Dubious diplomacy

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On Tuesday the UN General Assembly will open its regular session to debate a long agenda of highly complicated and pressing issues. The situation in the Middle East, critical as has recently been described by many regional and international figures, will certainly appear high on the agenda of this gathering via a tentatively scheduled ministerial meeting of the UN Security Council that could convene next Thursday upon a collective Arab request.

The focus of the expected debate on the Middle East is obvious, at least for the Arab side. Arabs have indicated a firm interest in launching a process of direct and credible talks between Israel and all concerned Arab parties to once and for all settle the Arab-Israeli conflict on a peaceful basis.

This is not necessarily in the interest of Israel, nor for that matter of the US, and consequently the UK. Given their humiliating political -- and to an extent military -- defeat before Arabs in Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere, these three countries seem to be more interested in initiating a political process that could grant the three governments a political face saving without really committing them to a process that would entail serious talks and inevitable concessions.

It was perhaps this spontaneous awareness of the bad intentions of Tel Aviv, Washington and London that turned the recent tour of Britain's scorned Tony Blair to the Middle East into an unwelcome diplomatic event. In Lebanon for the first visit of a British prime minister in almost 25 years, Blair was received with angry protest that reminded the world of the involvement of this demising politician in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and Israeli military assaults on Palestine and Lebanon.

But beyond the anger of Lebanese protesters, Blair's visit was rightly scorned in several Arab diplomatic quarters as an attempt to fudge the collective Arab effort to engage the UN Security Council in mediating future Arab-Israeli talks. Blair's attempt to escape his domestic quagmire by a foreign policy victory was bound to fail if he based his bid on the notion of "talks for the sake of talks" or an attempt to deepen the rift between Syria and Lebanon.

The Middle East deserves better. It deserves a candid and systematic effort to end the Arab-Israeli conflict that has for over half a century plunged this region into misery and dismay. Palestinians deserve a viable and independent state. Iraq deserves an end to its current misery. None of these can be achieved in the absence of a true world commitment, including that of the US, to bring stability to this region.

The recent counter-terrorism plan adopted by the UN to combat world terror -- notably at the expense of protected rights to resist occupation -- will prove to be unworthy of the ink with which it was written, as some Arab countries warned, if international bias continues to allow Israel to aggress Arabs and get away with it.