-Saudi Prince Turki Al-Faisal at Davos (h/t Journal of a Journalist).

Timothy Geithner didn’t produce, unfortunately, and so late last week, the Obama administration brought out the stick, sanctioning China’s foremost petroleum refiner for selling to Iran. (Despite being one of the world’s largest suppliers of crude, Iran lacks adequate refining capability and has to import usable forms of oil like gasoline.) China criticized the move, but the U.S. shouldn’t budge without a concession. (Meanwhile, send Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer back! Chinese leaders were apparently very, er, impressed when Fischer pointed out the adverse effects an Israeli military strike would have on global energy markets; maybe they need a reminder that Israel has kept the military option very much on the table, and that Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz and cause an energy spike even without an attack.)

On a separate note, I was struck by a passage I read this weekend in a review of the collected essays of Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese democracy activist who won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Recall that China blocks not only sanctions against Iran (which in addition to threatening regional stability also oppresses its own people) but also meaningful action against the murderous Assad regime in Syria, and listen to Xiaobo talk about his leaders:

At home, they defend their dictatorial system any way they can, [whereas abroad] they have become a blood-transfusion machine for a host of other dictatorships … . When the “rise” of a large dictatorial state that commands rapidly increasing economic strength meets with no effective deterrence from outside, but only an attitude of appeasement from the international mainstream, and if the Communists succeed in once again leading China down a disastrously mistaken historical road, the results will not only be another catastrophe for the Chinese people, but likely also a disaster for the spread of liberal democracy in the world. If the international community hopes to avoid these costs, free countries must do what they can to help the world’s largest dictatorship transform itself as quickly as possible into a free and democratic country.

Chinese Visit to Saudi Arabia Touches on Oil and Politics [NYT]
China: U.S. Sanctions for Iran Ties ‘Unreasonable’
He Told the Truth About China’s Tyranny [NYRB]
Earlier: The Eastern Solution

• The Obama administration has approved a $30 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Israel tends to be leery about such things, although the two countries share an enemy in Iran. [NYT]

• “It is incredible that a Republican candidate for president in the year 2012, supported by white supremacists, Jew haters and gay bashers, is a frontrunner in the upcoming Iowa caucus.” –Hizzoner Ed Koch. [Capital]

• Egyptian security services raided the offices of several NGOs yesterday, prompting U.S. condemnation. [Yahoo! The Envoy]

• Low-level rocket-firing and retaliation between Gaza and Israel continues. One man was killed in an airstrike this morning as he prepared to launch a missile into Israel. [Haaretz]

• The imam behind the Ground Zero Islamic center has a plan for a new holy month in which hostilities are suspended and Jews, Christians, and Muslims make pilgrimages to the Holy Land. This idea will probably have as much success as the Islamic center. [Haaretz]

• The U.S. has released $40 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority—it’s economic and humanitarian assistance, not security. [AP/JTA]

• Mazel tov to the Philadelphia students who had 687 dreidels (at least!) spinning simultaneously, tentatively setting a new world record. [JTA]

Happy new year!

• The latest price-tag attack came yesterday as a mosque in a West Bank village was almost burned down. [Haaretz]

• J Street not welcome at Berserkeley. [Haaretz/Goldblog]

• Bernie Fine, the Jewish Coaches Association founder and Syracuse basketball assistant, likely will not be prosecuted for alleged sexual abuse. [Deadspin]

• The Center for American Progress responds to Ben Smith’s article. [ThinkProgress]

• Right-wing casino magnate Sheldon Adelson donated $25 million to Yad Vashem—the largest private donation in the history of Israel’s Holocaust museum. [AP/WP]

Aw mom you’re just jealous that the Beastie Boys are going to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Incidentally, this probably should have made it onto the movies list:

On its face, it’s hard to believe all this; however, it becomes easier. Frequent Tablet Magazine contributor Yossi Melman, whose Israeli intelligence sources are more or less unparalleled, began incredulous: “It’s hard to believe that Iran, who has significant intelligence capabilities and has carried out sophisticated terror attacks in the past, would assign such an important task to an Iranian-American whose favorite drink is whiskey,” he quips. Yet he concludes that the charges are more believable than not: Iran does actively hatch such plots; the Saudis genuinely buy this one, and know that their ambassador, who has made a point of cultivating the U.S. Jewish community, is particularly loathed by the mullahs; and the plan “conforms to the Iranian strategy of proving to its bitter enemies that there is no place where they are safe.” Ultimately, Melman argues, “It’s hard to imagine that the U.S. Attorney General, the head of the CIA and most of all U.S. president Barack Obama would risk their reputations by publishing such unequivocal dramatic announcements” if they weren’t sure. His guess is that the administration is privy to covert communications that the rest of us aren’t.

Yet, true or not—and Iran denies it—the allegations are proving a political reality as the Obama administration and its allies step up an already fast-moving diplomatic offensive against the Islamic Republic. Saudi Arabia would like the matter to be taken up by the U.N. Security Council (and tomorrow, the U.N. will release an extremely damning report on the human rights situation inside Iran). Israeli ambassador Michael Oren said it was “definitely an escalation.” The administration spent the weekend calling on international nuclear inspectors to make public new evidence indicating Iran’s illicit weapons program. If nothing else, the whole event is bringing Saudi Arabia closer to the United States and Israel—this after last month, in which a prominent Saudi official said the U.S. alliance was jeopardized by American opposition to Palestinian U.N. membership. It is doing so if only by heating up the Iranian-Saudi and Iranian-American proxy wars.

An Iranian official, meanwhile, observed that making trumped-up charges is just the type of thing Hitler did. Gee, it’s like they’re trying to push our buttons.

Which, actually, is part of the point. Laura Secor, a top reporter on Iran, notes that, to an absurd degree, it is in everyone’s interests for tensions to be ratcheted up:

The Iranian regime wants its people to believe the Americans will attack, because it believes this will help it hang on to power. The U.S. government wants the Iranians to believe it just might attack, because otherwise the United States has very little leverage in nuclear negotiations. The Israelis want the Iranians to fear an American attack, because they believe this will deter Iranian moves against Israeli interests. The Saudis, too, would like to use a bellicose American ally as leverage against Iran, their regional rival. Then, there’s American domestic politics. The Republicans bluster against Iran to prove that they are tough and that the Democrats are appeasers; the Democrats bluster against Iran to prove that they are no such thing. The neoconservative right encourages the conclusion that the only solution is military; the anti-imperialist left forever argues that the neoconservatives are secretly steering America toward war.

As to the last, cue Bill Kristol calling for military action and Glenn Greenwald accusing the government of wagging the dog. Secor ultimately disbelieves the plot, but the real point, it seems to me, is that it hardly matters: everyone will act as though it were real.

Saudis Ask Alleged Iranian Plot Against Ambassador To Be Brought to U.N. Security Council [AP/WP]
The Mystery Behind the Alleged Iran Assassination Plot [Haaretz]
Michael Oren: Israel Taking Assassination Plot Seriously [Haaretz]
To Isolate Iran, U.S. Presses Inspectors on Nuclear Data [NYT]
Iran Calls U.S. Assassination Charges ‘Nazi Propaganda’ [DPA/Haaretz]
What’s Behind the ‘Iranian Plot’? [New Yorker News Desk]

• A member of Hamas’ negotiating team claims that Israel pledged to lift the Gaza blockade as part of the deal, though he attributed this plank to talks with the German mediator—i.e., not the talks that led to Gilad Shalit’s freedom. [Haaretz]

• President Abbas—who has been marginalized by the deal, since he had nothing to do with it—celebrated the Palestinian prisoners’ release, and asked God “to forgive these martyrs.” [JPost]

• In an unusually specific charge, Iran accused the United States of trying to foment strife between it and Saudi Arabia by revealing (or allegedly fabricating) an Iranian plot against the Saudi ambassador’s life. [NYT]

• So Israeli-American Ilan Grapel is next to be freed, right? [NYT]

• The IDF is warning its soliders not to be “another Gilad Shalit,” now that one abduction has gotten results for its perpetrators. [Haaretz]

Take a step back, though, and you see the following: the utter failure of Iran to launch its audacious attack; a clear example of why U.S.-Israel and Saudi Arabia should be cold allies, something that was tested recently over U.S. opposition to the Palestinian Authority’s U.N. gambit; and the further strengthening of that cold alliance, perhaps, in the form of slowly drawing Hamas away from Iran-Syria. President Obama has known about the plot since June, and so it must have been on Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s mind when he was in Cairo last week, potentially helping to orchestrate the release of Gilad Shalit. All this stuff feels connected. If they are, it means that the administration is jiu-jitsuing Iran’s “warmongering policies” to the U.S.’s advantage.

