The absence of peace

The Blair–Bush summit in Washington was long-planned, but fortuitously well-timed. The President and Prime Minister face not only a huge strategic challenge in the Middle East but also a fundamental political problem at home. They have not yet managed to persuade Western voters of the path they have jointly pursued in the region. Neither man is seeking re-election. All the more reason, then, for

candour and robust explanation of what this crisis is truly about.

With some exceptions, the default position in the West is now that Mr Bush and Mr Blair have allowed Israel to deploy tactics in southern Lebanon that are at best ‘disproportionate’ and at worst — in the words of Jan Egeland, the UN’s under-

secretary-general for humanitarian affairs — ‘a violation of humanitarian law’. On Tuesday the Tory MP Sir Peter Tapsell claimed — with a disgraceful lack of taste, matched only by historical ignorance — that Israel’s actions were ‘a war crime gravely reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter of Warsaw’.