ABSTRACT
In the following question-and-answer essay, Shibley Telhami forthrightly addresses key questions concerning the Middle East and America’s interests in it. He notes that even after the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq at the end of 2011, Arab anger at the United States persists, especially for the decline of Iraqi influence and the concomitant empowerment of Iran. There is “no question,” says Telhami, that Iran is the “biggest winner” from Iraq’s troubles, which makes the Sunni Arab regimes of the region nervous and gives them reason to want to revive Iraq’s role in the Arab world—an appeal to the Arab identity of Iraqis might then help counterbalance the affinity between Iraq’s Shiites and their coreligionists in Iran. An American military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would probably delay for only a few years an Iranian nuclear-weapons capacity. The possibility of provoking an angry Iran to eventual nuclear retaliation is worse than the option of pursuing economic sanctions and diplomacy, even if those efforts ultimately fail to prevent a nuclear Iran. Telhami reports that his public-opinion polls in recent years had shown a trend of increasing public anger with the rulers. The surprise, then, was not with the discontent displayed in the Arab Spring but with the fact that “dignity and freedom” were so commonly articulated as goals of the protests compared to narrower economic issues. The uprisings really were more Arab than Islamic, which is a leading reason why Persian Iran was relatively unaffected by the Arab Spring, despite its own massive protests following its 2009 elections. In Syria, the uprisings and the regime’s crackdown on them are likely to persist as a “bloody stalemate” for some time to come. Were the Bashar Assad regime in Syria to fall, however, it would deprive Iran of its only Arab government ally, and Hezbollah, too, would lose Syria as a link between Iran and Lebanon. But regime change in Syria could also open up Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict in that country and allow al-Qaeda to establish a base of operations close to Israel. In Egypt, the military abandoned Hosni Mubarak, thus making his ouster inevitable. Although, as temporary custodians of the government, the military did set up parliamentary and presidential elections, it was distrustful of both the antimilitary young liberals and the Islamist parties and, so, moved deliberately in order not to jeopardize its own interests and privileges. No 373matter who runs the new government, though, Egypt will likely reassess the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979. Likewise, the Egyptian public is sympathetic to Hamas and favors its reconciliation with Fatah. Recent peace talks between the Palestinians and Israel have met with little or no success. Consequently, the Palestinians have tried to go directly to the United Nations to seek declaration of an independent Palestinian state. The United States supports a Palestinian state but has lobbied against using the appeal to the United Nations as the route to that goal. Telhami points out that the prospects for a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue “are diminishing by the day” because of continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. But most Israelis and some Palestinians would oppose the other option, a binational state, passionately. Continued conflict, including armed conflict, between Israelis and Palestinians seems probable.
