One of the U.S. organizations that’s been targeted, the International Republican Institute, released a statement on Sunday arguing that these arrests represent a “politically motivated effort to squash Egypt’s growing civil society, orchestrated through the courts, in part by Mubarak-era holdovers.” Perhaps the organization, headed by Sam LaHood, son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and one of the Americans set to be prosecuted, put out this statement to give the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces a chance to blame the incident on Egypt’s bogeyman.

But the truth is that this crisis has nothing to do with civil society or the work that American pro-democracy groups do in the new Egypt. Had American hikers been available for kidnapping, they’d have served just as well as LaHood and the 18 others. No, this is simple extortion—and the Egyptian government expects to be paid.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has already dubbed this the “Obama Hostage Crisis.” He’s not too far off. What Ayatollah Khomeini said about the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis applies equally well here: America cannot do a damn thing.

By blaming the situation on “Mubarak-era holdovers,” the International Republican Institute seems to be suggesting that this incident does not really reflect the new Egypt. Instead, it must be the old regime that is responsible for threatening Americans. Only Mubarak’s cronies could want to hold back Egyptian democracy.

The reality is rather different. A December Gallup poll showed that 71 percent of Egyptians oppose U.S. economic aid of any sort, and that 74 percent oppose “direct U.S. aid to Egyptian civil society organizations.” While this doesn’t mean the majority of Egyptians support threatening American democracy activists with prison time, such behavior on the part of the country’s ruling authorities certainly reflects popular opinion—and that’s to say nothing of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, who combined won more than two-thirds of parliament in recent elections. Given their history of resistance to the West and their perception of the United States as an imperial power, it’s safe to assume that these groups aren’t much interested in U.S. involvement in Egypt’s new political arena.

It’s worth noting how these December poll numbers track in parallel to last March’s constitutional referendum. That vote gave the Egyptian electorate a choice: Either vote on a few amendments to the 1971 constitution and push ahead to elections, or write a new constitution, a process that would delay elections. The army and the Islamists favored the first, while the revolutionaries who brought down Mubarak opted for the second, since it would give them a chance to organize coherent political entities capable of winning seats in parliament. Ultimately, three-quarters of the voters sided with the army and the Islamists. Only one quarter voted with the revolutionaries—presumably the same quarter of Egypt’s population that polled in favor of continued U.S. aid to civil society, support that gave rise to the revolution itself.

The most curious question is this: If so many Egyptians are against U.S. aid money to Egyptian civil society, how did organizations like the International Republican Institute and its counterpart, the National Democratic Institute, manage to do their work for so long? If they are charged with operating without a license, but had been working in Egypt regardless for many years before the arrests, how did they get away with it? Because Hosni Mubarak let them.

The man who now lies in a hospital bed in Sharm el-Sheikh under house arrest and is typically blamed for everything that has gone wrong in Egypt over the last 30 years is the same man who was at the helm as Egyptian civil society grew. The revolutionaries who toppled the Egyptian president arose under him. The middle-class, ostensibly liberal-minded, and Western-oriented demonstrators who protested in favor of democracy were drawn from the nonprofit organizations, independent media outlets, and private-sector enterprises that had all come about under Mubarak.

These weren’t real reforms, runs the argument against Mubarak. He didn’t go nearly far enough. It’s true. Forty percent of Egypt’s population still lives on less than $2 a day, and Mubarak’s security services were still torturing and murdering innocent Egyptians, like Khaled Said, whose June 2010 death helped inspire the January revolution.

The tragedy is that the choice the revolution revealed was never between dictatorship and democracy. Rather it was between a pro-American ruler who kept his country out of war and allowed moderate, halting reforms, and whatever order would follow Mubarak. Because the transition into the post-Mubarak era was not managed, neither by Mubarak nor the White House, the post-Mubarak order is effectively a repudiation of everything that Mubarak stood for.

Continue reading: U.S. aid in jeopardy?

You don’t need to know much about history to recognize that Brzezinski here is trading in a classic anti-Semitic trope. Why didn’t his Salon interviewer call him out on it? Why hasn’t anyone else? Where are the American elites—the intellectuals, writers, policymakers, and political activists—when it comes to vigilance against anti-Semitism?

The editors of magazines and newspapers have a responsibility as gatekeepers of polite society. It turns out the gatekeepers haven’t been vigilant. We live in a culture where the social taboo against anti-black racism is so fierce that violating the taboo means certain expulsion from polite company. But the very reverse process is taking place when it comes to anti-Semitism: The taboo is being rapidly eroded, and those who ought to confront it are enabling it.

***

Israel Firsters, dual loyalists, Likudniks, ziocons, neocon warmongers—in the wake of the Holocaust, such anti-Semitic rhetoric would have been unimaginable. Yet it became commonplace little more than half a century later at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. Midlevel George W. Bush Administration officials with Jewish-sounding last-names—Wolfowitz, Abrams, Feith, and the rest of their neocon cabal—were accused of dual loyalty, sending American boys to die for the sake of the country that had their true devotion: Israel. According to this theory, administration principals like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and the president—policymakers with actual decision-making power—were merely instruments in the control of vast Zionist networks that were also manipulating the media and financial industries.

This theory reached full bloom in 2007, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of America’s most esteemed publishing houses, handed the political scientists John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt a $750,000 advance for their book The Israel Lobby. As my colleague Adam Kirsch pointed out last week, the book’s impact was massive because it made it possible to say almost anything about Jewish money, and Jewish power, and the Jewish state. Walt and Mearsheimer’s thesis was praised as bracing, and to question their motives or their ideas was to traffic in McCarthyism. And so the book’s argument earned respect.

Today that discourse has made its way into a Washington-based think tank with close ties to the Obama Administration. Last month, the Center for American Progress found itself in the middle of controversy when some contributors to the organization’s Think Progress blog were accused of writing posts and Tweets that were out-and-out anti-Semitic. One blogger, Zaid Jilani, used the term “Israel firsters” to describe pro-Israel Obama donors. “Waiting 4 hack pro-Dem blogger to use this 2 sho Obama is still beloved by Israel-firsters and getting lots of their $$.”

American Jewish groups were incensed. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Washington Post that, “The language is corrosive and unacceptable.” Jilani left the organization and apologized for using the term, but his colleagues remain, only slightly chastened.

CAP’s chief of staff Ken Gude explained in response to the criticism that, “We have a zero-tolerance policy for racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, or any form of discrimination.” However, it would seem that Think Progress’ bloggers were well-suited to the general temperament of the organization. The problem isn’t just CAP-sponsored ephemera like blogs and tweets, but its more significant offerings relating to the Middle East, like its massive research project on Islamophobia. On Page 94 of that study, for instance, the authors take issue with the Middle East Media Research Institute, founded by Israelis. “MEMRI is respected in some circles for its work to combat hate language and anti-Semitism, but it is also criticized for its selective translations. The institute contends that it highlights moderate Muslim voices on its Reform blog. Yet MEMRI’s selective translations of Arab media fan the flames of Islamophobia.”

How do the Jews who run this translation organization promote Islamophobia, according to CAP? By translating the opinions of those who want to persecute and kill Jews. Try fitting this twisted reasoning into Gude’s zero-tolerance policy against any form of discrimination: Women’s rights groups stir up male hatred by collecting statistics of violence against women; the NAACP fans the flames of racism because it advocates on behalf of equal rights for African-Americans.

***

The root of this problem is not a twentysomething blogger writing something stupid on the Internet. Rather, it is that anti-Semitic rhetoric and logic are being protected and justified by those who are supposed to be gatekeepers. These people, often in the service of their larger political aims, are willing to apologize for or ignore what is obviously Jew-baiting and Jew-hatred.

Continue reading: This isn’t an intramural debate

Rational, of course, is not the same thing as reasonable. A regime that shoots its own people in the streets, as the Iranian government did in June 2009, is not reasonable. In the policy debate, rationality refers to a regime’s interest in preserving itself. A regime is rational, therefore, if it understands that using a nuclear weapon would elicit a response that might spell its doom. An irrational regime is one that can’t be deterred because it may use a nuclear weapon regardless of the consequences.

Thus, the Islamic Republic’s threat last week to close the Strait of Hormuz—a move that would send oil prices skyrocketing—struck many as strong evidence of the regime’s irrationality. Interrupting the world’s oil supply would compel the United States, the guarantor of Persian Gulf security, to take military actions that might mean toppling Iran’s ruling establishment. On Sunday, U.S. Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said in no uncertain terms that if Iran tries to close the Strait of Hormuz, the United States “can defeat that.”

Others look at Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz as having little bearing on the country’s rationality. Since the Iranians know the Americans would have no trouble breaking through a blockade, their argument goes, Iran doesn’t actually have any intention of trying to close down one of the world’s most strategically vital waterways. This regime understands, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Sunday, that closing down the Strait of Hormuz is an American red line. If Iran crosses it, it jeopardizes its own existence—and so it won’t.

Those that argue the regime is irrational point to the fact that the Iranian regime regularly threatens to destroy Israel, which would retaliate by obliterating Iran. Those that claim Iran is rational write off such threats as mere rhetoric. A nuclear Iran, they say, poses little threat to a much more powerful Israel, never mind the United States. Membership in the club of countries with nuclear weapons might even make Tehran more responsible.

The reality is that it doesn’t matter whether the regime is rational or not. The issue is not whether the Iranians would use the bomb, but how Tehran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon would enhance the regime’s already reckless behavior. Moreover, it would severely limit the ability of the United States to respond to the provocations of this dangerous regime. For instance, if a nuclear-armed Iran actually closed the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. officials would be much less confident in their ability to re-open shipping lanes. American policy-makers already worried about high oil prices are not likely to risk the chances of a nuclear incident and even higher oil prices.

It’s pretty easy to make a strong case that the Iranian regime really is suicidal. This is the same ruling clique, after all, that pioneered the use of the suicide car-bombing during the course of the Lebanese civil wars from 1975 to 1990. The Iranians tapped their local allies, namely Hezbollah, for martyrdom operations against Israel, the United States, and other Western powers. The Iranians spent their own blood even more recklessly in the war with Iraq when they dispatched wave after human wave of teenage boys to march through minefields, clearing a path with their bodies. Perhaps most tellingly, the plummeting Iranian birthrate—from 6.5 children per woman a generation ago to 1.7 today—suggests that it is not just the regime, but an entire nation, that no longer wishes to live.

No country sets out purposefully to bring about its destruction. And yet history is nothing but the record of nations that have misunderstood the limits of their own power and the resources of their adversaries. Nazi Germany may have been suicidal, but the British Empire was not, and yet at the end of World War II both were finished. No one thinks that the rulers of Athens were irrational, but by the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War, their actions had effectively cashiered Athenian democracy.

Jewish leaders between 66 C.E. and 135 C.E. were not irrational, but their revolts against Rome put an end to Jewish sovereignty for two millennia. Furthermore, who is to say that renewing Jewish sovereignty in a sea of Muslim hostility is an entirely rational act? But the rationality of any given government is irrelevant. The question of rationality moves the debate from the real to the speculative—i.e., might a given nation use the bomb at some point? The fact is no one knows beforehand whether any regime is likely to use a nuclear weapon.

The only question American policy-makers should concern themselves with is whether or not a given regime seeking nuclear weapons is already hostile to U.S. interests. If it is, U.S. policy-makers should do everything in their power to prevent that regime from acquiring a bomb. The apparent injustice that Israel has the bomb while the world rues the prospect of a nuclear Iran is a quandary for academics and ethicists—and an entirely inappropriate concern for U.S. officials, whose concerns are much more specific: protecting U.S. citizens, allies, and interests. There is little debate in Washington over Israel’s nuclear-weapons program because Jerusalem has never posed a threat to American strategic interests. Iran, however, has threatened U.S. interests for 30 years.

If or when Iran gets a nuclear weapon, it might drop the bomb on Tel Aviv—or Riyadh, for that matter. But that’s not the main problem. The issue is that Tehran will act in precisely the same fashion as it has since 1979—hostile to the United States and its allies—only now on a much more ambitious scale. And the range of responses available to the United States and its allies will be seriously limited.

Imagine Iran with a nuclear weapon: Tehran will continue to support terror, except that Iranian assets like Hezbollah and Hamas would now be operating under a nuclear umbrella, which will shape Israeli responses. In planning its military strategy, Israel already has to take into consideration world opinion and the strain warfare puts on Israeli society and the economy. Now Jerusalem will have to wonder if crossing the border into Lebanon or Gaza will elicit nuclear threats from Iran.

The Iranians will further extend their reach into Africa and Latin America, where Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in the midst of a regional tour. Allies like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez will be emboldened to take otherwise unimaginable risks in Washington’s direct sphere of influence in the Americas. The recently unveiled Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington would be only a taste of things to come.

In other words: If Tehran gets a nuclear weapon, will U.S. policy-makers be prepared to ensure that the Islamic Republic doesn’t make good on a threat to close the Strait of Hormuz?

Lebanon’s Maronite community has long been the region’s Christian citadel. “It used to be that when Christians around the region looked at the situation in Lebanon, it cheered them,” Elie Fawaz, a Lebanese political analyst, told me this week in Beirut. “They saw that here the Christians were equal to their Muslim counterparts. They were citizens and had the same rights as Muslims.” The citadel is now tottering. If Lebanon once served as a beacon for the region’s other Christians, the dimming of this light is making Christians in unstable countries like Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and Egypt even more vulnerable.

Lebanon’s Christian community comprises up to a third of the country’s total population. It is made up largely of Maronites but also includes Greek Orthodox and a number of other sects, like Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Greek Catholic, and Roman Catholic. Christians were likely never a majority in Lebanon, and yet, says Fawaz, a Greek Orthodox, “the Christians didn’t act like a minority. They pushed their vision for an independent and sovereign Lebanese state.”

Historically, Lebanese Christians have provided some of the region’s most influential intellectual leaders, like Charles Malik, who helped write the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Michel Chiha, one of the authors of Lebanon’s 1926 Constitution. In the wake of Lebanon’s independence in 1943, the Christian vision was to build a sovereign state that would bring political and cultural modernity to the country and, eventually, to the broader Middle East.

That project stalled for a number of reasons. First, there was the relative demographic decline of the Christians in the post-independence period, due to the accelerated birth rates of Sunnis and Shiites. The French authorities that oversaw Lebanon during the mandate period created a power-sharing agreement that allotted Christians 50 percent of the parliament—the other 50 percent was split between Shia and Sunnis—and this struck Lebanon’s growing Muslim population as unfair. Most significantly, in addition to these domestic problems, the Christians were unable to protect Lebanon from the region’s furies, which culminated in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that pitted a number of different domestic players, as well as regional and international actors, against one another.

One of the main causes of that 15-year conflagration was the support of Lebanese Sunnis for the Palestinian cause, which attached these Sunnis to a larger Arab regional identity with a shared goal of eradicating Israel. The Sunni community’s political, diplomatic, and financial support of the Palestinians set them squarely against the Maronites, who resisted turning Lebanon into a forward operating base for the P.L.O. They sought to preserve their vision of a Lebanon free from the region’s destructive political currents and to avoid the Israeli reprisals they rightly feared.

What’s instructive is that the Christians fought in the war. “In 1975, mothers sent their kids to fight the Palestinians,” says Fawaz. “They had a vision for Lebanon.”

That changed when political calculation and greed shifted Christians’ focus from their war against the P.L.O. and Yasser Arafat’s allies to each other. The Christians split into different factions that faced off during the civil war. Two decades after the end of the war, the Christians are still plagued by this fissure, and they are still represented by the same political leaders who took them to war against one another more than 20 years ago. The result, says Fawaz, “is that today the Christians have no vision. They are definitely a numerical minority and acting like one—reactive and fearful.”

The Christian community here is suffering from a number of symptoms of minority psychosis. Consider that the head of the Maronite church has spoken out in defense of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Patriarch Beshara Butros Rai called Assad “open-minded” in a September interview. “I am hoping Assad will be given more chances to implement the reforms he already launched,” Rai added. An unfortunately all-too-typical Christian fear and hatred of Sunnis has convinced many Lebanese Christians—as well as Syrian ones—that only Damascus’ Alawite minority regime can protect the region’s Christians from Sunni Islamists.

Obviously, a regime that has slaughtered protesters for almost a year hardly embodies the sort of values promoted in the gospel, or warrants the faith of a cleric. But more to the point: This is the same Syrian regime that waged an open-ended campaign of terror against Lebanon’s Christians starting in 2005. Christian politicians and journalists were assassinated; bombs detonated in Christian regions of the country. And the official head of Lebanon’s Christian community is now appealing to Assad for protection?

The Maronites had always distinguished themselves as among the region’s most stubbornly independent of confessional sects. But fear, resentment, and short-sighted political calculation have led them today to seek protection and patronage from the Middle East’s most dangerous and retrograde elements: Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. Recently, Fawaz explains, senior church officials came out in favor of the arms of Hezbollah’s Islamic resistance. “The Maronite church,” Fawaz says, “has taken a position defending the party that stands accused of killing the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.” Fear has compelled the Christians to abandon logic as well as moral scruple.

In the aftermath of the February 2005 assassination of Hariri, Damascus withdrew its troops from Lebanon after almost 30 years. That represented a golden opportunity for the country’s Christians. “They’d been resisting Syrian hegemony in order to regain a free and independent Lebanon,” Fawaz says. “With Syria out, the Christians had what they always said they wanted: Sunni leadership that had a Lebanon-first policy.” Some Christian parties did ally themselves with the largest Sunni party, led by the late Hariri’s son Saad. But the majority, under the leadership of Michel Aoun, the former head of the Lebanese army, partnered with Hezbollah instead.

In other words, today’s Christians seem less motivated by their vision of an independent Lebanon than by their hatred of the Sunnis. It’s true that Lebanese Christians, like other minority groups here, including the Shiites, suffered terrible persecution at the hands of the Sunnis, who for centuries treated them as second-class citizens (at best). But Lebanon’s current Sunni leaders are not Ottomans, never mind jihadists. Like the Christians themselves, the Sunni leadership here promotes liberal values and a liberalized economy.

By openly siding against the Sunnis and allying with Hezbollah—and by extension Iran—the Christians have let identity politics and ideology, rather than interests and values, drive policy. The Sunnis are the regional majority, and no matter what sort of revolutionary project Iran has in store for the Middle East, the Sunnis aren’t going anywhere.

The question for the Christians is how to respond to the upheavals that have reshaped the region over the last year. Lebanon’s Christian population has the power to set the agenda for the rest of their regional co-religionists. Either they can identify and work with those Sunnis who share their same vision for Lebanon and the rest of the region, or they can let ancient wounds dictate a strategy of resentment that will ensure their demise.

Those inclined to discount the possibility of a Christian-free Middle East would do well to remember that Jews, in the recent past, had a significant place in the Ottoman Empire and Iran. Were it not for the birth of a sovereign Jewish state that took in Jewish refugees thrown out by countries that turned against them, this regional minority might well have disappeared half a century ago. Without an Israel of their own, if the Christians don’t get it right their era in the Middle East may be coming to an end.

Unsurprisingly, Gingrich’s comments set off a firestorm. Some thought his observations were refreshingly honest, others argued they were needlessly provocative and extremely counterproductive. But as many commentators have noted, the Palestinians are one of many peoples whose nationhood is “invented.” In the Middle East alone, invented nations include Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, and even Turkey. Like the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, these, too, were all once part of the Ottoman Empire. None existed before World War I, after which these jerry-built states united various, and often competing, sectarian, ethnic, and tribal identities.

The real question, then, is not whether Palestinian nationalism is “authentic,” but whether this particular national fiction is useful. Gingrich’s proposed alternative identity for the Palestinians—linking these Arabic-speaking, non-Jewish residents of the territories to the rest of the “the Arab people”—is bad for the region, the United States, and Israel.

The problem is that current Palestinian nationalism is not strong enough. If it were, Yasser Arafat and, later, Mahmoud Abbas might have been more inclined to accept the peace deals offered by Israeli prime ministers and American presidents. If Palestinian leadership were more like the early champions of Zionism, who wanted a state for the Jews no matter its size, then the conflict might have been resolved at any point over the last seven decades.

Maybe the Palestinians are still waiting for a better deal. Perhaps, as some argue, the Palestinians really believe that they’ll eventually manage to drive the Jews into the sea. In any case, one of the major problems is that the decision has never been entirely in the hands of the Palestinians. Even before the United Nations partition plan of 1947, there have always been external regional forces trying to prevent a resolution to the Palestinian problem, since prolonging the conflict enhances their prestige and bargaining position.

From the 1930s to the present, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iran have wrestled over the Palestinian file. Those states’ rationale for interfering in the domestic affairs of a foreign people is based on the presumption of a shared pan-Arab or pan-Islamic sensibility. But even assuming that all Arabs and Muslims really do care an awful lot about the Palestinians—though the status of Palestinian refugees in neighboring Arab states and as the paltry financial aid provided by oil-producing Muslim states strongly suggest otherwise—the notion that U.S. policy should accommodate regional forces because they claim to share a common identity with Palestinians is dangerous.

A region-wide contest to represent the Palestinians not only sets regional powers against each other, but it also channels their often destructive energies against Western interlocutors, primarily the United States. Through 1973, the Saudis fought for their role with their weapon of choice: oil. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria’s Assad regime use terrorism, just as Gamal abd el-Nasser did when he ruled Egypt. Therefore, a key goal of American policy-making has been to de-link the Palestinian file from other regional issues and to have the Palestinians represented by one agent: themselves.

Gingrich’s vague formulation cuts directly against the grain of the U.S. regional strategy. If the Palestinians aren’t a nation, which is the Arab nation that American officials are supposed to deal with regarding the Palestinians? Or, more vaguely yet, who is the representative of the “Arab people”? Is Gingrich referring to that entity imagined by the ideologues of Arab nationalism, a single and unified Arab nation?

It should be clear to even the most casual observer of the Middle East that the Arabs are anything but unified. Iraq’s conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, as we now understand, was only the tip of the iceberg in a region where civil war is not an exception but the norm. The Bahraini and Syrian uprisings are effectively sectarian revolutions against the established, and repressive, orders. Even in Egypt, Muslim violence against the Coptic Christian community reveals the true sectarian nature of the region.

The theorists behind 20th-century Arab nationalism recognized the region’s sectarianism and tribalism—which is why they proposed an identity based not on sect or tribe but rather on shared attributes, like language. The inhabitants of the region, from Western North Africa to the Persian Gulf, all spoke some variation of Arabic, thus they were Arabs. Their particularities, whether ethnic (Kurdish, for instance) or sectarian (Christian, Shia, etc.) were insignificant in comparison to their Arab identity. According to ideologues like Sati’ al-Husri, they were Arabs whether they liked it or not.

Accordingly, Arab nationalism has been a coercive and repressive doctrine. Even though it was an idea intended to forestall the civil strife that arises from competing identities, in reality enforcing Arab nationalism has led to bloodshed throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Under Saddam Hussein, Arab nationalism meant Sunni supremacism and the violent suppression of Kurds and Shiites. In Syria, the minority Alawite regime has used the doctrine to keep the Sunnis as well as the Kurds in line. In Lebanon, Hezbollah waves the banner of Arab nationalism in its fight against the Zionist entity, in order to intimidate and rule over other Lebanese sects. Violence and repression are key components of Arab nationalism, because as a totalitarian ideology like Communism and Nazism, it can brook no differences, no particularity.

Respecting that particularity is not only good for the inhabitants of the region but also for the interests of the United States and Israel. The United States has bilateral relations with other nation-states and political institutions like the Palestinian Authority. But this country is ill-equipped to deal with large amorphous bodies like the “Arab people” or, alternatively, the “Muslim world.”

The latter was the intended recipient of Obama’s Cairo speech in June 2009. Unfortunately, it seems not to have occurred to the president that the Muslim-majority Middle East comprises various Muslim sects often at odds, plus non-Muslims as well. By employing this particular fiction, the “Muslim world,” the Cairo speech happened to comport perfectly with the belief of Islamists who hold that non-Muslims and even Shiite Muslims are second-class subjects in the Sunni-majority Middle East, rather than individuals deserving of equal rights.

The “Arab people,” like the “Muslim world,” is an invention—and neither of them should hold much appeal for U.S. policy-makers. Given the nature of our own polity, Americans should take the lead promoting particular identities, even if some of them are formed more recently than others, like that of the Palestinians. This makes them no less worthy of the rights and respect due to other Middle Eastern identities, some of them ancient, like Egypt’s Christian community, or the region’s Jewish minority, which after being ruled by the Ottomans and other regional empires and powers, now enjoys its own state in Israel.

Nobody wants to hear the bad news, which only ensures it will get worse. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s fall in February was heralded with sunny optimism in Washington as the birth of an Egyptian liberal democracy, even though the facts were rather obviously otherwise. It was clear that free elections in Egypt would mean the rise of the Islamists, and last week we saw just that: In the country’s first round of parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood won the support of 40 percent of the electorate. The Salafists—hard-line Islamists whose 7th-century dress reflects their model for the ideal Islamic state—got 25 percent of the votes. All facts to the contrary, we’re now being told by policy-makers that these Islamists, even those who openly align themselves with Osama Bin Laden, aren’t so scary after all. In other words, the U.S. reaction to the Egyptian mess is that there’s nothing we can, or will, do about it, so best to get used to the new reality.

The same resigned attitude goes for Iranian nuclear weapons. Sure, there’s been plenty of high-toned rhetoric. President George W. Bush said Iran was part of the axis of evil, and President Barack Obama called an Iranian bomb “unacceptable.” But as U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta scolded the Israelis to get back to the “damn table” with the Palestinians last week, he also explained why Washington is ultimately not going to stop the Iranians from getting the bomb. First of all, Panetta explained, a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran would simply delay the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, not finish it for good. Even then, he said, the United States “could possibly be the target of retaliation from Iran, striking our ships, striking our military bases.” Furthermore, according to Panetta, a strike could mean “severe economic consequences” that could negatively affect “a fragile economy here in the United States.” It’s not just Panetta who makes this argument: His predecessor, Robert Gates, who worked for Bush before Obama, has made the same claims.

Of course, U.S. officials don’t want Islamists running the largest Arab state, or Iran getting a bomb. But neither Democratic nor Republican policy-makers are willing to pay the electoral and geopolitical price for making sure these bad things don’t happen. Instead, these policy-makers and these analysts protest that once a country is determined to get a nuke, there’s no stopping it. Besides, they claim, even if Iran does get a bomb, we can deter and contain it.

The truth is that the United States can stop the Iranian nuclear program any time it wants. It has the military capacity to turn the lights off across the country, cripple the economy, and bring the regime to its knees—by bombing its oil and natural-gas fields, its ports, power plants, reservoirs, and dams as well as its nuclear facilities. The fact that the United States has the power of life and death over 80 million Iranians may not make the rest of the world comfortable. But there’s no use lying about it. Similarly, American policy-makers continue to pretend that the fall of Mubarak was a triumph for U.S. values when the truth is that it was a catastrophe for U.S. interests. Why are we so confused about our priorities? And why are we insisting on our weakness?

The problem is that at the end of the Cold War the United States government turned away from pursuing our national interests and toward an abstract idea of American transcendence. Talk of interests, allies, balance of power, and so on began to seem a little vulgar. Part of this has to do with the rise of a generation of policy-makers who didn’t know from first-hand experience what it took to win the Cold War. To younger policy-makers, the triumph of the United States was inevitable. It represented, as Francis Fukuyama saw it, the final synthesis of a Hegelian dialectic—the end of history. The reality is that it was messy, and the outcome was never certain.

In the past, U.S. foreign policy-makers saw the world in stark terms. For instance: In the old view, it would be a good thing for the rulers of Iran to fall because they are enemies; and it is bad for Mubarak to fall since he is an ally. The new dispensation is instead premised on catchwords like “consistency.” If we want the mullahs toppled, the new thinking goes, then for the sake of consistency we should also demand Mubarak leave. The United States, you see, is no longer a normal country like all the rest pursuing its national interests. It’s a set of values.

Just one generation ago, this country was led by policy-makers who helped both sides in the decade-long Iran-Iraq war kill each other because they believed that the bloodbath kept American citizens safe. Now we’re governed by men and women who want to make sure the Syrian opposition is sufficiently devoted to pluralism before the White House decides if bringing down the anti-American dictator Bashar al-Assad is a good thing. It’s a noble goal to want Syrians to treat each other as Americans treat each other. But just because it’s a hopeful ideal doesn’t make it sound foreign policy. No one says we have to be as cynical as France, but we do need to conduct our dealings with other countries as though we, too, were a normal country with national interests.

The fact is that there are lots of countries with fine values, like most of Northern Europe. What makes the United States a superpower, the foundation of our prosperity and security, is not our values, but our policies. I am referring specifically to those policies that took us to war against the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in Asia in World War II and the Soviets on four continents during the Cold War.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Let us both commemorate and celebrate the American men and women who handed us as part of our birthright the free trade in Europe and the Pacific that made this country wealthy beyond comparison. A major part of our inheritance includes the Persian Gulf, through which the free flow of oil at affordable prices has made possible much of what we now take for granted, like the Interstate highway system, fresh vegetables on our plate, the social and geographic mobility that is a signature of our way of life.

There is always a price for being American. Everyone knows the cost of bringing the Iranian nuclear program to an end. The Iranians are going to shoot at U.S. troops based in the Middle East and attack soft targets in the United States—the Mall of America, the Port of Los Angeles, Disney World, who knows? And the price of oil is going to rise. The question is, are we are willing to pay for all that? If not, we shouldn’t be surprised when the bubble bursts.

This is only the agency’s latest setback at the hands of a terrorist organization. In December 2009, an al-Qaida suicide bomber killed seven CIA officers at an American compound in Afghanistan. In April 1983, a Hezbollah car bomb destroyed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 60 people, including 17 Americans, eight of whom were CIA employees. Given the agency’s track record, very few intelligence and Middle East experts were surprised by last week’s revelation that the CIA had been handed another loss in the region.

But the analysts have gotten it wrong on the bottom line. Though most experts and commentators are making this out to be bad for the CIA—and many current and former U.S. officials believe it is—it’s actually Hezbollah that comes out the big loser.

Hezbollah’s entire prestige is built on the idea that it is a highly disciplined organization that is nearly impossible to infiltrate. Indeed, Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah’s June speech announcing that Hezbollah had rolled up CIA assets was the party’s first public admission that it’d been compromised by hostile services. Hezbollah, said Nasrallah, had the “courage to confront the truth.”

The truth is that no matter how many American spies Hezbollah ultimately captured, being infiltrated by a hostile clandestine service is evidence of weakness. Moreover, as the Cold War showed, uncovering moles may result in tighter security measures, but the fact that they went unnoticed in the first place almost invariably demoralizes any organization built on loyalty and secrecy. In the 1960s and ’70s, paranoia crippled the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, after he became convinced that the agency had been penetrated by Soviet agents. In Hezbollah’s case, the damage will likely be worse, because this incident exposes the utter falsehood of the party of God’s divinely fashioned self-mythology.

Nonetheless, Hezbollah officials are putting up a good front. “The resistance blinded American intelligence eyes,” one Hezbollah member of Lebanese parliament said last week. Perhaps he’s right—even as there are plenty of good reasons for the American intelligence community to encourage Hezbollah to think it bested the CIA. But contrary to its reputation, Hezbollah may be more vulnerable to hostile clandestine services than any organization in the history of espionage. Hassan Nasrallah certainly thinks so. Unique among world leaders, Nasrallah lives in hiding. He has spent the last five years since the end of the party’s 2006 war with Israel bunkered underground because he fears his organization is so porous that the Israelis have a good shot at assassinating him.

Other recent intelligence triumphs against Hezbollah include Israel destroying most of the party’s long- and medium-range missiles within the first few hours of the 2006 war. Perhaps most spectacularly, Hezbollah’s legendary commander, Imad Mugniyeh, was assassinated in February 2008 in the middle of Damascus. Then there was an Israeli spy ring that penetrated Hezbollah. And even though more than 100 people have been detained by Hezbollah and arrested by Lebanese security forces for espionage since April 2009, things keep blowing up—literally—in Hezbollah strongholds. Maybe the blast last week at a Hezbollah arms depot in Tyre was just an accident. Or perhaps it was a timely reminder that there are plenty of hostile assets still operating successfully in some of Hezbollah’s most sensitive areas.

It is best, then, to treat Hezbollah’s Spartan reputation with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, many Western experts legitimize the party’s propaganda. For instance, Hezbollah leadership denied for many years that Mughniyeh had any official relationship to the organization. It was bad enough that researchers and journalists swallowed the party’s line. But even after Hezbollah buried Mughniyeh with full honors—not merely as a Hezbollah martyr, but as a pillar of the party’s revered leadership—regional experts never stopped to wonder: If Hezbollah lied about that, maybe they were lying about other things as well.

Obviously Hezbollah, like all security and intelligence institutions, dissimulates. What’s different about Hezbollah is that its fictions are the foundation of a self-image that touches not only on earthly matters, but on heavenly ones as well. The CIA is the intelligence service of a regular state; it is designed and ruled by human beings and therefore imperfect in its very nature. Hezbollah, however, is not a regular political organization, but the party of God. The arms of the resistance are sacred, entrusted with the duty of liberating Jerusalem, and its victories, like the 2006 war, are divine. But as it turns out, Hezbollah is not divine. It’s in fact quite flawed. And so the CIA story comes as another blow in a series of shocks to the Islamic resistance’s prestige.

Only credulous Western media sources believe that Hezbollah won a “divine victory” over Israel in 2006. The Shiite community in southern Lebanon knows better, which is why tens of thousands of them tried to flee when a rocket was fired from their area during the middle of Cast Lead in 2008-09. Even Hezbollah knows it is deterred, which is why the border with Israel has been relatively quiet since then.

On the domestic front, Hezbollah isn’t faring much better. In 2009, a financier close to the party and nicknamed the Lebanese Madoff was found to have stolen more than half a billion dollars from the Shiite community. Hezbollah’s May 2008 attack on Sunni neighborhoods in Beirut and on Druze regions in the mountains sullied the resistance—through the use of weapons that, according to Hezbollah mythology, are only to be used against the Zionist invaders, not fellow Lebanese.

Even more significantly, Hezbollah has been named in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In August, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon indicted four Hezbollah operatives, including two of Mughniyeh’s brothers-in-law, for their role in the killing. In other words, the party of God stands accused of murdering one of the Middle East’s major Sunni leaders, which puts Hezbollah in a dangerous position with its Sunni neighbors inside Lebanon and around the region. It certainly doesn’t help the party’s reputation that its Syrian patron, President Bashar al-Assad, has been slaughtering members of the Sunni-majority uprising in neighboring Syria.

Without Assad, Hezbollah will lose its supply lines. Even with Assad fighting to survive, circumstances are trying for Hezbollah. In the eyes of the regional Sunni majority, the regime in Damascus and Hezbollah are no longer Arabs at war with Israel—they are minorities, killing fellow Arabs on behalf of the Iranians.

It’s true the CIA has made plenty of mistakes in Beirut over the last several decades, and the U.S. intelligence community may have blundered badly in this instance, too. And yet no one knows exactly the parameters of the game now under way in Lebanon, where a number of regional and international actors—including, among others, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, France, Israel, and the United States—all have a stake in the outcome. All we know for certain is that the timing is bad for Hezbollah, divine no more.

Given this stated policy, you would think that news of the Syrian opposition gaining ground on Assad’s regime—the Free Syrian Army, for example, now has 17,000 men under arms and has carried off a number of daring operations—would be welcomed in Washington. But you would be wrong.

