Turkish-Kurdish relations have been notoriously fractious and violent; Turkey’s brutal, 25-year war against Kurdish separatists has killed an estimated 45,000 people, and skirmishes between the Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, which seeks to form an independent Kurdish state that would include parts of present-day Turkey, continue to this day. Last year, Erdogan forged a shaky truce with the Kurds, who comprise about a sixth of Turkey’s population and a fifth of Iraq’s, while continuing the fight against the violent separatist organization. This policy, referred to as the “Kurdish Opening,” has seen a warming of ties between Turkey and the broader Kurdish community, which is concentrated mostly in Syria, Iran, and northern Iraq. “I feel really among my brothers,” Barzani said, a sentiment that would have been unimaginable from the Kurdish leader just a few years ago. This past summer, Turkey opened a consulate in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government, or KRG, and a Turkish diplomat recently told me that his country “sees the Kurds as our strategic partners.”

Prior to the meeting, Erdogan had been working himself into a lather over the flotilla incident. He immediately withdrew his country’s ambassador from Tel Aviv, demanded an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the matter, and called the raid “inhumane state terrorism,” all in a seeming bid to become spokesman for the Muslim world. He went so far as to compare the Israeli Defense Forces to the PKK, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, and the European Union. “They saw innocent babies as a threat,” Erdogan declared in the Turkish city of Konya, just a day after meeting Barzani. “They massacred those innocent babies in their mothers’ arms, like those terrorists here.”

With this rhetorical onslaught, Erdogan presented a challenge to Barzani, who as leader of the Kurds has tried to distance the KRG (which has achieved a substantial degree of autonomy in three provinces in northern Iraq) from the PKK and taken a delicate approach to the touchy subject of Kurdish independence. While refusing to rule out the prospect that Kurdistan might one day become a sovereign state, Barzani has made efforts to support Iraq’s nascent federal democracy. When I interviewed him in May, in the midst of fraught negotiations following the most recent Iraqi parliamentary elections, he stressed support for a “national unity government.” (My trip to Kurdistan was sponsored by the KRG.) But if Erdogan was trying to goad Barzani into bashing the Jewish state, his attempts proved unsuccessful. The most that Barzani offered was that he’s “very upset from the loss of civilian life.”

Compared with the outraged reactions from other global figures—particularly his brethren in the Islamic world—Barzani’s response was remarkably tepid. And that’s hardly surprising. For decades, Kurds and Israelis have enjoyed a mutual affinity, fostered by shared aversion to forces that oppressed Kurds and supported terrorism against Israel. The extent of this sympathy was fallaciously leant a duplicitous cast in 2003 when the FBI launched a probe into the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The resulting case hinged upon fabricated, “classified” documents, delivered by a Pentagon analyst (working for the FBI as a condition of a plea bargain) to an AIPAC staffer, purporting to show that the lives of Mossad agents working undercover in Kurdistan were in danger. Another AIPAC staffer relayed the information to the Israeli embassy. The case, spurious from the beginning—and predicated upon a rationale that was referred to at the time as “an unprecedented interpretation of the 89-year-old Espionage Act,” by the then-ombudsman of the First Amendment Center—was dropped due to the government’s failure to prove that the activities of the then-AIPAC staffers in any way compromised U.S. national security.

The existence or extent of Israel’s intelligence relationship with Kurdistan is officially denied by both parties. When I asked a senior Kurdish intelligence official if the KRG cooperated with the Israelis, he demurred. In line with most Muslim states, Iraq doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Israel, and moves by the KRG to formulate a foreign policy independent of the central government irritate Baghdad. But official relations between an independent or autonomous Kurdistan and Israel could one day prove to be a decisive factor in the chessboard that is Middle Eastern politics, and whatever their present scope, such relations make a great deal of sense. That’s because Kurdistan and Israel, as well as Kurds and Jews as people, share strategic interests and historic commonalities.

***

The relationship between Kurds and Jews goes back to ancient times. Jews lived in Kurdistan since the exile of the 10 Tribes in the 8th century BCE. At the community’s height, Kurdish Jews numbered around 50,000, spread between Iran, Turkey, and northern Iraq. Many of them fled for Israel when the Jewish state declared its independence in 1948, and that trickle turned into a flood in the 1950s as life for Jews in Iraq became more and more difficult.

Political relations began in 1965, when David Kimche, one of the founding fathers of the Mossad, visited Kurdistan to meet with Mullah Mustafa Barzani, Massoud Barzani’s father and then-leader of the Kurds. The meeting came at the behest of the senior Barzani, who was seeking outside support for his people’s fight against the military regime that ruled the country. Kimche returned to Jerusalem urging Israeli support for the Kurds as part of the Jewish state’s outreach to non-Arab states like Iran and Turkey. With the United States, Israel covertly trained the Kurdish paramilitary, or peshmerga, and provided the Kurds with agricultural and technological know-how.

