JOHN ROBERTS, CNN ANCHOR: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is in the United States right now. He's going to be meeting with President Bush tomorrow. Both the United States and Israel are now lining up behind Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the new emergency government that he has swore in after Hamas took control of Gaza...

ROBERTS: So what does this mean for the peace process in the Middle East? What does it mean for war and peace? Does Israel plan an invasion in Gaza? What's going to happen next. Afshin Molavi is the director of the Middle East Global Initiative at the New America Foundation in Washington. He joins us now.

Afshin, you talk about this idea of there being two Middle Easts. And we've got some maps to illustrate it. First of all, this is the map of the overall Middle East area. What are the two Middle Easts that you're talking about?

AFSHIN MOLAVI, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION: Sure, John. As you can see, we have flash points all across the region right now. Almost as an arc of crisis and instability, or potential instability. So if you look from Egypt on into Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, where we see this violence between the Palestinian factions, in through Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, where former Secretary of State Colin Powell described it as an ongoing civil war, into Iran where we have the potential for U.S. military confrontation, we have this arc of crisis and instability.

ROBERTS: Now these used to be separate entities and now they're all kind of tied together, right?

MOLAVI: Absolutely. They are very much tied together. And Iran has a great deal of influence in what happens, for example, in Gaza, West Bank and particularly in southern Lebanon.

And then you move to the Persian Gulf region, particularly the Arab states of the Persian Gulf region, and it's almost as if we have a different Middle East. We have -- they're prosperous. There's a business boom going on.

One of the things that has happened in the past five years, John, one of the most under reported stories, is we've had this tremendous oil windfall. $1.5 trillion has moved into this region in the past five years. And as a veteran reporter, you know you got to follow the money, right?..

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