U.S. Accuses Iranians of Plotting to Kill Saudi Envoy [NYT]
Odd Twist for Elite Unit Guiding Iran’s Proxy Wars [NYT]
Iran Appeals to Ban Ki-Moon over U.S. Allegations of Terror Plot Against Saudi Ambassador [FP Turtle Bay]
Iran’s Covert War Against the United States [Daily Beast]
U.S.-Iran Shadow War Escalates [Daily Beast]
Earlier: U.S. Prisoner Unsung Player in Shalit Affair

UPDATE (7:15): New reports say Marwan Barghouti will not be a part of the deal, which is said to involve more than 1000 prisoners.

UPDATE (4:45): You can read Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks to his cabinet, in which he invokes the principle of tikkun olam, here. Speaking of saving one life versus saving the world entire, already a Committee of Rabbis for the Salvation of Israel is opposing the deal on the grounds that the prisoners it will free will end up killing Jews.

UPDATE (4:12): President Abbas announced his support for the Shalit deal (if the train is leaving the station, you may as well get on board). Also, Shmuel Rosner reports that the religious Shas party, unlike Yisrael Beiteinu, is backing it.

UPDATE (4:00): “In the coming days we will return Gilad to the bosom of his parents, Aviva and Noam, to his brother Yoel, his sister Hadas, his grandfather Tzvi and the entire people of Israel,” said Prime Minister Netanyahu. Hamas leader Khamed Meshaal claims 1000 prisoners will be released. Meanwhile, speculation continues to swirl about why both Netanyahu and Hamas would desire Barghouti’s freedom: he is at the very least an ex-terrorist likely to sharply challenge President Abbas’ leadership but also strengthen Fatah against Hamas.

UPDATE (3:35): Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office tweets, “I especially thank the #Egyptian government and its security services for their role in mediation & concluding of the deal #Shalit.” Shmuel Rosner reports that a few ministers, including Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, voted agains the deal. Haaretz reports that the deal has been several days in the making, with Israel’s and Hamas’ chief negotiators in Cairo for the past several days and with Netanyahu holding a meeting of a special committee, the existence of which was placed under a gag order.

UPDATE (3:10): According to the Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Twitter feed, Shalit “will be coming home in the next few days.” Also: “the agreement to release #Shalit was signed in initials last Thursday and today was signed formally by the two parties.” Much speculation is centering around the identities of the hundreds of prisoners which Israel would be releasing, and most of all whether Marwan Barghouti, the extremely popular Palestinian leader who was jailed for his alleged role in the Second Intifada, will be included. What’s interesting about this is that Barghouti is seen as a rival to Hamas.

(UPDATE 2:55: Israel Radio says the deal has been reached.) It might be happening. The Israeli cabinet is meeting in an emergency session over a prisoner swap deal (well into the hundreds) with Hamas, apparently brokered by Egypt (and not by the German mediator who had been handling things).

If approved, Shalit could be returned as early as November, or roughly 65 months after his capture.

Meanwhile, ABC News reports that U.S. authorities disrupted an Iran-backed “significant terrorist attack in the United States” targeting Israeli and Saudi diplomats and embassies. The Saudi embassy is in Foggy Bottom, in Washington, D.C., across the street from the Watergate complex, yards from the Kennedy Center, and a couple blocks from the State Department; the Israeli embassy is in sleepier upper northwest, a few blocks from my synagogue and a few more from my high school. In other words, the Iranians are kind of assholes.

Possible Deal Near to Free Captive Israeli Soldier [NYT]
U.S. Says Iran-Tied Terror Plot in Washington D.C. Disrupted [ABC News]

As for what happened to this bird: “It started to move across the Blue Nile slowly in the summer,” a scientist said. “For some reason, this bird, a male, gave up the spring migration. We don’t know why.” Sure you don’t.

White Bird Down Leads to Delicate Rescue Operation [JPost]
Earlier: The Vulture Was a Spy
Saudi Arabia Plans to Free Vulture-Spy

For if there is a single outside country clearly on the wrong side of the Arab Spring—specifically in Syria, where the Spring has taken its most violent and urgent turn—it is Iran. An important Wall Street Journal article today reports that Iran’s popularity in the Arab world has plummeted radically, largely due to its continued backing of the Assad regime, which it relies on as an ally to project power into the Levant as well as to Hezbollah and Hamas. “Increasingly, ordinary Arabs and Iranians are asking, on blogs and in conversations and interviews, what kind of resistance group would turn a blind eye to the killing of innocent fellow Muslims,” the Journal reports, referring here to Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite group. This was predictable: the regional hegemon, Saudi Arabia—which, unlike Iran, is Arab and Sunni—has seen the Syrian uprising as a chance to harness the aspirations of ordinary Arabs throughout the region to weaken Iran’s power. Strong, U.S.-backed Saudi influence as a counterweight to the Iranian-sponsored axis is also, of course, what Israel would like to see.

Meanwhile, your afternoon reading is Anthony Shadid’s tremendous New York Times Magazine article on the youthful protesters of Syria. He is one of the few Western journalists who has been in the country since the uprisings heated up, and his reporting is essential. “Abdullah represents what the government insists it is fighting,” Shadid reports of a young man.

He is a Salafist, an adherent to a puritanical Islam, though he disavows the term. To him, Salafists bear arms, and he understands that the moment he and others fire a bullet in Homs or anywhere else, the regime will have the justification it covets to crush them with even more force. But there was no question of his devotion to a state that adheres to Islam as its foundation, and he dismissed the comparatively liberal rhetoric of some Islamic activists, like the Muslim Brotherhood. “They want to satisfy the West, and they don’t want to satisfy Muslims,” he told me the next morning. “They say, ‘We’re a modern Islam.’ But there’s no such thing as modern Islam. There’s Islam, and there’s secularism.”

Iran’s Leader Warns Against West and Allies Making Gains in Arab Spring [AP/WP]
Iran Feels Heat Over Support for Damascus [WSJ]
Syria’s Sons of No One [NYT Magazine]
Earlier: Saudi Arabia Is Coming for Assad

Tablet Magazine contributor Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence analyst and regional expert, argues that Saudi Arabia senses opportunity to reassert Sunni dominance against Shiite Iran and its Shiite proxies in that corner of the region, the Syrian regime and Hezbollah. (Syria has long been ruled by Alawites, members of an eccentric Shiite sect.) Assad’s regime, Riedel notes, is a crucial connector between Hezbollah, the group that essentially controls Lebanon, and its sponsor in Tehran; likely orchestrated the 2005 assassination of the pro-Saudi Lebanese prime minister; and has (foolishly) been seen “wrapping itself in the flag of Hezbollah,” to quote one Saudi paper, during its brutal crackdown on popular protests. In other words, this is all part of King Abdullah’s plan to cut off the head of the snake. Reports Riedel:

Riyadh worries that Assad will be replaced by chaos, but it has now come to the conclusion the risk is worth the price. If the Assad regime is destroyed, so too will Syrian support for Hezbollah be destroyed. If a new regime emerges that reflects the will of Syria’s majority-Sunni population, it can become a base for destabilizing the Hezbollah-dominated government in Beirut. The power balance in the Levant could be tilted decisively against Hezbollah and undercut Iranian regional influence.

This is why, say, you have four Sunni countries, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, enthusiastically backing the referral of Syria to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The weakening of the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah hegemon would also, of course, represent good news for Israel, which went to war with Hezbollah in 2006, is no friend of Syria’s, and considers Iran its prime national security threat. Indeed, for more than two months Israel has repudiated the notion that it prefers the cold stability of the current regime and has explicitly hoped for Assad’s ouster (“Allied with Iran, Mr. Assad has helped supply 55,000 rockets to Hezbollah and 10,000 to Hamas, very likely established a clandestine nuclear arms program and profoundly destabilized the region,” Ambassador Michael Oren has argued. “The violence he has unleashed on his own people demonstrating for freedoms confirms Israel’s fears that the devil we know in Syria is worse than the devil we don’t.”) It’s all another reminder that Israel’s interests are frequently aligned with its Sunni neighbors’ against Iran and its proxies.

Engagement With Syria: Time For Reassessment? [Washington Jewish Week]
Saudi Arabia Moves to Take Down Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah [The National Interest]
Israel Prefers the End of the Assad Regime to Its Continuance [WSJ]
Arab Countries Back Emergency U.N. Session on Syria [JPost]
Related: Storm Over Syria [NYRB]
Earlier: Reform Is Not a Watchword in This Administration
U.S. Re-Upping Syrian Ambassador
Iran Is Better Armed Than We Thought
Cut Off the Head of the Snake!

This is … a curious decision. One need not be a staunch, ideological opponent of engaging with all regimes that one dislikes to nonetheless believe that engagement with this particular regime has run whatever course of usefulness it may have had. Precisely because the U.S. ambassador, Robert Ford, did such a brave, stellar job bringing attention to the plight of the Syrian protesters and staking the U.S. on their side, we can know with all the more certainty that the regime’s response—which was to organize the threatening of the U.S. and French embassies and then to bombard Hama, the very city that Ford visited—indicates that, as columnist Lee Smith argued last week, engagement is futile. At a time when American treasure and prestige is being spent fighting for regime change in Libya, the continual acknowledgment of the Syrian rulers is mind-boggling (well, maybe it’s understandable) and disheartening. Ford’s is a recess appointment, due to expire at the end of the year unless the Senate acts. Hopefully he will be confirmed as the envoy to a totally new Syrian regime at that time. But that is not the smart bet right now.