But Israel was forced to break off its relations with the Kurds 10 years later when Iran, then under the control of Shah Reza Pahlavi, signed an agreement with Iraq under which it would withdraw its backing of the Kurdish militants bedeviling Iraq’s Ba’athist regime, in exchange for the resolution of a territorial dispute along the Iran-Iraq border. Iran and Israel both pulled their military advisers out of northern Iraq, to the great dismay of Kurdish leaders.

The relationship blossomed once again, however, after the first Gulf War, when the United States and Great Britain began to enforce a United Nations-sanctioned no-fly zone over northern and southern Iraq that protected the Kurds (and southern Shia) from Saddam Hussein’s aggression. And cooperation allegedly heightened in the aftermath of the second Iraq War, at least according to a 2004 New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh, which asserted that Israel was “establishing a significant presence on the ground” in Kurdistan in order to keep an eye on bordering Iran. “Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan,” Hersh reported, “providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria.” Others dispute Hersh, who relies heavily on anonymous sources, and whose claims of Israeli involvement in Kurdistan have yet to be confirmed by any other media outlet. “The notion that there are hundreds of Israelis running around Iraqi Kurdistan is a fantasy and has been publicly ridiculed by Kurdish leaders,” says Andrew Apostolou, a senior program manager at Freedom House, an independent human-rights watchdog. “The main foreign political and economic presences in Iraqi Kurdistan are American, British, Turkish, and Iranian. Iraqi Kurdistan is also seeking to link itself economically to the Gulf.”

Those claiming that the decline in Israeli-Turkish relations is something sudden, the bitter fallout of the January 2009 Gaza War or this year’s flotilla incident, might look to this alleged move by Israel some six years ago as a contributing factor. And as early as 2007, Turkish security sources were allegedly complaining about Israeli recalcitrance in supplying them with promised weapons to fight Kurdish rebels. Potential Israeli cooperation with Kurds, even if initiated with the intent of undermining the despotic regimes in Syria and Iran, would bother Turkey regardless of the purpose. That’s because the Turks view the de facto independence of Iraqi Kurdistan as a threat to their control over their own Kurdish population.

The obvious alignment of interests between Israel and Kurdistan, and the concomitant decline in relations between Israel and Turkey, have let the Turkish press, never known for its responsibility or hesitancy to sink into sensationalism and anti-Semitism, run wild. Years-old rumors that Barzani is descended from a long line of Kurdish rabbis have been given new weight. Whether or not this aspect of Barzani’s lineage is actually true, it fits well into a conspiracy theory long peddled by Turkish nationalists, which paints Kurdish-Israeli ties as something more than just the result of empathy between two regional minorities that have endured discrimination, war, and genocide at the hands of others. Meanwhile, some enterprising Israelis coyly floated the idea of sending out “reverse flotillas” to aid Turkish Kurds.

Israel’s fraying relationship with Turkey will be to the Kurds’ benefit. One of the main factors that limited Israeli-Kurdish ties in the 1990s was Israel’s military and diplomatic alliance with Turkey, which for decades has been Israel’s most important ally in the Muslim world. That relationship at times led Israel to work against Kurdish aspirations, or at least give the appearance of doing so. In 1999, for example, hundreds of Kurds attacked the Israeli consulate in Berlin over accusations that Jerusalem had aided Ankara in apprehending PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in Kenya. Three Kurds were killed in the ensuing scuffle, and Israeli denial of the accusations did little to stem Kurdish anger. Thanks largely to the provocations of Erdogan’s Islamist government, however, the potential for a strengthened Israeli-Kurdish alliance has never looked better.

***

Beyond the strategic rationale for the Israeli-Kurdish relationship, there exists a deeper, values-based relationship. Both Jews and Kurds are embattled, once-stateless minorities in a region afflicted by obscurantist religious and ethnic movements that seek to sublimate, if not eliminate, religious and ethnic diversity. On one side of this divide lies a version of Sunni Wahabbist extremism and Shia radicalism pledging to rid the Middle East not only of Jews, but of anyone deemed insufficiently Islamic.

Another commonality is that both peoples have prevailed against attempts at extermination. In 1986, Saddam Hussein launched his Anfal campaign against the Kurds, eventually killing more than 200,000. In Halabja, the town about 10 miles from the Iranian border where, in 1988, the Iraqi military deployed poison gas to murder at least 5,000 people, a museum and monument stand to commemorate the dead. The museum’s inner sanctum, a round room with the names of the victims of the attack etched on the walls, evokes Yad Vashem. The city’s cemetery features a sign, “BA’ATH MEMBERS NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER.” Yasser Arafat’s support for Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War didn’t endear Palestinians to the Kurds, and general Kurdish indifference to the plight of the Palestinians argues against the trendy theory of “linkage,” which argues that resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a prerequisite to solving a host of other problems in the Muslim world.