In the past three months, the White House has failed to realize its stated goal of removing Assad from power. A key reason it has failed isn’t for lack of ability to project power, but rather because it has become distracted by the fractured nature of the opposition—over what comes after Assad—rather than focusing on the far more manageable pursuit of bringing down a long-time U.S. adversary.

Yes, the Obama Administration has built a strong sanctions regime, which is choking off the Syrian regime’s finances. But fearful of owning a potential civil war, the White House has shied away from any talk of force—not only U.S. force but even force on the part of the opposition. Taking up arms will play into the regime’s hands, undermine international support, and “divide the opposition,” the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman said earlier this month.

But it’s too late for such warnings. The Syrian opposition, as Feltman surely knows, is already divided. One faction, the Syrian National Council, has modeled itself after Libya’s Transitional National Council in the hopes of attracting the same international support, including a no-fly zone. The group just released its political program, which says it aims to “build a democratic, pluralistic, and civil state by … breaking down the existing regime, including all of its operatives and symbols.” Another faction, the National Coordinating Committee, has reportedly met with officials from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Assad’s closest—and, increasingly, its only—ally. The Iranians’ purpose in backing the National Coordinating Committee is to create a ready-made ally should Assad fall, much like they backed various actors inside Iraq, such as Moqtada al-Sadr. In Iraq, this competition turned into armed conflict. In Syria so far, it has set the opposition against itself. This group has so far distinguished itself by countering the Syria National Council’s strategy, arguing that the opposition does not want foreign intervention, or a no-fly zone.

The Obama Administration is reluctant to throw its support behind any Syrian opposition group when those factions are already at one another’s throats. But the White House should learn from the Iranians: Choose your horse and ride it. Moreover, it was Washington itself that gave an opening to the National Coordinating Committee—and Tehran—by over-emphasizing the importance of the opposition. The administration ought to be pulling every possible lever to overthrow the Syrian dictator, and U.S. policymakers are making a mistake by getting caught up in the details of the opposition’s weaknesses. What’s more, this obsession with “what comes after” is quickly becoming the undoing of U.S. foreign policy.

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The White House doesn’t want post-Assad Syria to look like post-Saddam Iraq, torn by civil war. But that outcome is probably unavoidable, regardless of U.S. involvement. Syrian political culture suffers from most of the same pathologies that marked Iraq before and immediately after the 2003 U.S. invasion. The main purpose of authoritarian security states is to stifle political opposition to the ruling regime. Thus it should come as no surprise that the political skills of any opposition group in a country like Syria are going to be rudimentary at best. And, as happened in Iraq, Syria’s opposition movement is going to attract opportunists, especially from the exile community, who have more contact with Western officials even though their understanding of what is happening on the ground is often murkier.

There will be much more conflict to come in Syria, perhaps as much as there was in Iraq. Like in Iraq, Syria’s sectarian strife has deep roots. Syria is historically a Sunni-majority region, dating back to the beginning of the Umayyad dynasty, which ruled from 661 to 750. Some fear that the specter of civil war now threatens Syria, but the truth is that the country’s civil war has been under way since 1966, when the Alawite minority first came to power and the Sunni majority lost its privilege to a heterodox Muslim sect with beliefs both Sunnis and Shiites consider heretical. Certain Sunni factions, spearheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood, rose up against Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, in the late 1970s, a revolt the late president put down with the 1982 massacre in Hama, killing tens of thousands. What we are watching now is the latest effort on the part of the Sunni majority to overturn the system and retake control of the country. This time around, the Sunnis will almost certainly be successful, and the Alawites, and perhaps other minorities, will pay dearly for it.

The Obama Administration is understandably concerned about the country’s various minority communities, even as some, like several Christian clerics, have disgraced—and perhaps further endangered—themselves by siding openly with a dictatorial regime whose business of late has been slaughtering Sunnis. Nonetheless, in the end there is little Washington can do to cool the enmities that have been roiling Syria and the region for more than a thousand years. It was not the presence of U.S. troops that gave rise to civil war in Iraq, and it will not be the absence of them that touches off more killing in Syria. Those conflicts are indigenous to the region.

Given the political character of the Middle East, which the Iraq war dramatically exposed, the Obama Administration is rightly wary of nation building. However, it does not seem to recognize that the desire to manufacture the ideal opposition movement in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries in turmoil is an outgrowth of the same hubris. The United States is limited in its ability to shape the political climate of foreign countries.

And yet policymakers on both sides of the aisle now seem beholden to the so-called Pottery Barn rule famously articulated by Colin Powell when he was George W. Bush’s first-term secretary of State. But, in fact, Washington is not required to buy something it has broken—especially if the damage was caused for the purpose of advancing U.S. interests. The Pottery Barn conviction has effectively become an article of faith in the foreign-policy establishment, and one that will eventually come to deter the United States from taking actions to protect U.S. citizens, allies, and interests. American taxpayers cannot be expected to sign on for foreign adventures if the price-tag is going to include remaking failed states, including those with leaders and publics who might wish us harm regardless of our contribution.

In the end, all Washington can control is what touches us directly. Right now, we want Assad fighting for his life in Syria because it will restrain the regime from projecting power abroad—exporting terror across the country’s borders into Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. With Iran’s lone Arab ally neutralized, the eventual fall of Assad will weaken the regime in Tehran and its regional proxies, especially Hezbollah, whose supply line goes through the Lebanese-Syrian border. For the United States, that simple outcome is a victory that we’ve sought for more than 30 years.

Along with Walter B. Slocombe, who served as undersecretary of Defense for Policy under President Bill Clinton, Blackwill detailed his findings in a paper just published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Israel: A Strategic Asset for the United States” argues that the United States not only shares national interests with the Jewish state—like preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and combating terrorism—but also reaps numerous advantages from the alliance.

The paper offers chapter and verse on Israeli contributions to the U.S. national interest. They include: Israeli counter-proliferation efforts, such as the 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility and the 2007 attack on Syria’s secret nuclear facility at al-Kibar; joint military training exercises, as well as exchanges on military doctrine; Israeli technology, like unmanned aerial systems, armored vehicle protection, defense against short-range rocket threats, and robotics; missile defense cooperation; counterterrorism and intelligence cooperation; and cyber defense. Blackwill and Slocombe conclude that the alliance is in fact so central to U.S. national interests that U.S. policymakers should find ways to further enhance cooperation with Jerusalem.

Blackwill and Slocombe’s detailed list is a unique event in the ongoing U.S. policy debate over the advisability of this bilateral relationship. Blackwill says that for all the media attention devoted to Israel, he and Slocombe were surprised to find no comprehensive account of Israel’s contribution to the U.S. national interest existed previously. “I figured I’ll just Google it,” he told me this week over the phone. “But there was no existing encompassing list. So, we went item by item, making sure we had the facts straight. We didn’t exaggerate or overstate the contribution.”

The fact that Slocombe is a Democrat and Blackwill is a pillar of the Republican policy establishment is meant to drive home the strategic nature of their argument. According to Blackwill, the alliance has nothing to do with who’s in the White House, whether the Israeli prime minister is Labor or Likud, or how much movement there is on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “It is meant to be a grander argument,” he says. “National interests don’t change, except over the very long term.”

What has changed—in a positive way—is Israel’s ability to advance U.S. national interests. The national-interest case for Israel would have been harder to make 20 years ago, argues Blackwill. That shifted as “defense cooperation in the ’90s began to be enhanced,” he told me. “It’s increased greatly over the last few decades.”

Though Blackwill served as Condeleezza Rice’s National Security Council deputy for Iraq during 2003 and 2004—in Rice’s recently published memoir she calls him “one of the best policy engineers I had ever known”—it would be a mistake to identify him with the famously pro-Israel neoconservative camp of Republican policymakers. Rather, Blackwill traces his intellectual roots to Henry Kissinger, for whom he worked as a staffer during the 1973 Arab-Israeli crisis. And it was Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s secretary of State during that crisis, who was perhaps the first Republican policymaker to understand Israel’s strategic value.

Where President Harry Truman felt a moral responsibility and emotional attachment to Israel, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican commander-in-chief to deal with the newly formed Jewish state, saw Israel is a strategic liability. He believed the Arabs were offended and alienated by America’s closeness to Israel. Eisenhower eventually came to a different understanding—Arabs’ hostility to Israel was far less crucial to the region’s dynamics than he previously thought—but, more significantly, he recognized that the Middle East was a key venue to defeat the Soviet Union.

This was Kissinger’s starting point. With the 1973 war, Kissinger saw that Soviet arms in the hands of Egypt and Syria could not be allowed to triumph over Israel, Washington’s client. During the course of the war, Kissinger came to understand that Cairo could no longer afford the cost of being Moscow’s ally. In order to enable Sadat to jump sides and join the American camp, Kissinger had to prevent the Egyptians from being humiliated and give Sadat a defeat that he could sell to his people as a victory. A peace treaty between Israel and the largest Arab state would both neutralize Moscow’s role in the Middle East and establish Washington as the undisputed power broker in the region. With Israel backed unconditionally by the United States, the Arabs could no longer afford to wage war against the Jewish state, he believed. And if they wanted anything from Israel, then only Washington, as Kissinger understood, could deliver those concessions.

As Martin Kramer explained in his 2006 essay “The American Interest,” the Pax Americana in the eastern Mediterranean was a tremendous accomplishment for U.S. policymakers. At $3 billion in aid annually, Israel’s friendship is a bargain. If the United States had an Israel in the Persian Gulf, another powerful ally it could count on to do its heavy lifting and keep the United States from having to land troops, Washington might well have avoided three decades worth of trouble in that part of the Middle East, from Saddan Hussein to al-Qaida to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The fact that Israel’s strategic value is lost on so many American journalists, analysts, and policymakers is largely a function of dogma, Blackwill argues. Given that so many American groups, from Christian evangelicals and the American Jewish community to the oil lobby, have a position on the U.S.-Israel relationship, it’s hardly surprising the issue generates heated emotions that tend to make the subject impervious to analysis. This affects American decision-making and public diplomacy. For instance, the U.S. Department of State, Blackwill’s home shop, is certainly not known for sending its foreign-service officers out to the Middle East to challenge Arab officials and journalists every time they say something negative about the Jewish state. The U.S.-Israel relationship really does make it harder for American diplomats to do their job—and so they just keep their mouths shut and internalize the Arab argument against the alliance.

But the hazards of the diplomatic profession shouldn’t obscure the facts of the matter for U.S. policymakers. If the alliance with Israel really is a liability to U.S. national interests, there should be concrete evidence to back it up. “We tried to identify episodes when you could plausibly argue that Arab governments exacted a price from the U.S. for its alliance with Israel.” Blackwill said. He and Slocombe found only one example: the Arab oil embargo after the 1973 war.

“Without doubt that embargo was related to the U.S. re-supply during the ’73 Arab-Israeli war,” Blackwill said. “We thought, ‘Well, there have to be other examples. We’re just not looking hard enough.’ But to our surprise, we couldn’t find another example from that instance to today.”

Why, then, is the notion that the United States pays a price for its alliance with Israel such a prevalent theme? “People confuse what Arabs say and what Arab governments do,” Blackwill explained. “No doubt Arabs complain very genuinely about our relationship with Israel. They don’t like it. And it’s not surprising then that U.S. ambassadors send these negative Arab views back to Washington. However, our piece doesn’t argue that the American relationship with Israel is popular in the Arab world. Our approach was to gauge the question analytically, and ask, what action have Arab governments taken? And it turns out that the policies of Arab governments toward the United States are dominated by their overall perceptions of their national interests, not by the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

For instance, as Blackwill and Slocombe speculate in their paper, would the Saudis lower their oil prices “if Washington entered into a sustained crisis with Israel over the Palestine issue during which the bilateral relationship went into steep systemic decline?” The answer, of course, is no. As is the case with all rational actors, what matters most to the Arabs are their own national interests. Yet Blackwill acknowledges that the Arab Spring may change the equation insofar as it empowers potential populist movements that look at the U.S.-Israel relationship from a very different perspective than their governments have.

In any case, the core of Blackwill and Slocombe’s argument is that the alliance with Israel is vital to U.S. interests regardless of how the Arabs see it, or how it’s interpreted by any given American administration or Israeli government. “Israel’s people and politicians have a deeply entrenched pro-American outlook that is uniformly popular with the Israeli people,” they write in their paper. “Thus, Israel’s support of U.S. national interests is woven tightly into the fabric of Israeli democratic political culture, a crucial characteristic that is presently not found in any other nation in the greater Middle East.”

Take a look at the map. In last week’s Tunisian elections, the Islamist al-Nahda Party, once outlawed, won 90 out of 217 seats. As goes Tunisia, so goes the Arab Spring. In Libya, several Islamist figures, some of them reportedly aligned with al-Qaida, seem likely to fill the vacuum left by Muammar Qaddafi’s death. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, the region’s oldest Islamist movement, is prepared to compete for 50 percent of the country’s parliamentary seats in elections scheduled for later this month. The exact strength of the Islamist element in the ongoing Syrian uprising remains to be seen, but the contours of this new crescent are already becoming clear.

An Islamist alliance drawn from the region’s Sunni majority spells a kind of long-term trouble for U.S. and Israeli interests that may be equally or even more dangerous than a Shia crescent—even if Iran gets a nuclear bomb. After all, the Shia crescent is sectarian by definition, which means that its transnational character actually enfeebles it. As most analysts recognize, if the clerical regime in Tehran comes tumbling down then all its regional assets will also be weakened, if not destroyed.

That’s not true of a Muslim Brotherhood crescent, where the relative strength or weakness of Tunisian Islamists, for instance, has little bearing on the political power of Egypt’s Islamist movement. As University of Virginia professor Ahmed al-Rahim explains in a forthcoming issue of The Historical Review, “the Muslim Brotherhoods—from Morocco to Egypt to Iraq—have operated in practice as national Islamist organizations.” That is to say, the Muslim Brotherhood crescent is powerful because it both draws on the political aspirations of the regional Sunni majority and is deeply rooted in national sympathies.

Parts of the West perceive this dangerous situation with a good deal of sangfroid. France, for instance, though it backed Tunisia’s former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali when the uprising against him first began last January, now welcomes the Islamist triumph in its former colony. The election results are “tremendously good news,” said French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé. “After decades of disputable and disputed elections,” Juppé continued, “the ballot went ahead under excellent conditions: no notable incidents, and very high turnout by Tunisian voters.” So long as hundreds of thousands of Tunisian refugees don’t wash up on French shores, Paris would settle for Osama Bin Laden’s ghost as the country’s ruler.

Washington’s position is a bit more complex. Even before the Arab Spring, the Obama Administration correctly believed that the Islamist movement was fast becoming one of the major powers in the region. The president’s advisers, including counterterrorism czar John Brennan, can be blamed for their enthusiasm in reaching out to outfits like Hezbollah, whose political program and intentions they misunderstood. But it was actually the Bush White House that set the precedent for reaching out to Islamists.

In order to keep the peace in Iraq, the Bush Administration was compelled to make peace with—and buy off—local Sunni Islamists that shared the U.S. interest in defeating al-Qaida in Mesopotamia. Moreover, the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is from the Dawa party, a Shia Islamist organization co-founded by Hussein Fadlallah, the late spiritual leader of Hezbollah. Perhaps most significantly, despite the warnings of our Israeli and Palestinian allies, the Bush White House pushed for the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2005 that brought Hamas to power.

All the Obama Administration did was read the writing on the wall: Given a choice in free and fair elections, Arab electorates will invariably put Islamists in power. It is for this reason that the present White House has privileged its relationship with Turkey, and to a lesser extent Qatar, while it has downplayed its alliance with Israel. If the Islamists are riding a wave, the administration’s logic goes, then it is useful to have an Islamist as a go-between, like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He is reportedly the world leader with whom Obama speaks most often after British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Some argue that in spite of its anti-Israel and anti-Western rhetoric, Erdogan’s Freedom and Justice Party really is a model moderate Islamist organization. After all, there’s no ban on alcohol in Istanbul bars, and Turkish women aren’t compelled to wear the headscarf. Unfortunately, these domestic issues have virtually no bearing on vital U.S. interests. What should matter to U.S. policymakers is that Erdogan is the architect of an adventurist foreign policy and has promised to send warships to protect future aid flotillas. Erdogan, who uses anti-Israel rhetoric to stir the passions of the Arab masses, is no moderate, but a demagogue who has patterned his career after the modern Middle East’s most famous radical, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Indeed, “moderate” is a word that gets thrown around recklessly when it comes to the Islamist groups that comprise this new Muslim Brotherhood crescent. Consider the leader of al-Nahda, Rashid Ghannoushi, who, after many years of exile, may well be Tunisia’s next prime minister. He is routinely described as a moderate, even though he has praised the mothers of suicide bombers and believes that the “region will get rid of the germ of Israel.”

Perhaps to better understand the term “moderate” we might consider Islamist parties in the context of how they exercise power in their local environments. Where Osama Bin Laden spoke of a revived caliphate that would unite the umma, Islamists like Ghannoushi, Erdogan, and the Muslim Brotherhood are focused on their own national projects. Extremist Islamist outfits like Bin Laden’s original al-Qaida live in caves and rely on the support of Middle Eastern governments in order to accomplish operations like blowing up planes. So-called moderate Islamist parties, on the other hand, win electoral contests that leave them in charge of Middle Eastern governments, security services, and militaries with artillery, tanks, air forces, and navies.

Despite their name, the moderates are more dangerous than the extremists by a matter of magnitude. It’s no wonder the Obama Administration seeks to appease them by keeping Israel at arm’s length.

Yesterday Israel approved a deal, seemingly hastened by the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap, which will free Grapel in exchange for 25 Egyptian prisoners. And if all goes according to plan, Grapel will be released Thursday. Some former U.S. intelligence officials believe Grapel may really have been an Israeli spy, but Israeli soldiers, never mind the Jewish state’s clandestine agents, are seldom returned alive. The Egyptians know he’s not a spy, but he’s a valuable card anyway, which is why they captured him. It is logic and behavior befitting a terrorist organization.

If Hamas and Hezbollah can get the Zionist entity to release their associates, the thinking goes, why can’t Egypt’s interim ruling body, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, do the same for Egyptian prisoners? The problem in the Middle East, then, isn’t that the Islamists are on the verge of taking over and thereby transforming Arab societies. The problem is that these societies are already governed by the passions that make the Islamists so popular.

Longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, would not have dreamed of taking an American citizen hostage. It’s true that things have changed in Egypt, but let’s not overstate the case: Grapel’s arrest is not a sign that the Supreme Council of Armed Forces is joining hands with Iranian-backed terror organizations. The purpose of the exchange, from Cairo’s perspective, is to placate the mobs that have already laid siege to the Israeli embassy, burned Coptic churches, and may in time cause even worse problems for the ruling military council. The way to calm the situation, they believe, is to show that Egypt’s problems are manufactured by the West, and that Cairo’s ever-competent rulers managed to unearth a plot before the foreigners could once again unleash their mayhem.

Why Cairo chose Grapel as its test case seems to be merely a matter of convenience. Yes, the Queens native served in the Israeli Defense Forces in the 2006 war, where he was injured fighting Hezbollah. Yet the fact that Grapel, a law student at Emory University in Atlanta, had taken a job in Cairo in May with St. Andrew’s Refugee Services, a Christian organization that mostly provides legal aid for Sudanese refugees, is perhaps what first attracted the attention of Egyptian authorities. African refugees—Christians and Muslims—are a sensitive issue for the Egyptians, not least because their mistreatment in Egypt has caused many of them to flee to friendlier vistas across the border in Israel.

While some believe the Shalit deal set the precedent for the Grapel exchange, it’s a mistake to see the two cases in the same light. For Israel, the point of freeing a thousand prisoners in exchange for one is not merely a moral calculation, but also a form of strategic communication intended to dishearten Israel’s foes. The message it sends is not only that Israel values life above all, but that the Jewish state can afford to put its enemies back on the street because in the end, no matter how numerous, those enemies have no chance of winning.

The Grapel deal is something else—straight-up extortion with domestic political benefits. For Egypt, getting prisoners released for Grapel is more like Libya winning intelligence agent Abdelbasset al-Megrahi’s freedom from the Scottish government as part of an oil deal in 2009, or Iran’s kidnapping three American hikers and accusing them of espionage two years ago. Here the point is to face down the West publicly, and generate popular support at home. The message is: Western actors are trying to sabotage the people of the Middle East, but the ruling authorities are proud heroes of resistance who have exposed the designs of the imperialist or Zionist oppressors and have made them publicly pay for their crimes.

The Egyptian army probably didn’t want to get into this game of political extortion, but with Mubarak’s downfall it became necessary to win the affections of a very demanding audience: Egypt’s middle-class urban youth, a constituency to whom Mubarak never paid much attention, which is precisely what led to his demise. The Obama Administration believed that Mubarak’s exit would have little effect on an Egyptian political system still dominated by an army dependent on $1.3 billion in American military aid each year, but the problem should now be as obvious to the White House as it was to the Egyptian military from the outset. As angry as the army was at Mubarak for trying to install his son in the presidential palace, it also understood it was dangerous to give the mob a de facto veto that would allow it to shape the Egyptian political system however it saw fit.

That vision, unfortunately, is very popular in the Muslim-majority Middle East. It’s generally anti-Israeli and anti-American, to be sure, but Israel and the United States are details in a larger architecture of resentment of the West.

Hatred of the West, and of its local proxies, has been a central part of political Islam’s program from the outset. The Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928 in the midst of Great Britain’s 72-year-old occupation of Egypt. But long before London took an active role in Egyptian politics, 18th- and 19th-century Muslim intellectuals and activists counseled the masses to be suspicious of the West. Take their science and technology, they advised, but forgo the West’s secular values, which undermine you and your faith.

Today, those who advocate for engagement with Islamists argue that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Nahda Party have matured and are now willing to play by the rules and act like democrats. The Islamists may not like the West, but they have no choice but to uphold agreements and partake in the international system. On the other side of the debate, skeptics fear that the Islamists are talking out of both sides of their mouth, and once in office they’ll never willingly forsake power. But both of these arguments miss the point.

Yes, Islamism is already turning out to be the most powerful political current across the region. But the attraction of Islamism is not simply that it appeals to conservative and traditional Muslim societies, but that it draws freely on the sources of resentment that have been part of the political language of the region for more than two centuries. It was not Egypt’s Islamists who led the charge against the Israeli embassy in September, but young and nominally secular Egyptians. And it is that mob, potentially in the many millions, with whom Egypt’s ruling body was currying favor when it arrested Grapel.

It’s strange the White House would miss an opportunity to pose as Israel’s worried and protective friend and ally, especially facing a presidential election campaign that some worry is losing Jewish support and money. After all, administration figures like Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta can’t insist strongly enough that Israel is isolated from the rest of the world and that the United States is the only one in its corner.

Amid all the different theories concerning the Iran plot—that the Iranians aren’t really behind it because they’re too smart, or that it was orchestrated by a rogue element of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards looking to embarrass Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—it is perhaps most useful to look at this recent effort as the final test Iran will face before it gets a nuclear weapon. Seen this way, it is clear that the White House wouldn’t want to highlight Israel’s spot in Iran’s crosshairs, because no matter how many times President Barack Obama tells Israeli officials and Jewish audiences that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be unacceptable, his administration’s real policy position has just been exposed. A demand for more sanctions against Tehran in response to an operation intended to slaughter hundreds of American allies in the U.S. capital—in a series of attacks that would have also caused hundreds of American casualties—makes it clear to everyone, especially the Iranians, that Washington isn’t going to do anything serious about stopping Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

Because Washington doesn’t want to do anything about Iran, it has little choice but to ignore it—or deny its machinations. Let’s look at the Iranian record in Iraq, and how former and current U.S. officials chose to explain it away. In 2007, Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he doubted that the Iranian government knew about the Iranian-manufactured IEDs killing American soldiers. The same year, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and a National Security Council staffer under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, claimed that the “The involvement of these outside actors”—that is, Iran-backed militias—“is not likely to be a major driver of violence” in Iraq. And most recently, Biden told a veterans group last summer that “Iranian influence in Iraq is minimal. It’s been greatly exaggerated.”

This gives rise to the notion that the Iranians are endowed with supernatural powers that allow them to wage operations around the world so clever and sophisticated in their planning and execution that they barely show any fingerprints. But it is not Washington’s lack of evidence that creates this idea; rather it is absence of will.

The 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack of the U.S. embassy there the year before, as well as the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, all bore the imprint of the Islamic Republic. The 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran and the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie clearly did. Indeed, the whole point of Tehran’s policy of terror is to lay claim to its actions and dare the United States to respond—which Washington doesn’t. What Ayatollah Khomeini said about the embassy hostage crisis more than 30 years ago still holds true: “The Americans can’t do a damn thing about it.” Admitting Iran’s involvement in repeated acts of terror would require the United States to act—something American policymakers believe that we are unable to do.

But the reality is that the United States can do something about it, if Washington wanted to. American taxpayers would be rightly aggrieved that our defense budget is so high if our elected leaders can’t stop an adversary that speedboats to harass a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf and includes Toyota pick-up trucks in its order of battle. Surely the far-superior American military is capable of bringing Iran’s armed forces to heel.

The problem is that Obama’s White House, like George W. Bush’s, fears that taking too active a role against Iran and its assets will put U.S. military personnel at risk of Iranian retaliation in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to some U.S. intelligence estimates, Shiite Iran is responsible for far more American deaths and injuries in America’s two Middle East combat theaters than al-Qaida or other Sunni factions. That means that American strategists, civilian and military, no longer consider the U.S. military a deterrent to Iranian actions; rather, the presence of American troops in theaters where the Iranians also operate has effectively deterred the United States from taking action against Tehran.

U.S. involvement in the Middle East and Washington’s policy of not confronting Iran about its openly aggressive behavior have created a situation in which our troops are now effectively being held hostage, a situation that Iran underlines with each new act of aggression and terror. Which is why U.S. policymakers cannot recognize the pending withdrawal from Iraq—or what is effectively the liberation of many thousands of American hostages—as an opportunity to go after Iran. Instead, Washington will continue to wage clandestine operations against Tehran—like killing Iranian nuclear scientists and sabotaging Iranian centrifuges with a computer worm. None of those operations will stop the Islamic Republic from getting the bomb—rather, that secret war, presumably conducted in tandem with Israel, is meant only to deter the Jewish state from attacking Iran in earnest.

Yes, the Iranians hate the Saudis, who reciprocate the sentiment, and the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, targeted in the disrupted plot, seems especially detested by the Islamic Republic. As the WikiLeaks cables showed, it was al-Jubeir who reminded U.S. diplomats that Saudi King Abdullah “told you to cut off the head of the snake,” meaning Iran. The point of the Iranian plot was to show that the Americans are incapable of protecting their allies, even in the U.S. capital. But as mad as the Saudis are at Washington for not doing anything about the Iranians, sometime down the road they’ll be prepared to grit their teeth and cut a bargain with their foe. There is no such deal in the offing for the Jewish state.

More to the point, the Iranians recognize that unlike Saudi Arabia, Israel is capable of doing something about the Islamic Republic’s ambitions. In the last five years, Jerusalem has waged war against two of Tehran’s clients, Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 and Hamas in the winter of 2008-09. Also, it’s worth remembering that the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 attack on a Jewish community center there were retaliations for Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s then-leader Abbas Mussawi. (Iran and Hezbollah left their fingerprints on those operations, too. The issue in Argentina was not insufficient evidence but police and prosecutorial incompetence.)

If the only country able and willing to go after Iran’s nuclear program is Israel, the only one who is capable of stopping the Israelis, Tehran realizes, is the United States. And so Iran and the United States now find themselves in one of the Middle East’s oddest alliances, with the United States unwittingly aiding Iran in its effort to get the bomb. If this happens, Tehran will use this new weapon to remake the political map of the Middle East in ways that are very unlikely to benefit the United States, and will directly threaten the survival of its closest ally.

Since its founding 63 years ago, the Jewish state has been relatively isolated from much of the international community. The United States has typically used the diplomatic and political clout befitting its superpower status—including its veto at the U.N. Security Council—to shelter Israel from the slings and arrows of its adversaries. So, why is the Obama Administration jumping on the bandwagon of those who peck away at Israel’s legitimacy?

When Panetta and others talk about Israel’s increasing isolation, they are essentially referring to Israel’s faltering relationships with Egypt and Turkey and the absence of a peace process with the Palestinians. As to the first, Egyptian and Israeli officials insist that while former President Hosni Mubarak is gone, relations between the two governments remain unchanged. Egyptian officials have repeatedly stated that they have no desire to break the peace treaty and forfeit $2 billion a year in U.S. aid. Of course, the Egyptian masses that toppled Mubarak have a rather different attitude toward the Jewish state, which is why they painted swastikas on the battering rams they used to storm the Israeli Embassy in Cairo last month. It would be useful to know what sort of policies Panetta thinks Jerusalem might pursue to earn the friendship of such mobs.

Many observers argue that Israel’s strategic relationship with Turkey began to deteriorate in May 2010, when Israeli commandos killed nine armed activists aboard the Mavi Marmara, a ship that Ankara dispatched as part of an unlawful effort to break Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza. Angry that Israel did not apologize to Turkey, the White House now peddles this narrative for reasons of its own. Washington sees the rise of Islamist parties in Egypt, Syria, and the Palestinian territories, and it believes that the Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be able to influence regional actors.

Unfortunately for Washington, any influence that Turkey exercises will be on behalf of its own interests—not American ones. And even then, Ankara’s ability to project power is much more limited than Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman rhetoric would let on. As Israel’s ties with Turkey have withered, Turkish rivals Greece and Bulgaria, two historical enemies of the Ottomans, have jumped at the chance to establish ties with Israel. By losing one ally and gaining two, Israel is plus one in the strategic relationship column.

Consider the current scorecard in the rest of the region. Of the two terrorist entities on Israel’s borders, Hamas had to put some distance between itself and Syria when the Alawite minority regime there started slaughtering its majority Sunni population. Syria is also Hezbollah’s customary supply line to Iranian arms, but with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fighting for his life, that’s now been cut off. Hezbollah is isolated domestically as well: Shiites’ fear of another war with Israel has isolated Hezbollah from large parts of its own Shia constituency.

Israel’s more conventional adversaries are in equally bad shape. The nascent civil war in Syria shows that no matter how long Assad survives, his regime will be prevented from projecting power in its typical fashion: by supporting terrorism abroad. An economic meltdown in Egypt has turned its army inward to deal with domestic problems.

What does Israel’s strategic position actually look like? Hamas, Hezbollah, Egypt, and Syria are isolated. It’s true that the Iranians are still marching toward a nuclear bomb, but the possibility of losing Hezbollah and Syria along the way would represent a net loss. The fact is that only Qatar has had a more successful Arab Spring than Israel.

Contrary to Panetta’s warnings, the picture has never looked rosier for the Jewish state. What’s worrying, then, is not Israeli isolation but rather the isolation of Israel’s superpower patron: the United States. The real strategic danger to Israel is that America is losing its place as the region’s great power. Egypt, the cornerstone of the Pax Americana in the Eastern Mediterranean since the 1978 signing of the Camp David Accords, looks like an increasingly shaky ally. Half a year after the fall of Mubarak, the Egyptian military is incapable of controlling Cairo—never mind the Sinai.

In Syria, the Obama Administration has disdained to play any hand at all. The administration has hesitated to throw its weight behind the opposition movement, and U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford has warned that if Assad’s opponents take up arms they will lose whatever international support they have. In other words, as Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia all make contingency plans for Syria, the White House announces it is out of the picture. Net American gain: zero.

By withdrawing from Iraq, the White House has effectively abandoned a vital U.S. interest to Iran. President Barack Obama sought meaningful engagement with the Iranians, but Tehran rebuffed even the administration’s offer to establish a hotline to prevent some minor event from turning into a major conflagration. The Iranian message is clear: There is no reason to talk, since our intent to drive you from the region couldn’t be clearer. Another zero.

The White House has shown it will not take the Iranian nuclear issue seriously. Clandestine operations and cyber-warfare are not serious actions taken by a superpower against a state threatening a nuclear breakout: They are sideshows meant to assuage Israel and distract our Arab allies in the Gulf. Accordingly, the Saudis have warned they will go their own way by building their own coalitions against Iran. Even the Palestinian Authority, which exists solely at the pleasure of the U.S. government, and thanks to the munificence of American taxpayers, has decided to strike out on its own at the United Nations.

Can Jerusalem survive Washington’s self-imposed isolation? Of course it will. Israel is a part of the Middle East—the region from which the United States, purposefully or not, is now extricating itself.

In spite of the Obama Administration’s snubs and slights, in the wake of the U.N. meeting Oren believes that “relations between the two countries are closer than any time in the last two and a half years.” Differences between the Obama Administration and Netanyahu regarding the peace process have been “tactical,” he told me. “Both agreed on the principle of two states, but the question was how to get there.”

Oren says that the White House and Netanyahu’s office closely coordinated their efforts to dissuade Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas from making his unilateral bid for statehood, which the United States also sees as contrary to its national interests. Both sides of the aisle in the U.S. House of Representatives support President Barack Obama’s stance on the matter. Rep. Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat, has already threatened to suspend aid to the Palestinian Authority. I asked Oren if he thinks that’s a good idea, given that the relative stability currently prevailing in the West Bank is generally attributed to American financial support. “We believe that if the Palestinians breach their commitments, avoid negotiations, and make an end-run around the peace process, there should be consequences,” the ambassador answered, suggesting that cutting off aid to the P.A. is hardly anathema to Israel.

Oren said his transition from life as an academic with opinions to being a statesman with official policy positions is a little like going from “writing slam poetry to composing rhymed haiku—it takes a lot of discipline.” He is certainly disciplined about his workout regiment: The 56-year-old New Jersey native looks about as trim as he did when he won a gold medal in rowing at the Maccabiah Games in 1977. Oren said he still rows every day, adding that the only way to keep up with a daily grind that includes a busy evening social schedule is to stay in shape.

Oren had to renounce his U.S. citizenship in 2009 when he accepted Netanyahu’s offer to take the job he’d dreamed of since childhood, but he said there was little in academia (including teaching posts at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown) or the think-tank world (the Shalem Center in Jerusalem) that prepared him for the challenges of his current job.

“Sure, I had a couple advantages,” Oren admitted. “I knew America very well. I not only grew up here; I also knew about American foreign policy from a historical perspective. For instance, I knew that this was the third time that America had been involved in Libya, and that back in 1801 Thomas Jefferson was talking about bringing democracy to the Libyans.”

Even though Oren understood that America’s relationship with Israel was the closest and most multifaceted relationship with a foreign country in post-World War II history, “It’s hard,” he said, “to understand the vast breadth and depth of the position until you’ve actually begun it.” He pointed to his desk and explained that the innocuous-looking piece of furniture is the “nexus among 535 members of Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, the U.S. intelligence community, the American Jewish community, and American churches” on one hand and, on the other, “the Israeli government, the IDF, the Knesset, 30 ministers, and Israeli society and culture.”

In the American context, at least, Israel is anything but isolated as far as the ambassador is concerned. He’s hosted first-time events for Americans not typically known as natural friends of Israel, like the gay community. Oren explained that Israel isn’t merely a regional leader in gay rights—not a particularly special distinction, given that many of its neighbors consider homosexuality a sin punishable by death—but also an international leader. “We never had anything like ‘don’t ask don’t tell’,” he noted.

