One Thing Leads to Another: Conflict and Linkage in the Middle East
While in Jordan about a month ago some friends and I were sitting around chatting politics when one Jordanian put it to me. Come on man, he asked, is not the resolution to the Israeli-Arab conflict the ultimate fix for the region? His question suggested that he ascribed to a commonly held belief in linkage. That is that conflicts in the Middle East are intertwined and the resolution of one can lead to the resolution of them all and that the Israeli-Arab conflict represents the keystone crisis which needs to be resolved if others are to be remedied, a sort of domino theory in reverse. Far from just a common sentiment on the street, linkage has been adopted as a widely perpetuated mantra for policy makers, academics, and interested observers alike when thinking about conflict resolution in the Middle East.
So how credible is this belief in linkage? Well, it’s much like religion in that the theory’s credibility is largely a matter of faith. When thinking of the issue I always recall a terse quip I heard from a professor at TAU a while back, “What? You think if the Arab-Israeli conflict is finished tomorrow, even if Israel never existed or ceases to exist today, that all the Arabs will pick up their guitars and start singing ‘let’s all get along.’ Not gonna happen.”
An interesting dialogue concerning the linkage theory has recently taken place on MESHnet. Martin Kramer drove the point home that linkage theory is, in a very rigid sense, mythical. He also argues rather convincingly that an overzealous belief in linkage is perpetuated by those who simplify the region by thinking about it in terms of the European system and its successful reordering since World War II. He created a list of nine contemporary “clusters of conflict” existing in the region that he largely considers to exist independent of one another (see article for details). Kramer makes a valid point. Crises in the Middle East are not always connected along a linear path and certainly don’t all lead to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Obviously, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was not caused by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, a sectarian Sunni-Shia rivalry or the regional Islamist challenge to state governments, fair enough. However, conflicts in the region suggest a higher degree of permeability in the region than Kramer lets on.
If we are to use the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as an example again we can say it very generally occurred as a result of an inter-Arab crisis that involved irredentist Iraqi claims harbored since the formation of the Arab state order in the wake of World War I. But Iraq’s nearly decade-long conflict with Iran certainly impacted Sadaam’s decision to move on Kuwait. Sadaam felt slighted by the unenthusiastic support he received from the Arab Gulf states in return for his sacrifice. Iraq had just fought an excruciating war, was bankrupted and had nothing to show in return, the port at Umm Qasr remained the country’s only access to the precious waters of the Gulf. So while the Persian-Arab conflict was not a primary cause for Iraq’s takeover of Kuwait, the two seemingly separate conflicts proved permeable. Another example of the permeability of conflicts is the link between Iran’s regional rise and the revival of intensified Shia-Sunni antagonisms in the Arab world. The Arab-Persian conflict is intimately bound up in the Shia-Sunni conflict across the region. A primary contemporary example of this connection is Iraq. Arab Sunni states refuse to support the Shia government in Baghdad due to their conviction that it is subservient to Tehran. So not only would the Sunni Arabs be losing a principal bulwark to the Shia (Iraq being the first Arab state with a Shia government) but it is assumed that Iran would be granted unprecedented influence in the Arab East as well. Any gain for the Shia is perceived as a gain for Iran, hence for Sunni Arabs Iraq amounts to a zero sum game on both the Shia-Sunni and the Arab-Persian fronts. So, the relationship between regional conflicts, it would seem, far from being directly linked, are also by no means disconnected. Rather, they more closely mirror relations among cousins—some are closer to others while yet some remain distant relatives.
DancesWithCamels 
Filed under: Al-Wahsh: The monster of commentary | Tags: linkage, Martin Kramer, Middle East Conflicts
While in Jordan about a month ago some friends and I were sitting around chatting politics when one Jordanian put it to me. Come on man, he asked, is not the resolution to the Israeli-Arab conflict the ultimate fix for the region? His question suggested that he ascribed to a commonly held belief in linkage. That is that conflicts in the Middle East are intertwined and the resolution of one can lead to the resolution of them all and that the Israeli-Arab conflict represents the keystone crisis which needs to be resolved if others are to be remedied, a sort of domino theory in reverse. Far from just a common sentiment on the street, linkage has been adopted as a widely perpetuated mantra for policy makers, academics, and interested observers alike when thinking about conflict resolution in the Middle East.
So how credible is this belief in linkage? Well, it’s much like religion in that the theory’s credibility is largely a matter of faith. When thinking of the issue I always recall a terse quip I heard from a professor at TAU a while back, “What? You think if the Arab-Israeli conflict is finished tomorrow, even if Israel never existed or ceases to exist today, that all the Arabs will pick up their guitars and start singing ‘let’s all get along.’ Not gonna happen.”
An interesting dialogue concerning the linkage theory has recently taken place on MESHnet. Martin Kramer drove the point home that linkage theory is, in a very rigid sense, mythical. He also argues rather convincingly that an overzealous belief in linkage is perpetuated by those who simplify the region by thinking about it in terms of the European system and its successful reordering since World War II. He created a list of nine contemporary “clusters of conflict” existing in the region that he largely considers to exist independent of one another (see article for details). Kramer makes a valid point. Crises in the Middle East are not always connected along a linear path and certainly don’t all lead to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Obviously, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was not caused by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, a sectarian Sunni-Shia rivalry or the regional Islamist challenge to state governments, fair enough. However, conflicts in the region suggest a higher degree of permeability in the region than Kramer lets on.
If we are to use the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as an example again we can say it very generally occurred as a result of an inter-Arab crisis that involved irredentist Iraqi claims harbored since the formation of the Arab state order in the wake of World War I. But Iraq’s nearly decade-long conflict with Iran certainly impacted Sadaam’s decision to move on Kuwait. Sadaam felt slighted by the unenthusiastic support he received from the Arab Gulf states in return for his sacrifice. Iraq had just fought an excruciating war, was bankrupted and had nothing to show in return, the port at Umm Qasr remained the country’s only access to the precious waters of the Gulf. So while the Persian-Arab conflict was not a primary cause for Iraq’s takeover of Kuwait, the two seemingly separate conflicts proved permeable. Another example of the permeability of conflicts is the link between Iran’s regional rise and the revival of intensified Shia-Sunni antagonisms in the Arab world. The Arab-Persian conflict is intimately bound up in the Shia-Sunni conflict across the region. A primary contemporary example of this connection is Iraq. Arab Sunni states refuse to support the Shia government in Baghdad due to their conviction that it is subservient to Tehran. So not only would the Sunni Arabs be losing a principal bulwark to the Shia (Iraq being the first Arab state with a Shia government) but it is assumed that Iran would be granted unprecedented influence in the Arab East as well. Any gain for the Shia is perceived as a gain for Iran, hence for Sunni Arabs Iraq amounts to a zero sum game on both the Shia-Sunni and the Arab-Persian fronts. So, the relationship between regional conflicts, it would seem, far from being directly linked, are also by no means disconnected. Rather, they more closely mirror relations among cousins—some are closer to others while yet some remain distant relatives.