The Kurds have proudly defied the anti-Israel theatrics of their Muslim brethren. Speaking with a variety of KRG officials, I heard that they would be more than happy to establish official diplomatic relations with Israel were such a decision within their power. “We have no problems with Israel,” says Falah Mustafa Bakir, head of the KRG Department of Foreign Relations. “They have not harmed us. We can’t be hating them because Arabs hate them.” In a 2007 television interview, Barzani said, “If an Israeli embassy were opened in Baghdad, we would no doubt open an Israeli consulate in Erbil.” That same year, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni sat next to Jalal Talabani’s wife, Hero Ibrahim Ahmed Talabani, at an international women’s conference in Vienna. The two discussed the peace process and the plight of citizens in Sderot, the rocket-plagued Israeli city on the Gaza border. At the 2008 Socialist International, Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s president and the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan political party, shook Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s hand.

“We’ve been called ‘the second Israel,’ ” Bakir says. “We cite Israel as a democracy in the Middle East.” The regional forces arrayed against an independent Kurdistan are the same sorts of theocratic and authoritarian ones that tried to destroy the nascent Jewish state in 1948 and that have been arrayed against it ever since. “This island of democracy,” he says of Israel, “was seen as a germ,” yet Kurds take heart in its success as an independent nation. In light of their experience as a stateless people continually subjected to discrimination and genocide by the regimes under which they have lived, the Kurds have woefully adopted a saying that they have “no friends but the mountains.” They also have the Jews.

James Kirchick is writer at large with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and a contributing editor to The New Republic.

Click here to view all articles in this series.

Yet Israel is hardly alone in failing to grasp the forces that have reshaped the nature of armed conflict in our 21st-century global information society, in which perception is almost as important as—some would say more important than—reality. The term “information warfare” first gained currency at the end of the 1980s as the Cold War was drawing to a close. Indeed the Gulf War of 1991 was labeled by some analysts as the “first information war.” Ever since, the phrase has entered popular media parlance, while academic journals, international conferences, and even scholarly institutes have been created for its analysis. It is sometimes used interchangeably with “media warfare,” but as it also became a military doctrine the relationship of IW with media relations—or military public affairs—can sometimes cause confusion in military parlance, where it has been replaced by the broader term “information operations.”

Of course, the use of information in warfare has always been a vital component of military strategy. The side with the best intelligence about its adversaries’ capabilities, troop sizes, equipment, and disposition, together with an understanding of the terrain, psychology, motivation, and even the weather conditions that were likely to affect the outcome of battles, has always enjoyed a greater likelihood of victory—from Alexander the Great to today’s commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. Information operations, or IO, have increased in military significance as modern conflicts have shifted from conventional war-fighting to counterinsurgency strategies that require greater attention to so-called “hearts and minds.”

IO as a military doctrine is broadly seen as a toolbox of capabilities consisting of computer network operations, electronic warfare, operational security, psychological operations, and deception. Computer network operations, or CNO, are about defending one’s own computer-based military systems—information assurance—as well as attacking adversaries’ systems. The attempt by NATO to destroy the broadcasts of Radio Television Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo conflict is often cited as an example of the latter, but that was really media warfare; the attempt to disrupt Serbian command-and-control capabilities is a much better example of electronic warfare. (The Stuxnet worm that has attacked the control systems of the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran also comes to mind.) Combined CNO and electronic warfare are what most people think of when talking about information warfare, such as the devastating 2008 cyberattacks on Estonia’s financial and other computer services by suspected Russian info-warriors resentful about the move of a memorial to Soviet World War II soldiers.

As the military doctrine of information warfare was emerging throughout the 1990s, there was an obsession with the new technology that was increasingly driving a revolution in military affairs—from cameras on the noses of smart missiles navigated by GPS services coordinated by satellites to the widespread take-up of Internet access, email, and cell telephony. The military began to talk of “asymmetric warfare,” in which a militarily inferior opponent could inflict significant damage through computer-based technologies using viruses, worms, trojans, and other “info-bombs” in cyber or hacker warfare. The threat most feared was an “electronic Pearl Harbor,” not Sept. 11—an attack that may have been coordinated partly using the Internet, but it was carried out by people who piloted old-fashioned airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

With the Cold War won, the U.S. government had also downgraded its international information programs, culminating in the closure of the U.S. Information Agency in 1999, creating a space that adversaries were eager and able to fill with a new kind of asymmetric warfare. Especially in places like the Middle East, terrorist groups were able to internationalize themselves quickly and at a very low cost by tapping into the global power of World Wide Web. The Palestinians were among the first to demonstrate how local causes could be internationalized via new media as the so-called “Electronic Intifada” became the most potent force-multiplier in the arsenals of Fatah and Hamas. Terrorist groups like al-Qaida, popularly thought of as struggling for a return to medieval values, embraced new media technologies not just to coordinate their planned violent attacks but also to disseminate their messages and recruit followers from the worldwide Muslim community, the Ummah.

