If the US loses Iraq and Afghanistan there won’t be peace in Israel or "Palestine".

Conventional wisdom in the Obama administration is that somehow peace between Israel and local Arabs is the lynchpin for peace and success in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some Obama officials have gone so far as to imply (if not say outright) that US soldiers are dying because of Israel.

The problem is that once again the Obama administration has the situation completely backwards.

Peace in the Holy Land will only be possible once there is peace and democracy in the rest of the Middle East.

The US troubles in Iraq stem from Iran and other Islamic fundamentalists. And Afghanistan? That’s been a problem ever since the Russians got there, if not before.

And let's not get started on Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon.

And none of them were caused by the problems of the Holy Land. They were caused by fundamentalist Islam and their individual dictatorial forms of government (and the colonial powers that created the artificial Arab states in the Middle East).

And the solution to their problem has nothing to do with the Middle East.

But the opposite is true.

If the US is unable to establish, implement and maintain a strong and stable democracy in these two countries which are lynchpins in US Middle East policy, and if the US can't bring Iran back into the cradle of civilized countries, then the US will have no credibility in being able to implement a solution to the Israel-Arab war either.

As Sharansky pointed out, you can only make a real lasting peace with a stable democracy. Egypt is soon going to go over the Islamic edge, and the Kingdom of Jordan is probably not long for this world either. And meanwhile, Iran will be destabilizing everything.

The PA and Hamastan have both long thrown out their fictional covers as a democracy.

Any peace treaty with them isn’t worth the paper its written on, as there is no other incentive for them to keep the peace (Egypt at least has US military aid to prop up the government).

It's US policy and failure that is preventing peace in the Middle East.

Let the US start introducing freedom and democracy into these hard-line belligerent countries and peace will naturally fall into place everywhere else.