Washington Sends Its Ambassador Back to Damascus [JPost]
Three Arab Countries Recall Ambassadors to Syria [NYT]
Syria Forces Extend Siege on Hama as Toll Rises [NYT]
Syrian Military Mounts Assult in Another City [NYT]
Security Council Rebuke of Syria Ends Prolonged Deadlock [NYT]
Related: Mad Men [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Assad Cracks Down Hard in Hama

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.

It's not clear whether Delta's partnership (one of many for an airline) requires it to deny Jews admission to any Delta flights to Saudi Arabia, as one rabbi alleged in HuffPo; or if Delta merely remains bound by all the laws of the countries to and from which it flies, and that Saudi Arabia as a policy denies entry to Israelis or those with Israeli stamps in their passports and (reportedly) sometimes to those with Jewish-sounding names, as a Delta spokesperson maintained. Either way, Delta should be held to account, right? "Delta could stand on principle and refuse to include Saudi Arabian Airlines based on its discriminatory policy," the rabbi, Jason Miller, argued. "No, it's not Delta's fault that the Saudi government is anti-Semitic, but it doesn't have to go along with it."

Valid point. But, the possibility of Delta being forced to screen passengers beforehand (in violation of U.S. law?) due to this new partnership is in fact a welcome dialectical development, a shattering of false, nay blind consciousness, and a heightening of the realities and the contradictions so that they are high enough for everyone to see. Saudi Arabia is a major U.S. ally, despite its anti-Semitism (and, sure, animus toward Israel); sponsorship of terrorism (who do you think gave Al Qaeda its seed money?); and misogyny (the Saudi ban on women driving has been much in the news lately). We depend on Saudi Arabia as a check on Iran, we depend on it to keep the oil flowing, and did I mention the oil part? Nobody can claim ignorance of the quid pro quos and the double standards involved in the relationship. And yet we persist, pausing only to chastise Delta for reminding us of what we'd rather forget: We are Delta.

This has been another episode of Vulgar Marxism on The Scroll.

Delta Adopts Saudi Arabian Airlines's No Jew Policy [HuffPo]
Airline to Jewish Rumor: ‘Delta Does Not Discriminate’ [USA Today Faith & Reason]
Earlier: You Can’t Start a Revolution on MySpace!

• “I would resign,” President Obama said of what would happen if he were found to have sent crotch-shots to people he had met over the Internet. [City Room]

• Street clashes yesterday evinced simmering discontent with Jordan’s King Abdullah II. [WP]

• Somebody had to take Seymour Hersh’s dubious article about the lack of an Iranian nuclear weapons program overly credulously, which is why we have Roger Cohen. [IHT]

• And somebody else had to be a transcriber for the Saudi government vis-à-vis Israel, which is why we have … Richard Cohen? [WP]

• Whoa. In Israel, a mother and a grandfather—who are also more than that—were convicted of killing their four-year-old daughter/granddaughter. [Reuters/NYT]

Essentially, Washington, D.C., sees a mix of opportunity and danger in the upheavals. If it plays its cards right, it is aiding people power (as well as ushering in more democratic governments, which, if you believe the arguments of some, is a better guarantor of long-term stability) as well as keeping the flame of rebellion alive so that it can spread to Syria and even Iran itself, in which the United States would like little more than internal regime change. If it plays its cards poorly, however—in part, if the Arab League, which backed a Libyan no-fly zone, turns against the action there—the Libyan intervention will be seen as yet another instance of (to put it bluntly) America bombing Arab and Muslim civilians. And in Bahrain, as the New York Times’s Michael Slackman laid out, the U.S. could be seen as a hypocrite that backs violent authoritarianism where a certain valuable viscous black liquid is at stake.

In short, and to oversimplify only a little, the past three months have confirmed that the region is essentially one big battleground between the U.S. and Iran, and their respective clients. And this, moreover, could be a useful heuristic for viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the next couple of months, particularly where the rising tensions with (Iran-backed) Hamas are concerned.

U.S. Reacts to Fear of Iran’s Rising Clout [WSJ]
Clinton Warns Iran About Persian Gulf Meddling [AP/WP]
The Proxy Battle in Bahrain [NYT]
Related: The Arab Powder Keg [Slate]

• “The current Israeli government has become a source of embarrassment to many liberal American Jews,” opines New York Jewish Week editor-in-chief Gary Rosenblatt. “More creative ways must be found to convince the world, starting with American Jews, that Jerusalem really wants a two-state solution before the option becomes moot.” [NY Jewish Week]

• If you can figure out exactly what Shimon Peres is saying about Muammar Gaddafi and John Galliano, you know him better than I do. [Ynet]

• Ilan Stavans expands on his thoughts on the late Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar. [Forward]

• Résistant Stéphane Hessel, 93, born half-Jewish in Berlin, writes leftist pamphlet that some have called anti-Semitic based on what it says about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The pamphlet, “Indignez-Vous!” is a best-seller. Gotta love the French. [NYT]

• Jack Gottlieb, onetime assistant to Leonard Bernstein and composer in his own right, died at 80. [Jewish Theatre]

For Stephen Colbert, Lent is not that far removed from Judaism.

• “Today belongs to the people of Egypt,” President Obama said. [WSJ]

• The Arab world has been shocked by the successful Egyptian Revolution, which toppled a regime that, in many respects, had existed since 1952. What’s next? [WP]

• Joy in Tahrir Square. [News Desk]

• Why a military-run Egypt isn’t necessarily a bad thing from the perspective of democracy (assuming it’s temporary), and why a “bumpy road” still lies ahead. [Slate]

• As Judith Miller has reported, Israeli officials are worried now—they prefer certainty. [NYT]

• “There is a big chance now and a window has opened after this white revolution, and after the president’s concession,” said Arab League head Amr Moussa. “As an Egyptian citizen, I am proud to serve my country with all the others at this stage, to build a consensus of opinion.” [BBC]

Did I say Arab League head? I meant former Arab League head: He resigned today. Hrmm. [Babylon & Beyond]

• American Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, congratulated the Egyptian people and cautioned against the rise of extremists. Fair. [JTA/Forward]

• Before resigning from office, President Hosni Mubarak reportedly told an Israeli lawmaker that the United States was making a mistake in backing Egyptian democracy—that radical Islamists will come to power as a result. [Haaretz]

• There are reports the military was displeased by Mubarak’s defiant speech last evening; this may have played a role in today’s events. [Laura Rozen]

• The Swiss government froze Mubarak’s assets. [WSJ]

• Of all the regional governments for whom this represents a setback, Saudi Arabia’s may be at the top of the list. [WSJ]

• Some American thinkers totally saw this coming. [PostPartisan]

• Iran’s government praises Egyptian people power, clamps down on internal protests. It’s like they’re trying to be as unlikable as possible. [Babylon & Beyond]

• Politics! Vice President Biden thanked Republicans for halting it at the water’s edge. A Democratic spokesperson lauded the president’s leadership. Presumptive GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty accused the president of—can you guess the word?—“appeasing” the Muslim Brotherhood. Oh, the next 20 months are going to be such a delight. [Ben Smith]

Pretty much:

• Aaron David Miller predicted in Tablet Magazine that Israel would fear the Egyptian uprisings; here, he explains why. [WP]

• Leon Wieseltier concedes Israeli fear of the new Egyptian government, but also indicts Israel’s government for not having made progress on the peace process during calmer times. [TNR]

• A Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson on CNN refused to confirm that his group, if in power in Egypt, would continue to respect the Israeli peace treaty. [JPost]

• How President Obama’s reaction to the Egyptian events has helped articulate the emerging “liberal realism.” [TNR]

• An additional primer on Egyptian Vice President (and likely next strongman) Omar Suleiman. [The Arabist]

• Israel depends on an Egyptian natural gas pipeline for one-fourth of its electricity. Uh oh. (For more, see my interview with James Hamilton.) [WSJ]

• Coptic Christians probably have the most indisputable case for wanting Mubarak to stay. [WSJ]

• Israeli-Arab leader and alleged Hezbollah spy Ameer Makhoul was sentenced to nine years in prison. [JPost]

• The University of Maryland’s endangered Yiddish studies department scraped together enough funds to last, for now, through 2013. Still can’t beat Duke, though. [JTA]

• Establishment-y people are standing up for foreign aid. [Laura Rozen]

• ‘Course, Sen. Patrick Leahy wants to cut Egyptian aid till this all gets sorted out. [Laura Rozen]

• “The main stumbling block is Israel,” says George Soros. Have fun in the comments, guys! [WP]

• We’re supposed to be scared of a Muslim Brotherhood-run Egypt? We’re allied with Saudi Arabia, for Chrissake. [Slate]

• Solomon and Cohen out at the Times Magazine (Times critic Ariel Kaminer will be the new Ethicist). For some of our readers, this is the biggest news of the day. Here is Rachel Shteir taking Cohen down. [Daily Intel]

• Oh, by the way, none of this matters compares to Jordan. I’m exaggerating, of course, but Jordan actually is more important at this point. Will the Hashemite monarchy survive? [Goldblog]

Enjoy the Game.