The Sept. 11 attacks also demonstrated how sophisticated terrorists are when exploiting the old media to wage their new kind of warfare. Striking at rush hour, when so many TV stations have traffic helicopters patrolling the skies above the cities, helped ensure that the attacks would be captured live (in real time) on television—and it worked. How many people have described watching those terrible scenes on live television that day as like watching a movie? From the terrorists’ point of view, that was precisely the point—especially given the importance in Islamic thought of bearing witness to so-called acts of martyrdom. Terrorists also understand that their acts of violence are unlikely to succeed in a military victory—they are acts of theater designed to strike fear into their opponents and instill pride in their supporters. The audience is their main target, not the victims of their violence, although the target audience is more likely to be the chattering classes who are most likely to express horror and disgust.

So, the declaration of a “global war on terror,” fought primarily with kinetic weaponry—guns, bombs, and drones—played into the terrorists’ hands. Acts of violence might repulse most sensible people, and the waging of a kinetic war, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, and again in Afghanistan, did precisely that, especially among the Islamic Ummah. Anti-Americanism, even in non-Islamic countries, grew to unprecedented levels as the war on terror dragged on to twice the length of World War II. The Internet became the primary battle space for anti-American and anti-Western propaganda about a renewed crusade against Islam, a clash of civilizations and a Zionist-Christian plot to subordinate Muslims everywhere.

It is impossible not to conclude that the war on terror completely missed the point about what Sept. 11 was all about. Although the ongoing fighting has been re-branded by the Obama Administration into the “struggle against violent extremism”—which is better than the use of the word “war”—the realization that a war of ideas is what’s really happening has come far too late in a conflict in which words and images matter and the primary battle spaces are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. For good or ill, the citizen information warriors who fight these conflicts are the bloggers, the citizen journalists, and digital eyewitnesses who disseminate images from Abu Ghraib or Afghan weddings to a global audience.

It is in this virtual theater that the real war is now being fought. From just a handful of extreme jihadist websites in 2001, there are now thousands. We are in the era of Web 2.0, in which interactivity rather than just the passive receipt of information is the norm: This is a space in which it is impossible, to use military jargon again, to take command and control or achieve full-spectrum dominance. It is also a strategic space, in which military doctrines like information operations have real limitations. IO embraces the use of military deception, and whereas terrorist organizations don’t play by the same rules when it comes to information and disinformation, democratic military organizations do have a degree of accountability. If they lie deliberately, they will get found out in an era characterized by the near-impossibility of keeping secrets. And if that happens, the credibility of any truthful messaging that may be disseminated will be irreparably damaged. IO has proved useful, to varying degrees of success, in the real war theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan but only really at the tactical and operational levels of command. For al-Qaida, it is the main tool at the strategic level of communication.

Although the United States and its allies are now in the process of developing strategic communications capabilities for conducting “global engagement” (another rebranding by the Obama Administration), early hopes for a return to non-military information strategies created by the president’s 2009 Cairo speech are as yet unfulfilled. As long as the war in Afghanistan continues in its current kinetic surge there is little likelihood of short-term success in the information domain. Many in the audience will continue to think they are watching a tragedy, and no matter how well the military actors perform, war is no laughing matter.

Philip M. Taylor is a professor of international communications at the University of Leeds, U.K.

With Iran’s seemingly inexorable march toward a nuclear weapon, it’s not difficult to see why the Saudis would want one of their own, to ensure the regime’s security against its key regional adversary. The Saudi population is among the world’s most vulnerable, as human existence on the Arabian peninsula is dependent on a number of desalination plants, which could be easily targeted with conventional payloads. What concerns Riyadh is how an Iranian bomb could destabilize the Saudi ruling order. That same concern for regime security affects every authoritarian state in the Middle East, and it’s only a matter of time before everyone has nuclear capability, as everyone has a reason to fear everyone else.

A number of observers maintain that the Saudis have not yet pulled the trigger. “We don’t know if they’ve made any decision,” says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington. Nevertheless, it was the working assumption of some high-level Bush Administration officials that the Saudis had a Pakastani bomb in escrow—one of the possible scenarios that Sokolski has heard. “One of the options might be to have the Pakistanis base some of their nuclear capability in Saudi Arabia. Saudi is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but that doesn’t forbid others, like the Pakistanis, from basing their nuclear capabilities on Saudi soil, as long as it’s under Pakistani control.”

