The main conflict in the Middle East is really between parties that accept Israel and parties that do not. Describing it as Sunni vs. Shiite or pro-American vs. anti-American misses an important point. Here are the abnormally perceptive for US analysts, Flynt and Hillary Leverett, going out of their way to evade the fact that Israel's legitimacy is the central conflict of the Middle East. Possibly they've been conditioned to worry about being called anti-Semitic when making that obvious observation. An unreasonable fear of being considered anti-Semitic has the capacity to cloud US analysis this way and in far more damaging ways.
On one side of this divide are those states willing to work in various forms of strategic partnership with the United States, with an implied acceptance of American hegemony over the region. This camp includes Israel, those Arab states that have made peace with Israel (Egypt and Jordan), and other so-called moderate Arab states (e.g., Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council).About Israeli hegemony, this is not a controversial idea. Israel has written guarantees that the US will work to ensure that Israel has a qualitative military advantage over every other country in its region. Describing the first group as pro-American instead of pro-Israeli misses an important part of the dynamic.
On the other side of this divide are those Middle Eastern states and non-state actors that are unwilling to legitimize American (and, some in this camp would say, Israeli) hegemony over the region. The Islamic Republic of Iran has emerged in recent years as the de facto leader of this camp, which also includes Syria and prominent non-state actors such as HAMAS and Hizballah. Notwithstanding its close security ties to the United States, Qatar has also aligned itself with the “resistance” camp on some issues in recent years. And, notwithstanding Turkey’s longstanding membership in NATO and ongoing European “vocation”, the rise of the Justice Development Party and declining military involvement in Turkish politics have prompted an intensification of Ankara’s diplomatic engagement in the Middle East, in ways that give additional strategic options to various actors in the “resistance” camp.
The United States depends on dictatorships in the Middle East for exactly one reason: Israel. If Saudi Arabia was as democratic as Colombia or Egypt was as democratic as South Korea, they would not tolerate Israel and would pursue policies designed to force Israel to reaccept the refugees and end its Jewish majority. In other words, unlike other democratic US allies in other regions, there is a structural reason that democratic countries in the Middle East could not go along with a central US policy priority, in other words they could not be US allies if they were democracies. That structural reason and that US policy priority are Israel's existence as a Jewish-majority state.
The people of Jordan and Lebanon are just as opposed to the maintenance of a Jewish state imposed by force as the people of Kenya and Mali were to the maintenance of a White majority state in Africa imposed by force. No reasonably democratic government in any of those countries would fail to oppose the popularly illegitimate country in their region as effectively as possible.
US pressure played a role in democratizing South Korea which a generation ago was a military dictatorship. As long as the conflict over Zionism remains, pro-Israel dictators do not have to worry about that happening to their backwards rulerships. US support for an entire string of oppressive dictatorships resolves to US support for Israel. Other than Israel, there is no reason every other country in the region would not openly host US troops and support US projects, even as democracies.
We're left with a strange and dysfunctional equilibrium in which dictators in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt - two vestiges of the colonial era, the other reimposed after - depend on there being a conflict over Zionism for the US support they need to survive while the US, in dramatic contradiction to its claimed ideals, accepts and even praises these dictatorships. Obama's bizarrely hypocritical claims to support freedom in Iran only highlight his support for worse dictatorships that favor Israel.
This dysfunction is what I had hoped Barack Obama would at least acknowledge. But of all the things Barack Obama is, (for example he is a skilled, patient and practical US domestic politician) a man of honesty or courage is not one of them. For me, that is the biggest disappointment of the Obama administration.