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.

“These systems are fitted to birds and animals, including marine animals. Most countries use these systems, including Saudi Arabia. We have taken delivery of this bird, but we will set it free again after we [have] verified its systems.” -Prince Bandar bin Saud Al Saud.

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: I apologize if you considered our accommodations insufficient to your needs. It was the best cage we’ve got.

VULTURE R65: Brawck!

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: And you should know your home-country has duly been notified of your whereabouts—although we both know that wasn’t really necessary. Don’t we?

VULTURE R65: Brawck!

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: Oh you don’t? You say you don’t know what I’m talking about? Interesting, interesting. Speaking of interesting: That’s an interesting bracelet-thing you are wearing on your ankle.

VULTURE R65: Brawck!

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: Er, you’re welcome. I see it reads Tel Aviv University. Were you aware that it is in fact a GPS tracker, capable of transmitting your exact locations back to, indeed, Tel Aviv?

VULTURE R65: Brawck!

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: Well surely you can understand our suspicion. Our countries have been at war several times, as you no doubt know.

VULTURE R65: Brawck!

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: Who started it isn’t the point. The point is that you were sent here by an unfriendly nation, possibly as a covert agent!

VULTURE R65: Brawck!

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: Nobody is accusing you of anything … yet. We just need—

VULTURE R65: Brawck!

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: Excuse me, I was talking. As I was saying—

VULTURE R65: Brawck!

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: INTERRUPT ME AGAIN AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS!

VULTURE R65: …

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: Thank you.

VULTURE R65: Brawck!

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: As I was saying, we just need to verify that you are indeed an innocent member of a science experiment rather than Mossad. So let me ask you: What would you say if I told you that … Mossad stinks! Mossad is terrible! They can’t even kill a top Hamas operative properly!

VULTURE R65: Brawck!

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: Hrmm. A real Mossad vulture would never have let such an accusation stand undisputed. Very well! This vulture really must be who he says he is. You are free to go!

VULTURE R65: Brawck!

SAUDI INTELLIGENCE: Yeah, well you smell, too.

Saudi Prince Clears Israel Vulture of Spying Allegations [TPM Muckracker/ABC News]
Earlier: The Vulture Was a Spy

Tablet Magazine has been given an exclusive look at the last known transmission between a vulture, identification code R65, captured in Saudi Arabia and his handlers, who are bird ecologists at Tel Aviv University. Or so they want you to think.

MOSSAD: “Vulture R65, are you there? Come in, Vulture R65!”

VULTURE R65: “Brawck!”

MOSSAD: “Roger that. Have you entered Saudi airspace?”

VULTURE R65: “Brawck!”

MOSSAD: “Okay, good. We knew we could count on you. Now we are going to tell you your exact mission.”

VULTURE R65: “Brawck!”

MOSSAD: “Right, exactly. Recon. We want you to drop to an altitude of 50 meters. Then—”

VULTURE R65: “Brawck!”

MOSSAD: “Hold on, Vulture R65, we’re not finished. Drop to an altitude of 50 meters and then you’ll want to—”

VULTURE R65: “Brawck!”

MOSSAD: “Dammit Vulture R65, please let us finish. That is an order.”

VULTURE R65: “Brawck!”

MOSSAD: “Thank you.”

VULTURE R65: “Brawck!”

MOSSAD: “So go to 50 meters, spy on this powerful sheikh, then come back home and tell us what you saw. And for heaven’s sake, don’t get caught!”

VULTURE R65: “Brawck!”

MOSSAD: “Do you copy?”

VULTURE R65: “Brawck!”

MOSSAD: “Okay. Good luck, and be safe. The State of Israel is counting on you. Over and out.”

VULTURE R65: “Brawck!”

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.

The Game

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.

• The Knesset passed a law, supported by Prime Minister Netanyahu, requiring a referendum before Israel cedes land it annexed, which means East Jerusalem and the Golan. It will make it more difficult for Israel to negotiate land swaps involving those territories. [NYT]

• Iran’s parliament made moves to impeach President Ahmadinejad; the grand ayatollah stopped them. But clearly there are some legitimacy problems and general dissatisfaction. [WSJ]

• More than 40 Saudi-sponsored part-time schools in Britain are programmatically teaching anti-Semitism and homophobia, a BBC documentary revealed. [NYT]

• A profile of David Nyer, the Orthodox resident of Monsey, New York, who has been a prime mover behind the recent efforts to free Jonathan Pollard. [JTA]

• Israel honored its 3,000,001st tourist of the year (a record). Perhaps inevitably, he is a pastor leading a Christian evangelical tour from Brazil. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

Of course, as Liel Leibovitz argued in these digital pages, there is something inherently Jewish about Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms. And something inherently threatening: <--more-->

Under the influence of Wahabism, the new zealots find in Web 2.0 a terrifying threat to an intolerant and hierarchical stream of Islam that spends as much energy crushing intrafaith competition as it does opposing foreign influence. Unlike China, which objects to social media platforms and search engines only when they are used to disseminate anti-government messages … they know that the most radical thing about [Google founder Sergey] Brin, Zuckerberg, and the technologies they created is that they encourage constant commentary, ongoing debate, endless involvement. It’s a way of thinking that is very bad for oppressive corporations, zealous theocracies, and anyone else wishing to exert complete control over information. But it is very good for the Jews.

Palestinian Blogger Angers West Bank Muslims [NYT]
Saudi Arabia Blocks Facebook [Ynet]
Video dispatch 2: Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad[Mideast Dispatch Archive]
Related: Web Jew.0 [Tablet Magazine]

• At left: This is what Leonardo Farkas, the Jewish-Chilean mining tycoon who gave the rescued miners $10,000 each, looks like. He is running for president! [Jewlicious]

• Israel politics may have played role in the disinvitation of a British-Jewish historian from a panel in Belfast. [Arutz Sheva]

• An unprecedented museum exhibition on Hitler, complete with rarely seen (in Germany) images of the Fuhrer, went up in Berlin. [JTA]

• Former Rep. Gary Condit (D-California) has written a book that touches on his affair with Chandra Levy, the 24-year-old intern who was found dead in Rock Creek Park. [CQ Politics]

• Another report on how mah jongg is back. This time with video!

• Some are worried that Iran’s soon-to-be-operational Bushehr nucler reactor could become, due to the opacity and haste with which it was built, a second Chernobyl. [LAT]

• The Bronx synagogue bomb plot trial was delayed as the judge considers how to deal with one defendant whose apparent mental illness has caused him to be unresponsive. [NYT]

• Jorge Puello, the maybe-leader of the Dominican Republic’s Jewish community, was extradited to the United States to face child-trafficking charges. [AP/Failed Messiah]

• A Saudi diplomat requested asylum in the U.S. (he works at the L.A. consulate) since he received death threats after revealing that he is gay and good friends with a Jewish Israeli woman. [NYT]

• Start drinking less coffee today! (Yeah, right.) [JPost]

But there is an Arab lobby in the United States—one as old as, if not older than, the Israel lobby, and it has helped to shape U.S. foreign policy and economic life since the end of World War II. Mitchell Bard’s The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East describes how this Arab lobby—from U.S. foreign service officers, oil companies, Christian anti-Zionists, and Ivy League universities to Gulf Arab states, Arab-American activists and Islamist ideologues—exercises its influence in U.S. politics. The book is already being dismissed by critics as a slapdash attempt by a former AIPAC employee to answer Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 2007 book, The Israel Lobby. But those who actually read the new book will find a serious and timely look at a powerful and remarkably under-studied influence on U.S. foreign policy.

“Unlike Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, I don’t think it’s illegitimate to lobby for one’s interests,” Bard told me on the phone last week. The executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Bard wrote his dissertation at UCLA on the limits to domestic influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. “I’ve been writing for more than 20 years about this issue,” he said. “The point of my book is to inform the American public that an Arab lobby exists despite the claims of others that it does not and to explain what its interests are.”

In describing AIPAC’s Arab cousin, Bard draws some useful comparisons between the two lobbies, which are not as similar as one might imagine from his book’s title. AIPAC is a grassroots organization funded by U.S. citizens that represents the broad sentiment of Christians and Jews who are interested in one issue—protecting and promoting the U.S.-Israel relationship. The Arab lobby, by comparison, has little organic U.S. backing and divides its efforts between two causes—oil and Palestine. The former is managed in Washington by what Bard calls the “petrodiplomatic complex” of former U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers, politicians, and defense executives. Funded by oil companies, the weapons industry, and Arab energy producers, mainly Saudi Arabia, it enjoys virtually unlimited financial resources. For instance, AIPAC’s annual operating budget is $60 million a year—pocket change to a Saudi prince, like Alwaleed Bin Talal, who in 2005 gave $20 million apiece to Georgetown and Harvard.