Oren hosted the Israeli Embassy’s first iftar last month, with 65 Muslim leaders in attendance, and he recently reached out to the Muslim community at the University of California, Irvine. Last week, 10 Muslim students in the so-called Irvine 11 were found guilty of misdemeanor charges for disrupting Oren’s February talk at the school. “That was the community I was intending to address,” said Oren. “I issued another letter to the students at Irvine and said I was willing to go back, and discuss anything, everything, as long as they were civil. The offer still stands.”

The Israel of the popular international imagination is the one held responsible for alienating Turkey when Israeli commandos boarded a Gaza-bound boat in May 2010 and killed nine activists after being attacked. It is apparently lost on most of Israel’s critics that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has deliberately turned his country’s foreign policy against the Jewish state in order to project power throughout the Muslim world. Still, Oren said, “It’s hurtful because Turkey was a long-standing ally.” Moreover, explained the ambassador, “There’s the friendship between Jews and Turks that goes back hundreds of years. It was Turkey that took in the Jews when we were banished from Spain.”

Losing Turkey has opened up other opportunities for Israel, like building strategic relationships with longtime Turkish adversaries Greece and Bulgaria. Still, Israel’s immediate region, Oren said, “is a particularly flammable Middle East, where all our assumptions as of a year ago are called into question.” Egypt is perhaps the biggest wild card, and Oren demurred when I asked what the consequences might have been if the staff of the Israeli embassy in Cairo hadn’t been rescued by Egyptian commandos. But he did challenge reports that the Egyptian military neglected to answer Netanyahu’s calls. “We eventually got through to the Egyptians,” he said, adding that Israeli officials are in close regular contact with Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which rules the country. “They are as committed to keeping the peace as we are,” he said.

Most daunting—for Egypt and Israel—is the prospect of a weak and disorganized democratic current in that country coming up against a well-funded and well-disciplined Islamist movement. That movement includes the Muslim Brotherhood and assorted Salafist organizations, which, said Oren, “want to see a universal sharia state in the Middle East, and one without Israel in it.”

Syria is one of the few places in the region where Oren and Israeli officials are guardedly optimistic. “The opportunity there,” he said, “is seeing a leader who is not Bashar, weakening the link with Iran and dealing a blow to Hezbollah.”

Israel’s key strategic concern remains Iran. “The Iranians have overcome their technical difficulties and are experimenting with missiles capable of reaching throughout the region and beyond,” Oren said. An Iranian bomb, he added, is “a game-changer. We have some time to stop them but not much time.”

When I asked if the Arab Spring has pushed concerns over Iran out of the news cycle over the last six months, the ambassador looked at me incredulously. “We’ve been shouting about Iran as much as possible,” he said. “And in this country, too, there’s a firm awareness of the threat posed by Iran.”

I mentioned a recent poll, conducted by the American Jewish Committee, which found that among Jewish voters a plurality of 45 percent disapproved of how the White House has handled the Iranian nuclear issue. Oren said that those polled don’t understand what’s going on behind the scenes. “The administration’s policy has unfolded,” he said. “First, it was the president believed an Iranian nuclear program was unacceptable, which morphed into Obama is determined to stop the nuclear program, which reflected substantive movement. Now the U.S. is ratcheting up sanctions. Our policy and the U.S.’s is that all options are on the table—and we remain committed to that policy.”

Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal’s New York Times editorial earlier this week, warning the White House that such a veto would mean losing Saudi Arabia as an ally, is only one part of the Middle Eastern campaign against the Americans. Even when Israel is the ostensible target of the region’s ire, it is the Obama Administration that led the Palestinians up a tree and kicked away the ladder, as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas put it.

Obama’s supporters in the pro-Israel camp are eager to jump on any evidence that the president is a great friend of Jerusalem, even if he doesn’t afford the same love to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would to one headed by Netanyahu’s left-leaning rival, Tzipi Livni. Thus, those supporters have made much of Obama’s assistance in securing the safe escape of the Israeli Embassy’s staff from Cairo, assistance for which Netanyahu was rightly grateful.

But it’s worth noting that when Turkey sent an angry mob after Israeli security personnel, the White House took a very different approach. After Israeli forces boarded the Turkish-sponsored Mavi Marmara in May 2010 to prevent it from running the maritime blockade of Gaza, the commandos found themselves faced with armed passengers and killed nine on board. The United Nations’ Palmer Report recently cleared Israel of any illegality in the incident. But the White House still wanted Israel to apologize to Turkey for killing the terrorists on the ship.

The administration was apparently looking to give the Turks something in exchange for agreeing to host an early-warning radar system. Moreover, Obama is eager to make Turkey happy because in his strategic view, Ankara is a key player capable of exercising influence across the Middle East. It’s a skewed perspective that the Turks share.

The fact that Israel will be the only regional actor left standing by the administration after this upcoming diplomatic storm is, paradoxically, the result of how badly Obama has mishandled the Jewish State. Creating daylight between the United States and its only loyal regional ally has been an invitation to regional governments in trouble to distance themselves even further from Israel—and, therefore, from the United States. Since every government in the region is in trouble, the Obama Adminstration’s policy of “even-handedness” is not likely to result in peace but rather in turmoil, bloodshed, and a further reduction in American influence.

The Turks are making noise not just because of their genuinely anti-Israel disposition but because they want to position themselves as powerful advocates of the Palestinians. That’s why they expelled the Israeli ambassador to Turkey earlier this month instead of a year and a half ago. The issue, then, is not Israeli action on the high seas but U.S. diplomacy in overcompensation mode. Ankara doesn’t deserve a tit-for-tat from Washington for hosting a radar system: It’s part of the NATO membership fee. But instead of reining in the Turks, the White House turned on Jerusalem last week when it leaked a story claiming that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates thinks that Netanyahu is “ungrateful.” Some in official Israeli circles believe that the Gates story is payback to Netanyahu for not apologizing to Turkey. In any case, it sends a strange message on the eve of the U.N. vote: The Americans are backing Israel, but they’re holding their noses as they do so.

And so the pre-veto campaign against Israel has already begun. Saudi papers criticized the Israelis, as did Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Israel, said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “is the West’s spoiled child.” In Cairo, Erdogan explained how “a Palestinian child’s pain hurts the heart of mothers in Ankara.” The hurt of those Turkish hearts is hardly going to be salved if Washington’s U.N. Ambassador, Susan Rice, votes against a Palestinian state.

**
For almost 40 years the U.S. order for the region has been built on the back of its Israeli ally, whose wars, especially in 1967 and 1973, effectively secured American hegemony in the Middle East. With Israel positioned as the region’s reigning military power, the United States could accommodate its other regional clients by compelling Israel to sit with its adversaries and, from time to time, give up land in exchange for an uncertain peace. Meantime, its enemies were rewarded with advanced weapons systems. In other words, for the United States the peace process was important not because it necessarily brought about peace, but because it showed Washington to be a cunning grandmaster, able to control the movements of all the pieces on the chessboard.

From an American perspective, the problem with the Obama Administration is not that it lacks the natural warmth for the Jewish state that Bill Clinton and the second Bush White Houses radiated. Rather, it is that it does not understand the rules of the game it is playing—chess—and so is incapable of assessing the value of the queen, Israel.

Obama came to office with the idea that what mattered was not the game but real movement on the peace process, resulting in the establishment of a Palestinian state. He believed the experts when they said that he had to go hard on the Israelis. In reality, the sticking point for Netanyahu and the right was never really, or not only, that they couldn’t stop settlement construction, but rather that the Israeli electorate had lost patience with phony talk about peace and was no longer willing to indulge the fantasies of American politicians at the price of their own lives. The sentiments of Israeli voters may change in the short term, or it may take much longer. But right now their memories are still bright with the images of rockets being shot from the lands they voluntarily gave up in the vain hope of peace. Any Israeli leader who tried to give up the West Bank after the experiences with Lebanon and Gaza would be committing political suicide.

That doesn’t mean there’s no game. It just means that the chessboard looks entirely different now that it did five or 10 years ago. Once the White House cornered both Abbas and Netanyahu, leaving neither man any room to maneuver, the result was not a swift march toward peace. Rather, the Americans lost control of the board: Netanyahu balked. The Palestinians decided to go to the United Nations to declare their state. Post-Mubarak Egypt brokered a reconciliation deal between Hamas and Fatah. Turkey moved against Israel to advance its own position. And Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, which had been quietly praying that the storms of the Arab Spring might pass them over, came out to sound off against the Israelis.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, including the testimony of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and other regional leaders who wanted Obama to focus on Iran, the White House believed that the region’s central issue was the Arab-Israeli crisis and the obstacle was Israeli intransigence. With the arrival of the Arab Spring, Washington’s experts were proven decisively wrong. As the Arab Spring turns into a long, hot summer, shaken rulers like Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the mullahs in Iran, and their clients in Lebanon will also look to stir up trouble for Israel in the hopes of distracting their people from the problems at home.

The shakiness of these regimes suggests that a shooting war is in no one’s interest right now. At the same time, the larger political instability of the region may also encourage these countries to act in ways that might ordinarily seem reckless. The vacuum created by U.S. abandonment of the old order has encouraged an intense competition for influence and power that has fueled the most recent upsurge of provocations and violence against the Israelis—a pattern that is likely to grow more intense after the statehood vote and can easily spiral out of control. If that happens, the Israelis will either acquit themselves well or else they won’t. Either way, America’s remaining prestige in the region will go up in smoke.

Israel’s stable state structure and advanced military have gained significant new advantages over its neighbors in Egypt and Syria simply by standing pat. The Qataris, meanwhile, have become the flagship of revolution through the influence of the television broadcaster Al Jazeera, privately owned by the Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. Al Jazeera
helped overthrow Hosni Mubarak, protected the government of Bahrain through its silence regarding the Shia-majority uprising there, and has now turned against its onetime ally Syria. The victory over Libya—won in part with Qatari money and weapons and fighters, in addition to the soft power of Al Jazeera—may have been the crowning touch. Needless to say, Qatar allowed no street demonstrations at home, and somehow pulled off the incredible feat of overthrowing U.S. allies throughout the region with the acquiescence of Americans—while continuing to host U.S. Central Command, the strategic headquarters of the two Middle Eastern campaigns the United States is waging in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, why of all times has Israel chosen now to pick a fight with Qatar, this clearly rising power?

Last week the Israeli daily Maariv relayed a report from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs explaining that Israel is incensed with Qatar and intends to break off relations with the spunky Persian Gulf emirate. Among other complaints Jerusalem has with Doha is its unyielding support of Hamas and efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state, like funding lawfare against Israel, including legal actions regarding the Mavi Marmara incident.

It wasn’t always like this between Jerusalem and Doha. Qatari officials are among the few Arab statesmen who have openly met with Israeli leaders, including Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, and Shimon Peres. Israel even opened an interest office in the Qatari capital in 1996 following a visit by then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

But in the wake of Operation Cast Lead in the winter of 2008 and 2009, regional pressure mounted on Qatar, which expelled the Israeli delegation from Doha. And so, it is in fact beyond Jerusalem’s ability to break off relations with Qatar—since it was Doha that cashiered the relationship first, more than two years ago. So, why has Israel waited until now to bare its teeth? It’s not like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t have more pressing concerns, like a domestic protest movement, Iran’s nascent nuclear program, and the uncertain future of the 30-year-old peace treaty with Egypt.

As part of its campaign against Qatar, the Maariv report claimed that the Israeli government would no longer allow journalists employed by Al Jazeera, the Qatari emir’s de facto public diplomacy wing, to operate within its precincts. However, the station’s bureau chief is still working from Jerusalem and is in little danger of being chased out of the country. Nonetheless, by shining the spotlight on Al Jazeera, Israel is illuminating the satellite network’s negative influence in the region.

***

In one of the stolen Wikileaks cables, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan told an American diplomat that Al Jazeera might start the next war in the Middle East. Indeed, during the course of the Arab Spring, a piece of conventional wisdom has emerged: Once Al Jazeera turns its attention to despotic regimes, their days are numbered.

Mainstream Western opinion of Al Jazeera started to turn rosier with the introduction of Al Jazeera English (which Time Warner Cable now offers to its New York City subscribers). Media critics and policymakers remarked on the useful international programming, informed commentary, notable guests, and the appreciably moderate tone of the station. And it’s true that AJE generally avoids the anti-Semitic, anti-American, and anti-Shia invective of Al Jazeera Arabic, but this is only because the entire purpose of AJE is to legitimize the Al Jazeera brand in the West, and therefore legitimize the goals of the emir and his country’s foreign policy, which included toppling regional rivals like Hosni Mubarak.

To be sure, in the end it is the United States that topples Arab rulers: Either Washington turns its firepower on enemies like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi or turns its back on allies like Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and compels them to relinquish their power. And it is Western and not Arab media that shape world opinion, including that of the White House. But beginning with the Egyptian revolution, the U.S. press has been challenged to match AJE and its tireless reporting, story by story. Otherwise, it is hard to see how an event taking place in Tahrir Square, two continents removed from the East Coast, could have come to dominate the news cycle for more than a week. When it did, the Obama Administration had little choice but to call for Mubarak to step down.

The most peculiar effect of the Arab Spring is that the Qataris have managed to leave the Obama Administration with the impression that they have been with the United States every step of the way. Doha, via Al Jazeera, also called for Mubarak and Ben Ali to step down; in Libya and Syria there has seemingly been little daylight between American and Qatari policy; and in Bahrain, the United States and Qatar both kept their mouths shut as a friendly, and strategically vital, Sunni government squashed its Shia opposition. Nonetheless, these coincidences hardly mean that Qatar is on the same side as the United States.

***

Two years before Doha broke off relations with Israel, Meir Dagan was telling U.S. diplomats that Qatar was a problem. If it seemed that the Qataris were playing both sides and engaging all comers, the reality, according to Dagan, is that the Qatari emir was “annoying everyone” in the region. Qatar had relations with both Hezbollah and its pro-democracy March 14 opponents in Lebanon, it dealt with Hamas and Fatah as well as Israel, and, most provocatively, Qatar hosted CENTCOM even as it shared the world’s largest natural gas field with Iran. Washington, Dagan advised, “should remove [its] bases from [Doha].”

The Maariv report essentially echoes the warning that Dagan relayed. Israel is airing out its differences with Qatar in public, but not because the Qataris themselves are ignorant about the state of relations with Jerusalem. The intended recipient of the message is Washington. Perhaps Jerusalem fears that the Obama Administration sees Doha as a more useful ally at present than Israel, or because the Israelis are concerned that the Americans do not understand that Qatar is not a benevolent actor. It seems that Jerusalem believes this is the one place where it can offer its advice to Washington, however obliquely.

From the American perspective, Qatar is extremely appealing. In the Arab Spring, Doha has picked nothing but winners for the last six months. Moreover, an Arab government with ties to the region’s likely rising powers—especially the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Libya, and perhaps Syria—may be a valuable friend as the new regional order begins to take shape. But just because Qatar has dropped the role of middleman and mediator—made evident by its severing of ties with Israel—and is now choosing sides in the region doesn’t mean that it has really opted to side with the United States. From the Israeli perspective, the Americans have been fooled at least once in the last six months, when they misread Egypt as the Qataris, via Al Jazeera, set the tempo and obfuscated the situation. Qatar is also lined up against Israel, which wants to remind the Americans that it is still a U.S. ally—America’s one real friend in the Middle East.

For six months, from North Africa and the Levant to the Persian Gulf, Arab masses toppled Arab regimes while Arab tribes and sects squared off against each other in internecine warfare. Now Israel, which has nothing to do with the intra-Arab conflict that instigated and shaped the events of the Arab Spring, has been dragged into a mess that shows no signs of ending soon.

If many Western analysts were a little too eager to overlook the anti-Israel—as well as anti-American—sentiment on display at Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising, their implicit interpretation was nonetheless accurate: Israel was not the central issue driving the protest movement that brought down Hosni Mubarak. The Arab Spring isn’t about Israel; it’s about the Arabs.

But the focus has returned to the Jewish state. The method employed is tawreet, an Arabic word that means embroiling. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Brookings Institution scholar Michael Doran explained its strategic value: “You embroil someone by goading him to take actions against a third party that will result in political effects beneficial to you.” Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, for instance, was a master of embroilment, using various Palestinian factions to attack Israel in order to create conditions that were domestically and regionally advantageous for himself.

Right now, as Doran told me in a phone interview, “it is in the interest of many actors in the region to heighten tension with Israel.” Among these actors, there’s Hamas, the Iranian-sponsored outfit that rules Gaza and seems to have more control than Egyptian security does over the porous Gaza-Egyptian border. But the perpetrators of the recent terror attacks on Israel also enjoyed some level of assistance from elements of Egypt’s security and military establishment. Egyptian Islamist factions may also have an interest in stoking the flames with Israel in order to position themselves as champions of “resistance” in the post-Mubarak political era.

Some analysts have suggested that the carefully planned and coordinated operations may be the work of al-Qaida, whose newly anointed leader, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, is eager to leave his mark in the country of his origins.

But none of these very reasonable explanations excludes the actor most interested in changing the subject away from Arab regimes: the non-Arab Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is the sponsor of Hamas and a sometime ally of al-Qaida that, as Tony Badran, research fellow at the Foundation of the Defense of Democracies said, “has been trying to secure the Sinai since Mubarak was in power.”

Iran’s strategic achievements during the Arab Spring have been mixed. After the fall of Mubarak, which fulfilled one of the Islamic Republic’s longtime goals, Tehran also suffered some notable setbacks. When Gulf Cooperation Council forces entered Bahrain, Iran was incapable of exercising any influence by offering at least token protection to the Shia community there, showing the limits of Iranian bluster even when it came to their co-religionists in a nearby country.

It’s still unclear how Iran will come out of the Arab Spring, or to what extent the Obama Administration is capable of making the Iranians pay for their strategic overreach in a region where Washington has exercised hegemony for more than half a century. As long as Tehran can keep the regional conversation focused on Israel and resistance to the Zionist entity, the Persian Shiites in power will be able to bridge the sectarian gap that divides them from the Middle East’s Sunni Arab majority. But when events like the Arab Spring push the Israelis to the margins of the picture and instead underline Iran’s role in regional upheaval and its sectarian identity, things look much less rosy for the Islamic Republic.

Right now, Iran is facing considerable sectarian pressure. Last week, four members of Iran’s ally Hezbollah were indicted in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister, and Sunni leader, Rafiq Hariri. While it is unlikely that Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah will turn over the suspects, the organization finds itself increasingly isolated. Much of Lebanon, if not the majority, has turned its back on Hezbollah. Its own Shia community dreads the prospect of another war with Israel. Most significantly, Hezbollah may be on the verge of losing its strategic depth and supply lines that stretch across the border into Syria.

The Assad regime’s troubles constitute a threat to Iran’s vital strategic interests in the region. Syria is the one Arab state allied with Tehran, a relationship that has flourished over the last three decades, most recently in Iraq, where they made war against the United States and its allies. Losing Assad would also jeopardize Iran’s 30-year investment in Hezbollah, which has already moved much of its weapons from Syria to Lebanon.

Even if the Syrian regime survives, it is going to have problems putting the lid back on the sectarian cauldron that Assad brought to a boil through his policy of violent repression. It’s bad enough that the Syrian Alawite minority regime was slaughtering Sunnis during the middle of Ramadan, but last week the Syrian navy opened fire on a Palestinian refugee camp, not an operation destined to win popularity points from the Sunni mainstream.

Iran needs to defend Syria, but its options are limited. When the Syrian regime tried to change the subject by sending Palestinian protesters to the Israeli border on the Golan Heights in May and June, the opposition didn’t bite—they understood that the pressing issue was not the Jewish state but the Assads and their allies. Nor can the Iranians afford to throw good money after bad by getting Hezbollah to stir up trouble in Lebanon, since it’s not at all clear that the organization would fare well in—or even survive—another conflict with Israel.

Sinai was therefore Iran’s last, best hope for embroiling the Israelis. “Because of the Assad regime’s outrages against Palestinians and Syrian Sunnis, Hamas would probably not take orders from Syria at this point,” Tony Badran said. “But it would from Iran. The upside for the Iranians is that they have now found a front that doesn’t jeopardize their main asset in Lebanon, all while advancing Iranian strategic interests in Sinai/Egypt.”

Egypt was formerly the cornerstone of Washington’s regional security architecture, a role that last week’s attacks show it is no longer capable of playing. Whether the violence on its Israeli border was a carefully calculated project to extort more money from the United States or simply the result of an incapacitated Egyptian state, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s request that Egypt bulk up border security will fall on deaf ears.

Syria played a similar part in Tehran’s revolutionary project for the region, and is now on the verge of falling. The Arab Spring has shaken the two pillars—Egypt and Syria—of the Arab status quo, and a new regional order is now being born. Israel is likely to continue to pay a price, no matter how hard its leaders work to avoid getting drawn in to an inter-Arab conflict whose direction is still unclear.

The last six months of instability in the region have brought a period of relative quiet to Israel, during which time the country has been enjoying unprecedented economic prosperity and the luxury of looking at some of its real social problems—which is to say that Israel really is enjoying a sort of democratic springtime. However, in the Arabic-speaking states, all that’s blossoming is violent conflict, especially in Israel’s neighbor Syria.

The Syrian uprising is now almost six months old, and some observers in Beirut, where I spent the past week, think it might go on for years. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is ratcheting up the violence and still has plenty of cards left to play. The opposition, for its part, has braved week after week of atrocities and shows no signs of backing down. Neither the regime nor its opponents are going anywhere, and neither the Obama Administration nor anyone else in the international community has the leverage or willpower to bring the issue to a conclusion, peaceful or otherwise.

Many Lebanese believe that the bloody standoff between Syria’s Alawite minority, which controls the army and security services, and the country’s Sunni majority will invariably worsen as the opposition there takes up arms. It’s little wonder that officials across Beirut’s political spectrum—from Druze leader Walid Jumblatt to Hezbollah, and from the Sunnis in the north to the Christians of the pro-democracy March 14 movement—fear that events in Syria will fuel Lebanon’s own simmering sectarian tensions.

Syria, in other words, is in the process of Lebanonization, referring not only to the madness of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war in the 1970s and ’80s but also its aftermath, which continues to the present. In this configuration, tribal factors, as well as local regional and international interests, will act as highly volatile elements of a political climate marked by violence or stalemate. In a Lebanonized Syria, as now in Lebanon, the state will not be able to function normally.

What we’ve watched the last six months across the Middle East is less a series of democratic uprisings—in which people stake their claims to individual liberties—than a series of battles in which tribes, sects, clans, and classes turn against the rivals that have humiliated them for so long. This is most obviously the model in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, but it also pertains to Egypt and Tunisia, where the military and security apparatuses are best understood as privileged networks imposing their will on the rest of society. The courage on display in these uprisings, especially in Syria, is no less impressive or human just because it is based on communal grievances rather than on notions of individual rights.

Lebanonization is the region’s real status quo, but it is also fundamentally unacceptable to the United States, the Middle East’s great power for over half a century. This is why Washington backed various dictatorships, most of them much less cruel than that of the Assads, when those dictatorships’ repression allowed their societies to function at some level like real states. America’s interests in the region are energy, trade, and, after Sept. 11, stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. All of these interests are much harder to maintain and advance amid widespread conflict. Given the Obama Administration’s reluctance to take the lead in the Middle East, the entire region might well become Lebanonized, a scenario dangerous for U.S. interests and allies, including Israel.

The sectarian conflict at the heart of the Syrian uprising is precisely what the Assad family, Bashar and his father, Hafez, had fought to avoid for 40 years, and it was fear of this conflict that shaped the regime’s domestic and foreign policy. At home, there was Baathism, an ideology that subsumed sectarian difference under a totalitarian ideology similar in ways to both national socialism and communism.

In pre-Arab Spring Syria, few dared discuss minority issues, a taboo so powerful that it extends at present even to those most opposed to the regime’s physical and spiritual violence. Given the extensive brainwashing of many decades, it is too emotionally daunting for the opposition to push back the curtain and explain that they are being persecuted not as Syrians or human beings but simply as Sunnis.

To be sure, the opposition has extended its hand to the Alawites, but so far it’s not clear if many are accepting the invitation. A Lebanese activist recently relayed to me that a local Alawite official he’d just met explained that he had no choice but to side with Assad and was ready to defend his community against the Sunnis. When the Syrian navy shelled the Sunni neighborhoods of Lattakia this last weekend, there were reports that Alawites stood by cheering. If there were any Alawites prepared to cross communal boundaries, then surely the fate of a top Alawite official, Ali Habib, reminded the community where their allegiances should lie. The former defense minister was replaced last week, then either put under house arrest or, according to some reports, executed by the regime when word got out that he was someone to whom the Turks or Americans might reach out.

The White House fears the uncertainty that would likely follow Assad’s demise, but it’s pretty clear what would follow the present regime—not the specter of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the state but the ghost of Syria pre-Assad: an endless series of coups and counter-coups, which in the past ended only when Hafez al-Assad took the reins in 1970. The one-time air force officer and defense minister recognized that some of Syria’s instability grew out of its neighbors’ ability to cause problems in Damascus. The way to keep Syria’s rivals, like Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Israel, in check was to go on the offensive. Sponsoring terrorism against its neighbors was a primary method by which the Assad regime ensured peace at home.

By exporting sectarian conflict abroad, primarily to Lebanon and most recently to Iraq, Syria’s ruling class deterred the domestic sectarian conflict that would have cost the Alawite regime power and the community its lives. All of the regime’s efforts, at home and abroad, were wrapped in the banner of Arabism, the war to liberate Jerusalem and eradicate the Zionist entity.

The Assad regime can no longer afford the luxury of ideology, which is why it shelled a Palestinian camp on the Mediterranean coast over the weekend, sending thousands of refugees scattering. The Palestinians are simply one card in a much bigger Middle East poker game (a game in which, it should be noted, Israel doesn’t have a seat at the table). The central issue in the region is not the Arab-Israeli peace process but the Arab civil war that has been reignited under the ultimately cynical label of Arab Spring.

Israel has very little to do with current turmoil in the Middle East, a fact made plain by the paranoid nature of Arab propaganda, which blames Jerusalem for backing Arab dictatorships while accusing Israel of plotting to set the Arabs at each other’s throats. But while Lebanon’s civil wars made clear that Israel does not profit from Arab conflict, it also suggests that the Jewish state will invariably become a proxy in someone else’s war, which will not be to Israel’s benefit. Nor is there any upside, strategic or moral, in Israel pursuing the policy of an alliance of minorities and aligning itself, as some Israeli analysts have called for, with minority regimes like Assad’s that massacre their own people in the streets.

There’s something to be said for the longstanding claims of its enemies that Israel doesn’t really belong in the Middle East. How does a modern neoliberal democracy fit with the rest of the region, as it looks now? So far, Israel has managed to keep its head down. For the time being, Israel’s neighbors seem to have forgotten about it. But that quiet can’t last for long.

So, why are Washington policymakers working overtime to find a way to do business with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad?

We’re still trying to figure out what made Breivik set off a bomb that killed eight outside the prime minister’s office in Oslo then dress in a policeman’s uniform, take a ferry to a youth camp, and methodically gun down another 69 people, many of them children. Maybe his reading of anti-jihad polemicists deranged his mind with visions of multiculturalism run amok, or maybe his strange interpretation of Christian values turned him into a self-styled crusader. Perhaps he imagined himself an avatar of Aryan purity, or perhaps he’s just a psychopath, cloaking his madness in whatever tattered stuff he could find on the Internet.

The problem with Western societies isn’t that we occasionally produce monsters like Breivik, of whatever political persuasion. Rather, it’s that we negotiate with monsters like Assad, who live in palaces and use the instruments of government to murder their own people. The difference between Assad and Breivik is that instead of an automatic rifle and a sidearm, the Syrian president uses artillery, tanks, government snipers, and government torturers to kill people, week after week, while the world watches evidence of his sickening brutality on YouTube.

Yet the United States, and many other democracies, still have diplomatic relations with Assad’s regime. And while the media put Breivik on a shrink’s couch, no one’s trying to figure out why Assad instructed his security forces to open fire on unarmed protesters over the last five months and perpetrated further acts of mass murder this past weekend in several Syrian cities, leaving at least 145 dead. Unlike for Breivik, no one in the Western press is wondering what Assad reads on the Internet, or if the god he worships made him a murderer.

Breivik’s identifying himself as a Christian (and conservative) raised the hackles of a number of commentators in the United States. They argued that he can’t really be a Christian, because his actions are so obviously not informed by Christian beliefs. Of course, the same argument was used when discussing Osama Bin Laden and other Middle East murderers—they weren’t real Muslims, the thinking went. Instead, Bin Laden hijacked Islam.

The argument was absurd regarding Bin Laden and it’s no less absurd with Breivik—or with pedophilic priests or adulterous evangelical Christians, for that matter. True, Islam and Christianity are not the same. Ideas, doctrines, sins, and virtues vary, because the ideas put forth in sacred texts matter, as do the interpretations of those texts in different times and places. But determining exactly where ideas, religious or otherwise, hit the rough ground of human life is the work not of bloggers, pundits, and psychologists but of philosophers, novelists, and theologians. To turn Breivik’s bloodshed into a referendum on the comparative virtues of Christianity and Islam is obscene. To argue with him and Bin Laden over the veracity of their respective faiths is to pursue a covenant for monsters.

In the end, this murderous sickness is not about religion as such. After all, the regime in Damascus is ostensibly secular and it’s slaughtering Sunni Muslims in cities throughout Syria. What does it say about our own values—religious, moral, and political—that the Senate is deliberating whether to confirm the recess appointment of Robert Ford as U.S. ambassador to Damascus?

President George W. Bush recalled the last U.S. ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobey, after the Feb. 14, 2005, assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Syria’s Assad regime was alleged to be involved in that crime as well as a series of political murders and bombs in Lebanon. Moreover, Syria was complicit in aiding foreign fighters traveling to Iraq to kill U.S. troops and ordinary Iraqis and boasted of its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. At the time, there were no deep mysteries about the Assad regime; its detentions, tortures, and murders of Syrian dissidents were a matter of ample public record. And yet the Obama Administration was convinced from the outset that treating Syria’s leader like a normal head of state was a more or less risk-free enterprise. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama explained that talking to your enemies was not rewarding them. He came to the White House promising to engage the rogue states that his predecessor had isolated.

Ford was dispatched to Syria on a recess appointment in December 2010, meaning that his appointment will expire when the current Congress recesses the session in the late fall, unless he is confirmed by the Senate, some members of which are disgusted with the administration’s Syria policy. It’s hard not to have some sympathy and respect for Ford, who by all accounts is a tough-minded foreign service officer who has served his country honorably in hard places, like Iraq, and is now being used as a political football. He showed courage three weeks ago when he traveled to Hama to show his sympathy with the Syrian opposition and perhaps to serve as a human shield—the Syrians wouldn’t dare attack Hama with the U.S. ambassador present.

Instead, the regime waited for Ford to get back to Damascus, where they attacked the U.S. embassy instead. Three weeks later, Assad’s security forces laid siege to Hama, with tanks firing shells indiscriminately into civilian neighborhoods and snipers placed on rooftops to pick off terrified people in the streets. Doubtless Assad would have gone after the people of Hama regardless of Ford’s visit, which was intended to draw a line in the sand and challenge the Syrian despot to stop killing his people. But the ease with which Assad crossed that line sent an unmistakable message of contempt for America’s empty condemnations of his behavior. Hama paid the price for what in the end has been revealed as American vanity.

It’s unclear whether Ford’s appointment will be confirmed or rejected by the Senate or if the White House will shy away from a possible setback and recall the ambassador, turning its current political weakness into an essay in late-blooming courage. But regarding the Syrian uprising that has so far cost the lives of thousands of peaceful protesters, the last thing the Obama Administration should be thinking about is politics. American prestige is not simply the sum of our military and economic power; it is rather a function of our values, taken from our historical experience as a free people. To have treated Assad like a statesman, let alone to have made him a focus for America’s ever-shifting plans for a new Middle East, is to have mingled with evil.

What we must finally admit to ourselves is that madmen are the products not of religion, video games, blogs, or other familiar parts of our common global culture but of an inner darkness that overrides sympathy as well as reason. The fact that the evil of such men cannot be redeemed by fine rhetoric, clever political dealings, or the ceremonies of polite diplomacy is precisely why it is so frightening. Now that Robert Ford has left Damascus for consultations in Washington, it is important that we don’t send him back until Bashar al-Assad and his henchmen are gone.

The Tamar field, discovered in 2009 roughly 50 miles off Haifa, is estimated to contain 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, while the Leviathan field, discovered further west in June 2010, is double that at 18 trillion cubic feet, one of the largest offshore finds in the last decade. And yet much more important, a former Royal Dutch Shell chief scientist who’s now chief scientist for Israel Energy Initiatives “has devised an ambitious plan that would, if successful, turn Israel into one of the world’s leading oil producers,” according to an Energy Tribune report earlier this year. It turns out that the oil-shale deposits in Israel’s Shfela Basin, 30 miles southwest of Jerusalem, hold some 250 billion barrels of oil—roughly equal to Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves. In other words, Israel may well become a player in the highly competitive field of energy-producing nations, which includes Hezbollah’s patron, Iran.

Israel argues that the maritime border should begin at a 90-degree angle from the coastline, while Lebanon says that it should continue in the same direction as the land border. But if Lebanon were to insist on that principle across the board, says David Wurmser, a former consultant to Noble Energy, a Houston-based firm with a large stake in the Tamar and Leviathan fields, “it would lose a lot of its territorial water to Syria. It’s clear who’s calling the shots here.”

The twist is that even as the Lebanese government gussies up phony challenges to Israel’s maritime borders, the map it submitted to the United Nations does not actually challenge Israel’s claims to the biggest prize that the Eastern Mediterranean has ever had to offer. If Syria has its own reasons for interfering with Lebanon’s border issues, so does Iran, it seems, which is using its Lebanese asset to keep a potential industrial rival in check. That is, the dispute is not personal: It’s not about Zionism, or liberating Jerusalem. This is not ideological, but strictly about business.

Doubtless, many in the Middle East believe the ideologies to which they’ve sworn their lives. And yet that same part of the Arab world that produced Wahabbism—the Persian Gulf—is also most in favor of normalization of relations with Israel. Indeed, the Saudis themselves have reportedly cooperated with Jerusalem on security issues regarding Iran—because what really matters to Arab rulers is holding on to their rule.

The lesson here is that ideology is useful in the Middle East only insofar as it is an instrument for managing power, and even Hezbollah might not be as ideological as we assume. In addition to the cash the Party of God is given by its Iranian sponsor, it also earns plenty through its own enterprises, some of them illegal. The money is used to buy weapons for the resistance, but the other side, usually forgotten by analysts, is that Hezbollah’s arms are there to protect Hezbollah’s money. Lebanon is a very competitive place, and more often than not the highest bidder gets what he wants, regardless of ideology or other loyalties. For instance, as Hussain Abdul-Hussain, the Washington correspondent for the Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai, told me, the same smuggling networks that move weapons through the Bekaa Valley from Syria to Hezbollah are now being used to provide satellite phones to the Syrian opposition determined to topple Hezbollah’s patron, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

That’s not to say that everyone can be bought off all the time. But too often we forget that the real interests driving Middle Eastern politics are often about power and money, not ideology. Hussain notes that what might decide Assad’s fate is the Sunni merchant class of Damascus. “If the merchants start holding on to foreign currency, especially dollars, that will devalue the Syrian lira,” he told me last week. “This will make it impossible for the regime to meet the payroll for the security services who are putting down the uprising. That will mean the merchants are betting against the regime.”