Who else needs a bomb? The United Arab Emirates, which has a civilian nuclear program that is further along than those in other Arab states, would want a bomb because it fears not only Iran but also its Saudi neighbor, with whom it has had territorial disputes. Kuwait, the Gulf state most recently invaded by an Arab neighbor, Iraq, has just announced it’s starting a civilian nuclear program. The fact that Egypt is restarting the program it halted several years ago suggests that it, too, is concerned about both Iran and Tehran’s ally Syria, a longtime Egyptian rival, whose own nuclear facility was destroyed by the Israelis in 2007. Jordan, which has also just started a civilian nuclear program, would want a bomb to keep at bay a Syrian neighbor that has worked to destabilize the Hashemite kingdom over a half century. Even Sudan wants a bomb, for prestige and to ward off Egypt, with whom it has frequent disputes over rights to the Nile. And then there are the non-Arab actors, like Turkey, which can hardly afford to let either Iran or the Arabs have a leg up. The Kurds appear to be the odd man out; however, against a backdrop of widespread nuclear proliferation it would not be impossible to imagine a scenario in which existing Israeli-Kurdish ties could be expanded to include technology necessary to ensure Kurdish independence against the Turks, Iranians and Iraqis, and Syrians.

So, what would the region look like with widespread proliferation? The good news is that Middle Eastern politics would look almost exactly the way it already does, except more so—violent, fractious, and with the most ambitious actors in the region looking to tip the balance of power in their favor but checked by other regional powers as well as by the United States. In short, this is the argument for containment—that the essential strategic contours of a nuclear-armed Middle East stay exactly the same, just more dangerous.

The nuclear bomb, wrote the British military historian B.H. Liddell Hart, “reduces the likelihood of full-scale war, [while] it increases the possibility of limited war pursued by widespread local aggression.” Liddell Hart was writing of the Cold War, but he might have been prophesying a nuclearized Middle East, where state-on-state warfare is already relatively rare, certainly compared to 19th- and 20th-century Europe. Perhaps it is because the nation-state is relatively new in the region, or maybe it is because the Arabs, as Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi told me, are a feuding people and not a warring one, but regional regimes tend to avoid direct confrontation with each other. Indeed, the last two state-versus-state wars in the Middle East had on one side a foreign power, the United States, as it squared off against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; the last time two Middle Eastern countries fought it out directly was the 1980s-long Iran-Iraq war; and Israel hasn’t fought an Arab army on its own borders since 1973.

Middle Eastern actors are historically inclined to wage armed conflict through proxies, or privateers, as America’s founding fathers referred to the pirates ransoming U.S. ships and citizens off the Barbary Coast at the behest of the Beys of Algiers and Tripoli. We now call them non-state actors—or terrorist organizations that are incapable of waging large operations without the logistical, financial, and political support of Middle Eastern states.

The bad news, then, is that a nuclearized Middle East will look pretty much the same as it does now, with governments using terrorist proxies to attack, and deter, each other. The real concern over an Iranian bomb and the subsequent arms race isn’t that regional states would drop their radioactive payloads on each other but that a chessboard full of nuclear umbrellas would further embolden terrorist outfits working at the behest of Arab and Iranian clandestine services. While Iran and Syria make use of Hezbollah and Hamas, let’s not forget that al-Qaida is largely a function of how the Saudi Interior Ministry and security services have dealt with Saudi’s excess young men—by sending them off to do jihad, whether that’s to Afghanistan in the 1980s, to Bosnia in the 1990s, or now to Iraq.

Who knows whether loose nukes would wind up in the hands of Hezbollah or al-Qaida, but we already know how nukes will embolden state sponsors of terror. Since Islamabad has gone nuclear, Pakistani-based terrorist groups have conducted attacks against India, like the one against the Indian parliament in 2001 and the Mumbai massacre of 2008, with the assurance that India can’t do a thing about it—or else risk nuclear war. It is reasonable to assume that other state sponsors of terror, once nuclear, will follow suit.

There’s another problem with Middle East proliferation, a lesson the Saudis learned with their purchase of intermediate-range Chinese missiles in the 1980s. As Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of State, explained to Riyadh, “You have put Saudi Arabia squarely in the targeting package of the Israelis. You are now number one on the Israeli hit parade. If the balloon goes up anywhere in the Middle East, you’re going to get hit first.” That never occurred to the Saudis, who were simply scared of the Iranians. If Middle East proliferation could be boiled down to Tehran and Riyadh, or even Sunnis and Shiites, or better yet if the Middle East really was all about the Arab-Israeli conflict, then the nuclear issue would be bipolar, precisely the sort of scenario the United States managed to contain for almost half a century. But the Middle East is not like that, and the issue is not simply multipolarity; rather, regional proliferation partakes of the same issues that make this highly ideological part of the world different from any other. In the Middle East, it is standard operating procedure to shoot at third parties in order to make war on your enemies.

