Why not simply declare that the United States will not go to war against Iran or any other Arab regime Israel dislikes without: (a) prior consultation and agreement on the need for war between the Obama Administration and Israel; (b) a request by the president that Congress declare war; and (c) a full and public debate in Congress before it votes on whether or not to commit the lives and fortunes of 300 million Americans to war on Israel's behalf against a country -- Iran, Syria, etc. -- that poses no threat to the United States.

This process would have the advanatge of following the Founders' intent and the letter of the constitution. And if conducted in an adult manner, it would allow enough time for the U.S. electorate to inform their federal representatives of their views on allowing Israel and its disloyal U.S. citizen proxies to dictate U.S. policy in the Muslim world and get increasing numbers of their soldier-children killed.

The “bolt from the blue” scenario, in Paul Pillar’s words, that worries our contributors is that of a Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear program. Such a strike Wayne White, for one, sees as increasingly probable the longer the diplomatic standoff with Iran drags on. But above and beyond the anti-U.S. backlash in the Islamic world from any act seen as “American-endorsed Israeli violence,” to use Michael Brenner’s phrase, an Israeli attack on Iran poses a unique geostrategic problem for the United States. The best path from Israeli airfields to Iranian targets passes through the airspace of Iraq – not only a sovereign Arab nation, not only a U.S. ally, not only one whose internal sectarian politics make attacking Iran especially unpopular, but the only Arab state whose sovereignty overall, and whose airspace in particular, is physically guarded by U.S. forces.

So if Israeli aircraft violate Iraq’s frontiers en route to Iran, what does the U.S. do? Let them through, in the most explicit endorsement possible of Israel’s action, and in violation of our commitments to Iraq? Or turn them back, if necessary by use of lethal force, in the most dramatic reversal possible of decades of policy on the Middle East?

The facts matter. "If this is true..." That seems to be the theme of the day. Where are the pictures? These things are not easy to hide. They must be in Lebanon. Syria would not be so foolish as to allow Hizbullah to fire them at Israel from her own territory. Look for them! Find them! If they are in the open, it will be child's play to find them. If they have been hidden in a building or under camouflage it will be more difficult, but that is why we pay for the intelligence community. The one thing we must not do is accept Israel's word for anything. Our interests are as much at stake as theirs and we are not they.

Sun Tzu, the much quoted Chinese military strategist, stressed the value of knowing your enemy. A broader diplomatic formulation is: know your enemy, know your allies, know everyone in the field of action – including yourself. Washington, like most great powers, is incapable of the last. Our special defect is the strong tendency to think that we know the enemy when we discern its hostile intent. That intent, in turn, is totally disconnected - in our minds – from what we, for our part, do and say. Such is strikingly the case in the Middle East. There, the resulting distortions in our reading of reality are compounded by including Israel in the American “we.” Washington has come to identify so completely with the Israelis as to deny ourselves dispassionate understanding of their place in the complicated regional scheme of things. Hence, we operate with two sets of blinkers – little sense of how others’ behavior is affected by Israel as well as disregard for how it is influenced by their perceptions of us.

So it’s time for a few home truths as might be seen by a visitor from Mars - or, more prosaically, an observer in Beijing. Here is my take on their perspective.

1. Washington is unduly prone to lump together as enemies a diverse number of parties who share a lack of sympathy with American ends and purposes. Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas are tightly knit co-conspirators only in the minds of the United States and Israel. Each has its own priorities, its own ambitions and its own vulnerabilities. Iran’s are most complex and opaque. We assume they are preoccupied with doing us harm. That is a dubious assumption when we look beyond the rhetoric. That they see us as an opponent and a threat is surely correct. But its meaning needs to be placed in their perspective for its full meaning to be understand. The regime’s weakness, the country’s encirclement by American military forces and its being the object of an unrelenting American political and economic campaign to undermine it are compelling features of their strategic environment. Does this mean that the leadership in Tehran is guileless? Of course not. It does mean that they will seek every means to counter the United States - including gaining allies by means fair and foul. They also will cooperate with us when it serves its interests – as it did in Afghanistan in 2001 before Bush short circuited the connection by declaring Iran a charter member of the “Axis of Evil.”

2. America’s unflinching backing for Israel creates opportunities for the Iranians and creates powerful incentives for Hamas and Hezbollah to welcome practical help from Tehran. The same logic applies to Sunni Hamas as it does to Shi’ite Hezbollah. The former’s abiding interest is Palestine. It has no wider ambitions. Hezbollah’s abiding interest is Lebanon and its growing political strength there. Israel’s implacable hostility and violent attacks play to the political advantage of both insofar as they are in a contest with local rivals (Fatah, other Lebanese factions). Will they use violence themselves, in one form or another, against Israel? Of course. Provoking that violence also serves the political interests of Israel’s ultra nationalist government. The United States’ uncritical siding with Israel makes it a party to this cauldron of emotion and political intrigue.