The Palestinian issue is paramount to the Arab-American sector of the Arab lobby. However, just as the Palestinians are divided against themselves—between Hamas and Fatah, among contending Fatah factions, as well as among competing clans—it is not the Palestinian cause that unites the Arabs or Arab-Americans but anti-Israel sentiment. The same goes for many of the Arab lobby’s domestic anti-Zionist partners, some of whom are motivated by religious conviction, especially the Presbyterians, and others by political ideology, but all of whom can agree on disliking first the idea and then the reality of a Jewish state.

The Arab lobby’s Palestine agenda, then, tends to be negative and, as Bard writes, “aimed at undermining the US-Israel relationship,” only rarely promoting a positive vision of a Palestinian state as a regional beacon of social justice or economic development, or defending the rights of Palestinian journalists, Christians, or other endangered social groups against the threats of the Palestinian political leadership. This part of the Arab lobby, writes Bard, “is small and mostly impotent.”

The real power is in the hands of the Arab lobby’s oil sector, the role of which is to keep the Arab oil producers happy by ensuring that Americans stay addicted to oil, that the defense industry keeps its production lines open, and that the image of Arab states stays polished, even for state sponsors of terror, like Saudi Arabia, and states whose rule is founded on flagrant social inequalities, the torture of dissidents and unbelievers, and other practices that most Americans rightly find abhorrent.

Surely the most depressing aspect of Bard’s book is his depiction of the craven subservience of so many U.S. diplomats and officials to the Saudi royal family. “Even when the Saudis had no money, and they only started to pump oil,” Bard told me, “a fear permeated the State Department that if we didn’t give in to them, we would lose our interest there. And the Saudis were clever about exploiting our fear. First they said they’d go with the British instead of us, then they threatened that they’d go with the Soviet Union, even as they portrayed themselves as anti-Communist and said they needed U.S. weapons to defend themselves against Moscow.”

Bard says that the Saudis are using the Iran threat now in similar ways. “The U.S. knows that in the end we have to defend the royal family,” he said. “The Saudis just want the latest toys and act like petulant children until they get them. Then the U.S. tells the Israelis not to worry when they sell the Saudis weapons because they can’t use them, but we go to Congress and say Riyadh needs these arms for their defense.”

With all the demands for U.S. presidents to pressure Israel, it’s worth noting that U.S. officials have rarely done anything but accommodate the Saudis. The one striking exception, as Bard notes, was John F. Kennedy’s demand that Saudi Arabia abolish slavery. Typically, U.S.-Saudi relations have been conducted in the dark, a trend that started in July 1945, when President Harry Truman approved construction of the Dhahran air base using existing War Department funds to evade congressional oversight. This became a precedent for keeping most of the U.S.-Saudi relationship secret, or at least beyond public scrutiny. For years, the U.S. government acceded to the wishes of the Saudis and other Gulf states to conceal information about Arab investments in the United States, and even U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia were classified between 1950 and 1972.

Today the unspoken issue is Saudi support for terror. Were U.S. officials to complain about how the kingdom funds jihad against the United States and its allies, “there’s a fear,” says Bard, “that the Saudis may punish us by withdrawing some of their billions of dollars in investments, cut U.S. companies out of deals to explore for gas or oil, or take other measures to damage our interests.”

Nor are the Saudis shy about promising to unleash jihad against those who cross their path, as when they threatened the British government when it was investigating the unsavory details of a Saudi arms purchase from a British weapons maker.

Given the nature of the Saudi regime, it is little wonder that the oil lobby prefers to work in the shadows. As one publicist explained in laying out his PR strategy for Riyadh: “Saudi Arabia has a need to influence the few that influence the many, rather than the need to influence the many to whom the few must respond.”

“This is a fairly smart lobbying tactic,” Bard told me. “It is very difficult to take a democratic approach, when most people don’t take your position.”

The story of the Arab lobby is also a story about Washington, more specifically an influential segment of the U.S. political elite that has contempt for the rubes who don’t understand that it is in the U.S. national interest to lean on the Zionists in order to make the Middle East’s Muslim Arab majority happy.

Bard believes that the Arabs and their Washington handlers were spitting in the wind of a post-World War II history that had turned in favor of the Jews. The Arabs, Bard writes, were “convinced that the United States supported the Zionists because of their propaganda. … Consequently, [the Arabs] never understood the depth of Americans’ feeling for the justness of the Zionist cause.”

Perhaps that is true, but it’s worth remembering that at the same time the Zionists succeeded in lobbying the Truman Administration to support a Jewish state, there was still widespread anti-Semitism throughout America, even as the horrors of the Final Solution were becoming known to the general public. It is comforting to believe that the 63 percent of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, who side with Israel rather than the Palestinians are now and will always be stalwart friends of the Jews. But in the end all we know for certain about Americans is that they can smell what stinks. The Saudi lobby pays Washington power-brokers to talk over the heads of ordinary Americans because the latter have enough horse sense to know that a regime that withholds the rights of women as well as those of its Shia minority, outlaws the practice of Christianity and Judaism, and promotes anti-American causes is not in any meaningful sense of the term a U.S. ally.

As Bard’s book documents, the Saudis’ well-paid American agents have been making the same arguments for 60 years. The reason their message is not getting through is not that Americans are stupid and susceptible to Zionist propaganda or that the Jews who “control” Congress and the media are blocking access to the truth. The majority of Americans haven’t yet joined in the chorus led by Walt, Mearsheimer, and their cohort because Americans simply do not like to be threatened by extortionists who warn that if you don’t do what we say we will turn off your lights and shut down your car engines, and if you don’t change your position on Israel, we will kill you.

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.

All told, the Jerusalem Post reported over the weekend, military sales to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar could top an unprecedented $60 billion—which naturally doesn’t include U.S. sales to Israel, such as the just-approved nearly $3 billion deal for 20 F-35s (the world’s most advanced warplane). Little wonder that Syria may want in and Iran is nervous.

Our Proxy War in the Middle East [Newsweek]

• Turkey says it won’t appoint a new Israeli ambassador until Israel apologizes for the nine civilian deaths aboard the flotilla. [WP]

• When asked at her confirmation hearing where she was on Christmas Day (when a man tried to bomb an airplane), Elena Kagan replied: “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” [JPost]

• President Obama and Saudi King Abdullah met at the White House. The topic of Israel was broached, though there were no breakthroughs. [WP]

• Thomas Friedman praises the West Bank state-building led by Prime Minister Fayyad and suggests that, when they meet next week, Obama urge Prime Minister Netanyahu to cede certain cities to the P.A. [NYT]

• Following hard upon his 25th anniversary on the show, Larry King is closing up Larry King Live, whose ratings have been in decline. He will remain a CNN contributor. [NYT]

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.

“The Obama administration had no choice but to respond strongly,” Mead writes. “Otherwise the administration would have looked weak and irresolute and the repercussions throughout the world could well have been grave.”

But in the Middle East, nothing reeks of weakness more than lashing out publicly at an ally. The administration is well aware of this, because it has endured the insults of virtually every one of its Arab allies (all except for Egypt). Most recently, for example, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal criticized Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to her face, explaining that the United States’s proposed sanctions against Iran were too little, too late.

On top of that, the White House has gladly swallowed the far worse taunts of actual adversaries, like Iran and Syria. At a Damascus banquet featuring Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, and Hamas’s Khaled Meshaal, Syrian President Bashar Assad openly mocked Clinton: he joked that he had misunderstood her demands that Syria distance itself from Iran, so instead, said Assad, he was waiving visa requirements for the Islamic Republic.

“The President of the United States cannot afford to look like a patsy,” writes Mead. “Any American president needs to be seen as a figure who commands respect.” Well, sure. But it is not clear why that respect should come at the expense of our allies instead of our enemies.

The Israel Crisis [The American Interest]

• The IDF indicted two soldiers in military court for allegedly getting a Palestinian boy to open a suspected booby-trapped package during last year’s Gaza conflict. [LAT]

• To head off buzzed-about rioting, Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered a 48-hour full closure of the West Bank. [Ynet]

• In Saudia Arabia, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Gulf countries will pressure China to support anti-Iran sanctions. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Egypt continues to clamp down on Hamas after sealing its Gaza border. [Haaretz]

• West Bank Palestinians commemorated the 32nd anniversary of the deadliest terror attack in Israeli history. [NYT]

• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to stick to the proximity talks, even after the construction announcement. [NYT]

• The Arab League secretary-general said Abbas wouldn’t start the talks now, due to the construction announcement. Hrmm. [JPost]

• The E.U. parliament formally supported the Goldstone Report’s findings, to strong Israeli criticism. [Haaretz]

• Consensus among high-level Israelis is shifting away from military action against Iran and toward supporting the Islamic Republic’s homegrown opposition. [WSJ]

• Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived in Saudi Arabia to drum up support for harsh sanctions against Iran. [NYT]

Recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained that the biggest threat to America’s national security comes not from Iran but al-Qaida. “Most of us believe the greater threats are the trans-national non-state networks,” Clinton said, referring to “the fundamentalist Islamic extremists who are connected to al-Qaida.”