By reading the border dispute as an exercise in Iranian power politics, the weirdness of the map that the Lebanese submitted to the United Nations actually starts to make sense. Iran’s interests are clear: Hold the Israelis down while also crippling the independence of the Lebanese state. If Lebanon were to develop its own natural gas fields that might encourage the country to free itself from Iranian and Syrian tutelage.

Accordingly, Iran last week signed a memorandum of understanding with Lebanon’s Hezbollah-led Cabinet to help explore for gas and oil. That’s bad for Lebanon, but it’s not so great for Iran either. Imagine a Lebanese energy sector entirely dominated by Iran; were Hezbollah to target Israeli rigs or other machinery or installations off the coast, Jerusalem would retaliate not only against Lebanon but the Iranians as well. Israel, with a booming tech sector and one of the few economies to weather the financial crisis, could handle an attack on its energy industry.

Iran, however, would be brought to its knees. The country has no economy outside of the energy sector, which is one reason why it must guard its access to vulnerable markets, like Europe. And if Israel were capable of fulfilling Europe’s energy needs for even a decade (though some estimates suggest more like 20 years), that would change Europe’s diplomatic and political position. European intellectuals can scream about Israeli checkpoints as much as they want, but no European leader whose poll numbers might someday depend on affordable energy coming from Israel will be likely to cross Jerusalem. Iran will not only have less leverage over Europe if and when Israel can develop its field, but the Islamic republic will even lose the little advantage it has over Israel.

The Arab Spring surely has something to do with Obama’s new approach, but it is hardly the sole or even the main cause of a shift that has turned U.S. Middle East policy on its head. So, what is?

Even before pro-U.S. regimes in Tunis and Cairo were toppled, Obama had said that he opposed the existing U.S.-backed order in the Middle East, which has rested on close military and diplomatic alliances with Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, and a substantial American military presence in the Persian Gulf. Most observers assumed that the president was indulging in rhetorical flights of fancy when he said that the status quo was unsustainable. But now we see he meant every word of it.

The existing political order in the Middle East has cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives over the past 60 years. In some cases, such as Israel, our alliances have been built on cultural affinity, military necessity, and domestic political considerations. In other cases, such as Saudi Arabia, our considerations have been more commercial. The larger point of U.S. engagement in the region has been to ensure the freedom of crucial shipping lanes and the flow of oil—without which the global economy that sustains billions of people around the world would grind to a halt.

Given the strong Wilsonian streak in U.S. politics, one might imagine that Obama is a staunch idealist—a man who, like Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, or George W. Bush, is disgusted by dictators. But Obama’s shameful record as a protector of human rights in the Middle East hardly bears out this theory: Iran’s Green Revolutionaries begged Obama for support for weeks, only to be greeted first with silence while being shot, tortured, and maimed by the mullahs and their goons, and then by lukewarm support, and now again with silence. Syria’s authoritarian rulers shoot their own people in the streets and bombard civilian neighborhoods with tanks and helicopter gunships, but the White House is virtually mum.

So, Obama is clearly not being driven by an obsession with human rights. Perhaps he is a wily master of realpolitik? A leader of this kind—like, say, Richard Nixon—would support the United States’ powerful friends, like Saudi Arabia and Israel, while seeking to constrain the power of its enemies, like Syria and Iran. Yet Obama has so significantly alienated the Saudis that they have embarked on their own cash-heavy royalist-oriented foreign policy, seeking to woo American allies like Jordan and Bahrain and even Pakistan into a new alliance devoted in large part to blocking Obama’s destabilizing policies in the region. Obama picks fights with Israel and then suddenly demands the Jewish state return to its 1967 borders as a condition for negotiating a peace agreement with the Palestinians—and is publicly rebuked by the Israeli prime minister, with the support of the U.S. Congress. Losing the trust and support of both Saudi Arabia and Israel in the space of a few months is hardly the move of a leader driven by realpolitik.

Perhaps, as some right-wing critics claim, Obama’s policy is the product of something worse, or more sinister, like a blueprint to weaken America on behalf of its enemies? Except this doesn’t fly either. Obama’s no Manchurian candidate, brainwashed by U.S. enemies during his schooldays in Indonesia to ruin the country. Instead, what all these theories miss is that Obama is simply a representative man of the post-World War II American Ivy League intelligentsia, which came to see the United States in a context shaped by the collapse of the European colonial empires under the weight of greed and barbarity.

***

It was the furies of Europe—its anti-Semitism and racism, its need to dominate and destroy—that drove its people to war twice in the last century while inflicting a series of revolting indignities on the so-called “lesser races” whose lands they colonized and plundered. Americans believed they were different, both at home and abroad, because they were anti-colonial from birth, and with the 20th-century advent of the decolonization movement they instinctively if sometimes cautiously sided with the new nations of the world against their former European overlords. The American sympathy for decolonization began with Woodrow Wilson and was passionately held by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and most of his top aides and by their successors in the U.S. foreign policy establishment of the 1950s, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, head of the CIA, none of whom can be dismissed as left-wing academics.

Anti-colonialism was the motor driving the Middle East policy of the American warrior who won Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose administration wished to make friends in the region by distinguishing itself from the great European powers and showing that Washington had no colonial ambitions. Ike put that premise into practice when he demanded England, France, and Israel stand down after invading Egypt in the Suez Crisis of 1956. Obama seems to understand the world similarly—the established order is wrong for us and wrong for the people of the region, morally and politically.

Obama may also reasonably believe that a United States in the grips of a financial crisis simply doesn’t have the money to meddle in the Middle East anymore. This country gets less than 25 percent of its energy resources from the Persian Gulf, so why should it be up to us to make sure that affordable oil transits the region? Let China, India, and Europe share the burden. Combine a bad U.S. economy, American exhaustion with our post-Sept. 11 commitments in the Middle East, and the nostalgic logic of decolonization and you can, finally, understand the origins of Obama’s regional policy.

But then you must tackle its consequences. The problem with this philosophy is that anti-colonialism is not a response to the realities of the Middle East but rather an exercise in self-congratulatory and often delusional nostalgia—and the results in practice have been awful. Eisenhower called his stance on Suez the worst foreign policy mistake of his tenure, and the results of Obama’s updated version of Ike’s policies have also been poor. After all the early enthusiasm for Mubarak’s ouster, Egypt is in deep trouble and spinning out of the U.S. orbit. If the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t rushing in to fill the vacuum, perhaps it’s just because they’re too savvy to want to claim ownership of a country that may be on the verge of bankruptcy and famine, as some analysts argue.

Pushing out Mubarak has made both the Israelis and Saudis wary of Obama—a move that has proven bad not only for Washington but for Riyadh and Jerusalem as well. The notion that several thousand libertine and/or fundamentalist Saudi princes are capable of formulating a coherent regional strategy is more fantastical than a J.K. Rowling novel. The Saudis on their own are a danger to themselves, the Middle East at large, and the world’s largest known reserves of oil. Leaving them to their own devices is easily the worst option among an array of bad choices.

With Israel, the administration may be on the verge of accomplishing the previously unthinkable—forcing the Jewish state to find other allies who will maintain the continuing supply of high-tech weapons to ensure its qualitative military advantage over its rivals. Perhaps Russia, India, and even China are interested in Israeli technology—military and civilian—and its newly discovered energy resources. By driving Israel away, the United States risks losing the leverage it has historically enjoyed with the Arabs by being able to broker deals with the Israelis, who will care a lot less about what Washington thinks once they can produce their own high-tech fighter planes, satellites, and missile systems.

Without U.S. leadership, the Middle East is less stable and less secure than it has been at any point since the 1973 war, for both U.S. allies and adversaries alike. The Iranian-led resistance bloc has also been hurt by the Arab Spring, even as the Obama Administration has failed to capitalize on Tehran’s setbacks. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is fighting for the survival of his regime, a fight that no one, not even Washington, expects him to win. Hezbollah has also been wounded and may suffer further with four of its members indicted for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The result of the political insecurity that Obama has fostered has been a plunge in the standard of living for ordinary people throughout the region and increasing instability there. In the absence of strong U.S. leadership, Turkey now fancies itself as the second coming of the Ottoman empire and creates international incidents by dispatching flotillas to Gaza and making nice with Iran and Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah, further rattling the political and security architecture that the United States built, and now wishes to abandon.

Obama has locked in Washington’s losses in the Middle East while ignoring opportunities to hurt U.S. adversaries like Syria and Iran. But sooner or later he will have to act there, too. It cost Obama nothing to ditch Mubarak, alienate the Israelis and the Saudis, or even wage a thoughtless war against Qadaffi. But if he crosses the line with the Iranians, as they rush to build a nuclear bomb, they have the power to retaliate by causing regional havoc and raising the price of oil to $150 a barrel—making the current global economic mess seem like a profitable holiday season and ensuring a Republican victory in 2012. The fact is that letting the Iranians get the bomb is a much worse outcome. Even if it has little effect on the president’s re-election chances, Iranian hegemony in the Persian Gulf would spell long-term disaster and shape Obama’s historical legacy. The lesson that the president needs to learn from his mistakes is that the status quo is worth preserving because change is dangerous in the Middle East, where things can always get worse. So far, that’s exactly what has been happening.

And what they throw into sharp relief is a larger lesson: Among all the minorities of the Middle East, only the Jews have escaped this unhealthy condition, thanks to the fact that for over 60 years now they have had their own state and can defend themselves against their adversaries. Theodor Herzl asserted that Israel would allow the Jews to live like normal people, and as it turns out—contrary to what nearly all Arabs, most Europeans, and many Israelis believe—he has largely been proven right.

But to understand why he was right, we have to put aside Herzl and Europe and look at Israel in a Middle Eastern context, as a refuge for a religious minority: the Jews of the Middle East. Many people, including many Jews, still see Israel as the end product of a European ideological movement that found an awful but undeniable justification in the Holocaust. Yet, as many Arabs argue, that narrative is unconnected to the Middle East. No matter how many Arab ideologues collaborated with the Nazis or adopted Nazi ideas about Jews, there is no reason that the Palestinians should have to pay for a European crime. It makes more sense, then, to look at minorities in the Middle East generally, the Jews specifically, and to evaluate the success or failure of Zionism by the standards of the region.

***

Anyone who previously wrote off as a right-wing Zionist myth the idea that Middle Eastern minorities are oppressed by the regional Sunni majority needs only consider the situation of Coptic Christians in Egypt over the last few months. Even many observers who did acknowledge the reality in Egypt are surprised now in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution to note the uptick in violence against Christians—the kidnappings of Coptic girls and the burning of churches, among other incidents. After all, it was commonly believed before the revolution that sectarian violence was the fault of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who, in this view, had empowered the Islamist movement and thus animosity against non-Muslim communities. But Egypt’s Muslim-Christian divide was not about Mubarak, any more than the United States was responsible for the murder of Christians in Iraq or Israel is responsible for the flight of Christians from Bethlehem and other towns in the West Bank.

Nor did sectarianism begin, as many believe it did, with the age of European colonialism, or with the Ottomans. While the French, the British, and the Ottomans hardly played constructive roles in taming the region’s sectarian furies, the problem goes back much further, at least to the Arab conquest of what we have come to call the Arabic-speaking Middle East.

The pact of Omar, named for Omar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph after Muhammad, stipulated the various laws and restrictions under which non-Muslims would be allowed to conduct their affairs. Their relative freedom, or burden, depended on the disposition of the particular caliph or the local authorities, but their legal status was never equal to that of Muslims. They were protected people, known as dhimmis.

Some regional minorities, by dint of their temperament and accidents of geography, were able to defend themselves with some success. Lebanon’s Maronite and Druze communities, for instance, made their strongholds in the mountains where they could cut intruders to ribbons. It is well known that the Druze community tends to align itself with the local power regardless of whether they’re based in Lebanon, Syria, or Israel. Historically the Maronites are somewhat more stubborn, and perhaps one of the great tragedies of the Lebanese civil war is that in its aftermath large parts of this proud community under the leadership of Gen. Michel Aoun have aligned themselves with the country’s Shia militia, Hezbollah. Part of the reason for that is the Maronites’ historical fear and hatred of the Sunnis and the wish, as Aoun has explained, to be protected against them by the Shia. This is the same reason why those Syrian-Americans in Michigan rallied in support of Assad: They feared what the Sunnis might do to their relatives.

The price of being a dhimmi is not just physical fear but intellectual confusion and moral corruption. Arab nationalism is largely the work of ideologues drawn from Middle Eastern minorities like the Syrian theorist of Baathism Michel ’Aflaq, who was Greek Orthodox. Arab identity, at least in its earliest iterations, was largely a product of the minorities’ desire to hide their sectarian identities from the Sunni majority. The minorities believed they had a better chance of blending in as part of one massive super-tribe, the Arabs, when as Christians or members of heterodox Shia sects like Alawites they were vulnerable. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and Syria’s former president, embraced Arab nationalism in order to legitimize his rule over Syria’s Sunni majority and protect his Alawite community. The present uprising in Syria shows that the thread is starting to become undone—sectarianism is starting to rear its head, and the minorities are terrified of the mostly Sunni opposition in the streets of Syrian cities.

It is hard not to sympathize with the regional minorities and their fear. However, it is also difficult not to be appalled by their support for a regime that is slaughtering children. One picture from the Dearborn event shows three Christian clergymen in the front row, all of them evidently supporters of Bashar al-Assad, which is unfortunately a common position among Syria’s Christian clergy, Catholics, and the Orthodox. “Definitely the Christians in Syria support Bashar al-Assad,” Yohana Ibrahim, the Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo told Reuters last month. “They hope that this storm will not spread.” The rather inconvenient fact for the archbishop is that Assad is trying to quell that storm by torturing and murdering people. The question is: What can be the point of preserving a Christian community if its values have been so thoroughly perverted? Or how many Sunni corpses is a church worth?

It’s not just Christians and Muslim minority sects who are afflicted with this moral sickness, but Jews as well. Jack Avital, head of the Sephardic National Alliance and a leader of the Syrian-Jewish community of North America, has been in touch with Syrian officials in Damascus and in the United States and seems to think Assad is an “honest guy” who is “protecting the minute Jewish community still in place in Damascus.” Avital thinks a regime that buries its opponents in mass graves is OK because in Syria “the Jewish community is doing well.” Compare this repugnant calculation to the position of all of Israel’s senior officials, from the prime minister and president to the defense and foreign ministers, who have condemned Assad’s massacre.

How did the Middle East’s Jewish minority escape this sickness? The state of Israel. Of all the Middle Eastern states carved up in the aftermath of World War I, Israel is the sole success story—politically, economically, socially, and technologically. Moreover, it has safeguarded the lives of a regional minority with minimal oppression of and maximum participation by other groups who are also citizens of the state. By establishing a Jewish majority in Palestine, Israel distinguished itself from other regional minority groups that succeeded in gaining control of a state while remaining minorities, like the Alawites in Syria, whose record has been one of stagnation, oppression, and plunder.

So, when it comes to the Holocaust, maybe the Arabs are right: The crimes of Europe need not justify the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. There is plenty of justification to be found in the Middle East. Without Israel, the region would lose its one success story—and the Jews of the Middle East would be yet another group of fearful, oppressed, and vulnerable dhimmis.

For more than 20 years—through both Republican and Democratic administrations—bolstering the Assad regime and securing a peace deal with Israel have been important goals of both American and Israeli policy. In the decades-old fantasy that Washington policymakers now appear to be abandoning, Bashar, like his father Hafez before him, was seen as a pragmatist who would forgo his alliance with Iran and Hezbollah in exchange for Israel returning the Golan Heights. So what if Israel was giving up a strategic plateau that the Syrians could use to rain down fire on the villages of the northern Galillee as they had before 1967, went the thinking—there was going to be peace with Syria.

Unlike the Palestinian track of Middle East peace negotiation—which was beset by competing factions and the meddling of Arab neighbors—the Syrian track, managed by one Arab strongman who can make and enforce decisions, was seen as the easy peace. Israelis would finally get to have hummus in Damascus! Negotiations advanced far, under both Prime Minister Ehud Barak and other Israeli leaders.

But over the last three months, the premises on which this joint American-Israeli policy were based have been shown to be insane. Assad’s actions—the torture, mutilation, and murder of teenagers, using tanks and artillery to lay siege to towns, and now the use of helicopter gunships against unarmed civilians—are a public repudiation of every one of the premises of what has been the dominant school of thought in Israel-Syria relations. And yet almost no one has said anything about these ideas being wrong—a silence that means that regardless of who ends up ruling Syria, the Golan is going to be on the table again, and American and Israeli officials are going to be pushing Israel to make a peace deal with Damascus.

Among the few pundits who have admitted they were wrong is Israeli columnist Sever Plocker of Yediot Ahronoth. Long a believer that “Israel can achieve peace with Assad’s regime in exchange for willingness to withdraw from the Golan Heights,” as he wrote in April, Plocker now admits he was mistaken. His error, he says, was that he “did not take into account the Damascus regime’s tyrannical character.”

Plocker’s confession is heartfelt, but he’s still wrong. Who did he think was responsible for killing tens of thousands of Syrians at Hama in 1982 if not then-President Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father? Plocker could not see the nature of the regime because he was afflicted with the same vanity that has corrupted Israeli and American policymakers who have sought for decades to arrange for the lamb to lie down with the lion, and be crowned as peacemakers: an obsession with peace, which blinded them to the character of a regime that murders its own citizens with conscience. He is still wrong because he thinks the problem is simply that Israel should not make peace with such a regime, when the reality is that peace is not in Israel’s power to make. Jerusalem cannot make a deal because the Syrians are incapable of cutting such a deal. The reasons for this are strategic, historical, and existential.

The strategic reasons have been obvious for years, even as many U.S. and Israeli officials have chosen to ignore them. It is only Damascus’ proxy war with Israel, through its alliance with Iran and support for Hezbollah, that has earned this state sponsor of terror the prestige that U.S. engagement has afforded this mid-sized Arab state with very limited natural resources. The regime’s self-image requires it, as Assad said in a speech Monday, to demand respect according to its historical size, not its geographical size. For U.S. diplomats, a peace deal means that they get to take Syria off their to-do list and move on to other problems. But for Assad it means that he has cashed in the only chips he had and is no longer able to project regional or international power.

Some argue that knocking Syria down to size would leave it resembling something like Jordan: a second-tier Arab power without oil. The difference is that unlike Jordan’s Sunni Hashemite royalty, Syria’s ruling family is drawn from its Alawite minority, and it is received wisdom in the region that minority regimes can’t cut a deal with Israel. Only the Sunnis, the regional majority, have the final say over such major decisions in the Middle East.

For centuries, the Sunnis have had it in for the Alawites, whom they consider heretics. Prior to Syrian independence, a group of Alawite notables petitioned the French mandate authorities for their own state so that they would not have to live with the Sunnis. “The spirit of hatred and fanaticism embedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion,” read the letter—one of whose signatories was Suleiman al-Assad, said to be Bashar’s great-grandfather.

Eventually, the Alawite accommodation with their countrymen was to out-Sunni the Sunnis regarding Israel. After Hafez al-Assad lost the Golan to Israel twice, first as defense minister and next as president, he turned to resistance, a trend amplified by his son. While Assad warns that he’d be replaced by the much more dangerous Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamist factions should his regime be toppled, the current ruling structure is the exaggerated cartoon version of a radical Sunni regime, which is to say that if Assad falls, there’s nothing worse that will follow.

In fact, some argue that a Sunni regime might represent the best chance for a peace deal, as Israel’s two peace treaties are with Sunni powers: Egypt and Jordan. And yet some analysts seem to have misunderstood the significance of the opposition’s chant, “No Iran, no Hezbollah. We want a Muslim who fears God.” To be sure, the Sunni-majority opposition is against the Shia-led resistance bloc, but not because they favor living in comity with their Jewish neighbors in Israel. It simply means they despise the Shia and their allies, like their own Alawite regime, as well as Israel.

Syria is not a state in the Western sense but rather is an interlocking network of tribal and sectarian systems. At present, the clique around Assad, including the security services and paramilitary forces, represents the most powerful gathering. They have spilled rivers of blood in tribal areas like Daraa not because they do not understand that their murders and mutilations have incurred blood debts against them that will last generations, but to show that they are powerful enough not to care. In other words, any peace treaty signed by Syria’s ruler would not be between states, but between confessional sects and tribes. The Alawites can’t cut a deal with the Jews, because they don’t have a deal with the Sunnis.

The Assad regime is the culmination of many hundreds of years of intra-Arab civil war. Before Syria’s ruling establishment is capable of making peace with Israel, it will have to preside over a peace process between Syrians themselves. And before that can happen, Syrians are going to have to get tired of shedding each other’s blood. That’s some way off yet. In the meantime, there’s no point in leading the Israelis to slaughter as well.

Well, by the kind of people who might feel comfortable custom-building a compound 100 meters from Pakistan’s leading military college to house the world’s most wanted terrorist.

It is no surprise that the recent arrests by the Pakistani government of several of its citizens for allegedly helping the CIA hunt Bin Laden is being reported as yet another sign of a growing divide between Washington and Islamabad. The New York Times reported the story straight, quoting the head of the House Intelligence Committee, Michigan Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who accused elements of the ISI and the military of protecting Bin Laden, a fact that you probably don’t need classified access to figure out.

Yet the congressman’s understanding reflects—as does the Times story—America’s broader problem in understanding and engaging with our enemies and allies alike. The significance of the arrests is not that they show that the Pakistani military protected Bin Laden: It shows that elements of Pakistan’s military or its intelligence service, the ISI, were also responsible for Bin Laden’s death.

Until yesterday’s revelation of the arrests there was no indication that Washington had any Pakistani assistance at all in finding and killing the al-Qaida chief. The story was that U.S. intelligence had located public enemy No. 1 by tracking one of Bin Laden’s loose-lipped couriers to the Abbottabad compound. The Americans, the story goes, never said a thing to the Pakistanis for fear that it would wreck the operation. And so the United States relied on satellite surveillance until the day the president gave the go-ahead to the SEAL team that finished the job.

Presumably, the Pakistanis recognized immediately that the story the Americans were peddling was nonsense. Someone in Pakistan—in either the military-security apparatus or from the political echelons—had to have sold Bin Laden to the Americans. I think it’s safe to assume that, for the last month and a half, Pakistani officials have been working to find out who bartered their prize away—and what they got in return.

It is possible that some Pakistani police and counterintelligence officials investigating the operation are motivated by sentimental or ideological reasons: They liked and sympathized with Bin Laden. Others realized that for all the noise about the refuge and killing of Bin Laden in Pakistan being an embarrassment to the army and ISI, this was a choice opportunity to stick it to the Americans, again, and make some money in the bargain. The five CIA informants that the Pakistanis have so far arrested—including an army major and the contractor who built Bin Laden’s house—are little fish that the Pakistanis are dangling to see what the Americans will do, or pay, to protect the key Pakistani assets who gave them their orders.

Even more interesting is the American version of the story, which is helpful mainly insofar as it illuminates the current U.S. position after 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The American public wants to believe in a simple, heroic story of Bin Laden’s killing, if only to celebrate the hard work of our intelligence community and special operators like the SEALs. But let’s remember that for all the excellent work the CIA does—and we are right to keep in mind that the agency’s successes are secret while its failures are public—America’s intelligence record is mixed.

In the winter of 2009, the CIA was tragically caught off guard when an asset of Jordanian intelligence turned out to be a double agent: He walked into a U.S. compound in Afghanistan and killed seven agency officers in a suicide operation. The problem was not that there were seven officers all in one place, but that U.S. counterintelligence had no idea that their prize was working for al-Qaida. Faulty counterintelligence is part of the agency’s Cold War legacy, according to which some of the walk-ins, or people who voluntarily came forward to provide us with information, were apparently Soviet assets. It seems they were simply providing false information—which, when combined with good information, made it difficult to detect that they were still controlled by our adversary. The United States was incapable of knowing what was true and what was false. Some speculate that this Cold War conundrum drove James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary head of counterintelligence, to paranoia. By the end of the Cold War, one of the CIA’s leading counterintelligence officers, Aldrich Ames, was revealed to be a double agent who betrayed nearly every one of the CIA’s assets in the Soviet Union (damage that appears to have initially been blamed on Jonathan Pollard).

Of course, it’s not easy to do good counterintelligence work. Some compare it to an elaborate game of three-dimensional chess. While the analogy seems suitable enough for a middle-class American sensibility that perceives of chess as something daunting, serious, and foreign, it is truly not foreign enough by half. Good counterintelligence requires a type of mind most likely found in this country running a California drug gang. The U.S. intelligence community does not actively recruit such sociopaths into its ranks, so in the end it is often ineffective at doing counterintelligence work in countries that are run by sociopaths.

For example, Leon Panetta, a very skilled political operator with many years of experience in Washington bureaucracies, has no idea what it takes to become chief of staff of the Pakistani army, like Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and to hold onto that position among so many murderous rivals—like the junior officers who want to oust him for his cozy relationship with Washington. Our inability to actually think like the people we are trying to influence or defeat is ultimately a much more fundamental problem than the challenges of securing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Both our adversaries and our allies in the Middle East—the political and military leadership of countries like Syria and Iran and Iraq and Egypt alike—are the products of a kind of finishing school that makes Rikers Island look like Miss Porter’s prep school. What they had to do to secure power and then maintain it is beyond the imagination of any U.S. official who thinks Rahm Emanuel is a tough guy or that the West Wing of the White House is a snake pit or is stung by a slighting mention by Bob Woodward.

So, who are these people? Bashar al-Assad, for instance, has astonished the international community with his slaughter of unarmed civilians because the leaders of the Western democracies are incapable of imagining a “Westernized” ophthalmologist being capable of such violence. His Arab peers know better, which is why they are saying nothing; they’re scared of him, because he is a sociopath who tortures, maims, and kills children without blinking. NATO thought Muammar Qaddafi was a lunatic in funny robes who would fold at the first—or fifth—aerial bombardment of Tripoli. What they missed was the fact that Qaddafi is the kind of funny lunatic who held onto power for four decades while gleefully slaughtering his political opponents, manipulating Libya’s tribes, and stashing billions of dollars away for exactly the moment when the West would try to drive him from power, and who pays African mercenaries a thousand dollars a day to rape his own people.

And so we wonder why things go wrong when we try to engage the Syrians and Iranians, or to get the Pakistanis to choose a side (our side). The fact is that we don’t see the world the way they do.

But thank God for that. We want the American story about Bin Laden’s courier and the heroic SEAL team—a story that is obviously incomplete—to be true because we prize transparency, a workable chronology, understandable motives, and clear loyalties. But the American story will never be true in Pakistan or in the Middle East. Washington likes to pretend it is fighting a regular war against an enemy we can capture or kill, like Bin Laden. But it’s not. It is fighting a war where the United States cannot come down too heavily on Pakistan, even when it harbors mass murderers of Americans, because it needs Pakistan in order to fight in Afghanistan, against insurgents backed by elements of Pakistan’s military-security establishment, who might in turn gain access to Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal. Does that make sense? Not to us. Indeed, as far as the Pakistanis are concerned, the Americans are simply tourists in Afghanistan, albeit well-paying ones. But this is precisely the kind of conflict the Pakistanis are accustomed to.

Keep in mind what Afghanistan is to the Pakistanis: part of their war with India. Because Pakistan fears an invasion by its archrival, it needs strategic depth in Afghanistan where it can regroup in the event it is overwhelmed by the superior Indian forces in the early days of a prospective war. It is to that end that the Pakistanis have cultivated alliances with Afghani insurgent groups allied with al-Qaida. When the Pakistanis refuse to help us in Afghanistan, it is not because they are fighting us, but because they are preparing for war with India.

There is also a second conflict under way in Pakistan: the de facto war for control of the Pakistani state between various cliques of the country’s political and military leadership. Remember that when American officials describe support for al-Qaida and the Taliban coming from elements of the Pakistani security and military establishment, that means there are other elements, too—those with whom the pro-insurgent figures are at war.

America has little to do with either the Pakistan-India conflict or the Pakistani-Pakistani clash. To some Pakistani officials we are a nuisance, and to others we offer them a means by which to fight their internal rivals. That’s why Bin Laden was sold to the Americans by one side. Now it’s time for the other side to get their piece of the pie.

The real question Washington ought to be asking is: After five years of being hidden by elements of the Pakistani state, why was Bin Laden given up now?

But one question still remains: What were they fighting for?

This weekend, Egypt reopened the Rafah crossing into the Gaza strip, which is perhaps a sign that it is time for a reassessment of Egypt’s recent revolution and the legacy of the man it brought down. Hosni Mubarak was considered a U.S. ally because he shared many of our country’s stated interests, including stopping Hamas, a group despised by Mubarak and his security chief, Omar Suleiman. The two men stood against the armed Palestinian resistance movement because they feared their own Muslim Brotherhood, a like-minded counterpart to Hamas, and Iranian expansion, which they saw as a by-product of Hamas’ power.

But Mubarak’s Egypt is no more—the military still rules as it did behind the veneer of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, but Cairo can no longer afford to be a stable U.S. ally. Mubarak has been charged with the capital crime of killing protesters during the revolution, along with assorted lesser crimes. The question then is whether the reportedly ailing Mubarak will die before the state can execute him—maybe it will be done quietly or perhaps, with a flourish, in the middle of Tahrir Square. Egypt’s rulers will spill the blood of Mubarak and his sons when they have nothing else with which to satisfy the hunger of the revolution—which is happening in the middle of an economic crisis that will make it difficult to feed a country of 83 million people.

Maybe someday there will be an accounting of all the fictions that determined our understanding of the Egyptian revolution as it unfolded. In retrospect, it is strange that an American intellectual and political class proved so credulous during the uprising. The Egyptian media and government officials are well-known for a casual relationship with the truth, as well as a tradition of anti-Semitism in the government-owned and independent presses. It was Egyptian officials who claimed that a shark attack on German tourists in the Sinai was engineered by the Mossad, a fable regarded by the U.S. intelligentsia as darkly humorous evidence of an abnormally thwarted culture incapable of distinguishing between reality and a bogeyman engendered by fearful, childish, systemic anti-Semitism.

And yet the international media took every word that came out of the Egyptian street during the revolution as the absolute truth. For instance, there was the notion that the violence of the revolution resulted from Mubarak’s order for the police to leave their posts and throw open the jails. That such an order would be followed throughout the chain of command would be a remarkable feat in a country not known for its bureaucratic efficiency. It seemed not to occur to reporters and policymakers that in the midst of general chaos—and Egypt is chaotic in its nature—many policemen may have simply left their posts for fear of being overrun by revolutionary mobs.

The people who fought with the police in the streets those first few nights seem to have been the same who later turned to violence against the demonstrators as well as the press. But this, too, was blamed on Mubarak, for these people were assumed to be thugs in his hire, as were the men who rode the horses and camels down from the Pyramids. Maybe, as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, it really was pro-Mubarak thugs responsible for the violence against the international press, but there are plenty of other Egyptian outfits hostile to free media, like the Muslim Brotherhood. According to Kristof, however, the Muslim Brotherhood is no worse than the Republican party. Pro-Mubarak thugs were even blamed for the rising tide of violence in post-Mubarak Egypt.

Mubarak was faulted for the anti-Semitism in the Egyptian media and for empowering Islamists while crushing the liberal movement. The facts, sadly, are otherwise. It is true that Mubarak had thrown certain liberals in jail, like the former presidential candidate Ayman Nour, but the former president is hardly responsible the absence of a genuine liberal culture in Egypt. Mubarak did not empower Islamists; he fought them tooth and nail for two decades, and they tried to kill him in Sudan. The reason that the Muslim Brotherhood still exists in spite of Mubarak’s ruthlessness is that Islamism is a powerful political current that represents the flower of Arab modernity and will always have a constituency in Muslim-majority countries. Nor is Mubarak responsible for anti-Semitism in the Egyptian press: The unpleasant reality is that the country and the surrounding region would be anti-Semitic if Mubarak had never been born.

None of these facts seemed to matter—not to the revolutionaries, of course, but neither to the U.S. intelligentsia, even as the narrative fit a familiar pattern. During the revolution, Mubarak came to play the role that Israel and the United States typically play in Egypt: He was the source of all evil. It is only now, as dissatisfaction with the army mounts, that the Egyptian revolutionaries are coming to recognize that the army they welcomed in Tahrir as brothers have always held the real power in Cairo.

The strange fact is that Mubarak was a reformer. Or at least he was considered so by the World Bank and the IMF, which gave Egypt high rankings over the last half decade. The army shared a common goal with the revolutionaries in bringing down Mubarak because it, too, did not want the president’s son Gamal to succeed him, lest he take a cut out of their lucrative business enterprises.

Since the country’s 2004 economic reforms, spearheaded by Gamal Mubarak and his band of technocrats, the country’s economy grew at an average of 7 percent annually. While the common charge is that the country’s economic miracle didn’t trickle down to the lower classes, the inequality index held steady. Moreover, it is not the rural or urban poor who engineered the revolution, but rather a large segment of middle-class youth enjoying the economic upturn who took to the streets on behalf, as they claimed, of all Egypt.

It’s fine if we want to chuck out IMF and World Bank benchmarks for reform, but if we are going to judge a country’s political system according to how many people social media networkers can put on the streets then that is going to mean something different for U.S. Middle East policy. In the case of Egypt, it means American taxpayers are expected to pick up the tab for someone else’s street theater.

The $2 billion that Washington has been giving Cairo every year for 30 years is essentially a bribe to convince Egypt not to shoot itself in the head by going to war with Israel. But the problem isn’t just that 1981 money doesn’t cover 2011 bills. Since the revolution, tourism, one of the country’s major sources of revenue, is way down due to the instability and ongoing violence, including several attacks against Coptic Christians, and $13 billion in foreign exchange reserves has fled the country. Egypt is not going to woo back foreign investors at this point, not just because of instability but because the policy is associated with the once-ruling family now on trial for its life.

So, how does Egypt, the world’s largest importer of wheat, feed itself if prices continue to rise because of a severe drought in China, the world’s largest exporter of wheat? Egypt’s new rulers need to show—by opening up Rafah, letting Iranian ships pass through the Suez Canal, brokering a reconciliation deal between Hamas and Fatah—what a new Egypt could look like, one that would threaten to spin dangerously out of the U.S. orbit unless the Americans pay up.

This gambit is nothing new for Egypt, which performed the same ballet under Gamal Nasser during the early years of the Cold War. Nasser used the United States and the USSR against each other to get what he wanted—prestige, power, and American money. It worked even after he concluded the 1955 deal for Czech (i.e., Soviet) arms. Sure, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to fund Nasser’s Aswan Dam project, for which the Soviets eventually footed the bill. But in 1956, Washington still thought highly enough of Nasser to demand that their British, French, and Israeli allies withdraw their invasionary forces from Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Only in the aftermath of the 1973 war with Israel did Egypt, now under Anwar Sadat, ally itself with the United States, a deal that Mubarak kept faithfully for 30 years.

Of course there is no longer a superpower rivalry, which is good for U.S. strategy in the big picture. But Egypt’s brinksmanship will still present plenty of headaches. Iran is not going to give the Egyptians money; and even if the Saudis don’t renege on the $4 billion they’ve promised Cairo, that’s hardly enough. The only place to turn is Washington, but the $1 billion in debt relief and the other billion in investment we’ve promised is evidence we don’t have the cash either.

