue what it entails. The short version is that nations and individuals have a multitude of connections between them, so that any action will have unseen implications both between nations and internationally. More importantly, it means that these unseen connections can be used to create a change in the obvious connections. Finally, the philosophy of linkage suggests that there is no such thing as "losing", just opportunities to be exploited, but only if you understand linkage. All setbacks can be turned to victories. In practice, linkage is most likely so complicated that even a genius couldn't keep track of it, so it must be data mined by computer. Major police agencies, and our soldiers in Iraq, also have police software that does much the same thing on the individual level, so this is not science fiction. It is very real and it works. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-06-15 09:51 |