Consider how Middle Eastern states triangulate off of Israel to enhance their own prestige. Our American obsession with the peace process obscures the fact that the conflict is the primary means by which Middle Eastern regimes compete with each other. For instance, supporting Hezbollah is not just how Iran fights Israel; it is also how Iran challenges the prestige of its Sunni Arab adversaries. By making war on Israel through Hezbollah, Iran has driven a wedge between the conservative Arab regimes that have made accommodations with Israel and the Arab masses who prize resistance to the Zionist enemy.

Most recently, Turkey sought to enhance its regional standing by competing for a stake in the resistance when it sent the Mavi Marmara to Gaza. The Iranians were caught flat-footed and promised their own flotilla, which has yet to materialize, to match Ankara’s. Proliferation means that all the regimes are competing against each other—with nuclear weapons in their quivers. If Hezbollah or Hamas were at war with Israel, maybe Turkey or Saudi Arabia would rush to put its nuclear umbrella over the resistance before the Iranians had a chance. If that intra-Muslim competition manages to deter Israel, it nonetheless raises the stakes among Tehran, Riyadh, and Ankara.

There is no containing several dozen men in a room shooting at each other, which is what a nuclearized Middle East will look like.

Wawro is a Middle East tourist, as he is more than happy to admit. His previous work was on modern European military history, though his hosting gigs on the History Channel have undoubtedly contributed to an aura of broad historical competence. He speaks no regional languages and thus is limited to English-language sources. As his title indicates, Wawro thinks that the United States has become trapped in the “quicksand” of the Middle East. I found this a promising beginning and looked forward to an intelligent deconstruction of U.S. policy from an isolationist point of view. A good case can be made that U.S. interests would have been better served if the United States had been much less involved in the Middle East. The core of that case is simple: a) oil is a commodity, and whoever produces it would have to sell it to us and the world at market prices; and b) the problems between Arabs and Israelis have very limited global significance, and their negative consequences for U.S. interests would be relatively easy to limit. Wawro, in the end, thinks he has made just that isolationist critique. He concludes the book: “Let us move deliberately and powerfully to the edge of the morass and climb out.”

But this is a bit of false advertising. He undercuts his conclusion just a few pages earlier, when he calls for a “reckoning” with both Saudi Arabia and Israel. With the former he implies that we need to pressure Riyadh for major domestic political changes. With the latter he says we need to solve the Palestinian problem, including its refugee element. One can make the case for both recommendations, but this is hardly a limited agenda for U.S. foreign policy. It is also at variance with Wawro’s sensible conclusion elsewhere (particularly in the Iraq context) that the United States should avoid quixotic efforts to change the domestic political systems of the region. A real isolationist critique would say that we should not care a whit about Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia or Palestinian rage, no matter how justified, because our interests can be secured without involving ourselves in these matters. In the end, despite the isolationist trappings, Wawro does not advocate a U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East, just an activist policy with different goals and methods.

The muddle of Wawro’s policy recommendations is matched by his overly simplistic account of how the United States ended up where it is in today’s Middle East. Boiled down, his argument is that everything the United States has done in the region has been a huge mistake. He is critical of U.S. intervention in Iranian politics to help overthrow progressive nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. He is equally critical of U.S. efforts at various times to embrace another “progressive” politician of that era, Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser. President Dwight Eisenhower should have supported the British and French intervention in the Suez Crisis of 1956 but should not have intervened in Lebanon in 1958. Even when he grudgingly concedes the success of a policy, like the Gulf War of 1990-91, he is critical of the lack of planning for the postwar situation (even though that critique implies that the Unites States should have been more involved in Iraqi domestic politics after the war).

In essence, when it comes to U.S. Middle East policy, Wawro is a Groucho Marxist—whatever it is, he’s against it. A reader has a right to consistency in critique, or some effort to judge which approaches were more or less successful. Wawro does not provide that consistency. As a historian, he is also surprisingly lacking in empathy for his subjects. At one point, he traces the Sept. 11 attacks directly to the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, which promised military and economic aid to countries threatened by another state. Even if we accept the questionable chain of causality Wawro implies in this charge, it would have taken superhuman foresight for a politician to have anticipated the consequences of his actions 45 years into the future.