Without bread, Egypt will turn to spectacles, and so the Mubaraks will probably hang. And after Egypt has purged itself of that evil, it will turn again to the evil that has plagued the Egyptian imagination since 1948: the Zionists and their backer in Washington. Cairo, say Western rationalists in the press and policy circles, knows it would lose any war with Israel and does not want to forfeit that $2 billion a year from the United States. But there are many other factors that will shape the thinking in Cairo in the months and years to come, and there is nothing rational about a society whose authorities believe that the Mossad exerts secret mind-control over sharks.

Presumably, when Benjamin Netanyahu gets to Washington next week, the Hamas-Fatah deal is going to be at the top of his talking points. Even those in the pro-Israel camp who were pushing the prime minister to make concessions to the Palestinians recognize that this new partnership jeopardizes the entire peace process. All the money and prestige the United States and European Union have poured into the Palestinian issue has come to this: The carefully tended moderate camp has merged with the extremists. Of course, some will argue that the deal is a sign of Hamas’ weakness and that Fatah will help moderate the Islamic Resistance movement that rules Gaza. In other words, Palestinian unification is all about exposing the Palestinians’ true colors. If you’re a peace-process pessimist, it shows Fatah’s latent extremism; if you’re an optimist, it will make clear Hamas’ pragmatism.

I, too, think the deal reveals something important, which is why I am a big fan of Hamas-Fatah reconciliation—not because I think it will make peace likely, but because I think it is the only way to expose the hypocrisy and moral rot that has been at the core of Western thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict for more than 30 years.

Osama Bin Laden’s death offers a good opportunity to take stock of the larger incoherence of American Middle East policy, whose most outstanding feature seems to be an inability to tell our friends from our foes. One easy yardstick to use might be this: If you enthusiastically support a man whose grand strategy consisted of killing as many Americans as possible then you are our enemy. So, why are we seemingly insensible to the fact that Hamas mourned Osama’s passing and its leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, the elected prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, said that his killing was a “continuation of the United States’ policy of destruction”?

I’m actually more comfortable with Haniya’s public devotion to Bin Laden’s memory than with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s conviction that the al-Qaida chief’s death will “mark the beginning of the end of a violent era.” To be fair, though, I suspect Fayyad really means his encouraging words, but in terms of American strategy his statements are useful only as fodder for Western publications that have an interest in furthering the fantastical narrative of Palestinian moderates waiting patiently in Ramallah to make peace while enduring the daily humiliations of a pointless Israeli occupation. Fayyad also says he was “not aware” of Hamas’ condemnation of the killing, which is absurd because his life depends on his knowing what Hamas says about everything—just as his U.S.-sponsored salary and the institutions he seeks to build require him to oppose Hamas. In short, Fayyad is an American invention, the latest in a long series of moderate phantoms that we summon forth to hide the gap between the way we want the world to be and a reality that is often cruel but not often difficult to fathom.

The original model of the imaginary Palestinian moderate was none other than Yasser Arafat, a lifelong believer in one Palestine, who never peddled any illusions about his ultimate aims or the violent methods he was willing to employ in order to achieve them. The myth of the moderate Arafat, the Nobel peace prize winner, the Palestinian Mandela, was a Western invention. His 1974 U.N. speech promising either an olive branch or a freedom fighter’s gun was clear: If I don’t have peace on my terms, there will be death. This was two years after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and only months after he’d personally ordered the assassination of American diplomats in Sudan. What was Arafat’s peace? He was always clear about this—it meant Israel’s destruction.

To fulfill those ends, Arafat tried to topple the king of Jordan and then drove Lebanon to civil war in the 1970s and ’80s. When the Israelis and Syrians finally drove him out of Beirut, Western policymakers rescued Arafat from watching Tom and Jerry cartoons in Tunis. A Palestinian-Israeli agreement was to be part of Bill Clinton’s peace dividend, and the Americans gave Arafat a makeover. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he was reconstituted as a man of peace.

Arafat never asked for the Nobel Peace Prize he shared with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin in 1994. It was given to him as part of a Western pantomime. He announced his intentions clearly when he said that the Palestinian movement had made a “strategic choice” for peace. But if peace itself isn’t the point, then what could possibly be the larger strategy, except the final elimination of Israel?

But why blame Arafat, or any of the Palestinian leadership, including Hamas, for taking American and European money, not giving anything in return, and saying they want more? They believe they’re in the right and that the land they get from Israel is theirs by right. The Palestinians, after all, do not see themselves as the beneficiaries of an international goodwill society, to whom they should be grateful. They are a real people who fight, kill, and die for what they believe in.

The Hamas-Fatah unity government does not lay bare the Palestinians’ hatred of Israel, which has been obvious for decades to anyone who reads the statements of Palestinian leaders or the textbooks they distribute to their children. It says nothing about the Palestinians themselves, for the Palestinians—moderates and radicals alike—have never been opaque about their goals. The debate between Palestinian moderates and radicals is a debate over the means, and the timetable, for reaching a common goal. They’ve been encouraged by Western mendacity for decades, and they’ve played a weak hand well.

Rather, Palestinian unification reveals the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the American and other Western policymakers who have been peddling a fantasy of Palestinian moderation and peaceful coexistence for more than 30 years. It is time for us to realize that the suggestion that fine words about peace will discourage people from shooting at each other is not clever or hopeful or even naïve: It is actively immoral. The Palestinians aren’t the liars; we are.

The hunt for Bin Laden was one of the most difficult campaigns ever undertaken by American policymakers, insofar as the failure to kill or capture a single man signaled failure in a much larger war—even if that war was going well. It was also one of the misleadingly easiest campaigns insofar as it promised that the death of one man represented a victory.

The assassination of Bin Laden is a major achievement for the Obama Administration, the intelligence community, and the armed forces, but there is also no mistaking that finally all it amounts to is a parade celebrating a victory in the last war, the war that ended 10 years ago with the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Al-Qaida seemed to be at its height, but looking back it is clear that by this moment it was breathing its last significant gasp. There were to be no more spectacular attacks, and Bin Laden’s field officers were hunted by the United States and its allies around the world. The group’s influence extended as far as inspiring disaffected young men to strap bombs on themselves—a tragedy for their victims, from Madrid to London and Baghdad to Kabul, but al-Qaida’s geostrategic weight was nothing in comparison to Hezbollah and Hamas.

Most important, we’ve known now for a decade that the real problem isn’t shadowy networks of rogue operators, or superteams of comic-book villains like Bin Laden and associates, but the Arab and Muslim states that sponsor terror, like Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and of course Pakistan, whose army and intelligence service appears to have actively protected Bin Laden for much of the past 10 years while receiving tens of billions of dollars in American aid.

It doesn’t take much acquaintance with the language of international politics to read between the lines of Obama’s announcement last night and understand that Bin Laden’s capture happened with the active cooperation of the Pakistani government—after elements of Pakistan’s military and security services that had been hiding Bin Laden either lost out to another clique who saw an upside in handing him over to the Americans, or were themselves persuaded to sell him out. As Obama explained on Sunday night, he was first approached with the intelligence about Bin Laden’s whereabouts in August. The location of Bin Laden’s custom-built compound in a Pakistani army town tells us who those sources probably were—the same people who have been protecting Bin Laden for the past 10 years.

Why now? Perhaps the Pakistani army saw how easily the United States got rid of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and got scared of losing U.S. support. Perhaps the Saudis, who have been a major source of financial support both for Pakistan and for Bin Laden, got tired of al-Qaida’s role in undermining the government of Yemen, which is Saudi Arabia’s next-door neighbor, giving a further opening to Iran to spread its influence in the Gulf.

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But still: Why did the operation to capture one man last more than 8 months? Because one of Washington’s key allies in the Muslim world was negotiating with the Obama Administration and didn’t cut the deal until it was happy with the price. Once they were happy, it was possible for two U.S. helicopters to fly through Pakistan’s sophisticated air defense system, built for an all-out war with India, to get their man.

Just as Bin Laden’s refuge in Pakistan is unimaginable without the long-term cooperation of the country’s leading officials, the entire enterprise of transnational terrorism is inconceivable without the logistical, financial, and often military support of states, which the United States has long tolerated while using its knowledge for its own diplomatic ends. Syria, for instance, has been listed on the State Department’s state sponsors of terrorism list since the register’s inception in 1979, but up until George W. Bush, no one wanted to make too big a deal of it. George H.W. Bush needed Damascus’ support to take on Saddam Hussein in Operation Desert Storm and go to Madrid for peace talks with Israel. The peace process was key for the Clinton Administration as well, which is why it, too, didn’t make too much of Syrian terror. Washington policymakers never took anti-American terror lightly, but they believed that at times there were more significant strategic interests; a state’s support of terrorism was something that Washington could use as leverage.

After Sept. 11, Washington came to see those same state sponsors of terrorism in sharper relief. Washington no longer considered regional regimes as its primary interlocutors, but rather instead as the source—through the neglect of their people, or through active state sponsorship—of America’s biggest immediate national security problem. By pushing its Freedom Agenda, the Bush Administration chose to go over the heads of Arab and Muslim rulers and speak directly to the masses—and for all their differences in style and tone, Bush’s successor sees the problem roughly the same way.

The entire point of Obama’s Cairo speech was to address the “Muslim world” even as he undermined a longstanding U.S. ally in his own capital—a dynamic that achieved one of its desired ends when Mubarak stepped down from office in February.

So, while Obama is believed by many in pro-Israel circles to have a special animus against the Jewish state, the truth is that his positions on Israel are part of a larger philosophical and strategic approach to the region that seeks to position the United States as a champion of the Muslim masses against the regimes. Arab-Israel peace is how the United States proves its bona fides. If Obama squeezes Jerusalem more than have other U.S. policymakers of the recent past, that’s because Israel is a strong country and a U.S. ally in good standing that can withstand the pressure—especially, in Obama’s view, since American success in winning Muslim hearts and minds will benefit Israel in the long run.

As far as the real American war on terror goes—the war that we have been waging under two presidents since Sept. 11, 2001—finding Bin Laden was never the issue. The question is what ideas do you use to wage a successful cultural war in the Middle East?

Essentially there are two different tactics. The first is to inject our own ideas of democracy, women’s rights, and minority rights into Arab politics, the downside being that such ideas will only appeal to a minority of people in the region. It’s hard work winning a cultural war if you keep telling the people you’re trying to convince that their values are wrong. If Bush believed that the only remedy for the failures of Middle Eastern political culture was democracy, his fault was in failing to see that sick political cultures are not immediately susceptible to remedy. The other approach is to temper some of your own values, to make room for the ideas of your interlocutors.

Obama appears to believe, not incorrectly, that his predecessor was too dogmatic, and that sometimes you can get more done by listening than speaking. His problem is that the more he is willing to bend on American values, the more he is going to be tilting toward the political culture that gave us the figure whose death we’re now celebrating. Bin Laden’s death, which was celebrated by Americans in Times Square, Detroit, and baseball parks, was publicly mourned by the leadership of Hamas in Gaza, with the elected Palestinian Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, referring to the dead al-Qaida chief responsible for the murder of more than 3,000 Americans as a martyr. “We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior,” Haniyeh told reporters. “We regard this as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood.” If dialogue has limits, then this should be it. And if it isn’t, it is unclear what we are fighting for.

But what if it doesn’t come to an end? Last Friday more than a hundred people were killed in 18 cities and villages around Syria. Another 100 disappeared with no record of their arrest. On Saturday, snipers shot mourners trying to bury their dead. On Monday, tanks and infantry units surrounded the city of Deraa, where the uprising first broke out six weeks ago. So far, at least 400 are dead, a higher total than in Egypt, which has roughly four times the population of Syria.

So, what should Washington do next? Previously, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained that the United States intervened on behalf of the armed Libyan rebels because the regime’s forces were firing on their own people from airplanes. Presumably, then, so long as Assad continues using only tanks, snipers, and battalions of army troops against peaceful demonstrators, he is safe. There are rumors of sanctions that may target Assad’s brother, who has led some of the shock troops against protesters, but probably not the president himself. As one administration official explained, Assad “sees himself as a Westernized leader … and we think he’ll react if he believes he is being lumped in with brutal dictators.”

There is some legitimate concern about what happens if Assad falls. Who will rule Syria next? Perhaps, as Assad warns, there is a powerful Islamist current that will come to power in this Sunni majority (70 percent) country now controlled by a ruling clique drawn from the minority Alawite sect. But Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, decimated the Muslim Brotherhood during the ’70s and ’80s, culminating in the 1982 destruction of Hama, where tens of thousands of Syrians were slaughtered by the country’s security forces. Most of Syria’s Salafist groups have been penetrated by the regime and used against its adversaries in Lebanon and Iraq. So, the Islamist current in Syria is hardly as powerful or cohesive as Assad’s apologists make it out to be.

The Obama Administration’s cautious Syria policy is not pragmatic and realist; it is, rather, an ideological fantasy. The White House is worried not about what happens to U.S. interests after Assad, but about how to salvage a campaign promise that has been thwarted by reality. The Obama White House is sheltering Assad for the same reason it was slow to support Iran’s green movement when it took to the streets in June 2009. Just as Obama held out hope for talking to the Islamic Republic, he still wants to engage Syria. The Obama Administration’s entire Middle East policy is premised on getting Damascus back to the negotiating table with Israel. Accomplishing that goal, the administration believes, will not only win the United States the favor of the Arab and Muslim masses, but it will also drive a wedge between Syria and its ally Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always been pessimistic that Washington could separate Damascus and Tehran. Nonetheless, official Israel isn’t saying much these days, because no one has any idea of what follows the Assads, or if it would be better or worse for Israel. The Assads have kept the border on the Golan quiet since 1973, even as they’ve waged war against the Jewish State through proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas, built secret nuclear facilities, maintained thousands of missiles armed with chemical warheads pointed at Israeli cities, and aligned their interests with Iran. In spite of this, there are almost as many Israeli officials as there are U.S. policymakers who believe Syria wants a peace deal—Defense Minister Ehud Barak most prominent among them.

And yet over the last 30 years it is Syria more than any actor that has brought war to Israel, on its borders and within, through terrorist assets and allies. If Damascus has not itself waged direct state-to-state war on the Jewish State, it is not because it doesn’t want to but because it cannot. Nor can it make peace with Israel. Forget for a moment the strategic reasons why Syria can’t sign a deal—that if Israel returns the Golan Heights as part of a full peace agreement the Damascus regime loses a legitimacy based on its war footing, or that without war against Israel, Syria no longer gets to burnish its prestige by bargaining with Washington. Consider instead the nature of the regime: A ruling clique whose snipers shoot its own children is not going to make peace with its own people, let alone with Israel.

The other problem with the fantasy of a Syrian peace track is that the peace process no longer exists. Obama unwittingly threw it under the bus when he abandoned Egypt President Hosni Mubarak, who kept the peace with Israel for more than 30 years at some personal risk to his own life. By trashing Mubarak, the White House showed that the so-called peace process isn’t really all that important to Washington. In Egypt, winning the love of the masses meant siding with the young social media activists-cum-populists and the Muslim Brotherhood when they wanted to pull down a U.S. ally who supported the most consequential peace treaty between the Arabs and Israel.

Nonetheless, the Obama White House has no other tricks up its sleeve in the Middle East. The Palestinian track has become reduced to Washington, the one-time regional power-broker, now petitioning Abbas to refrain from unilaterally announcing statehood. The hopelessness of the Israeli-Palestinian track is one reason why the administration keeps insisting Assad live up to his billing in Washington as a “reformer.” In reality, Assad put away any thought of reform a little less than a year after he took power following his father Hafez’s death in 2000. The so-called Damascus Spring was short-lived because Assad, only 35 at the time, knew then what the 82-year-old Mubarak would only understand when it was too late—opening the door to reform gives your opponents enough leverage to push it wide open and toss you out.

In the aftermath of Mubarak’s downfall, no Arab regime has failed to observe the lesson. Hence, instead of reforming a vicious political system that permits Bahrain’s ruling Al Khalifa family to treat the country’s Shia majority as second-class citizens, the government of Bahrain called in a 4,000-strong Gulf Cooperation Council force to terrorize Shia. Instead of reforming their medieval system, the Saudi royal family merely bought off their subjects with a $93 billion bribe.

When Obama officials call Assad a reformer, they are not making excuses for Assad but for themselves. Were they to admit to themselves and others that the Syrian president is a serial murderer of his own people as well as of Americans and their allies around the region, including Iraqis, Lebanese, Israelis, and Palestinians, Washington might have to design a new Syria policy. But in place of a rational intellect and a moral center, all the White House has is an imaginary peace process, a pipe dream that requires the “reform-minded” Bashar al-Assad to come to his senses and engage with Washington.

America’s special treatment of Syria long precedes the Obama Administration, as I’ve noted. U.S. diplomats have been coloring the Assads (the son and before him the father) in favorable hues ever since the family came to power. “Hafez always keeps his word” was the favored slogan of U.S. envoys for years, even as the Syrian president’s terrorist assets killed U.S. citizens and allies. American policymakers just back from Damascus liked to describe Hafez as a tough bargainer who can talk for hours straight without permitting his interlocutors to go to the bathroom. That is to say, U.S. officials turned the degradation that Hafez served them into a gourmet meal.

In the end, concern over who follows Assad is just another way of covering for the inadequacies of Washington’s Syria policy. It doesn’t matter who rules Syria—whether it’s ruled by the country’s well-educated merchant class, the Islamists, or, while unlikely, a broad multi-sectarian coalition of liberal democrats. Maybe, as one Lebanese journalist told me recently in Beirut, no one will rule Syria for some time. One likely scenario for Syria is that it will return to its pre-Assad character, scored by coups and counter-coups, a country that is a problem only for itself and incapable of exporting its problems to its neighbors as Damascus has done for the past 40 years—with Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, as well as Israel.

Sure, things can always get worse, especially in the Middle East. But not in Syria. It can’t get any worse than the Assads’ regime, or, rather, what could be worse? A regime that actually fires those chemical warheads at Israel, or activates its secret nuclear program and builds a bomb? The only limits the regime in Damascus knows are those that have been imposed from without, and not often enough by Washington. The end of this cancer might go a long way toward healing an American policymaking community whose Syria policies have been riddled with moral sickness for almost half a century.

Official silence over the killings in Syria is the fruit of America’s very weird love affair with one of the world’s leading state sponsors of terror. This emotional attachment, shared by U.S. policymakers, diplomats, and our intelligentsia, has been going on for decades, but it has reached a kind of apotheosis during the Obama Administration, during which officials have rushed to podiums across Washington to apologize for a regime that is picking off its own people with sniper fire.

“Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week. Caught by critics in that absurdity, Clinton tried to ameliorate her comments by explaining that she was merely relaying the opinions of others. But even then, she went back to the well of fantasy one more time. “We’re also going to continue to urge that the promise of reform will actually be turned into reality,” Clinton said.

Maybe it’s because Sen. John Kerry is a likely replacement for Clinton as secretary of State that he veered in the other direction and criticized Assad last week. Or maybe it’s just because he’s finally come to realize that he’s been made to look like a fool over the last few years by hawking a pro-Syria line. Even as recently as March 16, Kerry praised the Syrian president for the generosity he personally extended to the former Democratic presidential candidate during his half-dozen visits to Damascus over the last half-decade. And at the State Department, there’s Syria hand Fred Hof who, according to former Washington policymakers, doesn’t like hearing ill spoken of this murderous regime lest it shatter his dreams for an Israeli-Syrian peace deal—and his pet project, a “peace park” in the Golan Heights.

Still, self-delusion regarding Syria has been going on for years in Washington—regardless of which party is in office. The George W. Bush Administration spent several years trying to offer inducements to get the Syrian regime to alter its behavior, before it finally withdrew the U.S. ambassador to Damascus over Syria’s suspected involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. When Bush’s rivals wanted to take him on, Syria was one of their favorite venues. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, for example, made a memorable shopping tour through the charmed arcades of Damascus’ markets while the Syrians were killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Even in the 1980s and ’90s, Syria occupied a privileged position in Washington—immune to rational calculations or moral revulsion about the behavior of its leaders. President Bill Clinton’s secretaries of State, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, wore themselves out with shuttle diplomacy trying to placate then-president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father. And George H.W. Bush’s secretary of State, James Baker, turned a blind eye to Syrian-backed terror to kick-start the Arab-Israeli peace process.

That self-abasement of U.S. diplomats in Damascus is a longstanding habit of American Middle East policy doesn’t explain why they keep behaving this way. Our government does lots of bad things in the Middle East on behalf of what it says are U.S. interests. Some of them are done intentionally, like backing the ruling regime in Bahrain even as it brutally represses a peaceful Shia majority. Some are done absent-mindedly, like when George H.W. Bush’s administration encouraged Iraqi Shia and Kurds to rebel against Saddam Hussein and then did nothing to protect them from his retaliation.

But just because Washington’s willingness to give a free pass to the Syrians can be well-documented doesn’t make it any less weird; in fact, none of the oft-cited reasons for U.S. support of the Syrian dictatorship make any sense at all. If the Assad regime is key to the Arab-Israeli peace process, then it’s not clear why the White House helped usher out Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who abided by the Camp David accords for 30 years at some personal risk. Assad, on the other hand, uses the peace process as leverage to enhance his regional position while he sponsors Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel. In fact, before the protests started in Syria, Assad claimed that it was his lack of relations with Israel that made his regime safer than the former Egyptian president’s. Syria is stable, said Assad, because its policies are “very closely linked to the beliefs of the people.” In other words, if the Syrian people prefer resistance to peace, there’s no way he’s ever going to sign a deal.

Maybe Washington is protective of Syria because, as U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh is fond of claiming, Assad was once very helpful in rounding up terrorists. But, then again, the Obama Administration is looking to remove Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has waged a campaign against al-Qaida on our behalf; Damascus, in contrast, has served as a transit point for al-Qaida fighters to go into Iraq to kill American soldiers.

Maybe Washington supports Syria because it believes Assad’s admonitions that getting rid of his regime will create a vacuum that will be filled by al-Qaida or other Sunni extremists. But if that’s the case, why is the administration committing U.S. resources in Libya in order to back those rebels fighting Qaddafi, aka al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb? Washington has long feared that Assad will be replaced by a Muslim Brotherhood government, but that alibi is no longer serviceable since the Obama Administration’s trashing of Mubarak gave the Brotherhood political clout in Egypt that it never had under the tenure of our long-time ally.

Maybe it’s because under President Barack Obama’s new multilateral dispensation his administration is following the lead of our European allies on Syria, just as we are on Libya. The Europeans are scared of bringing down Assad, said one European diplomat, because in Syria “you have some extremist networks, connections with Iran, Hezbollah.” Yet those networks exist in Syria because of the regime already in place, the stated policy of which is to ally itself with Iran and Hezbollah.

When the Syrian protesters first took to the streets, they chanted, “No to Iran, No to Hezbollah,” which suggests they share an interest with the Obama Administration, which believes that separating Syria from its ally Iran will weaken Tehran. But if that’s the case, the White House ought to do all in its power to enable anti-regime forces to do their work, for if the ruling Alawite clique falls, it will be replaced by a Sunni regime that will separate itself from Iran as a matter of course.

It’s just plain illogical that Washington won’t come out against Damascus. And in the Middle East, when things are most illogical, folks point to Israel as the prime mover. Lots of Arabs think the United States won’t do anything about Syria because the Israelis are calling the shots and they’re happy with a relatively weak regime that for 40 years has kept the border on the Golan Heights one of the quietest in all of the Middle East. And yet the truth is that over the last few years the Israelis have done just about anything they could to damage the Syrian regime’s prestige. They killed hundreds of Syria’s praetorian guard in Lebanon in the 2006 war against Hezbollah. They assassinated Hezbollah legend Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus; and an Israeli sniper brought down Gen. Mohammed Suleiman, who handled many of Syria’s most sensitive portfolios, while he was vacationing in the Alawite stronghold of Lattakia. Perhaps most important, the Israelis destroyed Syria’s secret nuclear facility in Deir al-Zour in 2007—against the wishes of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Maybe in the end the U.S. soft spot for Syria is just a matter of aesthetic preference. As Robert Kaplan documents in The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite, starting almost a century ago the State Department’s Middle East specialists swooned over Damascus’ oriental refinements, the tiled courtyards and fountains secreted behind monuments of Mamluk and Ottoman design. Perhaps our diplomatic aesthetes share a sensibility with the fashion and travel writers who venture into what the Assad regime likes to call the capital of Arab resistance. Most recently, Joan Juliet Buck traveled to Damascus to grovel at the feet of the Assads in a profile of the first lady, Asma, (photographed by James Nachtwey) for Vogue magazine. It’s not surprising a fashionista would be swept away by a woman with good taste in handbags, but that U.S. policymakers and diplomats are blind to this dark regime’s murderous style is something else again.

Because of Passover, Lee Smith will be off for the next two weeks. His next column publishes April 27.

The fact that a wave of revolutions has shaken the foundations of Arab politics without the slightest apparent connection to popular outrage against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians should be surprising to most experts and politicians in the West. For over four decades, the driving idea behind the West’s approach to the Middle East has been the supposed centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to Arab popular anger at the West and its key to ensuring the stability of the West’s favored regimes. That the price tag for this American diplomatic instrument has been thousands of dead Jews and several lost generations of Arabs has, in the upside-down world of Mideast policymakers, made the achievement of an ever-elusive peace deal seem all the more important with every passing year.

This idea was a convenient point of agreement between Washington policymakers and Arab regimes. For Washington, the peace process was a good source of photo ops and a chance to show concern for human rights in the region without interfering with the propensity of America’s Arab allies to torture and murder their political opponents. As for the regimes, they were happy to escape criticism of their own failures—rampant corruption, lack of basic human rights and freedoms, and violence against the Arabs they rule—by blaming Israel.

Now the notion that the genie of revolution in the Arab world can be put back in the bottle by blaming Israel is laughable. Even Arab populations with no special love for the Jewish state know that the regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and now Syria were not loved or hated by their people because of their adherence or opposition to the Palestinian cause. In fact, one of the most baffling things about the current wave of Arab revolutions to professional Middle East watchers must be the complete absence of any mention of the Palestinians in popular demonstrations and regime counter-propaganda alike.

However there is a clear connection between the Palestinian cause and the wave of popular discontent that has upended the foundations of Arab politics. By pushing the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past four decades, the West has helped to underwrite Arab repression at home. The rationale behind the emergency laws in places like Syria and Egypt (even now after Cairo’s “revolution”) is that because of the war with Israel, the Arab security states must be ever-vigilant and therefore forbid their people from exercising basic rights like freedom of speech—or, in the words of Gamal Abdel Nasser, “no voice louder than the cry of battle”—diktats that they enforce through torture and murder.

If the recent wave of revolutions in Arab countries has proven anything it is that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process isn’t even a convenient fiction by which Washington can make nice to the Arabs. Rather, it has been a recipe for failure on a grand scale—social, political, and economic—that has now been laid bare. While the Arab regimes are being held responsible for their failures by their fed-up populations, Washington seems to feel no need to hold itself accountable for the collapse of a set of enabling fictions that has greatly diminished our position in a region that is of crucial strategic importance for the United States both militarily and economically.

***

So, who might have an interest in the sort of disruption and realignments the Jerusalem bus bombing has caused? Maybe it was the Syrians tapping a few of their Palestinian assets to heat things up in Israel. With so many people on the streets of Syrian cities burning pictures of President Bashar al-Assad and toppling statues of his father, Hafez, from whom he inherited this authoritarian Baathist regime, the leadership in Damascus could sure use a lifeline. And the U.S. administration, always on the prowl for another go at the peace process, is happy to throw it one.

Or perhaps it was the Islamic Republic of Iran, attacking Israel through proxies in order to signal to Washington that maybe they’re ready to come to the table at last. If this turns out to be the case, it will be worth remembering that President Barack Obama failed to support the protesters who took to the streets for Iran’s Green Revolution in June 2009—because he wanted to engage an Iranian regime he thought was ready to deal on a host of Israel-related matters, such as Hezbollah and Iran’s nuclear program.

Of course even then the blame couldn’t fall exclusively on Obama. It’s all a matter of perspective, for in reality everyone plays the same vicious hand, from U.S. presidents to Arab regimes, as well as Arab “liberals,” and even the government of Israel itself.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, reached out to Syria when he embarked on a quiet round of negotiations with Damascus under Turkey’s supervision in 2007. Up until then, President George W. Bush’s administration had put the Syrians in isolation after their suspected involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. But Olmert was facing a domestic crisis, including charges of corruption, and he knows how the game works—as soon as the international community gets a whiff of the peace process, everything else is put aside: The Arab regimes get a free pass for killing Arabs if they say they’re willing to talk to the Jews.

Still, Olmert’s opening freed the Syrians from their separation and brought the rest of an international community back to Damascus on bended knee—with France in the forefront. So what if the Syrians tortured their own people, murdered Lebanese journalists and political figures, and helped kill U.S. soldiers and American allies in Iraq, as well as Palestinians and Israelis? Olmert needed some breathing space, and the rest of the world was happy to comply.

***

Whoever attacked Israel last week knows how the game works, too, and sure enough in short order the U.S. policy community jumped to attention. Instead of pushing to cut off the regime in Damascus as the Syrian people braved death to go the streets, American policymakers like Sen. John Kerry and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered their bona fides. “There is a different leader in Syria now,” Clinton said of the man believed responsible for ordering the murder of Hariri. “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” Never mind that her own State department says rather that Syria is a state sponsor of terror; Washington will do nothing to help the Syrians who’ve come out against their own government, because the U.S. president is going to make good on his word to engage dictators, no matter how many Arabs have to die as he proves his point.

The pro-Israel community in the United States must also share in the blame, or at least that large segment of it that has invested its energy and money in backing the peace process. Some say peace talks have to bring in the hardliners, like Hamas and Hezbollah—even as that means empowering those who have most to gain through murder. Those who want to keep the terrorist outfits out of negotiations are less stupid than they are cynical, for they know that in truth any agreement without Hamas and Hezbollah isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Others say that the peace process is phony, but it’s a diplomatic tool that Washington uses to keep our Muslim allies off our back.

And finally there are the Arab “liberals,” those Western-educated intellectuals who fill the editorial pages of the U.S. press with pleas to push harder on the peace process lest we empower the radicals. But at this stage the peace process does nothing except empower radicals by providing them with a staging ground.

The peace process wasn’t so bad when it started. Sure, President Jimmy Carter nearly undermined the prospects for an Egyptian-Israeli treaty when he tried to bring in the Palestinians and Syrians, but Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was savvy enough to escape the American president’s grand plans. And surely Sadat’s idea of reorienting Egypt from the Soviet Union toward the United States was a good thing for the Egyptian people. There’s also a Jordanian-Israeli deal on the books. But we’re just now beginning to see how high the price is.

There are the thousands of Israelis who were killed and injured when Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Palestinian factions negotiated on behalf of Syria, Iran, and others through the use of terror. And there are the thousands of Arabs killed and injured when the Israelis responded. But this is no “meaningless” cycle of violence; rather, it is the product of a deliberate diplomatic process overseen by the world’s oldest democracy. It was the United States that kept going back to the well over and over, with U.S. policymakers telling themselves that anything was worth the chance of peace.

Suicide bombing and the attacks of Sept. 11 were the logical conclusions to a strategy that started with a fund of surplus Arab youth that the regimes could dispose of as they saw fit. It is that same disposable youth that have taken to the streets these last three months—Arab men under the age of 30 who have no prospects because their regimes turned their countries into economic basket-cases and physical torture chambers, with Washington’s blessing. What they got in return for their suffering were the other-worldly fictions of a peace process that have now been laid bare.

The Obama Administration was compelled to join its European allies in going against Qaddafi, but what forced the Europeans to act were the scandals surrounding the British academic institutions—like Leeds University, Glasgow University, the School of Oriental and African Studies, King’s College London, and the London School of Economics—who’d enjoyed unseemly ties with Qaddafi. Most famously, Howard Davies was compelled to resign this month as director of the LSE, to which Qaddafi’s International Charity and Development Foundation donated £1.5 million (about $2.5 million), and which admitted to its doctoral program his son Saif al-Islam, now best known not for his academic endeavors, or even his expensive suits, but for exhorting his allies to “fight to the last man, until the last bullet” in a rambling speech that more closely recalled his father’s tirades than polite London dinner-party chatter.

These highly publicized scandals would make it very difficult for European governments to continue to deal with Qaddafi now that he has turned his country into a war zone. But the main problem for British Prime Minister David Cameron is that, as we recall from the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the United Kingdom’s pension fund is tied to its BP portfolio, and BP has extensive deals with the Libyans. In other words, it is a vital British interest to get rid of Qaddafi, at the very least so that BP and London can continue their key relationship with a major oil-producing state.

The irony then is that it was the intellectuals whose peaceful outreach to Qaddafi made war against the Libyan strongman necessary. The U.K. intellectual and academic elite surely led the way, but their American colleagues weren’t far behind. They all congratulated themselves that they were shaping the dictator’s ideas.

For instance, Rutgers professor Benjamin Barber wrote just last week that he has “no doubt” that his engagement with Qaddafi “ameliorated the consequences of his rule and created conditions conducive to gradualist reform.” How Barber squares this assessment of his contribution to Libya’s future with events unfolding in the country is unclear. What is clear is that Barber turned a blind eye to Qaddafi’s past record, the murders, tortures, and disappearances that were the basis of Hisham Matar’s novel In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize.

In the same category as Barber is Joseph Nye, the Harvard professor famous for his ideas about soft power, or “the art of projecting influence through attraction rather than coercion.” “Sometimes people say soft power is too soft to accomplish anything,” Nye told an interviewer. “It’s an important part of the arsenal of power. When you ignore it, as we tend to have done, it turns out to be quite costly.”

Nye knows that Qaddafi “has long been seen as a bad boy in the West”—a sponsor of terrorism with little respect for human rights—“but in recent years, Qaddafi has appeared to be changing. He still wants to project Libyan power, but he is going about it differently than in decades past.” Does that mean the Bedouin chieftain in the big tent is interested in Nye’s intellectual framework? “Sure enough,” writes Nye, “a half hour into our conversation, he asked how Libya might increase its soft power on the world stage.”

It was clearly lost on the Harvard academic that he is part of Qaddafi’s “soft power” campaign to whitewash his regime’s image. But the Libyan strongman had him at hello—“Qaddafi ushered [Nye] into his tent, where he had five of Nye’s books laid out on a table.” Thus are intellectuals bought off, by showing an “interest” in their work.

Perhaps even more troubling than Nye’s easy virtue is that this academic who specializes in interpreting the behavior of states does not seem to understand that what altered Qaddafi’s behavior—what got him to drop his nuclear program and stop sponsoring terror attacks—was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Qaddafi didn’t want to be the next Arab leader after Saddam Hussein caught live on TV crawling out of a spider hole into the waiting arms of U.S. soldiers. In other words, it was hard power the old-fashioned way that brought Qaddafi to heel, and violence remained the central pillar of the regime long after Nye and Qaddafi exchanged signed editions of their books.

What’s interesting about the intellectuals-and-Qaddafi controversy is that most of the reports have focused on the sums exchanged—the payments that the Monitor Group doled out to Nye, Barber, and the rest, or the contributions Qaddafi made to the LSE. But the issue is not simply money, or else Lee Bollinger and Columbia University would’ve charged the Islamic Republic of Iran for use of the auditorium space that it provided Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the last two years.

The Qaddafi scandal is not an isolated case. Warming to violent rulers is the rule for Western intellectuals rather than the exception—and here the character type was made all the more irresistible by Qaddafi’s eccentric tastes: his Euro-Bedouin couture, the cadre of Amazon bodyguards, the bogus philosophical-political ramblings with third-world pedigree. But whichever way you cut it, this Pierrot of the Sahara is a murderer. If intellectuals can embrace Qaddafi, they will embrace anyone. The issue then is not simply the money.

