Publius

First I would like to thank you Mr Mephisto for this post as I believe it lays out fairly clearly the advantages of bringing in the UN to handle this situation. However, I must make one minor correction, Turkey is not an Arabic country, its Turkic. The Turks great offense to being called Arabs as I learned the hard way when I made a slip of the tongue while I was over there last summer. Non the less I agree with you on most of the points that you made, but I would like to suggest extending the circle of consideration from the ‘Arabic’ world to include the greater Muslim world. (The Arab world is a considerably smaller community consisting of roughly 20- 22 countries depending on who is counting, whereas the OIC (Organization of Islamic conferences) consists of 56 states) Just for reference there are 191 counties that are members of the United Nations, so the OIC consists of nearly 1/3 of all the present members.

Furthermore, quick history lesson for everyone bickering over the Israeli/Palestinian issue. In 1947 the U.N. passed Resolution 181 which created both the Palestinian and Israeli state. Now, while Israel always points to this resolution as the legal basis for them to exist as a state they unconditionally refuse to acknowledge the part of the resolution which establishes the right of Palestine to exist as a free and independent state. Also, again if you look at your history, Israel has refused to acknowledge almost every other single resolution dealing with the Palestine issue since that point. So, it really should be no surprise to anyone that so many of the OIC countries refuse to acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as well, considering that Israel will not live up to the second half of the bargain to which they agreed. ( full the full story go to: http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/qpal/index.html )

Just as a quick point of reference, I am not trying to take sides here, just trying to shed some light upon the issue. As I have stated before, I think that the best thing to do is to just have everyone pull out of the area and let the two sides have at each other, then, when the dust has settled, go back in a rebuild unified states that are willing to get along. That is the major difference between this war and WW2. After the carnage of WW2 all sides concerned wanted to avoid any further conflict whereas here the price has not yet been high enough to convince people that peace and diplomacy is the way to go. Might I also add that Afghanistan worked so well because the population in that country has been fighting for nearly 30 years nonstop and the people there are sick and tired of the bloodshed and are now willing to come to the table.

Anyway, just my thoughts on the matter.
Cheers,
Publius