There are two great villains in his telling of the story: Israel and Saudi Arabia. For Wawro, the Israelis have manipulated U.S. domestic politics since 1948 to involve the United States in an unbalanced policy of support for their expansionist aims. He makes very little differentiation across time periods. For him, the domestic-politics explanation is as powerful in the 1950s—when many American Jewish organizations were just beginning to exert themselves or did not yet exist, and Eisenhower reversed Israeli gains in the Suez War—as it was in the 2000s, when the George W. Bush Administration allied with Israel in the “global war on terror.” He acknowledges but downplays the importance of shifting Cold War considerations in U.S. policy toward Jerusalem, which provide a better explanation for the relative distance Eisenhower exhibited toward the Israelis versus the beginning of the “special relationship” under Kennedy and its full flowering under Johnson and Nixon. If Jewish political power were so central and so all-encompassing, it is difficult indeed to explain these changes. But if you realize that Eisenhower and his secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, still held out hope of bringing Egypt and Syria into the anti-Soviet alliance, you understand their arms-length approach to Israel. By the early 1960s, it was clear that Nasser and the Syrians had chosen the Soviet camp, and thus the growing strength of the U.S.-Israeli strategic relationship made sense in the Cold War framework even to Richard Nixon—not a politician known for his close relations with the American Jewish community.

Wawro is on firmer ground in emphasizing domestic politics as the main driver in the U.S.-Israeli relationship after the Cold War ended. But once again his mono-causal emphasis on the domestic factor does not help us explain important differences among the post-Cold War presidents, from Bill Clinton’s intense focus on the peace process to Bush’s hands-off stance to Barack Obama’s promise of a more critical, even-handed engagement. Wawro’s intense criticism of the pro-Israel lobby will undoubtedly lead to comparisons with the recent work on the subject by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt. However, I see a substantial difference in their critiques. Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the policies supported by the pro-Israel lobby do not advance U.S. interests, but they repeatedly assert that it is normal for U.S. citizens to engage in lobbying.

Wawro at no point acknowledges the legitimacy of the domestic political process in the formation of U.S. foreign policy. Instead, he allows his distaste for the results of that lobbying to affect his tone about the process itself. The implication of his analysis is that there is something inherently illegitimate about the way supporters of Israel attempt to influence U.S. policy-making. The distinction between the Mearsheimer-Walt position and Wawro’s is subtle, as both are very opposed to the current level of U.S. support for Israel, but important. Mearsheimer and Walt are engaging the public in an effort to develop a base of support to counter what they see as the influence of the pro-Israel lobby. Wawro is simply hinting that the lobby’s activities, in a somewhat sinister way, harm U.S. interests.

The same prospect of public controversy is not present in Wawro’s other choice of villain. Nobody in the United States really likes Saudi Arabia, for all the obvious reasons: the cultural differences, the puritanical and narrow interpretation of Islam that is the state religion in the country, Saudi power in the world oil market, the involvement of so many Saudis in the Sept. 11 attacks. Wawro never mentions the Saudis without emphasizing their obscurantism, their hypocrisy, their greed, and their support for terrorists ranging from the Algerian opponents of French colonialism in the 1950s through al-Qaida today. What he never satisfactorily explains, though, is why every U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt thought it was important to have a good working relationship with them, despite all the differences between the two countries and despite the occasional domestic political cost maintaining the relationship entailed.

Much as in the case of Israel, Wawro attributes the Saudi-U.S. relationship to domestic politics. In this case he sees a combination of the power of the oil lobby and the more general and seemingly insatiable public appetite for petroleum as producing an unfortunate reliance on a country that is really an enemy of the United States. Again, his mono-causal explanatory framework obscures much more than it enlightens. He has little to say about the common Cold War interests of Washington and Riyadh. He gives little explanatory weight to regional shifts that drove the two countries together, particularly the Iranian Revolution, which not only ended the most important U.S. alliance in the Persian Gulf but also presented the Saudis with their first real challenge to leadership on the Islamic platform in the region.

Wawro’s lack of concern for the nuance of Middle East politics also undercuts his most serious charge against Saudi Arabia: that it has consistently supported terrorism. He does not acknowledge that at least some of the “terrorists” the Saudis supported were also supported by the United States, as part of our common Cold War strategy against the Soviet Union. An author with a greater sense of the ironies of history would have noted that the Sept. 11 attacks can be directly traced back to the two greatest successes in that relationship: the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and the Gulf War of 1990-91. But Wawro is not interested in tragic ironies or historical nuance. He knows the bad guys, and that is that.

When Wawro gets to the payoff of the book—Sept. 11, the Iraq War and its aftermath—he tells a surprisingly conventional story. The Sept. 11 story was better told by Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower, and Steve Coll, in Ghost Wars. His account of the Iraq War, building on the extensive public record and literature now developed, does not attempt to judge which of the many motives attributed to the Bush Administration were most important in driving it to war. He simply throws them all in the pot—WMD, terrorism, democracy-promotion, neocon hubris, oil, and Israel.