What Clinton meant certainly seems straightforward enough. Transnational, nonstate Sunni jihadi networks like al-Qaida are responsible for not only 9/11 but also attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have dispatched at least one suicide attacker, the Detroit Christmas bomber Omar Faruq Abdulmuttalab, and apparently have plans to send more. While it is arguable whether a shadowy network of terrorists led by a man who may or may not be alive is more dangerous than an Iranian regime with terrorist assets throughout the Middle East and a nascent nuclear program, Clinton’s assertion is hardly ridiculous. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that we could still sit down and strike a Grand Bargain with the Islamic Republic, whereas we don’t even have a working phone number for al-Qaida.

For the interpretive community that forms itself around the products disseminated by the American media—that is, for New York Times readers, Washington Post readers, and the CNN audience—Washington’s apparent about-face is due to the desire of the current White House to do the exact opposite of its unpopular predecessor. But a Middle Easterner hears something else.

For the interpretive communities of the Middle East, who watch Al Jazeera and are acutely sensitive to sectarian language that may well affect their lives and the fate of their communities, “al-Qaida” is shorthand for Saudi Arabia and the Sunnis. So, when Hillary Clinton talks about the dangers posed by al-Qaida being greater than the dangers posed by Iran, a Middle Easterner hears that the Americans are dropping the Sunnis and siding with the Shia. That is to say, what a Middle Easterner hears is the beginning of a new chapter in the grand narrative of strategic realignment—the epic poem of today’s Middle East.

The real question in the region, as Middle Easterners understand it, isn’t on the daily agenda of Washington policy chatter about whether to engage Iran or talk to terrorists. Rather, it’s the very practical and immediate question of how the Americans will use their power to tilt the regional order. Will the United States stick with the Saudis or throw its weight behind Iran?

The Sunni-Shia split goes back 1,400 years, and the conflict pitting the Saudis against the Islamic Republic of Iran dates to the 1979 revolution. But the campaign for strategic realignment began in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. With the Americans angry at the Sunnis, and Riyadh in particular, over the attacks, the Iranians saw a window of opportunity to push their case that, despite their recent differences, they were America’s logical strategic partner in the region. U.S. policymakers who wanted rapprochement with Tehran agreed.

The State Department Policy Planning staff drafted a recommendation to the president for an opening to Iran in response to Sept. 11, says Steven Rosen, director of the Washington Program at the Middle East Forum. “Richard Haass and Flynt Leverett stayed up all night to write it on Sept. 11, and the next morning Secretary Powell walked it over to the White House. While the rest of the country was reeling from the attacks, they saw in 9/11 an opportunity for engagement with Iran. They assumed the Iranians would of necessity be opposed to a Sunni organization like al-Qaida, and here was a way for Iran to prove its bona fides with the U.S. President Bush accepted the idea of testing the Iranians’ intentions, but the White House was much less hopeful about Iran’s response than Leverett and Haass.”

A number of stories surfaced to explain why U.S.-Iranian rapprochement hit a wall. “It seems there has been a debate inside the [U.S.] government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, then a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and now an adviser to top U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, told The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh in 2007. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.”

While this perspective dovetails nicely with the struggle over strategic realignment narrative, it is an inaccurate appraisal of what really happened. The previous Bush administration did not view the issue in terms of Sunnis vs. Shia or Saudi vs. Iran. Rather, it believed that the most serious strategic threats to U.S. interests could be found in places where state sponsors of terror intersected with transnational terrorist groups. In theory, Tehran and Riyadh were equally problematic. In practice, however, the Iranians and their Syrian allies were fighting the United States in Iraq while their assets, like Hezbollah and Hamas, were challenging American allies in the Palestinian territories, Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt. Meanwhile the Saudis, the world’s swing producer of oil, were at least nominally on our side. Indeed, in May 2003, an operation against Saudi Arabia that was planned and directed by al-Qaida leadership in Iran killed eight Americans.

If Vali Nasr was correct, Hillary Clinton’s statement is evidence of a major victory for the Iranian line—and Nasr, the Iranian-American author of The Shia Revival, seems like one of the messengers. As an advocate of U.S. realignment with Iran, he has a personal stake in such an outcome—and as a Holbrooke aide in the State Department he’s also well placed to shape the secretary of State’s message to the world. Game and set—if not yet the entire match—to Iran.

But Clinton meant nothing like that. In plain American-speak, she was simply saying that the Obama administration has accepted the inevitability of an Iranian nuclear program and is now hard at work getting American citizens and U.S. allies comfortable with that unpleasant fact. The Middle Eastern interpretation of her remarks is simply wrong.

But, in a sense, it doesn’t matter what Clinton meant to say: The meaning of a text is not up to its author alone; rather, its meaning is the product of an open-ended communal process. Reading like a Middle Easterner means believing that every story in the U.S. press about the Middle East is the fruit of a long campaign involving competing interests who operate in a conspiratorial way, whether those interests are different branches of the U.S. government, agents of foreign governments, or both. For instance, a 2007 Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times arguing that Iran’s history and culture make it a much more likely U.S. ally than obscurantist Saudi Arabia signals that Tehran is winning the case in Washington for strategic realignment. A column his colleague Maureen Dowd wrote earlier this month, praising the Saudis for their liberal reforms, shows that Riyadh is fighting back and has powerful bureaucratic allies on its side, too.

We know that columnists like Friedman and Dowd are merely private citizens whose arguments are not being crafted in the State Department or the Pentagon. However, it is precisely our certainty that U.S. journalists are working within the norms of American media that makes us vulnerable to information operations—instruments of political subterfuge employed by all Middle Eastern regimes and intended to shape perceptions, and, therefore, real events.

Reading like a Middle Easterner requires a discriminating taste for conspiracy that enables the reader to separate the real conspiracies from the false ones. A corollary of this fact is that sometimes the paranoid style of the Middle East is much more suitable than the American faith in transparency for understanding what we read.

A few weeks ago, for example, I got a call from pro-government friends in Lebanon who wanted to know when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gave his most recent interview to Seymour Hersh. The date, they believed, would indicate whether or not one of Assad’s statements in that interview was a threat to destabilize Lebanon. Clearly the Hersh interview was not the final straw that broke the will of Lebanon’s pro-democracy movement and compelled them to make amends with Damascus, but it was part of a long and successful information operations campaign waged by Syria against U.S. allies—a campaign that included Hersh’s interview with Assad, which appeared on the The New Yorker’s website.

“I love Seymour Hersh,” a friend told me one night in Beirut. “It doesn’t matter if what he writes is nonsense, I love the storytelling.” Hersh, perhaps only half consciously, has been the main chronicler of the struggle for strategic realignment, its bard, over the better part of the last decade. It’s well known in Washington that his New Yorker stories serve as an instrument for those on the losing side of the Beltway’s bureaucratic wars. What’s less obvious is that Hersh’s hostility toward the Bush administration signaled to publicists in the Middle East that he was a likely channel for a pro-Iran narrative about a dim-witted American president who was steering the United States toward disaster through his poor taste in regional allies.

As is the case with other Western journalists who write about Iran’s allies and assets in the Eastern Mediterranean, Hersh’s access to high-profile figures like Assad and Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah is controlled by Lebanon’s former minister of information, the pro-Iranian, pro-Syrian, and pro-Hezbollah apparatchik Michel Samaha. This leverage gives Samaha, as it would for any celebrity publicist, a significant role in shaping Hersh’s stories. In 2004, Samaha told Hersh that Israel had “programmed” the Kurds to do “commando operations” throughout the region. At the time, this well-placed piece of gossip was useful to Samaha’s clients. The same was true of the message that al-Qaida is equivalent to Saudi Arabia, which Hersh has also transmitted. Think of Hersh as a celebrity profile artist for Vanity Fair and Samaha as a powerful Hollywood publicist like Pat Kingsley, except one whose associates assassinate rivals.

The dark power behind Samaha’s PR operation is Jamil al-Sayyid, a former Lebanese security chief who is believed to be involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. Accordingly, part of the Samaha group’s message is to suggest that Hariri’s son Saad, Lebanon’s current prime minister, funds al-Qaida affiliates, another campaign helpfully conveyed by the prize-winning reporter. Hersh has even internalized the slogans of his handlers, excitedly explaining to CNN that the Bush administration and the Saudis were backing al-Qaida via the Lebanese government. Four months after the interview on CNN, Hersh’s account was exposed as a fabrication when Lebanon’s Sunni prime minister ordered the army to take down a Sunni jihadi group in a bloody battle that was won thanks in part to generous U.S. arms shipments to the Lebanese Army.

