THE ODD DECOUPLE:

Is Palestine the Pivot? (Michael Scott Doran, March 16, 2005, Foreign Affairs)

When the statue of Saddam was pulled from its pedestal in Firdos Square a year later, the streets of Safwa remained quiet. Watching in rapt attention as the United States unshackled their brethren in Iraq, the Shiites of Saudi Arabia asked a question that has now become familiar in the region: "Why not here?" Soon Abdullah received a delegation of Shiite notables who presented him with a petition entitled "Partners in the Homeland." Since among the Shiite petition's demands was the right of religious freedom, if enacted it would alter the fundamental relationship between state and society. It has the potential to be as important for Saudi Arabia as Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech was for the United States. And yet it was hardly covered in the U.S. media, probably because it did not easily fit the framework that understands Middle East developments by focusing on Israel and Palestine.

So far the "lawless unilateralism" of the Bush administration, along with its failure to "deliver" Israeli concessions, has generated not the Arab nationalist backlash that the root-causes school predicted, but the end of the Libyan nuclear program, elections in Palestine and Iraq, a move toward elections in Egypt, and a nationalist uprising against Syrian occupation in Lebanon. These events would seem rather good evidence for the proposition that the Palestinian issue is only one of several important concerns in Middle East politics, not the pivot on which all regional events turn.

The Arab world is in the throes of a prolonged historical crisis, as its societies, economies, and polities struggle to overcome their various internal problems and make a successful transition to modernity. The Palestine-is-central dogma offers little insight into that crisis. Recognizing this, the Bush administration has wisely decoupled the Palestine question from the other major issues that bedevil Arab-American relations. So far this strategy has worked well, bringing benefits to both the United States and many Arabs. By putting the Palestinian issue in its proper perspective, it could even end up helping Palestinians and Israelis as well.

It's not that the President didn't recognize there are root causes to Arab extremism, just that he knew the root cure.

MORE:
Palestine, Iraq, and American Strategy (Michael Scott Doran, January/February 2003, Foreign Affairs)

When toppling Saddam Hussein rose to the top of the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda, a chorus of voices protested that Washington had misdiagnosed the root cause of its Middle Eastern dilemmas. "It's Palestine, stupid!" was the refrain heard not only from European and Arab capitals, but from some quarters in the United States as well. These voices argued that attacking Iraq while the Israelis were reoccupying Palestinian lands would substantiate the claim, already widespread in the Middle East, that the United States had declared war against all Arabs and Muslims. The ensuing backlash would undermine the American position in the region and wreak havoc on American interests. What Washington really needed to do was postpone or abandon a showdown with Saddam and focus instead on achieving a breakthrough in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

Unqualified U.S. support for Israel, the critics reason, drives a wedge between Washington and the Arabs, most of whom support Palestinian aspirations; for the United States to improve its regional position, it must remove the wedge by tilting somewhat toward the Palestinians. The problem with this argument is that it rests on two hidden and faulty assumptions: about how much Washington would have to change its stance, and about how much goodwill that change would produce.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 16, 2005 7:49 AM