Peace is just a fantasy if radicals are excluded
THAT a summit in Damascus of the Middle East’s “axis of evil” — Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, and Hamas — was convened immediately following President George W Bush’s call for a conference of “moderates” to promote an Israeli-Palestinian peace, demonstrates once again how intertwined the region’s problems are. The Damascus meeting reflects Iran’s view of Israeli-Arab peace as a major strategic threat, because it would condemn it to isolation in a hostile Arab environment free of its conflict with Israel. The Iranians also sought the meeting to forge an alliance against a possible US attack on their country’s nuclear installations.
America has always known that the Middle East’s problems are interconnected, but for years it got its priorities wrong, because it failed to see that if there was an Archimedean point to the Middle East problem, it was to be found in the Palestinian issue, not the “war on terror”, Iraq, or the need for Arab democracy. It took Mr Bush six years of foolhardy policies to finally admit that “Iraq is not the only pivotal matter in the Middle East”.