Gullible New Yorker readers and CNN viewers were never the primary audience for the message Hersh carried. Rather, when the pro-Iran media turned and quoted Hersh on a story fed to him by the pro-Iran camp, the point of the operation was to get two of the U.S. media’s flagship organizations to whitewash a disinformation campaign intended for internal consumption in the Middle East, a operation whose goal was to convince swing states in the region to move away from the United States and its allies.

In recent weeks, the Iranian narrative of strategic realignment has hit the mainstream again, in a Washington Post op-ed by Robert Malley and a long analytical article from Stratfor’s George Friedman. Savvy American readers are likely to regard the apparent coincidence as another media trend. But if you’re a Middle Easterner seeking to make sense of the statements of American public officials and editorialists, the resurgence of the Iranian line is a clear sign that the Obama administration’s regional policy is a mess and that the grand narrative of realignment is once again in play.

• The top U.N. official for humanitarian relief condemned the Gaza blockade, saying it imposed on residents “an existence, not a life.” [NYT]

• Most Arab states support four-month U.S.-organized indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinians. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• One week after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was received warmly in Syria, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced an upcoming state visit to Tehran. [Arutz Sheva]

• Maureen Dowd reports that, “at their own galactically glacial pace,” Saudi Arabia is modernizing, even as Israel grows less secular. [NYT]

• Hank Rosenstein, who in 1946 played for the New York Knicks in what’s now considered the first NBA game, died at 89. In that 68-66 win over the Toronto Huskies, Rosenstein had seven Jewish teammates (in addition to himself). [NYT]

The Saudi-American relationship has traditionally been managed from the Saudi embassy, especially during the heyday of U.S.-Saudi comity presided over by Prince Bandar, a high-spirited Dallas Cowboys fan affectionately known to members of two recent administrations as Bandar Bush. “Bandar used to have strong ties with everyone in town,” explained Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a Washington-based journalist with Kuwait’s Al-Rai newspaper. The prince, who once bought a Jaguar for the wife of his long-time tennis partner, Colin Powell, and was shown war plans for Iraq, was far and away Washington’s preeminent diplomat. “The new Saudi ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir,” said Hussein, “is just not as influential.” While Bandar was famous for visiting presidents at their homes and smoking cigars on the Truman Balcony, al-Jubeir has apparently visited the White House only once during the first year of the Obama presidency—as one of some 50 Muslim guests invited for Iftar, the evening meal during Ramadan.

Riyadh is in special need of a capable point man in Washington, one who can prevent Saudi Arabia’s contradictory signals from confusing the Americans. This is no mean feat, for it often seems there are as many Saudi policies and agendas as there are Saudi royals with private treasure chests. Princes like Al-Waleed Bin Talal donate hundreds of millions of dollars to American universities, such as Georgetown, to promote a positive view of Islam, while other Saudis distribute still greater sums to disseminate Wahhabism, an austere version of Islam that provides the ideological bedrock for al-Qaida.

Yet relations between states are never a one-way street, and they’re rarely the product of personal chemistry—or a lack thereof. Knowledgeable observers point to a sea change in American behavior towards the Saudis since Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush and began paying less attention to what the Saudis want. “We’re the ones who’ve changed,” said a former senior official in the Bush administration who worked closely enough with the Saudis to learn that it’s a very high-maintenance relationship. “Look around. Sure, the Saudis have a new U.S. ambassador, and Yemen is heating up, but what’s really changed for them? Nothing. The trouble in the relationship is from our side.”

We were having lunch in a noisy cafeteria close to Dupont Circle in downtown Washington. It’s the kind of place where people out of power like to have lunch. “The Saudis need to have their hands held all the time,” the former official said. “They had it for 20 years with Bandar, and their ambassadors are accustomed to access straight to the Oval. It seems that no one is caring for the Saudi account.”

Whatever side of the political divide you are on, it seems clear that Obama’s June 2009 trip to Riyadh was a disaster. After pushing the Israelis on settlements, Obama counted on securing some minor confidence-building measures from the Arabs and instead wound up with an earful from the 85-year-old Saudi king. The administration had not done its homework.

“People at the upper echelons do not seem to understand the complexity of Saudi Arabia,” the former official said. “If you come at it blindly and conventionally, then you assume that their main concern is the peace process: ‘It is a huge issue for all Arabs, so the Saudis must care.’ The Palestinian-Israeli issue was not the highest priority with the last administration, and we found that if you don’t bring it up, the Saudis won’t bring it up either. But if you do bring it up, they feel they have to talk about it, or else they will be shamed—the Saudis can’t be less pro-Palestinian than the Americans. The Obama people didn’t know this or care, and they didn’t seem to know or care what the Saudis were really concerned about. The number one issue in Riyadh is Iran.”

In addition to projecting power through their ambassador in Washington, Saudis have gilded a number of think tanks and analysts, like Chas Freeman, who in March 2009 withdrew his nomination to head the Obama administration’s National Intelligence Council, citing a smear campaign by the Israel lobby. Freeman often stated that the Middle East’s single most important issue is the Arab-Israeli conflict—and yet the Saudis themselves tell anyone who will listen that their major concern is not in achieving a just resolution for the Palestinians but in countering the Iranian threat the the kingdom.

In the Middle East, Saudi policy is similarly incoherent, except for its consistent efforts to push back against what it perceives as a Shia crescent rising out of Tehran. In Yemen, the Saudis are fighting a proxy war on their Southern border against the Iranians. Yemen’s president has accused Tehran of supporting the Houthis, a band of Zaidi Shia rebels with some similarities to Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shia militia. Lebanon, too, was once a vital interest for the Saudis, and Riyadh closely worked with the Bush administration to counter Hezbollah and its Iranian and Syrian sponsors. Recently, however, the Saudis have jumped ship to get closer to Damascus in the conviction that this would weaken Syria’s alliance with Iran. Nothing of the sort has happened. Instead Syria and Iran have helped Hezbollah strengthen its grip over Lebanon.

It is possible to argue that abandoning the Saudis isn’t such a bad thing. It’s not clear, after all, why the United States should desire an alliance with a country that executes “witches” and lashes adulterers. Women are treated as second-class citizens, as are members of Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority, who happen to inhabit the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province. Yet even after the Sept. 11 attacks and the revelation that 15 of the hijackers carried Saudi passports, the Saudis, like the Israelis, enjoyed a privileged relationship with the Bush White House. According to one Riyadh-watcher, Vice President Dick Cheney, who managed the Saudi file, rarely returned from any trip abroad without a stopover in the Kingdom to consult with and calm the King’s executive office, the Royal Diwan. There the Americans learned to defer to their hosts—and to eat quickly, for once King Abdullah had picked at the food during his one circumambulation of the buffet table, it was time to get down to business.

Obama, despite his famous bow to Abdullah, has hardly shown much deference to the Saudis. That raises the interesting possibility that the Obama administration has decided to reevaluate Washington’s regional commitments on a grander scale than has previously been imagined. Most observers have focused on Obama’s Israel policy, a strategy premised on the State Department’s conventional approach to the Arab-Israeli issue—to get tough with Jerusalem on settlements and punish right-wingers like Netanyahu. Perhaps Obama is freezing out Riyadh, too.

A Saudi freeze-out might be welcome in some quarters, especially among those who have moral qualms about America’s other “special relationship” in the Middle East. Yet it carries some of the same risks as Obama’s failed “get-tough” policy with Netanyahu—a situation in which American influence is reduced and the threat of independent action by American allies is increased. “The Saudi line,” the former official said, “was this: ‘Americans, are you going to do anything about our number one issue? If not, we will go our own road.’”

Wherever there’s an American vacuum, the Saudis are apt to stumble into trouble. Now that American troops are scheduled to withdraw from Iraq, Riyadh and Syria share an interest in bringing down Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, whose Interior Ministry has named both countries as suspected supporters of recent attacks. “This is what happens,” says Tony Badran, a Middle East analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, “when the Americans leave the Saudis out on their own.”

Distance between Washington and the Saudi Kingdom allows Riyadh to pursue policies that are dangerous to U.S. interests and deadly to American citizens. “For the Saudis,” the former official said, “going their own road could mean making a deal with the Iranians, getting their own nuclear deterrent, or backing Sunni fighters such as al-Qaida. Or it could mean doing all of those things.”

Riyadh’s need to be protected from Iran is one way to understand the recent uptick in al-Qaida activities coming out of Yemen, where the Saudis are really fighting on two fronts. One front is a conventional counterinsurgency waged by the hapless Saudi military against the Houthi rebels. The other is a campaign to combat Iranian influence by dumping cash into al-Qaida bank accounts, and there is evidence that some of the Saudi money flowing into Yemen is not being used for its intended purposes. In October 2009, for instance, an al-Qaida operative tried to kill a Saudi counterterrorism official with explosives hidden in his underwear.

