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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/opinion/02oren.html
Middle East Peace Through Anxiety
[New York Times] Michael B. Oren - Last week's multi-national summit meeting in Annapolis was about many things, the least of which was the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace. While Annapolis is unlikely to succeed in bridging the gaps between Israeli and Arab positions, it effectively drew lines in the sand between those nations siding with America and the West and those allied with Iran. As a rule, international conferences have never served as effective frameworks in the search for Middle Eastern peace. Peace treaties in the past were forged by strong statesmen - Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Israel's Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan's King Hussein. Yet Annapolis must be deemed a triumph - not of peacemaking, paradoxically, but of girding the region for conflict with a radical and relentlessly aggressive Iran. The Iranians reacted ferociously to Annapolis and Ahmadinejad pronounced it a "failure." But such rage merely betrays the anxiety induced by Annapolis in Tehran. For the first time a coalition of Western and modern Arab leaders has coalesced and declared its commitment to resist "extremism" in the Middle East - a well-known euphemism for Iran.