What’s the most immediate Middle East worry? With Israel’s new right-wing PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, now in Washington, some people might think it’s that country’s intransigence over peace talks with the Palestinians. No. That’s a problem that will drag along for some time to come.
With the growing concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, some people might think this issue will come to the fore very soon. No. This one will also likely be percolating for months to come.
And there’s our long-running Iraq war adventure. As the U.S. military prepares to leave major cities in that country by the end of June, violence is again increasing there, along with new signs that the Kurds are pushing harder for independence. An immediate set of worries? Probably not. These, too, will likely take some time to cause huge new ripples.
The real immediate near-term worry in the Middle East involves Lebanon. It’s having national elections on June 7, and these could bring to power a Hezbollah-led government that could throw the entire political and military balance in the Middle East askew.
It could give Syria and Iran, two Hezbollah backers, much greater leverage in the region. It could throw Israel into a panic, with a heavily armed and duly-elected foe right on its border.
It could scare the pants off the Saudis and deepen the tensions between Shia and Sunnis in Iraq. It could give a giant boost to the power and prestige of Hamas in Palestinian politics.
A Hezbollah-led government in Lebanon also has the potential to do grievous harm to the basic assumptions undermining much of America’s own foreign policies in the region.
We may be just a few weeks away from a Middle Eastern crisis whose outcome, while not predictable, is almost certain to be very, very unsettling.