Real Conflicts and Imaginary Ideologies

BEIRUT -- US President-elect Barack Obama has much on his foreign policy plate and he will have to make some hard decisions about prioritizing the issues his team will address. The Middle East is likely to emerge quickly as a high priority area, given that many of the key concerns of the United States and the world directly emanate from, or are closely linked to, the Middle East, i.e., energy, terrorism, religious radicalism, illegal immigration, drugs, and non-proliferation of nuclear fuels, and weapons of mass destruction.

When the region's many conflicts are boiled down to their essence, however, two core sources of tension account for most of the regional and global confrontations that plague the Middle East. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict -- and its wider Arab-Israeli conflict-- is one, and the other is the Iranian-American confrontation -- with its wider Iranian-Western-Israeli tensions.

Obama's foreign policy team would do well to review recent history in the Middle East to grasp how so many active conflicts or mere ideological confrontations can be traced back to these two quarrels. The rise of Hizbullah since the early 1980s, for example, is an example of how both of these conflicts can generate new political dynamics and even military confrontations if they are left to linger for years.

Hizbullah's emergence as a powerful, but not universally loved, Lebanese-Shiite group also reflects the third consistent source of political tension and turbulence in the Middle East: the prevalence of Arab domestic political governance systems that are either grossly autocratic and dictatorial, or, as in Lebanon's case, merely steadily dysfunctional. These three sources of tension reflect a fearsome combination of local and regional discontent and some global grievances related to how Western powers have behaved in the region for the past century or so.

Resolving the assorted legitimate grievances that underpin the ongoing conflicts requires first and foremost an honest, comprehensive assessment of precisely what the real problems are that need to be resolved. The people of the Middle East and foreign parties that have interests here (such as their armies, for starters) must first sort out hyperbole and diversionary ideological zealotry from the genuine disputes and core oppositions that are anchored in historical reality.

For a first example, we can easily put aside the mutual accusations that the United States and Iran both wish to dominate the entire Middle East and both wish to pursue their hegemonic aspirations. Another area where there is a great dela of room for realism and accuracy to replace hysteria is in the role of Israeli interests in these wider relationships. Does the United States confront Iran these days because of genuine fears that Iran will harm American national interests -- or mainly because Israeli fear of a nuclear Iran drives American policy? 

In the same vein, why should the United States and Hamas be at loggerheads? They do not directly confront or threaten each other, and they should be able to coexist peacefully, were it not for the fact that Islamists like Hamas fight Israeli occupation and also challenge pro-American Arab regimes.

For decades now, we have argued these issues in a cat-and-mouse-like game of each side claiming that its own policies only aim to defend national interests and repel the other side's aggression. That approach not only has gotten us nowhere, it has also exacerbated the cycle of confrontation that see the Middle East today dominated by angry and fearful populations, increasingly autocratic and security-led governments, foreign armies, terrorist groups, resistance movements, and political violence as an everyday reality in many countries.

The new American administration provides an opportunity for all concerned to reconsider our collective basic approach to conflict-resolution in the region, particularly in view of Barack Obama's stated willingness to diplomatically engage rather than just sanction and threaten Iranians and other adversaries. 

A critical first step is to sort out the genuine conflicts from the ideological rhetoric -- the political posturing, electoral populism, and demagoguery.

Winding down the Iraq war and withdrawing American troops will be an important move -- but only a marginal issue in the wider confrontations that are all rooted in pre-Iraq war dynamics. Those wider confrontations usually bring us back to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Iranian-American-Israeli-Western confrontation. (The other major issue, transforming Arab autocrats into democrats, will take some time and will have to be driven by the Arab people themselves).

The past several decades have provided many valuable lessons in how to fail in resolving or toning down these two conflicts. It is important now to zero in on these two crises as core drivers of many of the region's problems. But in so doing, we also must sort out the real causes of conflict from the manufactured stresses and imagined threats of the many ideological warriors on both sides who still plague and hamper us all.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.