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Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-31/sleepy-chuck-hagel-has-some-bigger-questions-to-answer.html
Is Palestinian-Israeli Peace the Key to Happiness in the Middle East?
(Bloomberg) Jeffrey Goldberg - It is an article of faith among so-called foreign-policy realists that the key to American happiness in the Middle East is a resolution to the Israeli-Arab conflict. "Linkage" is the shorthand for this view. But linkage - the belief that a Middle East freed from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute would be a "placid lake" - has been utterly discredited by events. On a quick tour of the greater Middle East we see the Syrian civil war, the slow disintegration of Yemen, chaos and violence in Libya, chaos and fundamentalism in Egypt, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, terrorism in Algeria, the Iranian nuclear program, the Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq, unrest in Bahrain, and Pakistani havens for al-Qaeda affiliates - all unrelated to the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.