I wanted to like this book. I share Wawro’s absolute rejection of the Iraq War and the neoconservative project in the Middle East and his disquiet about the power of the pro-Israel lobby in U.S. policy-making. Like him, I think that U.S. interests could be served by a less interventionist approach to the region. But in the end his account of the U.S. Middle East adventures is unsatisfactory. Too many details are wrong, too many nuances are unexplored, too much explanatory weight is put on his villains. What he gets right is not new, and what he presents as new is not particularly right. The isolationist critique of U.S. Middle Eastern policy, which Wawro set out to write, remains to be written.

F. Gregory Gause III is a professor of political science at the University of Vermont and the author of The International Relations of the Persian Gulf.

With Saddam’s steely emissaries raining on us for weeks, I, like many other Israelis, began to prepare myself for a bloated death toll. Some analysts spoke of dozens of casualties, others feared hundreds. The reality, we soon learned with great relief, was starkly different, and the antiquated weapons—not more than aged pipes, really, groaning under the burden of their long and strenuous flight—caused some damage to property and claimed the lives of two Israelis, with an additional three suffering fatal heart attacks as a result of war-related stress. Five people, I thought, five people was not bad at all. What I felt was relief. But judging by the media’s extensive coverage of the five victims, one could easily think that Baghdad’s attacks had annihilated a substantial portion of the population: profiles of the deceased were reported at length, their weeping relatives interviewed, government officials filmed rushing to comfort the bereaved.

I asked my mother why all the fuss. Trying my best to sound like a grown man, I said we should be grateful, as we’ve clearly avoided a much larger catastrophe. Five casualties, I stated in a voice that I thought was confident and macho and mature, is a price we could live with.

“No,” my mother said, so softly her words were almost drowned out by the din of the television news, “it’s not.” Her look suggested that our conversation was over, that I didn’t—couldn’t—understand. I went back to my room burning with shame, and listened to Lou Reed wail about heroin until the next missile hit later that afternoon.

My mother’s words, however, refused to leave me. It didn’t take much thought to realize the context of her sentiment, namely that each life was sacred and every needless loss a tragedy and five deaths just as horrible as five hundred. But the piercing gaze with which she stabbed me as she spoke suggested there was more to it than that. Confused, I sought distraction in mindless entertainment.

Like most Israelis during those strange days of that phantom war, I, too, was taken with Zehu Ze, the Israeli equivalent of Saturday Night Live, magnified a hundredfold by the fact that our televisions carried just one, state-run channel, and that Zehu Ze was, at the time, its solitary comedic offering. The most popular recurring character was the Babba Booba, a loopy rabbi who claimed to predict the war’s outcome using gematria, the Jewish system of assigning numerical values to letters and conducting complex calculations to try and unlock the hidden meaning of words—the meaning, mystics believe, that only numbers can reveal.

The skits were hilarious, but for a change, I wasn’t laughing. That crazed comedian, I thought, was demonstrating the same point my mother just had. He was demonstrating how, in times of crisis, we begin to ignore words and place our faith in numbers. Five casualties, then, becomes a national tragedy, not just because of the devastating sorrow of five families, but because the number itself, five, has become our albatross. The analysts might have had their hypothetical hundreds, but the concrete, real-life five somehow seemed like a more menacing, ominous figure that terrified us far more.

Numbers are also what this week’s parasha is all about. It begins with a strange request. Speaking to Moses, God demands the following: “Take the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by families following their fathers’ houses; a head count of every male according to the number of their names.” One would think that a deity that had only recently torn the sea in half should not have much difficulty with a simple census. Still, the Lord insists, and the Israelites begin their counting.

Although the parasha itself, with its minute detail of each tribe’s count, is dry and technical—54,400 to Issachar! 57,400 to Zebulun!—there’s something irresistibly charming about imagining this tiny nation, lost in the wilderness, taking the time to painstakingly count each and every one of their numbers.

They had to, of course. Like Israelis during the Gulf War, numbers were all the Israelites had to go on in order to make sense of their other-worldly situation. This is why God instructs them to conduct a census. There’s nothing else he can offer by way of tangible reassurance save for ordering his chosen few to count their ranks and take solace in the figures. When we can’t comprehend or control our circumstances, we cling to the numbers, simple and incontrovertible, with all our might. Just think about the significance, almost mystical in its own right, that the number six million has taken on in our collective imagination. Call it the gematria of crisis.

Which, of course, suggests an interesting new facet to Bernie Madoff’s crimes. The betrayal of trust, the financial ruination, the savage blow to the global economy, all are valid points. But there’s also this: for millennia, Jews have taken comfort in numbers, turning to digits when words were somehow not enough. And Madoff violated this haven, using his prowess to create a false and dangerous trap that lured so many of us to damnation. Had he been around for the Israelites’ census, he might have reported Issachar as eight hundred thousand men strong, and Zebulun as having crossed the one million mark.

Madoff, then, is learning what Moses had already gleaned from God, what I learned the hard way from my mother, and what us Jews seem to have embedded in our genetic codes: false numbers are far worse than false words.