Al-Qaida picks up when and where Saudi money is dispensed. When the cash flow is curtailed, the jihadi handout lines move elsewhere. If you handhold the Saudis, they can be helpful partners. Let them wander off on their own, however, and you pay in blood.

Lee Smith is the author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations.

The next day, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had declared political war on HRW and other non-government organizations that were continuing to investigate Israel’s conduct during last winter’s war in Gaza. “We will dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups,” Netanyahu’s chief policy adviser, Ron Dermer, told the paper. “We will insist that they defend their record and their values.” Last week, after HRW released a 63-page report accusing Israeli troops of killing Palestinian civilians who were waving white flags in Gaza, Ben-Dror Yemini, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, accused HRW’s deputy Middle East director, Joe Stork, of attending a 1976 anti-Israel conference organized by Saddam Hussein and of writing bitterly anti-Zionist screeds at roughly the same time. The story, which was translated into English and was reprinted on Commentary’s blog, provoked a heated letter from Stork, who said he had written exposes against Hussein in the 1970s and did not espouse the anti-Zionist views attributed to him. (Stork did not respond to e-mail or phone messages from Tablet.)

At a time when Jews are anxious about how Israel will fare in negotiations with the Obama administration over a peace deal with the Palestinians, the Stork and Whitson affairs present an unfamiliar problem to HRW: how to reassure liberal Jews, including HRW’s founder and one of its current board members, worried that the organization is playing into the hands of anti-Israel activists from New York to Riyadh. Whether or not its staff actively seek out ways to target Israel, as Netanyahu’s office claims, by appearing to focus so many of its resources on Israel—five reports have been issued already since the Gaza War, three of them criticizing the IDF’s conduct, and another report about Israel’s “wanton destruction” is forthcoming—and by hiring people like Stork and Whitson, HRW, under executive director Ken Roth, leaves those doubts unanswered. “Ken feels their facts are right, and the critics are wrong, next case,” said Sid Sheinberg, the former Hollywood mogul and vice-chair of HRW’s board. “I don’t believe that’s the way the Israelis should be treated.”

Founded in 1978 as Helsinki Watch—mainly to help insure that dissident intellectuals were treated fairly by the Soviet Union in accordance with the Helsinki Accords—HRW has, over the past 20 years, come to occupy a diplomatic position of heft and responsibility, “somewhere between a permanent and a rotating member of the Security Council,” jokes one longtime U.N. watcher. Even harsh critics like Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University who also runs NGO Monitor, which tracks HRW and other NGOs in Israel, concede that HRW is unmatched as a voice for exposing grave human rights abuses, from Sudan to China. According to Roth, its work in Israel is no different from its work anywhere else. “We look at the worst abuse on both sides,” he said, pointing out recent reports on Hamas rocket fire and executions. “It’s not that we’re exclusively focusing on Israel. But if the question is, ‘Why are we more concerned about the [Gaza] war rather than on other rights abuses [in Israel]?’ Well, we’ve got to pick and choose—we’ve got finite resources.”

HRW has been dogged for years by Israeli claims that it is unfairly biased, or, more specifically, that it has failed to hold others—namely, Hamas and Hezbollah, along with anti-Semitic groups worldwide—sufficiently accountable for human rights violations. But relations between Israel and HRW are now at their worst since 2001, when Israel, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, blamed the organization for failing to stand up against expressions of anti-Semitism during the United Nations’ 2001 conference on racism in Durban, South Africa. “This is the first time it’s really resonated,” said Steinberg. “It’s only in the past couple of years that Jewish board members, especially, began to be concerned and think there’s a problem.”

“They frequently say, ‘We’re trying to be evenhanded,’” said Robert Bernstein, the founder of Helsinki Watch and now a board member emeritus at HRW. “I don’t understand trying to be evenhanded, because to me Israel is interested and a believer in human rights and it stands out in the Middle East as practicing it in their country.” At its inception, he said, Helsinki Watch planned only to operate in closed societies—undemocratic, illiberal countries without freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and other basic rights. Operating in open, democratic societies like Israel is complicated because, as Bernstein noted, there are domestic organizations, like B’tselem in Israel, that do “a beautiful job” of holding their own governments accountable. “If you could cover every human rights act, it would be fine,” Bernstein said. “But you can’t, so you have to make choices about what you cover, and once you make choices, you’re political, whether you want to be or not.” The overall result of HRW’s current work, he added, “is to say we’re being evenhanded in a way that makes it come out that both sides are equal abusers of human rights—I don’t agree with that.”

But the organization also takes great pride in criticism, as evidence that it’s doing its job well. “I’m not going to do something to appease people who have no interest in the truth, or who are only screaming about Israel,” said Whitson, the Middle East division head. A former high-ranking staffer recalled being told by Carroll Bogert, Roth’s deputy, that “Human Rights Watch doesn’t pull its punches when it comes to Israel” after asking whether it made sense to release a document critical of Israel on the same day the organization was holding a fundraiser with Jewish donors. “There are human rights groups that deliberately choose not to cover Israel, and we’re not one of them,” said Gary Sick, a Columbia professor who is on HRW’s Middle East board. “If we backed away because it causes some discomfort, because of all the radical attacks that are directed at us, what we’d be doing is emasculating ourselves.”

After the Journal piece was published, Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg published a lengthy email exchange in which Roth acknowledged that the standard pitch in the organization’s fundraising efforts in the Middle East includes a reference to the “lies and obfuscation inevitably thrown our way” by Israel and its supporters. Roth, who said the organization hasn’t lost any significant donors over its latest round of Israel reports, told Tablet he interpreted the attacks as a sign of credibility. “If we were irrelevant, if people didn’t take us seriously, we would be left alone,” he said. Roth, whose father fled Germany in 1938, said he felt particularly strongly that Israel should not get a free pass—either from his staff or from his donors. “I identify with the persecution of the Jews—it’s why I do this work, and I don’t believe we should make exceptions for Israel,” Roth said. “The people who don’t believe in that principle, who want to apply them to the other guy”—Hamas—“and not to their favorite country, don’t support us already, and I don’t want them.”

But critics like Sheinberg, the legendary Lew Wasserman’s longtime No. 2 at MCA, respond that even being right isn’t the same as succeeding as a rights organization. Recently a donor called Sheinberg asking whether it was too late to have his donation to HRW refunded in light of an an op-ed Whitson wrote in the Los Angeles Times, in which she bluntly compared Israeli settlers to thieves. For Sheinberg, the message was clear: “Don’t we know when it’s time to talk and when it’s time to shut up?”

Correction, August 27: Ken Roth’s quote, “But if the question is, ‘Why are we more concerned about the [Gaza] war rather than on other rights abuses?’ Well, we’ve got to pick and choose—we’ve got finite resources” referred specifically to HRW’s work in Israel. It has been edited to clarify that.

UPDATE: Tablet contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg, on his Atlantic blog reports his email exchange with HRW chief Ken Roth whether it’s true that his organization fund-raises in Saudi Arabia by touting its “battles” with pro-Israel groups. Remarkably, and after lots of evasion, Roth basically says yes.

Human Rights Watch Goes to Saudi Arabia [WSJ.com]

Berkowitz also sketches possible regional consequences of a preemptive strike. Iran could order Hezbollah to attack Israel. It could encourage independent terrorist groups to go after synagogues or other Jewish sites in Europe. It might disrupt Persian Gulf shipping lines. And it could cause further chaos among Shiites in Iraq. He rejects the notion that the recent Iranian elections and their brutal aftermath might affect Israel’s calculus: Could the recent spectacle of brave Iranian dissidents taking on the Khamenei regime actually embolden an Israeli effort to forestall an atomic theocracy?

It’s been an interesting recent news cycle for these what-ifs. Vice President Joe Biden told ABC’s This Week on Sunday that the United States “cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do,” a comment many interpreted to be a green-light to Israeli preemption. And although today’s Jerusalem Post leads with a story explaining that President Barack Obama in no way supports or condones an attack, that’s a minor footnote compared to what Eli Lake at the Washington Times has uncovered: that Netanyahu hasn’t even asked the president’s permission.

Israel would ideally like Washington’s consent to attack because it would like access to Iraqi airspace, which affords the fastest flight-path to Iran and which the U.S. still controls. But its bombers can also reach their targets via less direct routes, like over Saudi Arabia, which the London Times reported last week has told Israeli officials it wouldn’t object to flyovers. Remember that George W. Bush nixed Ehud Barak’s plan to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites in 2008. If Netanyahu never asks permission, Obama can never say no.

Bibi’s Choices [Weekly Standard]
Israel Declines to Ask U.S. to OK Iran Attack [Washington Times]
Saudis Give Nod to Israeli Raid on Iran [London Times