To be sure, Libya and the rest of the oil-producing Arab states give tons of money to Western universities to promote their twisted versions of Islam and Middle Eastern politics. Cambridge has £8 million from Saudi Arabia and another £4 million from Oman, Kuwait donated $4.5 million to my alma mater, George Washington University, and so on. But if it were simply about cash, how do you explain why Harvard’s Arab alumni association chose to hold its 2011 Arab World Conference in Damascus, under the auspices of Asma al-Assad, wife of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad? Harvard’s vice provost for international affairs, Jorge Dominguez, will be delivering a keynote address in the city that the Syrian regime likes to call the capital of Arab resistance—which served as a transit route for foreign fighters like those same Libyan Islamists going in to Iraq to kill U.S. troops and Washington’s Iraqi allies. Syria has very little oil wealth, so that’s not why Harvard works with a regime that supports anti-U.S., anti-Israeli, and anti-Arab terror.

The relationship between the intellectuals and the regimes started with money, but in order to justify the cash the intelligentsia explained that they were not simply bartering their prestige but rather that the deal afforded them an opportunity to affect change. But what values do they have to share when the transaction has exposed their willingness to sacrifice their values?

This is not about money because no amount of it would enable these academic institutions to affect change among the societies they are engaged with, nor even to teach students from Arab societies. The problem here is not the Arabs, nor even their ruthless and often rich regimes—the problem is the intellectuals. The reason that the Western intellectual class is not able to judge a dictator by his actions is that it does not believe in the moral values that would give rise to the ability to make such judgments. The issue is simply vanity—by which I mean not merely an overabundance of self-regard but a deep and abiding emptiness. There is nothing humanitarian about the class that clamors for the end of a tyrant who had their prestige at a discount.

As many readers will undoubtedly (if imperfectly) recall, the former Defense secretary was heavily criticized for insisting on force levels in Iraq believed to be based on the Bush Administration’s overly optimistic assessment of how the Iraqi people would respond to the end of Saddam’s dictatorship. When it comes to predicting the outcome of recent popular upheaval in the Middle East, Rumsfeld is clearly more cautious. The popular revolutions that have reconfigured the political landscape in Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries, Rumsfeld says, “might be good, might make things more hopeful. But you can also think of it as someone who yells fire in a crowded theater. Who can tell you who will get out safely? Or who will manage that process? This is the perfect instance of an unpredictable situation. It creates an opportunity for vicious minorities.”

When the smoke clears in Egypt and other Arab countries, Rumsfeld believes, those who are most disciplined are most likely to succeed. I ask if that means a willingness to use force. “It can come to that, but first there’s discipline,” Rumsfeld replies. “There is a lack of discipline in the mass of humanity. You have hundreds of thousands, millions of people who don’t know what they want and a handful who do. Determination is worth something. I close my eyes and picture this turmoil and ferment, and this image that comes to my mind is of magnets and magnetic particles. A magnet will draw along these particles in the direction it’s leading. The question is, who are the magnets going to be? People will have their own views and then add to these views an impression of how things are going.”

Rumsfeld is 78 years old and quick to point out that his time on earth has spanned one-third the history of the United States—the country that he has served for more than three-quarters of his life. After graduating from Princeton in 1954, Rumsfeld was commissioned as a naval officer, serving as an aviator and flight instructor. He was an Illinois congressman from 1962 until 1969, when he joined the Nixon Administration as director of the United States Office of Economic Opportunity. He also served as President Gerald R. Ford’s chief of staff and later as his secretary of Defense before becoming President Ronald Reagan’s Middle East envoy—a role made notorious by the frequently replayed image of Rumsfeld’s 1983 handshake with Saddam Hussein, the man his military would later depose. But it is his last position in government, his second stint as secretary of Defense, from 2000 to 2006, by which history will largely judge Rumsfeld. And if the recent uprisings against Arab regimes are any indication, history may come to look more kindly on President George W. Bush’s administration than seemed likely when Rumsfeld left office.

Rumsfeld’s recently published memoir, Known and Unknown, currently No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list, was four years in the making. “I didn’t think I’d write a book,” says Rumsfeld. “Then I thought I’d write a faster one.” Rumsfeld and his staff of young aides, editors, and fact-checkers have also set up a website with all of his many papers, memos, and briefings, so that “anyone who wants to look up the context for one of the quotes in the book can go to the whole document and check it for themselves.”

Known and Unknown opens with an explanation of one of Rumsfeld’s best-known statements, delivered in a 2003 press conference: “[T]here are known knowns … we also know there are known unknowns, that is to say some things [we know] we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” If Rumsfeld was mocked at the time for his utterance’s apparent obscurity and seeming pedantry, the meaning is clear to any first-year philosophy student: What does past experience tell us about things, and what can it not forecast? In other words, what are the limits to what we know of the world?

Rumsfeld’s uncertainty about the outcome of the series of uprisings in the Middle East is an antidote to the blind optimism of those who see military coups as social media revolutions and hence refuse to see the risks involved, not only to U.S. interests and allies, especially Israel, but to the Arabs as well. “Few things are as exhilarating as hope,” Rumsfeld says. “And few are as frightening as the uncertainty that comes from a situation like this.”

Rumsfeld’s worldview is a combination of a conservatism that springs from the experience of witnessing first-hand the limits of political activism and an optimism that is inevitable for any American who believes, in spite of human nature and the course it has charted throughout history, that sometimes the better angels of our nature gain the upper hand. His style is warm and personable, and it’s not difficult to see how he had the press corps eating out of his hands after Sept. 11—up until, that is, the Iraq war.

Overall, he says, he is disappointed in how the Obama Administration has handled the developing situation in the Middle East. “They should have been quicker off the mark with Libya,” Rumsfeld says. “You would be happy to encourage revolts and uprisings in Iran, Syria, and Libya. We almost can’t lose. It’s hard to think those circumstances could get much worse than they are. Qaddafi’s behavior has been harmful to us.”

Egypt is a different matter. “How you behave with an ally tells other allies how you behave,” Rumsfeld says of the White House’s marching orders to Mubarak. Rumsfeld explains how he had just seen a video in which Niall Ferguson ripped into what the Scottish-born NYU professor believed was the administration’s lackluster response to the crises in Tunisia and Egypt. “I can’t help but agree with what Ferguson said, but it’s easier for him than someone who has been in those positions. I’m slow to judgment.”

Still, as Rumsfeld notes, “Mubarak was helpful in the region and created a period of stability that was helpful to everyone”—Arabs and the United States no less than Israel. “If you were an Israeli that benefited from the Egypt-Israel treaty, which provided a respite from decades of fighting, you just have to be deeply concerned,” he continued. “It’s not that they don’t want the Arabs to have opportunities. But if you were in that situation, you might opt for stability versus opportunity for your neighbors.”

I ask how he sees Israel’s strategic situation in the region and whether the Jewish state will continue to serve as an American asset or turn into a liability. “I don’t look at Israel as an asset for the U.S.,” he says. “Any country that is democratic is an asset to the world, a model. That’s despite all the criticism they get from the U.N., the pressure they get from Iran, and the not-so-latent anti-Semitism in our country and other countries.”

While Rumsfeld’s vision of a smaller, more mobile Army may have been partly responsible for the rocky early years of American occupation of Iraq, it may become even more significant now than when he was in office. Rumsfeld’s successor as Defense secretary, Robert Gates, recently said that any future Defense secretary suggesting land invasions in Africa or Asia should have his head examined—a quip apparently aimed at Rumsfeld. But of course that wasn’t what Rumsfeld advised George W. Bush at all. Instead, he argued for a lighter force to go get Saddam and then leave. It was on Gates’ watch that the U.S. military has placed a premium on its counterinsurgency capabilities. In other words, he has helped turn an instrument designed to fight and kill enemies into one with the purpose of winning the hearts and minds of foreign populations. But because the loves and hatreds of foreigners are by definition obscure to American officials, including all future secretaries of Defense, a military centered on counterinsurgency will soon find itself irrelevant.

It is Gates’ Pentagon that perceives of the U.S. armed forces as potential hostages in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they are at the mercy of Iran and its local allies. And it is Gates who has put the brakes on establishing a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace that might shape the growing civil war there to the advantage of American interests. It’s somewhat paradoxical that Gates’ Pentagon has become more influential in the policy-making process than other bureaucracies, even as it means that American influence is shrinking in the Middle East. And it’s not going to get any easier for Washington to project power there, as it did during the tenure of Rumsfeld’s career.

As some analysts have suggested, Arab regimes are now going to be less likely to cooperate with Washington, whether that’s because their publics demand it or because the region’s political elite no longer trusts us as an ally. For instance, Middle Eastern regimes like Egypt’s and Pakistan’s may not give us the sort of help with terrorist suspects that our intelligence community and military have grown accustomed to.

“There are all kinds of power,” says Rumsfeld. “There’s the visible power to dissuade and deter, the power to impose, the power that comes from a nice marriage of military and diplomatic influence. That influence is greater if you know where to focus it.”

This week I’ll argue the other side—not just that Israel will be fine but rather that it is the rest of the Middle East that is in big trouble. Recent history and statistics show that in order to survive Arab and Muslim societies are going to have to forget about the notion of an Islamic alternative to modernity and will instead have to adopt what they have typically described as Western values but are in reality the universal values of political modernity. Learning to live like the West is not going to come through buying more Western goods—from cell-phones to tanks—or even earning more Western diplomas but by embracing those values as embodied by the one country in the region that lives them. The Arab model for success is not Iran, or Turkey, but Israel.

In its essence, Israel is the West—a culmination of its successes and a symbol of its failures, a reminder of a millennia-old madness, anti-Semitism, and the failure of the Enlightenment. Criticism of Israel is very often a reflection of the bad faith of a Western intelligentsia and political class uncomfortable with its history and unsure of its moral bearings. That Europeans frequently hold negative attitudes toward Israel while the vast majority of Americans are favorable to it can be explained in part by how each society came out of World War II.

Europe’s war, and the mass slaughter of its Jews, revealed that the continent’s great cathedrals were built upon a bedrock of pagan barbarism celebrated in different ways by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. It was left to the United States to pick up the banner of Western civilization and lead the West to victory during the Cold War after the Europeans had trashed it.

Unlike their European cousins, contemporary Americans still read the Bible and understand that the Jewish nation is a historical reality connected to a living narrative that shapes the present in a constructive and desirable way. Americans abandoned replacement theology (or the notion that Jesus’ resurrection superseded God’s covenant with the Jews) after the Holocaust in order to embrace their elder brothers—as did Pope John Paul II, who lent his moral authority to President Ronald Reagan’s conviction that America’s victory in the Cold War was a historical necessity.

That is to say, pro-Israel Americans have also tended to misunderstand Israel’s place in the world. Yes, the point of Jewish self-determination is that the Jews can protect themselves. Yet the West needs Israel to succeed, because its success is a marker of our ability and determination to defend our values and our interests, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

And the truth is that Israel has been doing a remarkably good job of it, especially in the past 20 years. Israel is an IT powerhouse with more companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange than any other country except the United States, and its scientists have produced more tech patents than all of Asia. Last year Israel ranked 17th out of 58 of the world’s most economically developed nations, while the country’s economy was rated the most durable in the face of crises and rated first in investments in research and development centers. The Bank of Israel was ranked first among central banks for its efficient functioning.

Contrasting Israel’s performance with that of its neighbors, most of whom still abide by the half-century-long Arab boycott of the Jewish state, throws Israel’s achievements into even sharper relief. Consider Egypt, with a literacy rate anywhere between 50 to 70 percent, and considerably lower among women. The country’s unemployment rate is believed to be twice the official level of 10 percent, and 40 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. While the Syrian regime proudly supports the resistance, thousands of its own people are suffering with a drought in the eastern part of the country that has ravaged crops and livestock. Iran’s nuclear program and full-throated opposition to the United States and the Zionist entity may make it the envy of some fans of resistance in the region, but the fact is that an Iranian bomb is the Hail Mary pass of a dying society where there’s been no economic development for 30 years.

If you follow these two trend lines, it is easy to project what the fate of these two different civilizations is likely to be. Israel will enjoy the ups and navigate the downs of the global economy and, if the last two years are any indication, will weather those setbacks better than most. For the Arabs things are only going to get worse.

The college graduates who took to the streets in Cairo to protest their lack of opportunity are going to have to keep coming back because the problem was not simply the corruption of the Mubarak regime. Rather, the issue is that the Egyptian people themselves are deluded if they think bogus business degrees are going to earn them a place in a globalized economy. By and large, the Arabs are simply not prepared to compete with the rest of the world. When the oil runs out, it will crush not only the energy-exporting nations but all of the Arab countries whose economies, like Egypt’s, depend heavily on guest-worker receipts from the Arab Gulf states. As such, every weapon purchased by an Arab regime is effectively a down payment on a forthcoming Mad Max vision of the Middle East—including a series of civil wars like the one now under way in Libya.

The only way for the Arabs to avoid that scenario is for them to become more like Israel. Because Israel is the West, it is essential for Arab political, social, and economic development that the people of the region break with the past and embrace the Israelification of their societies. If not, the current popular demonstrations will end in yet another round of benighted dictatorships, as has repeatedly happened in the region, starting with the era of Arab independence in the 1940s.

The other choice—the typical choice—is to fight Israel, which is in the end little but a token of Arab despair. As the Arab uprisings have shown, the problems of Middle Eastern societies have little to do with Israel. So even if the dreams of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the other guardians of the resistance were fully realized and they were able to destroy Israel tomorrow, corruption, repression, and obscurantism would still be rotting away Middle Eastern societies.

The West and its values—what Israel stands for—will survive, no matter how many suicide bombers the Islamic resistance throws at it. That tactic, even if tied to religious concepts like jihad, has a built-in limit to its effectiveness in the face of people who are determined to defend themselves. Hassan Nasrallah mocks those who love life and boasts that the resistance loves death. But in the end, it will make little difference if Egypt eventually joins its army to the forces of the resistance bloc, adding tanks and planes to Hezbollah and Hamas’ rockets, Syria’s missiles, and Iran’s forthcoming bomb. The reality is that the party of life will fight to preserve it, while the party that cherishes death will reap what it desires in abundance.

Nonetheless, I do believe that, as I argued last week, events over the last few years have presented serious threats to the Jewish state—not least of which is a delegitimization campaign waged not in the region itself but from the capitals of Europe. It is a peculiar moment in history, to see Europe tottering on the precipice of resentment and obscurantism while the uprisings in the Middle East over the last two months have shown that the Arabs are perhaps on the verge of something new. Maybe the protests reveal not a revolution as such but a recognition.

Up until now, one of the more bizarre and widespread beliefs in the region is that Israel wants to be the only democracy in the Middle East—as if democracy were a limited resource it needed to hoard, like oil. The uprisings suggest that the Arabs may have come to recognize that, to paraphrase the late Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, liberty is free to everyone, like air and water.

I certainly hope so, for Israel is doing fine and the conclusion of my brief dialectic is that it will continue to thrive. The real concern is for the fate of the Arabs. The longer they continue to make Israel the focus of rejectionism and hatred, the more impossible it will become for them to join the West and arrest the death-spiral of their societies and economies. The inability of Western observers who claim to care about the fate of these societies and their people to make this point clearly and repeatedly has only damaged the cause of Arab social and political development. Now, in the midst of all the excitement following the Arab uprisings, is a moment that calls for such clarity.

Since the beginning of the Zionist enterprise, supporters like Winston Churchill have argued that the Jews of Israel would have a positive influence on their neighbors—that their industry and their values would rub off on the Arabs. Outside of Israel’s own Arab community, that hasn’t yet been the case. Either that will change now or it won’t. But whether the Arabs embrace Israel and the West, or decline into total economic, cultural, and military irrelevance within the next generation, Israel will survive and prosper.

Things have been trending badly for Israel for some time now, but Hosni Mubarak losing control of Egypt makes the Jewish state untenable. That’s right: Israel is no longer feasible. I don’t mean that in the manner the international left usually does—that nationalism is passé and we must move on to higher forms of communal existence. I mean it in the old-fashioned way of nations and peoples who are vanquished when the balance of power tips against them. And I mean it strategically—a tiny country with a Jewish majority of 6 million can’t survive surrounded by enemies and forsaken by its superpower ally.

For several decades American policymakers from both sides of the aisle traveled to the Middle East to explain how much peace there meant to Washington. During the October 1973 war, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s airlifts showed the Arabs that it was futile to make war on Israel while they were backed by an awesome superpower. The Arabs could not hope to beat Israel in war so they would have to petition the Israelis’ U.S. patron if they wanted any concessions. Besides, there were great rewards, such as American military aid, to be had for anyone who would sign a deal—which essentially amounted to a bribe.

Coming to power in Egypt after Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated for signing a treaty with Israel, Mubarak kept the peace and thereby underwrote the integrity of the peace process. Egypt was the trophy that Washington kept on display to show all the other Arab states what they, too, might have should they come to their senses and just sign a deal. But as it turns out, the peace treaty must not have been that important because the man who preserved it for some 30 years in the face of domestic as well as regional opposition—enduring several attempts on his life—was tossed aside by the Obama Administration. In doing so, the United States showed that everything it had ever said about the peace process was total nonsense.

America’s Arab allies were astonished that the White House would treat a close ally like Mubarak as it did; but they were also dumbstruck that the Americans could undermine their own position in the region without a second thought. If binding the region together in a peace process is no longer the cornerstone of U.S. Middle East strategy, what do the Americans have up their sleeve? Washington only has one move, which is to throw Israel under the bus.

Sure, things were bad for Israel even before Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based radical cleric who is the spiritual voice of the Muslim Brotherhood reappeared last week in Cairo to call for the liberation of Jerusalem. But consider the most optimistic scenario for Egypt, in which it follows the Turkish model, once a strategic ally that in the space of just a few years has become moderately hostile. Ankara’s involvement with the Mavi Marmara incident made Turkey part of an international delegitimization campaign against Israel, waged largely in Europe but making inroads now in the United States.

For instance, consider the administration’s bizarre mishandling last week of the Palestinians’ proposed Security Council measure denouncing Israeli settlements. Not only did Washington delay in vetoing a proposed resolution that in the past it would’ve batted down immediately, but the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, felt compelled to make a statement covering the administration’s flank. The veto, she explained, should “not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity.”

Washington, it seems, is tired of having to stick up for Jerusalem. It’s bad enough that having Israel’s back always sets the United States against the rest of the international community, but in the wake of the Arab uprisings, defending Israel also means that Obama has to cross the Muslim and Arab masses he’s courted ever since his 2009 Cairo speech. But nothing Washington is able to wring out of Israel never seems to satisfy anyone. Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 bought it tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets, while its 2006 war there bought it international opprobrium. The 2005 withdrawal from Gaza that was supposed to burnish Israel’s bona fides with the international community only won it more rockets. And after the war with Hamas in the winter of 2008, Israel got the Goldstone Report.

Now, with the end of Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, Washington will have no choice but to move further away from Israel. It’s an understandable move from a superpower whose prestige is waning in the Middle East.

So what of the near future? There will still be a peace process, but it will be rather like a living will, in which the party with power of attorney, Washington, decides when to pull the plug on Israel—and how to dispose of the corpse. Indeed, the Obama Administration still wants talks between Israel and Syria—even though Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has said that a peace deal would cost his regime its life. It is Assad’s resistance to Israel, through his support of Hezbollah and Hamas and Syria’s alliance with Iran, that has endeared him to the Syrian masses. Syria is stable, said Assad, because “you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence … you will have this vacuum that creates disturbances.”

In other words, the peace treaty with Israel that Egypt signed has now been exposed as a suicide pact. In Assad’s view, the former Egyptian president’s great misstep was diverging from the beliefs of his people, who are anti-Israel. Or, as Syria’s foreign minister put it, “the leaders of regional countries should befriend their peoples. That’s the best choice.”

The notion that the Arab masses hate Israel is difficult for Washington policymakers to swallow. Their working assumption for the last several decades is that Arab rulers were responsible for anti-Israel sentiment by redirecting popular anger at their own regimes onto the tiny Jewish state. But as we’re seeing, the Arab public is more than able to voice its discontent with their rulers while also hating Israel. Whether Washington grasps the fact that Arabs hate Israel is immaterial, for Arab rulers cannot afford to forget it without losing their grip. And the United States will have no choice but to make those rulers happy if it is to pursue its interests in the region. Unfortunately, this means that Israel is no longer viable. By which I don’t mean that 6 million Jews are going to be killed, only that if they want to survive they can’t stay in Israel.

According to the president, the way to empower America’s friends is to “get all the groups together in Egypt for an orderly transition and the one that is a meaningful transition.” As if Egypt’s liberal current isn’t weak enough already, Obama believes that the best way to ensure the sharks don’t come out on top is to throw a whole bunch of liberal guppies into the tank as well.

While the parallels between Iran in 1979 and Egypt in 2011 can be overdrawn, it is foolish to pretend that they are not there. Cairo doesn’t have to literally become a Sunni version of Tehran to do terrible damage to U.S. interests and prestige in the Middle East—and to the hopes and dreams of its own people. And the Egyptians already have their own prospective Khomeini: Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based Muslim Brotherhood preacher who exiled himself from Egypt in 1961.

***

Assertions that the Muslim Brotherhood and its leadership are too disorganized and uncharismatic to gain a hold on power in Egypt unaccountably ignore the world’s most popular and authoritative Sunni cleric—an Egyptian by birth and member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood whose son currently lives in Egypt. Where the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the Iranian revolution, made radio broadcasts in exile from Paris, Qaradawi hosts one of the region’s most famous talk-shows on Al Jazeera, Sharia and Life. Qaradawi has cultivated among some American analysts a reputation for moderation with his fatwas, permitting masturbation and condemning Sept. 11 (while supporting suicide bombers in Israel). But in the Middle East his popularity resides in his stringent criticism of Arab regimes. His public support for violence, combined with the fact that he is a principal shareholder in and adviser to the al-Qaida-associated Bank al-Taqwa in Switzerland, led to him being banned from entering the United States in 1999 and from Great Britain in 2008.

What makes Qaradawi most worth watching is the fact that the Egyptian party system is badly decayed, and no credible opposition figures have stepped up to fill the gap. Mohammed ElBaradei is entirely a creation of Western opinion leaders and has no constituency in Egypt. Amr Moussa has some popular appeal, but his job as general secretary of the Arab League is not a position that showcases an ability to get things done. Moreover, as Mubarak’s former foreign minister he has deep ties to the old regime. The local Muslim Brotherhood was slow out of the gate, and its 68-year-old leader, Muhammad Badie, is not exactly charismatic.

As a media personality with a presence on TV and the Internet—and who is far out of reach of Egyptian internal security and free from Egyptian censors—Qaradawi is perfectly positioned to play the role of Muslim Brotherhood publicist or even kingmaker over the coming months. Nor is there any particular reason to think that Qaradawi’s willingness to embrace facets of modernity while promoting violence and hatred makes him less than dangerous to the dream of a future liberal society in Egypt and to Western interests in the region. The idea that Qaradawi is a moderate because he favors a relatively liberal interpretation of the status of women within Islam, for example, disregards his belief that homosexuality is a crime that should be punished by death and his embrace of the Holocaust as a divine punishment of the Jews that will hopefully be repeated soon.

Here, for example, is Qaradawi speaking about the Holocaust to the audience of his popular Al Jazeera television show on January 30, 2009:

Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them—even though they exaggerated this issue—he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.

***

Of course, many foreign and Egyptian observers contend that Egyptians, a moderate people by nature, don’t want anything like the Iranian regime running their country. That may be true, but the only real evidence we have, aside from questionable polling, suggests something different. After all, supposedly secular and moderate Palestinian voters were not impressed with the regional failure of Islamist politics—they voted for Hamas, the Gaza branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Or consider Lebanon, where at least 30 percent of the Christian community has aligned itself with the Khomeinist project in their country via Christian leader Michel Aoun’s alliance with Hezbollah. Presumably Middle Eastern Christians are among the last people who want to live under an Islamist regime, but what they fear and despise most now is the country’s Sunni community. That is to say, there are many reasons that people might choose to go with an Islamist party, many—but not all of which—are irrational. Mubarak’s departure will almost inevitably leave the ruling National Democratic Party’s organizational structure in shambles, which means that the best-organized political party in Egypt will be the Brotherhood.

And it would be strange if, given free elections, the Brotherhood did not eventually rule Egypt, for it has not only been a pillar of Cairo’s political, cultural, and intellectual life since its founding in 1928; it is also the flower of Arab political modernity, which began with Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt.

Napoleon’s conquest left Muslim intellectuals and activists in a bind: If the ummah was, as the prophet of Islam said, the best of all people, then why had it been overrun so easily by the infidels? The answer, said the 19th-century Egyptian intellectual Muhammad Abduh—the one-time mufti of Egypt and rector of Al Azhar, a traditional seat of authority in Sunni Islam—is that Muslims had veered away from the true faith. By the end of the 19th century, Abduh believed, Islam had become riddled with fatalism and superstition; therefore, since Islam was the lifeblood of the Muslims, it was hardly surprising that the ummah was weak. The answer, Abduh argued, was to purge Islam of its non-Islamic excesses—particularly Sufi practices like the veneration of saints and other beliefs associated with traditional Egyptian folklore—and return Islam to the way it had been practiced by the prophet Muhammad, his companions and his earliest followers, collectively known as al-salaf, or the righteous forebears. Thus Abduh and his followers were known as the salafis, and their movement was the precursor of Islamism, or political Islam. Abduh’s biographer was Rashid Rida, the godfather of the Islamist movement, whose most famous disciple was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who in turn inspired Yusef al-Qaradawi.

The fact is that the movement Abduh pioneered is now in the mainstream of Muslim belief, if not always practice. It was Abduh who said Muslims needed to adopt the science and technology of the West, while not abandoning their faith, as Christendom had forsaken their own beliefs for secularism. And this is precisely how the Muslim Middle East has engaged with modernity for more than a century—to take the West’s technology, arms, and consumer goods, but eschew the values, such as freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech, that made those products possible.

No one embodies this cultural schizophrenia better than Qaradawi, a media mogul who has risen to fame on the back of information technology and yet whose information is essentially medieval. Qaradawi approves of wife-beating, he defends female genital mutilation and signs off on female suicide bombers, and he attacks Shia for trying to subvert Sunni nations. To the Iranians, Qaradawi is perhaps not the ideal voice of Sunni Islamism, but insofar as he rises and the Americans suffer, Tehran will make its accommodations.

Yes, it is possible that even though Egypt gave birth to the Islamist movement that is synonymous with Muslim political modernity, maybe the Muslim Brotherhood would find itself thwarted at the polls. It’s a big decision for U.S. policymakers and the president. After all, what right do Americans have to tell the Egyptians who they can and cannot vote for? It is the height of hypocrisy for a liberal democracy to stand in the way of the freely won aspirations of another country. Egyptians have the right to choose their own government and their own future, just as we have the right to call them our friends or not on the basis of the policies that their government adopts.

However, the other argument is that it is not the job of the American president to promote the natural rights of others. Rather, it is his task to protect and preserve U.S. interests around the world, and peace in the Eastern Mediterranean is an important U.S. interest, as is preventing a larger regional war that might ensue from conflict between Egypt and its neighbor Israel. We might as well face the fact that the more political power that the Muslim Brotherhood wields will make that war much more likely—a war that would be not only bad for U.S. interests but also potentially catastrophic for our ally Israel, as well as to our ally Egypt.

The Bush White House believed that the problem with the Arabic-speaking Middle East was in the nature of repressive Arab regimes: In this view, Sept. 11 was the product of a political culture that had been strangled by its rulers, allowing their people no form of political expression except extremism. Deposing these regimes would unleash the native political energies of Arab peoples, went the argument, who would turn their attention away from anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments to the thoughtful participatory governance of their own societies. Accordingly, promoting democracy in the region was not only good for the Arabs, but also in America’s national interest. The first test for this Freedom Agenda was Iraq, followed by Lebanon and then the Palestinian Authority. Egypt is the fourth test—and the most consequential yet, for Cairo is the linchpin of Washington’s Middle East strategy.

Egypt was once commonly referred to as leader of the Arab world—an honorific denoting Egypt’s leadership in the arts, intellectual life, and media, as well as its enormous population of 80 million. And unlike other Arab states—Syria, say, or Saudi Arabia—Egypt has a real history and identity dating back thousands of years. Primarily, however, “leader of the Arab world” referred to Cairo’s political status, specifically its role in the wars against Israel.

When Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s second president, was in office, all his political capital rested on the fact that Egypt, unlike U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Jordan, clamored for war with the Zionist entity. When Anwar Sadat, his successor, brought Egypt from the Soviet to the American side after the 1973 war, it represented a Cold War victory for Washington that paid huge strategic dividends. However, it is one of the paradoxes of U.S. Middle East policy that by signing a peace treaty with Jerusalem, Sadat took Cairo out of the front-line camp and thereby weakened the regional prestige of a key American ally. Of course that treaty also put Sadat in the crosshairs of the Islamists, who killed him at Cairo stadium in 1981, with Mubarak beside him on the reviewing stand.

That peace has not only been good for the United States, securing our hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean, but also of course for Israel. It is that treaty with Cairo that allows Israel the relative luxury to worry primarily about a Persian adversary far from its borders and two terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. The prospect of Egypt, with a large U.S.-trained and equipped army, air force, and navy, once again becoming “leader of the Arab world” is a nightmare for Israel’s leaders.

The U.S.-backed order in the Middle East is founded entirely on Cairo’s position as an ally—and on keeping the peace, as Mubarak has. If Egypt moves out of the American fold, it might well align itself with Iran. Mubarak has known well enough to fear the Islamic Republic—a street in Tehran is named after Sadat’s assassin. Or perhaps it would challenge the Iranians, in the way regional competition has worked since 1948—by seeing who can pose the greatest threat to Israel. Therefore, this fourth test of the freedom agenda could not be more important.

***

Unfortunately, after the first three runs, it’s hard to be optimistic this time. What we’ve seen so far is that the political energies unleashed by the Freedom Agenda are not democratic but tribal, sectarian, and violent. In Gaza, the Palestinian electorate voted for Hamas. In Lebanon, while the majority voted for the pro-democracy March 14 movement, Hezbollah still won power in government even as it embarked on a bloody campaign culminating last week in the party’s takeover of the state. After U.S. forces brought down Saddam Hussein, Iraqis turned on each other, fueled by more than a thousand years of a sectarian rage that was further aggravated by Saddam as Sunnis and Shiites shed blood at a clip typically associated with the grislier sectors of central Africa.

It is true that Egypt is not Iraq. And yet as many seem to have forgotten, only a month ago Islamist militants attacked a church in Alexandria, killing 23 Coptic Christians. To be sure, many Muslims rallied to defend their Christian neighbors, and today there are Christians in the street alongside the Muslim majority, but anyone who thinks sectarian tensions are simply the fault of “extremists,” or the Mubarak regime’s inability to protect Christians, is missing the point: The execution of minorities strongly suggests that a society might not be ready for democracy.

The relevant minority here are the liberals and democrats, for they do indeed exist and Egypt is the historical capital of Arab liberalism, from the novelist Taha Hussein to the journalist Farag Foda. Today there are a number of bloggers, intellectuals, and journalists, like the playwright Ali Salem and Hala Mustafa, editor of the political journal Dimoqratiya (Democracy), who keep the liberal flame alive. The former wrote a book about his trip to Israel and the latter met with the Israeli ambassador, and both were punished for it and ostracized by their colleagues. This is an indication not only of their lack of popularity but also the temperament of Egyptian intellectual culture: illiberal and populist—in other words, undemocratic.

There is some truth to the idea that Mubarak has choked off his liberal opposition, leaving only the Muslim Brotherhood to challenge him, but arguably the Egyptian liberal movement came to an end with the 1926 publication of Taha Hussein’s work on pre-Islamic poetry, which dealt with the historical and literary foundations of Islam. Under pressure from the religious authorities and death threats from Islamists, Hussein removed the passages deemed offensive, and the precedent was set: Men with guns make the rules, which liberals must abide by or be killed. Nonetheless, more than half a century later, Foda challenged the Islamists, and they reminded him how precarious liberalism is in Egypt by gunning him down in a Cairo street in 1992.

The Islamists, represented now by the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, are one of only two political institutions that would survive Mubarak’s downfall; the other is the military. Indeed, Egypt has been run by military rulers more often than not—from the Muslim conqueror of Egypt Amr ibn al-‘As to the Albanian soldier Mohamed Ali, whose dynasty fell to Nasser’s Free Officers in a 1952 coup. Mubarak’s son Gamal’s presidency would have represented something like a coup d’etat against the military, which is why they got him out and chief of military intelligence Omar Suleiman was named vice president, making him Mubarak’s official successor. The awful irony is that Gamal and his gang of young financiers and businessmen probably represented Egypt’s best chance to move away from military rule. At least this is what much of the Washington policy establishment believed, with the hope of getting Gamal to pick up the pace of political reform to match the country’s notable economic reform. If Mubarak goes down, the security forces, the military and the Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, will fight each other, or cut a deal, or both.

***

Consider the other options. The United States wants national dialogue, which seems to include Mohamed ElBaradei. By virtue of his name recognition alone, the former IAEA head has been hailed by the Western press as one of the leaders of the democratic opposition. However, at the IAEA this so-called reformer distorted his inspectors’ reports on Iran and effectively paved the way for the Islamic Republic’s march toward a nuclear bomb. Now the Muslim Brotherhood has named him as their interlocutor. In other words, ElBaradei is nothing other than a shill for Islamists.

There’s also Ayman Nour, leader of the liberal Ghad (Tomorrow) party, who finished third in the last presidential elections before he was jailed on trumped-up charges. Then there’s Saad Eddine Ibrahim, the Arab world’s most famous democratic-rights activist, who was also imprisoned by Mubarak and is now living abroad in the United States. During Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, Ibrahim came down on the side of the Lebanese militia. Ibrahim’s posture was hardly surprising given that his onetime jailer despised Hezbollah. But it is odd that a democratic advocate should applaud war with Israel, a country with whom Cairo has had a peace treaty for more than 30 years.

Maybe this should be one of the tests for Egypt’s democrats in the streets: Where do you stand on Israel? If they are really democrats, or just pragmatists, the young among them protesting for higher pay would answer that warmer relations with an advanced, European-style economy—like, say, Israel’s—would provide jobs for the millions of Egypt’s unemployed. Of course that is not the answer you’re going to get from the young men now filling the streets of Cairo. Or forget about Israel and ask them instead about Hezbollah. Do they support the Islamic resistance? Of course they do, because Egypt’s most famous democrat Saad Eddine Ibrahim supports Hezbollah, the outfit that has turned the remnants of Lebanese democracy on its head while killing its opponents.

No doubt there are real liberals and democrats in Egypt, and some may even be in the streets today, but they are not going to come out on top. In part that is because the United States is not going to help them. Indeed, Washington showed how seriously it takes Arab liberals and democrats two weeks ago when it watched silently from the sidelines as Hezbollah toppled Saad Hariri’s government. Plenty of Arabs hoping for a democratic Lebanon died over the last five years since the assassination of Rafik Hariri, and it is important to note that the million-plus Lebanese who went to the streets on March 14, 2005 demonstrated peacefully, unlike the Egyptians, and all the destruction and violence was caused by Hezbollah and its pro-Syrian allies.

