This strikes me as eerily similar to neoconservative promises of “regional transformation” following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Just as those proved to be bunk, I think it’s safe to assume that any “echo effect” caused by resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute will be similarly insignificant. We should have learned by now that individual societies have their own grievances and their own dynamics and that basing U.S. policy on sweeping predictions about how they’ll react to changes in other countries is a recipe for trouble. ~Greg Scoblete on Clemons

For the most part, I agree with Greg that we should put no more confidence in an “echo effect” resulting from any deal made by Israeli and Palestinian leaders than war opponents put in the “demonstration effect” that was supposed to follow regime change in Iraq. If the interminable peace process finally did come to some reasonably satisfactory conclusion complete with a genuinely sovereign Palestine and the resolution of major outstanding questions on land, water rights, the status of Jerusalem, and all the rest, we need to understand that showing a willingness to address one set of grievances isn’t going to make other grievances elsewhere disappear. Muslims who are resentful of U.S. backing for authoritarian regimes and monarchies in the region are unlikely to become less resentful, because their main grievances will still be unaddressed. Indeed, there might be greater discontent in another country where the population feels that its grievances are just as important and significant as those of the Palestinians.

That said, there is a difference between what Clemons describes and the promise of “regional transformation” that war supporters made before the invasion of Iraq. At both the official and popular level, Muslim countries throughout the region and around the world make a point of saying that they want a resolution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. That doesn’t mean that such a resolution is necessarily realistic or that it will fix any other issues in the region, but we can pretty reliably assume that this is a major priority of most of the governments and publics in Muslim-majority countries. There were no calls for the U.S. to solve the region’s problems by launching an unnecessary war and throwing one of the larger countries in the region into complete chaos. On the contrary, there was vehement, constant opposition to such a course of action among the countries of the region that was going to be “transformed” as a result. The “echo effect” may not happen, either, but there is a much better chance that a resolution to this conflict will produce goodwill and positive political consequences for the U.S. among many of the Muslim publics Washington has futilely tried to win over in the past. The effect would probably be minimal, and it would be very brief, but it might give the U.S. some of its lost credibility back and repair America’s reputation to some extent.

In any case, the “echo effect” wasn’t the main point of Clemons’ argument. The core of Clemons’ argument was that the White House should “hard wire” linkage of the conflict to the Iranian nuclear issue, as the title of his post makes clear. The idea of linking this intractable conflict to Iran policy seems crazy to me. It isn’t just that the idea of linkage doesn’t have much going for it based on past precedents, but that there is absolutely no reason to link these two very distinct issues together. For linkage to make sense, one has to accept that there is an impending threat to vital U.S. and allied interests from Iran, and one also has to believe that Israel and the Gulf states are unwilling to collaborate effectively against this Iranian threat until the status of Palestine is settled and they can all normalize relations with Israel. If the Iranian threat doesn’t exist or if it is grossly exaggerated, resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine therefore becomes much less urgent. If the Gulf states are truly terrified of Iran, they will presumably offer at least tacit support for any Israeli anti-Iranian action anyway. If they are trying to extract Israeli concessions on Palestine, the Saudis and other Gulf state governments have been doing a really poor job of hiding their anxieties about Iran.

Clemons makes the argument for linkage this way:

The interesting thing is that progress on a Palestinian state is what Arab governments may most need in order to be more robustly supportive of American, European, and Israeli designs with Iran. Delivering on Palestine may actually create conditions in which these states accept an “all options on the table” approach to Iran.

This is the sort of behind-the-back, triple-bank-shot approach to foreign policy that simply makes no sense. It’s a bit like arguing that the U.S. should try to force India to budge on the status of Kashmir to get the Pakistani army to take fighting the Taliban more seriously. As it turned out, this was completely unnecessary, it would have been nothing more than a free gift to hard-liners in Pakistan’s military, and talking about it just made the Indians upset and nervous. All of this is premised on the idea that the U.S. should want to get a lot of Arab states on board for an “all options on the table” approach to Iran, when this is the last thing the U.S. should be doing. What is most bizarre is that Clemons seems to be saying that an Israeli-Palestinian peace is essential so that the U.S. and our allies can escalate conflict with Iran. This is a weird, inverted version of the foolish, old hawkish claim that the “road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad” in that Clemons seems to be saying that the “road to Tehran runs through Jerusalem.”

Clemons’ reliance on the charge of anachronism makes his overall argument pretty weak. Consider this passage:

These naysayers surround themselves with and thrive in anachronistic assessments of these challenges in a way that have been appropriate and worked out over the last several decades — but which are simply out of place and passively reckless in the post-Cold War period.

It’s true that the world is different from the way it was during the Cold War, but the basic dynamics of inter-state relations haven’t changed all that much. If resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine wasn’t essential to other geopolitical issues in the past, it probably isn’t essential now, because the secret is that the conflict and the parties to the conflict are not nearly as important as we and they keep pretending. Seeing his disapproval of the “passively reckless” views of naysayers, I am struck by how depressingly similar Clemons’ rhetoric is to the fiercely urgent claims that “9/11 changed everything” and that those attacks had dramatically and totally changed how we should assess international threats from then on. This sort of hastiness has caused a lot of people to make some huge mistakes in the last decade, and we would be wise not to encourage more of it.

On one side of this question, there is ample evidence based on historical precedent and experience that says that tying these two issues together makes no sense, and on the other side Clemons is insistently telling us how everything is different now. That’s not a good sign for Clemons’ argument. Incrementalism might take the U.S. over a cliff, but there’s a much better chance of going over the cliff if you leap off of it, and that seems to be what Clemons is inviting the administration to do. Let’s hope they decline the offer.