3. Syria, for its part, plays its own hardball game of protecting its stake and advancing its self-defined interests in a region dominated by the United States, its Arab allies and Israel. Does it want a settlement with Israel? Probably - on its own terms, as does everyone else. Is it viscerally anti-American? Probably not. It can’t afford to be with the Soviet Union now history and being a secular regime in the vicinity of Sunni and Shi’ite fundamentalists with whom it shares little in the way of ideology.

4. American endorsed Israeli violence against Palestinians and Lebanese has produced 500 times more casualties than Hamas and Hezbollah violence against Israelis. To recall the facts, thousands of civilians were killed and wounded in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in 2008-2009. Entire sections of Beirut and villages in the south of the country were razed, much Lebanese infrastructure destroyed. As for Gaza, there is the stunning report of Justice Goldstone, the self-avowed Zionist from South Africa whom the White House reflexively scorned. You still may judge that Israeli violence was justified. That is not the point of this commentary. Rather, it is the inability to comprehend how those actions were experienced by Palestinians and Hezbollah followers that is a serious foreign policy failing. Recent Israeli murmurings about another 'go' at Hezbollah to erase the humiliating stalemate of 2006 feeds fear and anger. The attitudes thereby engendered are objective facts of the political state of affairs. The behavior that flows from them can best be dealt with by recognizing it as such - whatever one chooses to do about it. If administration officials want to avoid a close concert of the Iranians, Syrians, Hamas and Hezbollah, then they should cease making the casual, convenient assumption that they're all a bunch of bad guys out to get us. That is not simply wrong; worse, it is not very smart and a recipe for diplomatic failure.

5. Following on the above, it is an analytical mistake to view Hamas and Hezbollah as Iranian proxies who are obediently doing Tehran's bidding. Whatever the reality of alleged Iranian Scuds to Hezbollah, and collaboration between Damascus and Tehran, it stems from a tactical, self-interested calculation among the parties. It is not diabolical machinations on the part of a latter-day 'Axis of Evil.' That is a self-serving, intellectually lazy notion nurtured by many inside and outside the Obama administration. It can only lead us into blind alleys. That is, unless one sees all these intricate issues liable to resolution by confrontationwith the prospect of war.

As we all know, the Middle East region has been chronically tense, punctuated by conflict, but there have been recent developments that suggest a potential worsening under some reasonably plausible scenarios. Though concerned, I am, however, reluctant to be “alarmist” at this point: not only are events scenario-dependent and often play out over long periods of time, but gaps remain in our information and understanding of key drivers.

One of the latest topics of concern and speculation stems from reporting of shipments of more powerful surface to surface missiles from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Such deliveries have not been fully confirmed, but, if they have taken place, they might be the result of linkages between the possibility of Israeli military action against Iran and Tehran’s likely contingency planning for Hezbollah counter-strikes should such an Israeli attack take place. Despite UN and Israeli reassurances last week, if such missiles did enter Lebanon and are located, the Israelis might attack them to warn against further missile deployments.

Should Israeli-related violence erupt in Lebanon, there could be echoes in Gaza. Since the possibility of securing meaningful progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is remote in the near-term, that impasse most likely will continue festering until some sort of event or series of events spark still more bloodletting, with timing, severity and duration unknown.

And as month after month passes without any significant change in Iran’s nuclear stand-off with the IAEA and UN Security Council (and with the latter unlikely to agree to robust sanctions, and Tehran seemingly determined to press on), the danger of potential Israeli military action probably will rise. Varying assessments of Iran’s nuclear intentions and capabilities as well as limits on Israel’s ability to strike decisively complicate forecasting. Nonetheless, if the situation continues to drift it is quite possible that this Israeli government will not remain passive indefinitely, regardless of whether Washington is opposed, resigned, or accommodating.

As for Iraq, which is in the midst of an anticipated post-election crisis, some observers are once again raising the specter of civil war. And the behavior of Prime Minister Maliki and some other leading Shi’a leaders toward Iraq’s Sunni Arab community over the past two years certainly has been needlessly exclusionary and provocative, with Maliki’s actions since the election so far only making matters worse. Yet, following the bloodbath of 2006-2007, most Iraqis seem quite wary of revisiting such strife. Also, unlike the situation on the ground at the beginning of that last awful round of sectarian violence, Iraq’s ethno-sectarian communities, particularly in the greater Baghdad area, are less intermingled and vulnerable. A substantial spike in violence would not surprise me at all under certain circumstances, but bloodshed along the lines of two years ago would seem less likely.

