Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to both Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, has a well-crafted op-ed piece in today's Washington Post. There, he outlines the rationale for and the necessary components for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East.
Like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Scowcroft believes that the latest outbreak of fighting presents an "opportunity" for crafting such a comprehensive peace. He believes that the US will need to play a lead role in assembling an agreement, along with partners from "the quartet": the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia.
He also argues persuasively that peace is needed in the region so that "Arab leaders to focus on what most say is a primary concern: modernizing their countries to provide jobs and productive lives for their rapidly growing populations."
But a major stumbling block I see in the implementation of Scowcroft's laudable vision is the existence of national governments like those in Iran and Syria and extragovernmental groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaeda, all of which insist that nothing less than the destruction of modern Israel is acceptable. There are many reasoned voices and sentiments in the Middle East. But every time peace appears to be at hand there, one of these groups or governments causes trouble, with the support of many on the Arab Street.
The government in Iran is particularly troubling and particularly capable of fomenting difficulty. Its level of irrationality was underscored just yesterday when its president issued a decree that words not rooted in Persian would no longer be used in modern Iranian Farsi. Pizzas, for example, will no longer be known by that name; they'll now to be called elastic loaves. That name alone conveys something of the inelasticity encountered in the Middle East and the difficulty of bringing the peace plan that Scowcroft outlines into being.
Nonetheless, I am praying for such a comprehensive peace.
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