Leon Hadar in Foreign Affairs:
The George W. Bush administration saw its foray into Iraq as a substitute for a diplomatic strategy to bring about Israeli-Palestinian peace. But the notion that the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad — that transforming Iraq into a pro-American liberal democracy and promoting a "freedom agenda" in the Middle East would empower regional forces supporting peace with Israel — proved to be an illusion. Instead of strengthening the pro-American bloc in the Middle East, weakening the power of radical political Islam, and accelerating the peace process, the Bush administration's policies helped tilt the regional balance of power toward Iran and its satellites, empowering anti-American and anti-Israeli forces in Lebanon and Palestine and generating mistrust and violence in the Holy Land.
Now the message emanating from Israel and some of its supporters in the United States is that the road to Jerusalem leads through Iran….
And any notion that Amman, Cairo, or Riyadh might go so far as to approve and perhaps even applaud an American or Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear military installations is based on wishful thinking. Sunni Arab leaders are concerned about the potential for backlash by angry publics against their regimes after any such attack. They also realize that Iran would be in a good position to unleash its regional proxies against Israel and the United States, rather than vice versa. So Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia would probably hedge their bets as Iran responds to an outside attack while Israel would be exposed to massive Iranian retaliation. That could force the United States into a costly, direct military intervention on Israel's side and throw the region into chaos. At the end of the day, Washington would discover that the chief alternative to invading Iran and toppling its regime was engaging Tehran diplomatically — an option available to it today, without all the messy preliminaries.The Obama administration seems to understand this