The history of past wars in the Middle East underscores how hazardous it would be to try to predict the next one. Most of those previous rounds have not been clear-cut cases of one side going to war after it calculated the advantages of military aggression. Most have involved a dangerous dance of mutually reinforcing fears and miscalculations, and of missteps by one side providing a stimulus or pretext for the other side, already primed to resort to arms, to do so.

That said, the premise of the question is correct in that the current risk of another round of combat is significant. Once again, most of the possibilities would not be bolt-out-of-the-blue aggression but instead the spinning out of control of incidents and altercations short of war. The one exception—and it is a major one, having more than just a small chance of occurring—would be an Israeli air strike against Iran, conducted in the name of setting back the Iranian nuclear program. Like the other possibilities, and like so many of the previous rounds of combat in the region, that exception would be understandable as much in terms of emotion as in terms of strategic calculation. It would reflect a visceral unwillingness to countenance the possibility of (or adapt strategy to) an Iranian nuclear weapon—an unwillingness that perhaps does not extend across the entire Israeli body politic but does extend beyond the current Israeli government. Israel might execute a strike with no prior warning to the United States, notwithstanding all the rhetoric about the closeness of the alliance and the talk about Prime Minister Netanyahu tightening internal controls to avoid a repetition of the contretemps involving construction in East Jerusalem and Joe Biden’s visit. This time the lack of warning could not be dismissed as involving a local zoning matter. But the very intensity of feeling about Iran and the nuclear issue would provide all the more incentive for Israel not to do anything that might enable Washington to pre-empt or prevent an attack.

The report about Syria and Scuds, if true, would bear on the question not because of any likelihood that Hizballah suddenly would start firing missiles at Israeli cities. Hizballah’s political stake in Lebanon has moved it well beyond being only a proxy of Iran. It does not have an obvious interest in a new war with Israel. The 2006 war had at best mixed results for Hizballah; it gained politically from standing up to the Israeli military but took a pounding in doing so, sustaining significant material losses. Hizballah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah subsequently acknowledged that the organization’s pre-war actions that stimulated the Israeli response involved a miscalculation. (As for Hamas, it is not an Iranian proxy and has never wanted to be one, although its isolation impels it to accept Iranian help.)

It is in the interest of Iranian hardliners, however, to stoke tensions between Israel and its neighbors in any way that increases the chance of a new conflict along the lines of the 2006 war. If Iran did ship Scuds, the shipment would serve this purpose, even if the missiles never become involved in an incident that precipitates a new war. The purpose is served insofar as it exacerbates Israeli fears and makes ever thinner the hair in the Israeli hair-trigger for responding militarily to whatever incident does occur. Iranian hardliners would leverage a new Israeli-Arab war to their own political advantage in Tehran by claiming validation for the anti-Israeli invective that is one of their trademarks.

Hardliners in Israel have somewhat parallel interests. Whether a new war would eventually work to their net political advantage would naturally depend on the course of the war and how subsequent debate within Israel plays out. But at least in the near term, an escalation of tensions—which carries at least the risk, though not the certainty, of a new round of fighting—plays to the hardliners’ advantage for the same general reasons tensions with foreign adversaries tend to help hardliners politically in any country. And if a war did break out, it almost certainly would lead to U.S. statements that would emphasize solidarity with Israel and support for Israel’s security, leading the frictions over settlements—and domestic criticism that Netanyahu’s government has sustained for its part in causing those frictions—quickly being overshadowed and all but forgotten.

This would be another of the (usually unmentioned) respects in which U.S. interests diverge from those of Israel, and more specifically from those of the Israeli government of the day. Any new armed conflict in the Middle East would be an unalloyed negative for U.S. interests. Amid renewed U.S. expressions of support for Israel, it would intensify the animosity, especially in the Arab world, that comes from the United States being implicated—accurately or not, reasonably or not—in almost everything Israel does that hurts someone else’s interests. This includes the 43-year occupation of one portion of the territory to which Palestinian Arabs lay claim, and strangulation of the other portion of it, even though these have nothing to do with, say, a new war with Hizballah in Lebanon. The animosity would add more fuel for anti-U.S. extremist violence, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere. And of course, a war also would end the baby steps the Obama administration has taken toward resurrecting something that could be called a peace process.

A new conflict would set back efforts to pressure Iran on the nuclear issue. It would do so by diverting attention and diplomatic resources from the issue, politically strengthening Iranian hardliners, reducing the inclination of other governments to gang up on Iran while the region’s one existing nuclear weapons state is flexing its military muscle, and strengthening a general disinclination not to be aligned with what is seen as the Israeli side of an issue.

Neither Israel’s actions nor any other single factor would be the only cause of such untoward consequences, as asserted by that straw man who so often raises his seedy head in discussion of Middle Eastern issues. The question is about what affects U.S. interests, not about finding a single cause for all such effects.