That the United States will not come to the aid of its liberal allies, or strengthen the moderate Muslims against the extremists, is one reason why the Freedom Agenda is not going to work, at least not right now. The underlying reason then is Arab political culture, where real democrats and genuine liberals do not stand a chance against the men with guns.

If it weren’t for the historic events in Tunisia—where for the first time in Arab history a people rose up to send their ruler packing—people in Rabat, Morocco, where I’m traveling for the next week, and throughout the region would still be talking about Clinton’s speech. What made it surprisingly welcome is that, up until last Thursday, the Obama Administration had been putting as much distance as possible between itself and President George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” It wasn’t clear whether President Barack Obama believes that democracy promotion is likely to destabilize the repressive and volatile political systems of the Arab world—and that the survival of those regimes would be in America’s best interest—or if he was just following an anything-but-Bush handbook.

But Clinton picked up the gauntlet and laid it at the feet of Arab regimes, timed perfectly to herald an age of Arab accountability: Right after the Tunisians deposed their president-for-life, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, sealed indictments were handed down in the United Nations investigation of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and while the names are yet to be revealed, the indictments are expected to identify Hezbollah members as well as government officials of its Syrian and Iranian sponsors.

Tunisia’s so-called Jasmine Revolution is the culmination of demonstrations that started with the self-immolation of a produce vendor in Sidi Bouzid after his goods were confiscated. Other suicides followed, accompanied by widespread protests against the lack of jobs, housing, freedom of speech, and food price inflation and corruption. Police and security forces shot and killed demonstrators, but when the army refused to turn on their countrymen, Ben Ali fled the country for Saudi Arabia last Friday, leaving Tunisia without a government and Tunisians elated with the rarest of achievements: vanquishing an Arab strongman.

In the days following Ben Ali’s exit, the Tunisian army skirmished with security forces still loyal to the ousted president. One hopes the military can now serve as the guarantor of a more or less peaceful transition as Tunisia takes its first steps toward a more democratic political culture. The more pessimistic interpretation is that the stark image of city streets vacant of any human beings except those who are armed to the teeth is a living tableau of Middle Eastern political culture. Here the masses are merely props to be chewed up and tossed away, and the real action is nothing but security chiefs and generals in a fight to the death.

That is to say, as thrilling as it is to see a people take its own destiny in its hands, there is reason to be concerned—for Tunisians and for the rest of the region, where protests seem to be gathering momentum. Algeria, Egypt, and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania have already reported cases of self-immolation—an ostensibly selfless and heroic gesture that is unfortunately reminiscent of one of the Middle East’s more popular forms of political expression: the suicide bombing. Something is happening in the region—in fact, has been happening for some time—that is simply not going to be solved with the downfall of one dictator.

***

Which is why it’s not surprising that the Moroccans I’ve met here, on a trip sponsored by the Moroccan American Center for Policy, do not share the excitement with which the Jasmine Revolution has been received in many corners of the U.S. policy establishment. Some of the Moroccan diplomats, human rights activists, and parliamentarians I’ve spoken to even believe that Obama’s carefully modulated statement on Tunisia was too enthusiastic, given that no one has any idea yet whether democrats or Islamists or the army will wind up in power, and what the consequences will be.

Because many of these Moroccan officials are close in one way or another to the ruling regime, it is reasonable to interpret their vivid worries about “security”—all couched in terms articulating brotherly concerns and hopes for the citizens of another Maghreb state—as the fears of a ruling order imagining a bad end for itself. However, while it is important to understand the worries of any elite class in terms of its own self-interest, it is also foolish to discount the misgivings of those who actually have experience in Arab politics and governing Arab people.

From here in the region, it is perhaps easier to see the fundamental problems with Clinton’s welcome brand of Western-style honesty. For instance, what she calls “corruption” is just one family or tribe advancing the interests of its own clique while shutting out the others. Corruption as such is standard operating procedure in the Middle East. Only a lunatic, or an American public official, would give money to an armed gang with uncertain loyalties.

In Doha, Clinton argued that “[i]t is important to demonstrate that there is rule of law, good governance, and respect for contracts to create an investment climate that attracts businesses and keeps them there.” The problem here is that this isn’t necessarily true—a fact borne out by Ben Ali’s Tunisia. The regime was corrupt to the core—Ben Ali’s wife’s family had a hand in virtually every business venture in the country—but the country’s pro-business climate and liberalized economy won praises from all corners, including the IMF. Good governance then had nothing to do with building Tunisia’s economy or creating the country’s middle class, for it was all crafted by the heavy hand of a dictator.

“If leaders don’t offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum”—namely, “extremist elements, terrorist groups and others who would prey off desperation and poverty,” Clinton warned her audience in Doha. Alas, this isn’t true either. Visitors to the police state that Ben Ali ruled admired the country’s relatively open atmosphere—open, except for political dissent—but its secularism, educational system, and the relative freedom of women, had very little to do with a positive vision. Rather, it was all engendered by the single-minded obsession of a tyrant who perceived, perhaps rightly, that the country’s Islamist movement constituted his most serious and best-organized opposition. It is the fact that Ben Ali thoroughly repressed the Islamists and eradicated any evidence of their potent symbols and discourse that gave Tunisia’s its left-bank flair.

What is more depressing is that while we believe poverty, hopelessness, and despair may pave the way for extremist elements and terrorist groups, we know that democracy has empowered them where repression sidelines them. Even avid Bush partisans cannot ignore the fact that the gospel of democratization propagated by Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, during the president’s second term helped bring Hamas to power in Gaza and strengthened Hezbollah’s hand in Lebanon.

There is a reason why a famous Arab dictum has it that 100 years of tyranny is preferable to one day of chaos. It is meant to remind us of the nature of man, the political animal, who cannot foresee the consequences of his actions. The Arabs’ ancients would have been right to fear how an uprising that began in a suicide might end. If this saying is frequently held up as an example of Arab timidity, the same might be said of any society, and the fact is that the Arabs have stood up before and will invariably do so again. Still, it is unlikely that the uprising in Tunisia will serve as a model for the rest of the region. The Tunisian middle class succeeded where, for example, the Iranians failed in June 2009 only because the divisions in Ben Ali’s security apparatus were decisive. Presumably, rulers around their region right now are worried less about crowds in the street than about whether their intelligence officials are happy with their latest paycheck.

Moreover, it is unseemly for Americans to gloat about the fate of Arab regimes when the real issue is Arab people, like those getting shot in the streets of Tunisian cities or setting themselves on fire in Cairo. Their problems are not going to be solved with the exit of one Arab dictator—or even the whole pack of them, from Riyadh to Algiers. What’s wrong with Arab reform is that in most cases the institutions that need to be fixed do not yet exist—a fact that makes the content, though perhaps not the rhetoric, of Clinton’s speech no less irrelevant to Arab reality than the high-flown language of democracy favored by Condoleezza Rice. If there is a formula to fix what’s wrong with the region, no one has it.

An example: Last week, the New York Times reported that a Palestinian woman named Jawaher Abu Rahmah had died from inhaling tear gas after participating in a demonstration against the separation barrier. In response, Israeli military officials, along with a group of pro-Israel bloggers, challenged the Palestinian account, and claimed they had evidence that she died from complications due to the medication she was taking for cancer. Among other tell-tale signs that something was amiss with the Palestinian version, there was the curiously worded cause of death: “Inhaling gas of an Israeli solider according to the family.”

The pessimists who think Israel’s case is hopeless have a point. It’s not clear why both the Times reporter, Isabel Kershner, and her editors at the foreign desk failed to treat the story with more circumspection: If the chances of dying from inhaling tear gas in an open space were not infinitesimal, wrongful-death suits would prevent police forces from using it as it they do throughout the United States and Europe to disperse riotous crowds.

If journalists won’t run narratives like the death-by-tear-gas tale through the most rudimentary BS-detector, it makes it harder not to conclude that they are willing to believe the worst about Israel. At the least, this is evidence of a lazy press corps that ought to take its work a little more seriously; at worst, it means that the Western media knowingly participates in a campaign to slander and libel a U.N. member state.

Outside of the Palestinian fable, floated in the late 1990s, about the Zionist chewing gum that made Palestinian women both sexually intemperate and sterile, it’s hard to think of a whopper that the Western media has not swallowed whole. Among other exaggerations and outright fabrications was the so-called “massacre” at the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. The Western press dutifully followed the lead of the Palestinian news agency, Wafa, and reported that thousands, or hundreds, of Palestinian civilians were killed. Even as subsequent reports, including a U.N. investigation, revealed the truth of the matter—56 Palestinians were killed, the majority of them armed combatants—the narrative describing Israeli soldiers as war criminals and wanton murderers stuck.

Even more impressive is when images are attached to the narrative, like when a Palestinian cameraman in 2006 caught pictures of a young girl distraught on the same Gaza beach where, he reported, seven members of a her family had been killed by an Israeli Air Force onslaught. However, it seems now that a Hamas mine was likely responsible for the tragic deaths.

Most famous is the story of Mohamed al-Dura, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy believed to have been killed by Israeli gunfire on the Gaza Strip in September 2000. His last moments were recorded and flashed across the world, turning the boy into an international icon of Palestinian suffering and Israeli brutality. However, the Israelis didn’t kill Dura, and it’s not clear if he was killed instead by Palestinian gunfire or if the entire episode was staged by a French-Israeli journalist named Charles Enderlin and his Palestinian cameraman. Richard Landes, a Boston University history professor who has done extensive work on the Dura case, coined the term Pallywood to describe the “media manipulation, distortion and outright fraud by the Palestinians (and other Arabs, such as the Reuters photographer caught faking photos during the Second Lebanon War), designed to win the public-relations war against Israel.”

***

But this anti-Israeli misinformation is in fact part of a larger phenomenon. The Arabic word taqqiya is frequently used to denote the kind of dissimulation practiced by Muslims in the Middle East. Westerners tend to abuse the term, as if any Muslim who lies, for instance, about a car robbery, was practicing taqqiya, when he’s just trying to avoid arrest as any other suspect would. Taqqiya is a doctrine particular to the Shia, a Muslim minority who, because they have had much to fear over the last millennium from their more numerous Sunni neighbors, are permitted to lie under duress about their real religious sentiments. The concept, however, is a useful reminder that this is a part of the world where saying the wrong thing to the wrong person can be costly.

Nonetheless, Westerners are very sensitive to the idea that some cultures do not value truth-telling in the same way that we do. For reporters it can be embarrassing if your beat is to cover, say, the Palestinian Authority, since the bulk of your work is taking dictation from frequently malevolent fabulists and having to pass it off as though you were interviewing someone actually worth speaking to. But the convention of our press corps is to treat the utterances of Muamar Qaddafi with the same respect due the prime minister of Canada. To fact-check an entire political culture is beyond the pale of Western journalism, so instead we pretend that Arab societies respect the truth as much as we do, for to say otherwise is to sit in judgment over another culture.

Unfortunately, there is no getting around the fact that societies where the truth is just one among many possible narratives are going to fare worse than societies where truth is valued. In Western culture, truth has been virtually deified since the Enlightenment. Beginning in the early 19th century, Middle East reformers have rightly feared that a similar enlightenment in their society, a regime of Arab or Muslim reason, would threaten the entire ruling order, including God’s place in it. If reason is supreme, and everything must fall under the scope of the empirical method, then there is nothing to protect the supernatural or divine from the same rigorous investigation. The Muslim reformers looked at the West and saw a civilization to be admired for its scientific and technological progress and pitied for its spiritual malaise. Thankfully for us, even as the crisis of faith must inevitably follow enlightenment, it is only reason that guarantees technological progress.

Arab educators and other liberal intellectuals regularly decry the lack of critical thinking in Arab education, and yet the problem is not the ability to think critically but what it is possible to think critically about. You can’t speak critically of political authorities in the Arabic-speaking Middle East or security services will break your limbs and crack your skull, as they did this week in Tunisia. Obviously, religious topics are off-limits in a region where cartoons of a prophet can touch off widespread riots. Once you have circumscribed any limits to critical thought, you have inscribed red lines throughout your society. The reason the Arab countries do not lead the world in any field is not because they are any more violent or stupid or lazy than anyone else; rather, it is because the culture is set against the very principles of reason that make success possible. It is no mystery why Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah must come to New York for medical treatment—even though his country is more than wealthy enough to build first-rate medical facilities. The culture of the kingdom rewards students for memorizing the Quran, not for scientific explorations or pushing cultural boundaries; half of the country’s population is not even allowed to drive a car.

***

Western cyber-optimists argue that information technology like satellite television and the Internet will so inundate the Arabic-speaking Middle East with images and information that it will entirely reconfigure Arab societies. But this has it exactly wrong: Culture is more powerful than technology, and how a society uses any given technology is determined by its culture. This is why no one wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to have a nuclear bomb, but no one has a problem with France’s weapons program. This is also why the Internet is not going to open the eyes of those Arabs who are instead more inclined to use it to spread disinformation. Pallywood is nothing more than the nexus where an Arab culture of lies meets Western technology.

That is to say, the Arabs are not winning an information war against Israel, nor anything else for that matter. Rather, the stories and lies they tell to delegitimize the Jewish state are part and parcel of the war that they have been waging against themselves, and with stunning success. The tragedy is that everyone knows where the Arabs are heading, because the signs of failure and self-destructiveness couldn’t be clearer—poverty, violence, despotism, illiteracy, mistreatment of women, and the persecution of confessional minorities, like Egypt’s Coptic Christian population. The Western journalists and NGOs who repeat and credential these lies are doing no honor to either the values of their own society or those of the Arabs; they’re merely helping a culture kill itself.

Look around the region: Every bloody government and non-state actor has attracted a cohort of Western fans who feed off of the brand of gore in which those institutions specialize. Some people, like former British intelligence official Alastair Crooke, praise Hamas and Hezbollah as proud resistance organizations. As Michael Young, the Lebanese journalist and author of The Ghosts of Martyr Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle, says, “To many Westerners it represents an Arab authenticity, in contrast to the pro-democracy March 14 movement whose members too much resemble Westerners like themselves.” An entire Beltway industry, including former and current U.S. policymakers, diplomats, and intelligence officials, is devoted to rapprochement with Syria’s vicious and kleptocratic regime, the importance of which to U.S. regional policy they wildly overstate lest anyone scrutinize too closely how Damascus targets U.S. citizens and U.S. allies. Then there are the cheerleaders for the Islamic Republic of Iran, for whom the country’s leaders and security services are incapable of any rape or murder so vile that would lose it the support even of fans like Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.

And let’s not forget the many hundreds of professional and amateur Middle East analysts who have argued since 2003 that Iraq was better under Saddam Hussein. They knew that the Baathist regime prosecuted sectarian wars against Iraqi Kurds and Shia, massacred its neighbors in Iran and Kuwait, used terrorism as an instrument of its regional and international strategy while pursuing a policy of rape, torture, and murder at home.

The more prestigious the forum, the more this kind of moral blindness to the suffering of others and the norms of justice is presented as proof of sophistication. Roger Cohen of the New York Times recently suggested that Hezbollah should be rewarded for killing former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. With indictments expected soon in the U.N.-sponsored Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which is investigating Hariri’s assassination, Hezbollah has, as usual, threatened violence in the event any of its foot soldiers are named—meaning, in Cohen’s view, that “It’s time to drop either-or diplomacy to address a many-shaded reality.”

Yet there can be no real stability where the rule of law is subsidiary to the rule of the jungle—a fact no less true in Lebanon than in the United States. The entire point of the special tribunal is that the international community seeks to hold assassins as accountable for their crimes in the Middle East as they would be anywhere else. So, why does Cohen believe that Hezbollah should be granted impunity for political murder and the Lebanese should forget about justice? Because like many other Western observers of the Middle East, he uses the region as a kind of virtual reality screen on which to project a self-congratulatory vision of a world in which superior beings like himself can naturally expect to live under the sign of law, civility, and morality while lesser beings in other parts of the world are quite naturally ruled by violence. “The sort of justice that Westerners demand as their due seems faintly inauthentic to them when it comes to Middle East. There’s a distaste for people who make these demands,” says Young, the Lebanese journalist. “In this view, there is a double standard; justice is variable; if it creates problems, let’s not go all the way, this is the Middle East after all. But if this were the U.S. or Europe, justice would be much more straightforward.”

Hezbollah presents an interesting problem for the Roger Cohens of the world. The organization he wants to excuse for killing a Lebanese politician is also responsible for the deaths of American civilians, diplomats, and military personnel. “According to reports, members of the special operations unit of Hezbollah will be indicted in the Hariri murder,” says Andrew Tabler, a Lebanon and Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The U.S. government believes that the late leader of this group, Imad Mughniyyah, was the mastermind behind the kidnapping and killing of U.S. educators, officials, and journalists in Beirut in the ’80s and the bombing of the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks. In the 1990s we were told this group no longer existed, or was never really part of Hezbollah. But their tune has changed since Imad Mughniyeh’s 2008 assassination in Damascus. Now Hezbollah repeatedly holds him up as a key member of their organization. If for no other reason, the administration is right to support the tribunal because letting these Hezbollah members off the hook would amount to an enormous victory for a group that killed Americans.”

What are the origins of a worldview that would hand over the world to murderers? “For many intellectuals there is a sense of weakness toward the pre-modern,” says Hazem Saghieh, a Lebanese journalist with the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Hayat. “There is a political nostalgia in looking to the past. This manifests itself as a progressive tendency, but it is in fact very reactionary.”

The paradox is that while it is man’s ability to tell good from bad that makes him most human, certain Western intellectuals take the unwillingness, or inability, to do so as a sign of the genius to rise above the small-minded morality of the masses. Excusing Hezbollah may seem like the rational decision-making of a thoughtful intellectual who is observing a society ostensibly different from his own, but in reality the moral universe of the Middle East is no different from in the rest of the world.

It is the parasitic nature of the relationship between Middle Eastern reality and the narcissism of the Western intelligentsia that helps explain the other half of the Middle East’s moral equation: While the murders by Hezbollah, Saddam, and Iran are justified, even celebrated, Israel is censured for actions for which even the United States is normally excused as a matter of course. People like Roger Cohen have no hesitation in holding Israeli soldiers and civilians to a higher standard than he holds the United States. But logical or moral consistency is rarely the point. In the end, the pleasure of holding other people to a higher standard is perversely the same as arguing that they should be held to no standards at all. Both postures elevate the person making such judgments to a godlike place above the antlike creatures whose daily sufferings and misfortunes have meaning only according to the author’s personal whims.

Consider, for instance, Tony Judt, the late historian of modern Europe, who argued that it would be a good thing for the Jewish state to disappear and for millions of other human beings to forfeit their political rights because he was personally frustrated by Israel’s post-1967 political direction. Because the reality of Israel did not fulfill his psychological needs, others were to pay for his disappointments.

In their own minds, Westerners like Cohen and Judt have risen above the facile judgments of their peers in order to understand deeper truths. They are the supermen who rose in place of the idols. However, their problem is that even if the gods did perish, moral judgment was not in their power to take away since is was not them who gave it to us in the first place. These intellectuals who feed their egos with the suffering of others are not gods. They are simply people who are lucky enough to live in the West, where the consequences of their moral blindness are visited on other people, who live far away.

Recently I spoke with two retired Israeli officers, Gen. Natan Sharoni and Col. Shaul Arieli, who represent the Council for Peace and Security, a group of pro-peace former Israeli defense and security officials. Sharoni is a 77-year-old veteran of Israel’s many wars who speaks English with only the slightest trace of accent. Arieli, who looks as though he could be a Tel Aviv tech executive, defers to Sharoni’s experience. They had just arrived from Israel when we met in the lobby of a Washington hotel. We then moved to the bar, where Arieli put a small map of Israel on the table.

“The leadership of the state of Israel has to make a choice,” Sharoni said. “What does it want and where is it leading people? The longer there is no agreement, the more people will believe it’s not achievable.”

Sharoni and Arieli are part of a different Israel lobby—that segment of the military and security establishment aligned with the country’s dwindling left wing which sees itself as having a mission to promote an Arab-Israeli peace. If this lobby is less powerful than AIPAC, that’s because AIPAC represents the will of its American donors, who are broadly supportive of the government that Israelis elect, rather than one particular segment of the Israeli polity. The two ex-officers were in Washington to see members of Congress as well as State Department officials and White House aides.

Their presentation, earthy jokes, can-do optimism, hopefulness, and longing for peace seemed to me designed to reinforce the conviction of any American already convinced that Israel’s right-wing government is the main impediment to finding a solution to a century-old conflict.

Yes, it is likely that as President Barack Obama finds his domestic policy checked by a Republican-majority House of Representatives, he may turn his energies to the international scene. But this commander-in-chief, like his many predecessors, is not going to make peace in the Middle East. No Israeli leader is going to commit political suicide to make the Obama Administration happy.

Recent experience shows that when Israelis make hard choices for peace they get war instead. Both the 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon and the 2005 evacuation of Gaza led to battles with Iranian proxies. An IDF withdrawal from the West Bank would tip the balance of power against Mahmoud Abbas, Salam Fayyad, and the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, paving the way for a Hamas takeover—and leaving Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Ben Gurion Airport vulnerable to rocket attacks that would cripple the country’s economy. Nonetheless, Arieli and Sharoni still happily sing the peace movement’s mantra of the 1990s—Israeli leadership must make the difficult decision to withdraw from the West Bank in order to make peace.

Sharoni knows peace is possible, he’s seen it with his own eyes and remembers when Sadat came to Jerusalem. When I asked him which Arab leader could play Sadat’s role today and come to speak in the Knesset he tacitly conceded that there is none. “The Israeli Prime Minister could encourage the Israeli electorate, as Sadat did,” he said.

In effect, Sharoni agrees with his domestic opponents that there is no Arab partner to make peace with. Which means it doesn’t matter how much Israeli officials, or their American patrons, want peace, because the sound of one hand clapping is not a negotiated settlement.

“We won’t allow ourselves to be attacked just because we signed an agreement,” Arieli said. “We have the right to self-defense. And nobody in the international community will blame us.” Unfortunately, recent history shows this to be untrue. The Israeli government allowed its citizens to be attacked for several years after it withdrew from Gaza, and when it returned in the winter of 2008 and 2009 to stop the Hamas rocket fire, it was blamed by virtually everyone in the international community. The lesson is that once Israel withdraws from territory, political exigencies make it very difficult to return. In exchange, Israel wins neither the world’s sympathy nor its approval. What it gets instead is the Goldstone Report, accusing the Jewish state of war crimes.

The real problem, Arieli and Sharoni said, is that Israel left Gaza without a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. Since 2005, this has become the standard explanation rationalizing the rain of rocket fire on Sderot and other Israeli villages. But it is best to see this patch of reasoning as part of the ongoing narrative in which Israel is an extra-historical anomaly. In the annals of world diplomacy, we find two types of agreements between belligerents—the first is a surrender and the second is a settlement imposed by the victor after it has destroyed its enemy’s will to fight. So why do former Israeli soldiers, men who have committed themselves to the security of the Jewish state and its people, advocate what in real-world terms is clearly nonsense?

The first reason is that Arieli and Sharoni and the Council are fighting their domestic political opponents, namely the Israeli right, and Washington is a natural venue for such a conflict. But if the White House had hoped that Israeli officers might turn Jewish fundraisers and some in Congress their way, it’s too late now. Israeli peace processors are likely to find themselves blocked here by a Republican-led House that is largely sympathetic to the current Israeli Prime Minister.

The second reason is that Arieli and Sharoni are in the middle of an argument with their colleagues in Israel’s military and security establishment. In particular, as they told me, they are in disagreement with Major General Uzi Dayan, former national security adviser, and Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations and currently head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Gold and Dayan were themselves in Washington several months ago speaking about Israel’s need for defensible borders, which in essence boils down to maintaining tight security control over the Jordan River valley and large chunks of the West Bank. Gold and Dayan’s message, in other words, is that everyone who has been saying that we know what a final settlement looks like is wrong.

“The Jordan River is the only defensible border and particularly the only place Israel can defend itself against possible conventional attack coming from the East,” Dayan told me on the phone recently. “Iraq has sent forces in every war since 1948. How do we know what the Iraqi government will be like in two years, five years, 10 years?”

For that matter, how do we know what Jordan will look like in five years if the hills of the West Bank becomes a Hamas-controlled free zone where Islamic militants from around the region can take shots at Israel’s coastal plain? The Hashemites have their hands filled maintaining security inside Jordan without having to keep their borders from being overrun. Israel, Dayan said, cannot afford to base its security planning on hope.

“Some people will never learn the lesson that land for peace doesn’t work,” Dayan said of Arieli and Sharoni. “We tried it for many years. We tried to be flexible. The idea was that if we compromise, then we can achieve peace and this will give us security. That seems rational, but it is really the other way around—only by providing security can we provide a lasting peace.” In Israel, Dayan said, Arieli and Sharoni have almost no support for their positions. “The Israelis understand that they are selling illusions.”

However, in one respect the two ex-IDF officers have fixed on an important fact. Throughout my conversation with them, they emphasized how Israel cannot afford to be isolated from the international community, and that the lack of a lasting peace with the Palestinians was serving Israel’s enemies. That is to say, the reason that veterans of Israel’s military and security establishment are deluding themselves is that the campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state is working. The international community is pushing the country into a corner, where the least of its worries are Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran. Israel’s real security problem is a Western world that has grown tired of a conflict to which, realistically, there is no end in sight.

Lee Smith’s column will return January 5, 2011.

But that was in the pre-Cablegate age. One of the surprising (to some) revelations of the leaked diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks is that, counter to what we’ve been told for over a half century, the Palestinian question does not dominate the thinking of Arab officials.

American journalists still get the “half-hour drill”—I’ve gotten it most recently from the prime minister of Lebanon—but with U.S. diplomats, Arab rulers have more pressing issues to discuss. Indeed, the Wikileaks cables seem to confirm that our Arab allies are consumed by their fear of the Iranians. But are they really?

A number of analysts have spent the first weeks of the post-Cablegate era fighting a rear-guard action against the reality of Mideast diplomacy portrayed in the Wikileaks cables. Some are claiming that what the Arabs say in private to U.S. diplomats about Iran is not what they really mean, or that Arab security regimes do not represent the will of the Arab people. Others argue that those American analysts who find their positions vindicated in the released cables are just looking for any evidence to justify their desire to make war on Iran.

Even if these critics are just trying to cover their tracks, their remarks raise, albeit indirectly, an essential point: We know what the Arabs tell diplomats and journalists about Iran, but we don’t know what they really think about their Persian neighbor. The gap between internal Arab discourse and statements made to Westerners is a staple of that branch of intelligence work often neglected here in the United States known as counterintelligence, which helps sift out truth from noise.

Perhaps it is helpful to think of the Wikileaks cables in lay terms as a transcript of a guy (in this case, the Saudis) trying to pick up a pretty girl (the Americans) at a bar. What the boy says to the girl may or may not be true. What is most significant is the effect he means to produce, which is to convince the girl to go home with him. Hence, for observers what’s most interesting about the boy’s end of the conversation is the insight it offers into his own psyche—is he subtle, overbearing, self-obsessed, sensitive to others?—and into his perceptions of the girl.

For example, it is well known that during the Cold War the U.S.-Saudi alliance was facilitated by the fortunate fact that the adherents of an austere brand of Islam known as Wahabism who preside over the world’s largest known reserves of oil feared godless communists as much as we did. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite true.

While the United States ensured the steady flow of Saudi oil that stabilized world markets—and the constant stream of oil receipts that filled Saudi bank accounts—Riyadh flirted just enough with Moscow to keep Washington on its toes. Even before the Saudis’ 1988 purchase of Chinese missiles, it was obvious that what the house of Saud feared was not communism so much as the Soviet alliance with radical actors—from Nasser’s Egypt to Saddam’s Iraq—who were opposed to Riyadh.

The Saudis told U.S. officials they hated communists because it flattered their American protectors who were fighting Moscow on four continents; the notion of a shared ideological passion, as well as a common strategic interest, gave the Saudis special status in Washington. Yet it was clear after Sept. 11 that our feckless petro-billionaire allies were themselves a strategic threat, a perception that the Saudis countered by telling us that they feared Iran—just as we do, and just as Washington’s nearly omnipotent Israel lobby does.

Seduction, or seeming to make your own the fears and desires, the habits and anxieties, of your allies is one of statesmanship’s more useful arts. The Wikileaks cables have very handsome examples of diplomatic seduction, most notably the emir of Qatar’s sympathizing with poor Israel, America’s ally, who he says can’t be blamed for not trusting Arabs. The Israelis, said the emir, nearly Shakespearean in his unctuousness, “have been under threat for a long time.”

American officials do it, too, which is the original reason why U.S. diplomats ever sat still for the “half-hour drill” in the first place. However, the Washington policy establishment’s obsession with the Arab-Israeli peace process shows the danger in using seduction as an instrument of statecraft—less-clever diplomats are susceptible to seduction and easily led astray from pursuing the interests of their own country.

Here, for instance, is Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri fixing on a vital American interest, terrorism, in a recent interview with the Washington Post. According to him, terrorism and violent extremism are the result of a failed peace process.

“In the ’90s there wasn’t al-Qaeda, there wasn’t Hamas, there wasn’t all these extremist groups,” Hariri claimed, incorrectly, but with an eye trained on getting the sympathetic attention of Washington. “The main problem that we have in Lebanon, and in the region,” he continued, “is we don’t have a real peace process. … A lot of people talk about arms and smuggling and Hezbollah and all of this. But if we have a comprehensive peace, would we be talking about this?”

In other words, if you don’t have a peace process, you get terrorism. Never mind that Hariri here effectively blames the stalled peace process for the murder of his father, Rafiq Hariri, killed in a spectacular terror operation almost six years ago. What is important is that U.S. officials have come to mouth the same commonplaces: Without peace in the Middle East, they say, you are going to have terrorism in the region. But by that reckoning, since the United States has a central role in the peace process, a lack of peace is also going to bring terror to American shores. In this interpretation, there can be no other explanation for Sept. 11 except that the United States brought those attacks upon itself by failing to create peace. But an interpretation that exculpates not only al-Qaida but also the Middle Eastern intelligence services responsible for the preponderance of terrorism must lead to irrational policies that are invariably detrimental to U.S. interests. The lesson is that if you do not do counterintelligence, or sift out the noise, you cannot understand what is in your own national interest.

As it turns out, the debate over what our Arab allies say to U.S. diplomats in the released Wikileaks cables is mostly noise. The pro-Israel side now has more evidence to show that it is not just Jerusalem that fears Iran, while the opposing faction contends that it doesn’t matter because no matter what anyone says the problem really is Israel. In the end, both camps have some truth on their side.

The anti-Israel camp is correct insofar as there is no obvious reason why we should act at the behest of the Gulf Arabs. The fact that the Sunni Arab regimes “hate” Shia and Persians should disgust us rather than please us. The Saudis are the same rulers who also hate Jews and, as the cables show, still back anti-American terrorism, while they repress their own subjects.

What the Saudis have provided that’s useful is not their counsel but rather insight into their efforts at seduction, which convey their understanding of how we perceive our own national interest, and how easily they believe we can be seduced. If they repeat obvious lies about the depth of their feeling for the Palestinians enough, we will take them at face value. If they say that the communists and then the Iranians are their deadly enemies, we will accept this commonality of interests without question.

Just as the Saudis accurately mirrored Washington’s fears of the Soviet Union in order to seduce us into protecting their own interests, they are now reflecting our fears of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is likely they fear Iran as much as they say they do, even as they are already moving to make certain accommodations with the Shia power. The fact is that the Arabs live in the Middle East and understand that someday, even if that day is far off in the future, the United States will leave, either by choice or coercion, and they will be stuck with their Iranian neighbors whether they like it or not.

In the meantime, the words the Saudis utter to American diplomats are not intended to provide us with a transparent window into royal thinking but to manipulate us into serving the interests of the House of Saud. Accordingly, once we have dispensed with the noise, it should not matter one whit to U.S. policymakers whether Iran is a danger to the Arabs or, for that matter, to Israel: Tehran represents a major strategic threat to American interests.

With all due apologies to Oliver Stone (and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey), what the Wikileaks documents reveal is not a conspiracy of any kind but a scary and growing gap between the private assessments of American diplomats and allies in the Middle East and public statements made by U.S. government officials. The publication of these leaked cables is eerily reminiscent of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a decade-long attempt by U.S. officials to distort and conceal unpalatable truths about the Vietnam War, and manipulate public opinion. The difference is that while the Pentagon Papers substantially vindicated the American left, the Wikileaks cable dump vindicates the right.

Here are eight of the most obvious examples from the initial trove of documents that has appeared online:

1. While the Israelis are deeply concerned about Iran’s march toward a nuclear program, it is in fact the Arabs who are begging the United States to “take out” Iranian installations through military force, with one United Arab Emirates official even proposing a ground invasion. Calling Iran “evil,” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly urged the United States to “cut off the head of the snake” by attacking Iranian nuclear installations.

2. It is not just Israeli leaders who believe Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reminiscent of Hitler; U.S. officials think so too, as do Arab leaders, who use the Hitler analogy to warn against the dangers of appeasing Iran.

3. North Korea, an isolated country that enjoys substantial diplomatic and economic backing from China, is supplying Iran with advanced ballistic missile systems that would allow an Iranian nuclear warhead to hit Tel Aviv—or Moscow—with a substantial degree of accuracy. Taken in concert with the North Korean-built nuclear reactor in Syria, it would appear that North Korea—acting with the knowledge and perhaps direct encouragement of China—is playing a significant and deliberate role in the proliferation of nuclear equipment and ballistic delivery systems in the Middle East.

4. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not a model Middle Eastern leader who has found the right admixture of religious enthusiasm and democracy, as U.S. government officials often like to suggest in public, but “an exceptionally dangerous” Islamist. U.S. diplomats have concluded that Erdogan’s anti-Israel rhetoric is not premised on domestic Turkish electioneering or larger geo-strategic concerns but rather on a personal, visceral hatred of Israel.

5. Tehran has used the cover of the ostensibly independent Iranian Red Crescent—a member of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, whose pledge of neutrality allows it access to war zones—to smuggle weapons and members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force into Lebanon during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, and into Iraq, to fight against U.S. soldiers.

6. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman are more worried about Hamas than about Israel and are staunchly opposed to the expansion of Iranian influence in the region.

7. The Amir of Qatar is a dubious ally, who plays Washington and Tehran off each other. “The Amir closed the meeting by offering that based on 30 years of experience with the Iranians, they will give you 100 words. Trust only one of the 100.”

8. America’s Arab allies do not believe that the Barack Obama Administration can separate Syria from Iran through any foreseeable combination of carrots and sticks. According to one cable, the UAE’s Sheik Mohamed Bin Zayed “showed no confidence that Syria could be separated from the Iranian camp” and quoted him directly as saying “If you want my opinion … I think not.” He advised that Syria would continue hedging on key regional issues (Iran, support for Hezbollah, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process) for the foreseeable future.

If these cables make many on the right look prescient, or at least in touch with reality, it is hardly a surprise that their domestic U.S. rivals are trying to spin the Wikileaks cables to their own advantage. For instance, leftwing academic specialists on the Middle East who have argued that the peace process is the key issue in the region and that the Gulf Arab states do not want the United States or Israel to bomb Iran are nonetheless celebrating the Wikileaks documents, even as their argument is now vitiated. Some university professors claim that their analysis is better than those of Washington’s Arab allies anyway. The New York Times is trying to make the case that in the wake of George W. Bush’s mismanagement the Obama Administration has managed to build a strong sanctions regime against Iran that includes Russia and China. Unfortunately, the cables prove only that Russian envoys are working to frustrate the U.S. effort by selling the Iranian position to the Arabs.

