False Religion of Mideast Peace

The front page cover story on Foreign Policy magazine this week is titled, THE FALSE RELIGION OF MIDEAST PEACE.

Again...we have Israel front and center as the world continues injuring itself as it attempts to lift the burdensome stone of Jerusalem.

Like all religions, the peace process has developed a dogmatic creed, with immutable first principles. Over the last two decades, I wrote them hundreds of times to my bosses in the upper echelons of the State Department and the White House; they were a catechism we all could recite by heart. First, pursuit of a comprehensive peace was a core, if not the core, U.S. interest in the region, and achieving it offered the only sure way to protect U.S. interests; second, peace could be achieved, but only through a serious negotiating process based on trading land for peace; and third, only America could help the Arabs and Israelis bring that peace to fruition.

As befitting a religious doctrine, there was little nuance. And while not everyone became a convert (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush willfully pursued other Middle East priorities, though each would succumb at one point, if only with initiatives that reflected, to their critics, varying degrees of too little, too late), the exceptions have mostly proved the rule. The iron triangle that drove Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and now Barack Obama to accord the Arab-Israeli issue such high priority has turned out to be both durable and bipartisan. Embraced by the high priests of the national security temple, including State Department veterans like myself, intelligence analysts, and most U.S. foreign-policy mandarins outside government, these tenets endured and prospered even while the realities on which they were based had begun to change. If this wasn't the definition of real faith, one wonders what was.

See it here; http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/19/the_false_religion_of_mideast_peace?page=0,0

Remember, "faith" actually means believing in something that you can't see or know for sure....there may be evidence, but no scientific proof.

The problem in Washington is that the leaders there seem to have more faith in their personal desire to accomplish something....while lacking any real faith in the Creator of the Universe who also happens to be the Creator of every politician in Washington.

It seems like many of earth's disasters and many of the sins mentioned in the Bible all start with faith in ourselves...which leads to pride...which leads to a fall.

The Bible clearly says, "Pride comes before a fall". I think it's in Proverbs....but please look it up and tell me exactly where.