Full House

Lee Smith
tabletmag.com
27 October '10

It seems fair to say that the Obama Administration’s Middle East policy has been a bust. The concept of “linkage”—on which the administration has based its approach to such thorny and specific problems as the Iranian nuclear program, the shakiness of the Iraqi political system, Syrian backing for violence, and the rise of Iranian-backed militias like Hezbollah and Hamas, and the Iranian take-over of Lebanon—has been clearly revealed as a species of magical thinking the main virtue of which appears to be that it absolves the United States of actually having to address problems that get worse with each passing month.

But if every new administration makes mistakes, and learns from them, President Barack Obama’s self-appointed task of bringing peace to the Middle East may get more difficult with the mid-term elections Tuesday, when the House, and perhaps the Senate, will fall into the hands of a Republican party that is poised to push back against an administration that is commonly perceived as less friendly to Israel than its predecessors.

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