What comes through most strongly from the Wikileaks documents, however, is that U.S. Middle East policy is premised on a web of self-justifying fictions that are flatly contradicted by the assessments of American diplomats and allies in the region. Starting with Bush’s second term and continuing through the Obama Administration, Washington has ignored the strong and repeated pleas of its regional allies—from Jerusalem to Riyadh—to stop the Iranian nuclear program. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation in the documents is the extent to which both the Bush and Obama Administrations have concealed Iran’s war against the United States and its allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states, even as those same allies have been candid in their diplomatic exchanges with us. U.S. servicemen and -women are being dispatched to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan where they are fighting Iranian soldiers and assets in a regional war with the Islamic Republic that our officials dare not discuss, lest they have to do something about it.

Members of the Washington policy establishment should be considerably less worried about how the foreign ministries of allied countries respond to the leaks than how the American electorate does. Even in a democracy, we accept that a key part of our diplomacy depends on concealing the truth, or even lying, in order to advance the interests of one’s own country. But it is hard to see how the public, mendacious, face of U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, serves American interests. By systematically misleading the American people, our policymakers have undermined the basis of our democracy, which is premised on the existence of a public that is capable of making informed decisions about a world that is only becoming more dangerous.

One way to understand Obama’s presidency is as the stewardship of a leader who must subtly make his countrymen confront a fact they would prefer to avoid—namely, that the age of American prosperity is over. From that perspective, passing healthcare legislation was all-important to his presidency because without the economic boom of the post-World War II era, the state is now being forced to care for its aging population by dividing up a shrinking pie. As for Obama’s foreign policy, it is not a matter of making the United States appear to behave in a more modest and polite fashion after eight years of George W. Bush’s stubborn unilateralism. Rather, reality itself has humbled us.

But if the American century is coming to an end, it’s not just on account of Bush’s failures or the worldwide economic crisis, but because of a larger historical divide that we have barely begun to fathom—the end of the Cold War.“There was a balance of terror during the Cold War that people didn’t acknowledge,” Marc Weitzmann, a French journalist, literary critic, and novelist, told me recently in Paris. “The violence of the Cold War was sent to the Third World. These conflicts existed in faraway areas, places that we didn’t care about, like the Middle East. Now they’re fought out everywhere. As it turned out, the Berlin Wall wasn’t between East and West Germany, it was protecting the citizens of the West from violence.”

Weitzmann and I were having lunch near his apartment, at the Hotel du Nord, a quiet restaurant on the site of the 1938 Marcel Carné movie of the same name. A short, powerfully built 51-year-old man with a shock of red hair and intense blue eyes, Weitzmann speaks English with the fluid wit and mania of a New Yorker. He splits his time between Paris and New York, where he’s become close to writers like Philip Roth and Paul Berman. Weitzmann and I first met more than a decade ago, when he was still safely in the mainstream of Parisian literary culture and writing regular book reviews for Les Inrockuptibles, a leftist weekly that resembles a combination of Rolling Stone and the New York Review of Books. In the aftershocks of Sept. 11, Weitzmann’s former colleagues came to consider his qualified support of Bush, the war in Iraq, and Israel heretical. His intellectual re-orientation began when Weitzmann moved to Israel to write a book about the recent massive Russian migration, the post-Cold War world, and globalization. The end of the peace process and the onset of the second intifada caught him by surprise, and he started to investigate his Jewish roots, a legacy that was largely obscured by his parents’ communist convictions. It is perhaps partly his family history that makes him especially sensitive to the significance of the Cold War, a conflict fought on four continents between two nuclear superpowers for nearly half a century.

The Cold War is again drawing attention from the French intelligentsia, with articles recently featured on the covers of news magazines and intellectual journals. This indicated that France is among the first countries to wake to the fact that it is not a post-Sept. 11 world but one still shaped by the Cold War and its conclusion, an aftermath that we have yet to account for properly. The spectacular nature of Sept. 11 and the consequences of those attacks obscured the remarkable fact that a war that had so profoundly shaped the modern world had only recently come to an end.

If Germany was the Cold War’s strategic battlefield, Weitzmann told me, then France was its “ideological battleground,” which makes his home country an ideal perch from which to understand the reality we inhabit now. A case in point is the part former President Jacques Chirac’s France played in opposing the Iraq war.

“There was anti-Americanism on top of it,” said Weitzmann, “but the French just wanted peace restored, and peace of mind. But they never understood that during the Cold War things were never that stable to begin with. The Cold War was a great time for Europe, especially France. There was stability and prosperity, and it was all protected by the Americans, and Europe didn’t even know it. This schizophrenia was possible as long as the Cold War went on, but as soon as it was over, the contradictions appeared. The French were afraid of the new context, so they hung on to what they knew in order to explain it: The U.S. was evil, and the Jews were manipulating things.”

Weitzmann’s new novel, Quand J’Etais Normal, or When I Was Normal, is about the insecure political context that has beset post-Cold War France. Set in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq war, when Paris was sharply divided between pro-war and anti-war camps, it is the story of a French Jewish family—“a chaotic family,” according to Weitzmann—muddling through a landscape of political chaos, paranoia, and Jewish anxiety and insecurity.

“The anti-war demonstrations were composed of Chirac supporters, leftists, and Muslims,” Weitzmann said. “And the pro-war demonstrators were basically Jews. The Jews were scared of the climate in France, and for good reason: These anti-war demonstrators were openly anti-Semitic. Along with images of Chirac, you had Hamas songs. There are both 5 million Muslims in France and also the biggest Jewish community in Europe today.”

Weizmann says that anti-Israel rhetoric has largely disappeared from French political discourse even if anti-Israel sentiment hasn’t changed much. In contrast to the Chirac years, said Weitzmann, “with Sarkozy there is no link between popular resentment toward Israel and the official government position.” But hostility toward the United States has different roots, which the election of Obama did little to quell. “The fact that a black man is president impresses Europeans for the wrong reasons,” Weitzmann said. “They see Obama’s election as a victory for Third Worldism. In the end, his election was a message from America to Americans, not to the world.”

The United States, Weitzmann argues, are no longer capable of playing the role of world leader because the world itself has changed. “Coming out of World War II,” Weitzmann said, “the American idea was that the U.S. is the only country capable of fighting terror regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets. Europe needed to be rebuilt, and the U.S. was the only free country able to lead the way. The legitimacy of that leadership depends on the fiction that there is indeed a Western world to be led.”

Weitzmann explains that by fiction he doesn’t mean that the idea is false, only that every identity is created, and this is how America’s postwar identity came about. “The idea that there is such a thing as the West is how the U.S. legitimized its leadership.”

In other words, the real challenge to American leadership is not the economy or even the desire of some U.S. policymakers to reduce our international profile but a lack of legitimacy. “World War II was the moment that the idea of what America was and the reality coincided,” Weitzmann said. “You liberated the camps, you beat the Nazis, and so on. But now the landscape is different. Now what you think you are is in conflict with what others think of you.”

The question then is not just whether the United States is capable of leading but whether anyone is interested in or capable of following. Western Europe is scaling down its global commitments. France and Britain are planning to share aircraft carriers, as their economies won’t permit them to operate independent modern navies. “Europe is trying to exist without military power,” Weitzmann said, “but there is no economic power without military grounding.” The irony is that a U.S. victory in the Cold War revealed Europe’s impotence. “Bush’s big mistake,” Weitzmann argued, “was that he did not understand that if Europe is militarily impotent, if Europe is effectively dead, then the U.S. has lost its legitimacy to lead the West.”

It’s worth remembering that French intellectuals condemned the naiveté and imperial greed of our political classes for almost 50 years after the end of World War II and, as Weitzmann said, ignored the fact that their freedoms were ensured by American economic and military might. If Weitzmann’s frightening thesis is correct that there is no longer a West for the United States to lead, it’s a concern that was shared by members of the Bush Administration. In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld distinguished between Old Europe, which included France, and New Europe, the Central and Eastern European states once behind the Iron Curtain. In the wake of the Cold War, New Europe still looks to Washington for leadership. Whether we’re capable of leading there and elsewhere, like the Muslim Middle East, remains to be seen.

In the end, though, the American century was never about history, or the notion that it was simply our turn in the great historical cycle. Rather, we are self-generated, self-willed, born of the desire to recreate ourselves. We took that privilege and responsibility upon ourselves. It is difficult to imagine what the United States is without the idea that we bear a great responsibility for the fate of others and are willing to lead.

Almost as absurd is the theory introduced by British security officials, with some recent support from the White House, that the bombs weren’t going to go off in America at all. Instead, they were going to blow up the planes carrying them in mid-air. This narrative is, it seems, mostly substantiated by the fact that a UPS cargo plane crashed in Dubai two months ago—even as there is no evidence that this crash was an act of terror.

More to the point, the mid-air explosion thesis needs to explain why the two bombs had already been transported by two air-carriers and yet failed to explode. “This was a potential attack on U.S. business,” explained one British official, “and the impact could have been huge. Damaging the West’s economy is a key objective of al-Qaida.” But it is not clear how these attacks would have damaged the economy of the West. The practical effect would have been to close down express mail services, like FedEx and UPS, out of Yemen. A 20-minute delay on the New York subway any given Monday morning is apt to affect our trillion-dollar economy more than two cargo planes from Yemen with no passengers blowing up in mid-air. Either al-Qaida has entered the spectacularly pointless and silly phase of its war against the West, or the latest narrative doesn’t wash.

What we do know is that the bombs were addressed to American synagogues—not churches or mosques (or financial institutions)—and that our national security apparatus is visibly uncomfortable dealing with this established fact. Neither the president, nor his spokesman, nor the White House’s counterterrorism czar made much of the notion that this act of terror had specifically targeted the Jewish community. No one denounced the attempted murder of American citizens based on their faith. No one said that foreign maniacs who target Jews are part of a global sickness.

It is unpleasant to have to make the comparison, but instructive nonetheless: Had a mosque been targeted, or had American Muslims been marked for death, we can be sure that the president, rightly, would have denounced not only the act but the idea that it had singled out a particular section of the American people.

As I argued right after the prospective attack was first announced, we have accustomed ourselves to acts of terror against Jews by rationalizing them. After all, since Israel “occupies” Muslim lands in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Shebaa Farms—and since many people see all of pre-1967 Israel itself as occupied land—it’s not surprising if Jews around the world are going to have their blood spilled because of boundary disputes in the Holy Land.

But that’s not why President Barack Obama and his Cabinet are loath to point out that this thwarted operation constitutes a hate crime. Americans believe that the worst thing you can be accused of is racism, our “original sin,” as the former senator from Illinois once phrased it before he was elected the 44th president of the United States. We assume that other people must feel exactly the same way, even if it is clear they do not, as the Arabs do not. The common word in Arabic for a dark-skinned black person is abed, slave. In Egypt, the butt of almost every joke are the Saidis, those reputedly shiftless, not-too-bright, and dark-skinned inhabitants of Upper Egypt.

The Arabs are not particularly embarrassed by their racist feelings about Jews. Rather than detail the anti-Semitic offerings available all day and night on Arab TV, where wild fantasies about Jews drinking blood and stealing the organs of gentiles occupy the same place that hardcore pornography does on your average hotel pay-per-view menu, suffice it to say that the father of the UAE’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayid, who was thanked on Sunday by White House counterterrorism czar John Brennan for his help in foiling the Yemen package bomb attack, gave his name and financial support to a think tank in Abu Dhabi notorious for its hatred of Jews. The Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow Up hosted Holocaust deniers, promoters of the protocols of the Elders of Zion, and other assorted Arab and Western anti-Semitic intellectuals before it closed in 2003.

The Arabs recognize that we’re very sensitive about racism and anti-Semitism, which is why they know their calling Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman a racist resonates with us—even as the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to Washington openly calls for the transfer of all Jews from any future Palestinian state. We are the ones who quiver at the accusation of racism—not them. We would not dream of calling the Arabs anti-Semitic or racist because we fear that we have subjected them to our Western colonial racism, and we feel guilty about it. Indeed, many in the West have even gone so far as to ignore the evidence of 1,300 years of Muslim anti-Jewish polemics to claim that anti-Semitism is a Western import. To call the Arabs anti-Semitic would be shaming a people we have already hurt too much.

All of our noble sentiments toward the Muslim world would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that our political correctness has created a context where it’s OK to dehumanize, terrorize, and murder Jews.

However, I have to say that when reading the comments to my pieces, I am routinely surprised that some readers appear to believe anti-Semitism is simply about the Jews. That is, that there are some in the Jewish community who would seem to prefer it if someone with a name like Lee Smith would stop stirring the pot and just let it alone. But as I said, anti-Semitism is not just about Jews; after all, it’s not a Jewish idea, any more than the Holocaust was. I like Jews as much as I like the next man on the bus. But I’m not particularly interested in the internal politics of the Jewish community. I am interested in anti-Semitism not just because it sickens me, but because it poisons American society as a whole, affecting both Jews and non-Jews.

If racism is our original sin, then anti-Semitism is the essential test of our character. Our current failure to recognize it and denounce it proves that our enemies have taken our measure. They know who we are. After killing 270 people, many of them Americans, over the skies of Lockerbie in 1988, Abdul Basset Ali al-Megrahi walked out of a Scottish prison last year to pave the way for British oil deals. It is not clear why Megrahi’s release caused shock, disappointment, and anger among American officials who demand the Israelis release Arab prisoners with Jewish blood on their hands as a show of “good faith.”

In Washington, the world’s superpower looks on in detached wonderment as we hazard educated guesses as to whether or not the Israelis are really going to attack the nuclear facilities of a regime that has called for another Holocaust. In our universities, professors explain away the Islamic Republic’s threats to destroy the Jewish state by claiming the translations from Farsi are flawed.

It’s not just about the Jews. As the most recent Wikileaks documents show, the George W. Bush Administration deliberately covered up the extent of the Iranian war against the United States in Iraq so as to save itself the trouble of responding to the killing of American soldiers by a foreign government. There was no way the American military was going to open up a third front in the war on terror, reasoning that that only made American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan more vulnerable—as well as American civilians at home whose government will not name and pursue their enemies. This is an old habit now of U.S. policymakers, and it knows no party. Democrats and Republicans alike play the same sick game. The Islamic Republic released the American hostages it had taken under the Jimmy Carter Administration to the newly elected Ronald Reagan—who blinked when Iran and Syria, via Hezbollah, killed diplomats and Marines in Beirut.

Rather than making our enemies pay, we’ve let them off time and again over the last 40 years, thus ushering in the golden age of international terrorism, which is helping to capsize the short-lived Pax Americana. Our leaders will not speak frankly to the people who elected them because they fear the American electorate has no stomach for it. War in the Persian Gulf that sends gas to $10 a gallon combined with terror attacks at home would ravage the American economy and our national psyche. So we are silent. And in our silence, monsters breed.

It means that al-Qaida’s networks in the Arabian Peninsula are very active. It means that al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Aulaki, the onetime “moderate” Imam in Virginia who inspired Major Nidal Malik Hasan to shoot 12 of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, is trying to kill as many of his fellow Americans as he can before the Obama Administration catches him in the crosshairs of a drone attack. It means that the Yemeni government is weak. Were it strong, it would have either found those devices before they left Yemen or, alternatively, it would have ensured those bombs reached their destinations by providing the sort of logistical support that only Arab and Iranian security services can offer terrorist groups.

Most important, it means it’s OK to kill Jews.

These two explosive devices, directed at the president’s hometown on the eve of midterm elections, constitute an information operation. While the message is not particularly sophisticated, what makes it interesting is that the perpetrators seem to have come to a perfect understanding of their target audience. After all, what do two synagogues in Chicago have to do with anything in Yemen?

President Barack Obama, Homeland Security chief John Brennan, and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs all carefully declined to take the opportunity of the well-publicized threat to make any comment whatsoever about the fact that American Jews were being specifically targeted by terrorists, to reassure the Jewish community that it was being protected, or to denounce the planned attacks on Jewish places of worship.

And yet, in the next few days, someone in the media—I don’t know exactly who, but someone—will argue that these synagogues were chosen because the president’s former chief-of-staff, a Jew, wants to be the next mayor of Chicago. Hence, this is, in reality, a message to the White House to stop targeting Yemeni militants.

Absurd? Sure it is. But it is more plausible than the notion that American Jews and Jewish houses of worship in Illinois were targeted because of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, or the Golan Heights, or Shaaba Farms, or because of the existence of the State of Israel itself. Someone is surely going to make that argument, because almost all Arab terror against Jews is now attributed to—and excused by—the Arab conflict with Israel, which has become a free pass to commit acts of terror against Jews.

Terror, violence, and bloodshed against Jews now come pre-packaged with a sanctimonious justification. It’s not seen as crazy, sick, irrational violence. It’s political violence. Terrorist violence is irrational and incomprehensible—unless the victims are Jewish. Why do terrorists bomb America, bomb London, bomb Madrid, bomb Casablanca, burn Mumbai? Because they’re crazy, that’s why. With the Jews, well, there’s the occupation. There’s Israel. There’s America’s support for Israel. Terrorism may be abhorrent, but when it comes to the Jews the terrorists themselves have a lot to be angry about. Accordingly, we’re supposed to regard these acts with both horror and reason at the same time—“sure, it’s not pretty, but we get it.” In other words, terror against Jews may produce violence and bloodshed but not moral revulsion.

The target of this attack was Jews, but the target of the information operation is all Americans—including the Americans who rationalize terror attacks against Jews. We created the context for operations like this one and we will see many more of them, bombs and much worse, against Jews and non-Jews alike, for our enemies have taken stock of our character. We are looking for excuses not to fight them. And we accept their phony justifications for the killing of Jews.

But if every new administration makes mistakes, and learns from them, President Barack Obama’s self-appointed task of bringing peace to the Middle East may get more difficult with the mid-term elections Tuesday, when the House, and perhaps the Senate, will fall into the hands of a Republican party that is poised to push back against an administration that is commonly perceived as less friendly to Israel than its predecessors.

House Republicans have pitched their rhetoric high. Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, for instance, described the current White House as “the most anti-Israel administration in the modern history of the state of Israel.” Indeed, there’s some concern in pro-Israel circles that the bipartisan nature of support for the Jewish state is starting to show cracks. Fifty-four Congressional Democrats (but no Republicans) signed a letter urging Obama to “press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza” suffering under Israel’s blockade. A few months later 78 House Republicans wrote a letter to the Israeli Prime Minister expressing their “steadfast support” for him and Israel. The same divide seems to hold true with the electorate as well. An October poll conducted for the Emergency Committee for Israel showed that of “those intending to vote Republican this fall, 69 percent would be more likely to vote for a candidate who was pro-Israel” while only 40 percent of Democratic voters are more likely to vote for a pro-Israel candidate. It appears that the new Congress will be very much in line with the man likely to become its new majority leader, Virginia’s Eric Cantor, the House’s lone Jewish Republican, who recently told the White House that playing “hardball” with Israel “jeopardizes our national security.”

The emergence of Israel as a partisan political football is representative of not only a political difference but a philosophical one as well. One segment of the American political class sees Israel as an exceptional, and like-minded, ally and the other sees it as merely another nation-state—and a problematic one at that. Obama, it seems, is of the latter camp. He came to office with the hardly novel idea that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the Middle East’s central issue and that ending the conflict would cool off the Muslim masses whose hatred of the United States is supposedly tied to Washington’s “unconditional support” for Israel. A peace deal would also be a powerful means—perhaps the only available means, given the improbability of any kind of further American military action in the Middle East—of reducing the strength of the region’s radical actors, especially Iran.

The president pushed the Israelis hard, which only gave the Palestinian Authority incentive not to negotiate but rather to wait for Obama to deliver the Israelis. Domestically, the administration’s bullying of Israel angered some key Democrats, like New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer and many Jewish Democratic donors. Once the midterms are over, Obama will have at least six months before he has to worry about alienating Jewish fund-raisers for his 2012 re-election campaign. Then, as one source in Washington’s pro-Israel community puts it, “we will see what the administration has learned in 18 months; if they’ve understood that the way to move the process forward is to make the Israelis feel confident by embracing them in friendship, and not club Netanyahu like a fish you’re reeling in.”

It’s not clear yet how, or if, the divide over Israel within the administration has been resolved. Both the pro-Israel faction and the faction less friendly to the Jewish state have lost prominent figures (including former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel from the former and James Jones, the national security adviser, from the latter). In another internal fight, it appears that Dennis Ross is gaining the upper hand on George Mitchell, who has dropped his chief of staff, Mara Rudman, who was famously in favor of ratcheting up the pressure on the Israelis. But it was the secretary of State who gave perhaps the clearest indication of where things stand in the administration with one of the most sober assessments in the history of American Middle East diplomacy. “The future holds the possibility of progress,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told guests at the American Task Force for Palestine’s annual banquet last week, “if not in our lifetimes, then certainly in our children’s.”

If the State Department is clearly chastened by the failures of the past 18 months, the fact is that the president makes foreign policy. And this particular commander-in-chief has shown not only a reluctance to delegate important matters to subordinates (as Bush handed off all Middle East policy, save Iraq, to Condoleezza Rice), but also that he is willing to stand his ground to do what he thinks is right and only he can get done, regardless of the political cost. For their part, the Republicans will do what they can to put on the brakes.

Already Eric Cantor has touched off a minor crisis by suggesting that a Republican majority would seek to remove Israel from the foreign operations budget. Cantor’s proposal is to move aid to Israel over to the Pentagon in order to protect it if the GOP seeks to attack the president’s foreign aid budget by cutting funds for states that they believe do not merit U.S. aid. The fact that New York Rep. Nita Lowey, a strong supporter of Israel, has slammed Cantor’s proposal as reckless indicates that this is not about Israel but a political instrument to tie down the executive’s prerogative in making foreign policy.

It’s unlikely the Republicans will push their agenda, or counter-agenda, too far, for in the end their options are quite limited. They can call hearings on Capitol Hill, and they can challenge the White House’s Syria policy by maintaining there a hold on the appointment of the ambassador to Damascus, but too many fights with the administration will stretch the time and resources of the majority. The GOP will need to muster its strength for more pressing concerns than a moribund peace process. Despite the relative quiet in Washington over the last few months about the Iranian nuclear program, this is still a major issue for the GOP as is the deadline for the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan looming in July. The reality is that even when Obama was at the height of his powers he couldn’t force the peace process—not because of a lack of will power and volume, but because there are other political energies at work, some of them far outside the Beltway.

That’s not to say Obama won’t keep pressing. Sources close to Netanyahu’s office say that Obama is already pressuring Israel to extend the freeze. In Washington, some believe that Netanyahu will have a very hard time justifying his refusal. If he could do it for 10 months, what is it about 60 more days that imperils his coalition? If he doesn’t, Israeli sources say, the White House has threatened that it will do nothing to block the Palestinians from unilaterally declaring statehood at the United Nations.

Yet apparently Washington was just showing Jerusalem the instruments of torture while it did the same to the PA—and Abbas, who has much weaker domestic support than Netanyahu, appears to have backed down first. Instead of seeking recognition for a state within the 1967 borders, the PA will present a resolution to the Security Council stating that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal and must be evacuated. The Palestinians recognized they would lose U.S. support if they stepped out on their own and maybe even understood that very few of the member nations that matter most were predisposed to recognize such a state; they would have had more support from, say, Norway than Jordan.

In other words, the PA is trying to force an error from the White House with empty threats of its own. “Unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state is one of those things that comes up often,” says Martin Kramer, the Wexler-Fromer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. “The other is the prospect of impending violence, the next intifada.” However, as Kramer explains, were another intifada to erupt, Abbas and Salam Fayyad understand that the protection and the foreign cash that have created the West Bank’s economic boom would all go away, and they would be left alone to face Hamas.

The peace deal that Obama wants is already out of his hands. The real check on his ambitions is not a Republican majority in the House but the political forces that rule the Middle East. Fayyadism, or that combination of U.S.-sponsored transparency and accountability, is working on the West Bank—at least until Hamas decides to pull the plug on the PA, which is not going to happen so long as the IDF is sitting there. Insofar as Obama believes the status quo is unsustainable, the only other option is chaos—a chaos that he can bring about by forcing the issue yet again.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is in stasis, for the time being anyway, which presents a golden opportunity for a president faced with a hard-line opposition in control of one or both houses of Congress. Let Obama keep his peace process envoys on the run, going back and forth between Ramallah and Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, and Riyadh, and keep expectations low. Even the smallest concessions will be chalked up as groundbreaking—if, for example, the PA agrees to recognize Israel as a Jewish state or Netanyahu gives more time on the settlement freeze—and if nothing gets accomplished, he can blame it on the Republicans. In the political arena, at least, the end of Obama’s grand ambitions may make him the winner of the next few hands of the Middle East poker game.

Ergenekon is the name given to a massive clandestine organization that the AKP says has plotted a host of conspiracies including plans to crash airplanes and bomb Istanbul mosques in the hopes of precipitating a military coup. The Turkish authorities have used these allegations to arrest hundreds of people who oppose Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government—arrests that have been greeted in the West with confused silence.

However, according to Dani Rodrik, a Turkish academic now based in the United States, Ergenekon is not a threat to Turkey’s increasingly Islamist form of democracy but rather an elaborate political fiction created by the AKP and its ally, the mysterious billionaire religious leader Fethullah Gulen, in order to discredit, imprison, and silence opponents. Rodrik believes that the AKP and the Gulenists are looking to consolidate their power not just with a view to short-term political victories, but as part of a vision to change the nature of the fiercely secular Turkish republic. “You get a different perspective on what they’re doing internationally once you understand what they’re doing at home,” Rodrik told me by phone this week. “The AKP and its Gulenist allies are authoritarian at heart, one by one capturing state institutions and undermining the rule of law. What you’re going to get is not a more democratic Turkey.”

Rodrik, the 52-year-old Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is best known for his views on trade policy and the developing world. What does a Harvard economist who makes his home in the United States know about the pitched battle between the military and the Islamist political establishment in a proudly Muslim country? The fact that Rodrik is a member of Turkey’s dwindling Jewish community makes his charges against the AKP and Gulenists suspect to some. “There’s been a level of predictable anti-Semitism in some of the government-friendly media,” Rodrik said. “But it is important for the government to have the liberal intelligentsia with them on this, and persistent anti-Semitism rants wouldn’t go over very well with them.”

Still, this is not the same Turkey that once enjoyed a strategic alliance with Israel. The Turkish-sponsored Mavi Marmara dispatched to Gaza in May suggests that Ankara has instead joined the ranks of the resistance axis, a strange decision for one of Washington’s NATO allies. The writing was on the wall as early as March 2003, shortly after Erdogan took office, when the Turkish parliament rejected the George W. Bush Administration’s request to use Turkey as a launching ground for the invasion of Iraq.

If U.S. officials were slow to chart Turkey’s shift in the international arena, they have been oblivious to the mounting domestic crisis driving the Ergenekon affair. Rodrik himself wasn’t paying especially close attention to the spiral of weird conspiracy cases that have taken over the Turkish justice system until a relative was named in one of the many Ergenekon trials, this one related to allegations of a 2003 anti-government plot known as Sledgehammer. “When these cases came out three years ago,” Rodrik said, “I was where most Turkish liberals are today. I thought, maybe there were some improprieties in the way they were handled, but essentially the government was moving in the best way possible.”

In January a Turkish newspaper began publishing documents produced by an anonymous individual who claimed to be a retired military officer with knowledge of the Sledgehammer plan to bring down the government. Close to 200 active-duty and retired military officers have been charged as conspirators—for plotting terrorist operations like the mosque bombings intended to destabilize the state—all allegedly under the orders of retired four-star general Çetin Doğan, Rodrik’s father-in-law.

“I was skeptical from the beginning that he could be involved in such a thing,” Rodrik told me. “It’s horrifying stuff. Later, I became certain the documents were fabricated.”

What Rodrik and his wife found, he said, were obvious forgeries, clear to anyone “with a working command of Turkish.” The case is based on documents loaded onto three CDs, with no direct evidence tying them to computers where they are said to have been produced by Turkey’s First Army. As Rodrik has written: “Not a single one of the hundreds of officers questioned in the case has acknowledged ever hearing of the Sledgehammer plot or any of the other plans included in the incriminating CDs. The evidence that the three CDs in question are authentic comes solely from their metadata: the username and time information contained on the CDs and the Word documents therein. According to these metadata, the documents and the CDs were produced in 2003.”

It hardly takes a tech expert to alter such metadata, and according to Rodrik it is obvious that these documents could not have been made in 2003 but were produced sometime after, perhaps as late as 2008. Among other glaring anomalies is the fact that some of the organizations named did not exist when the plot was supposedly hatched. Journalists ostensibly blacklisted by the Sledgehammer conspirators were not writing about political issues at the time—one was a food critic, hardly an obvious target in a coup attempt.

“There are many reasons to be suspicious of the authenticity of the documents,” Rodrik told me. “But the zinger is that they are full of references to events that happened after 2003, literally dozens of these things. For instance, the documents mention a hospital by the name it uses after it merged with another hospital in 2008, they mention a company by the name that it took after it was sold to a foreign investor in 2008. Even without these anachronisms, there are enough inconsistencies that the case wouldn’t have gone forward in any legal system that takes the presumption of innocence seriously. But the anachronisms establish conclusively that the defendants have been framed.”

However, the legal system seems to be part of the problem. “Some crimes are based on evidence fabricated by the national police with the connivance of prosecutors,” said Rodrik. For instance, when an anonymous tip led the police to seize a DVD from a retired naval major’s house, the initial report, Rodrick wrote, “found nothing suspicious on the DVD, but a subsequent technical analysis uncovered a hidden file with details of a plan to intimidate non-Muslim minorities through bombings and assassinations. … Unaccountably, the prosecutors are on record questioning another defendant on this hidden file days before the technical analysis was conducted and the file was ‘discovered.’ ”

If the case against his father-in-law and the other alleged Sledgehammer conspirators is so patently flimsy, why, I asked him, isn’t anyone else doing the detective work he and his wife did? Those Turks most inclined to get in the weeds with him are the media and the liberal intelligentsia, are they are either too scared to say anything, said Rodrik, or they side with the AKP and the Gulenists.

Much of the Turkish media is owned by or affiliated with Fethullah Gulen, the supposedly charismatic but largely silent religious figure who has made his home in Pennsylvania since the late 1990s and is closely allied with the AKP. Gulen’s criticism of Ankara over the Mavi Marmara incident suggested to some that a breach had opened between his movement and the AKP, but Rodrik disagrees. “The criticism caught his domestic supporters off guard, because the local Gulenists are all on board with the IHH,” said Rodrik, referring to the Istanbul-based charity with ties to Islamic terrorist organizations, including Hamas. Gulen had good reason for seeing the incident from Washington’s point of view. “What’s important for Gulen is to be on the good side of the U.S. government.”

The AKP and the Gulenists, Rodrik explained, “are interlocking but independent. The Gulenists are an opaque movement. What they stand for is broadly in line with what the AKP wants: a culturally much more conservative Turkey, religious values, and practices. It’s an alliance based on perception of common interests. You can’t tell what’s happening in the Ergenekon affair without accounting for the role of the Gulen movement. The people who are responsible for fabricating evidence, intimidation, and wire-tapping, these are supporters of Gulen.”

The fact that the AKP is a broader umbrella than the Gulen movement, Rodrik argued, is yet another factor in keeping the Sledgehammer case rolling. “The AKP is supported by many liberals, who agree with them on issues of personal freedom, like the headscarf,” he explained. Sledgehammer and other cases that suggest a military plot to destroy Turkish democracy dovetail perfectly with the anti-military sentiment of secularists and liberals who might otherwise be worried by the AKP’s religious bent. “Liberals are anxious to see the military brought down to size,” said Rodrik. “And it’s true that they’ve been involved in some stuff in the past that’s not pretty. So with this narrative already in liberals’ heads, the case has been stage-managed extremely well.”

The storyline happens to fit the preconceptions of most U.S. officials as well. “Washington sees it something like this: The Turkish military and its allies have become too powerful, and now the AKP is trying to liberate the democratic system. This is a process of a deepening of democracy,” Rodrik said. “The narrative is very appealing on the surface. In Washington, I’ve been told it will change only with the arrest of U.S. citizens.”

In addition, Gulen’s public-relations apparatus reaches inside the Beltway. “Gulen encourages his devotees to contribute to members of Congress. When his supporters do an event in D.C., scores of congressmen show up. I have been told members of Congress go fishing on his compound in Pennsylvania,” Rodrik said. “You won’t see Gulen’s name on things, but he commands a vast network of schools, business associations, charities, and media outlets. It’s quite remarkable, how wide and influential this network is.”

To many U.S. officials then, Gulen is the model moderate Muslim, a Sufi who preaches coexistence and cooperation with the West—even as it is the Gulenists who are making war against the United States and Israel’s traditional allies in the Turkish military. But since Sept. 11, U.S. policymakers of both parties have been so giddy at the prospect of Islamic democracy that they have given a free pass to anyone clever enough to cloak their actions and intentions in the cloth of moderate Islam. The fact is that Erdogan and his allies are running roughshod over fundamental democratic principles—which is to say that the problem with Islamic democracy isn’t Islam as such, but rather the corruption and conspiracies of the governing party and its allies, who use Islam as cover for their own hunger for power. Washington, meanwhile, doesn’t dare criticize the domestic machinations of a Muslim democracy’s ruling Islamist party, for fear of crashing its own plans, and alienating Muslims.

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“The State of Israel has reached the height of fascism,” says Haneen Zoubi, a member of the Knesset representing Balad, an Arab Israeli party. The oath’s author, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, charges that it is precisely those like Zoubi who make the oath necessary. Zoubi was aboard the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish-sponsored boat that attempted to run the naval blockade of Gaza. The ship violated international law by refusing to respect a blockade and then attacked an Israeli boarding party, which would make Zoubi, were she a citizen of, say, the United States while it was at war, subject to a number of charges, including conspiracy and treason, and liable to execution by the state. And she’s not alone: Some of her fellow Knesset members from Arab Israeli political parties have become notorious in recent years for actions that no Western government would tolerate from its citizens—let alone from legislators who are privy to government decisions and counsels. Ahmed Tibi, an Arab Israeli member of the Knesset, served as a close political adviser to Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian leader planned to undermine the Oslo Accords and murder hundreds of Israelis in the second Intifada. Tibi’s colleague, Azmi Bishara, resigned from the Knesset and fled to Syria in 2007 to avoid facing charges of espionage and treason for giving Hezbollah detailed information about optimal rocket targets inside Israel during the Second Lebanon War.

The idea that mandating an oath of allegiance for new citizens is a sign of Israeli fascism is part of the delegitimization campaign against Israel. It fits so well with media blather about the decline of Israeli democracy—and the nightmarish scariness of Israel’s foreign minister—that critics have conveniently ignored the fact that such oaths are normal fare in every major Western democracy. The U.S. oath of allegiance for new citizens, for example, requires new Americans to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty”; promise to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic”; promise to “bear arms” and “perform noncombatant” service at the direction of the U.S. government; and swear that one takes the oath “freely and without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion” in the name of God Almighty himself, all of which makes swearing an oath of allegiance to the democratic Jewish State of Israel seem like pretty weak stuff.

The fact that Jews who become new citizens under the Law of Return are exempt from taking the oath is wrongly cited as proof of the inherent racism of the proposed new law. Countries that allow individuals not born in the country to establish citizenship on the basis of blood and cultural ties