The False Religion of Mideast Peace - Aaron David Miller

This is a very long article in Foreign Policy Magazine. While the length is oppressive, the thoughts are instructive. He basically leaves one with the impression that currently, peace between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and the Arabs is unattainable. With all of the complex problems facing the US both at home and abroad, we cannot bring enough focus to work with the parties to solve this problem. He does not say it specifically but only another war will create the needs to find a chance for peace. The two times that great progress was made was following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which led to peace between Israel and Egypt, and following the Gulf War when we began the Oslo Process. Barring such catastrophic events, we will remain stuck in a quagmire. He does not say we should give up but we should have a realistic understanding of where we are at.


For information on the author, Aaron David Miller, you might look at the Wikipedia post on him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_David_Miller


A small excerpt from the article:


I can't tell you how many times in the past 20 years, as an intelligence analyst, policy planner, and negotiator, I wrote memos to Very Important People arguing the centrality of the Arab-Israeli issue and why the U.S. needed to fix it. Today, I couldn't write those same memos or anything like them with a clear conscience or a straight face. The notion that there's a single or simple fix to protecting U.S. interests, let alone that Arab-Israeli peace would, like some magic potion, make it all better, is just flat wrong. In a broken, angry region with so many problems, it stretches the bounds of credulity to the breaking point to argue that settling the Arab-Israeli conflict is the most critical issue, or that its resolution would somehow guarantee Middle East stability.


A brilliant, empathetic president has made America the focal point of action and responsibility for the Arab-Israeli issue at a time when the country may be least able to do much about it. The painful truth is that faith in America's capacity to fix the Arab-Israeli issue has always been overrated. It's certainly no coincidence that every breakthrough from the Egypt-Israel treaty to the Oslo accords to the Israel-Jordan peace agreement came initially as a consequence of secret meetings about which the U.S. was the last to know. 


The link to this article :
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/19/the_false_religion_of_mideast_peace