The Belmont Club: Misdirection

re: "It's been said that the most important step in problem solving is defining what the problem is. This is even more true in politics when the terms in which a problem is originally cast often determines how it is approached in the future. Martin Kramer asks, at Middle East Strategy at Harvard, why every Middle Eastern crisis is necessarily linked to Israel. Kramer argues that Israel is placed at the center of every problem in the region not because it is true; but because things have been set up that way. The result he says, is a distortion in which otherwise tractable problems are twisted out of shape and made dependent on the resolution of its "linkage"..."...