A myriad books, articles, editorials, columns, TV interviews, and conversations discuss what they refer to as “the Mideast problem.” That colorless phrase may itself be one of the reasons for the sterility of most of the discussion. “The Mideast problem” is a shorthand phrase in which lurk at least three errors that can confuse the unwary: the error of thinking there is only a single major Mideast problem; the error of limiting the geographical focus to the Mideast; the error of assuming, from the use of the word “problem,” that there could be a solution.
If we persist with “problem,” let us at least make it plural, and recognize that there are many Mideast problems: a dynamic set of vectors, we might say, of different magnitudes and directions, that intersect in the Mideast.
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