A Concert Of The Middle East?

Col W. Patrick Lang suggests that the Great Concert of Vienna, which after the Napoleonic Wars created a a system of balanced agreements which brought stability and (mostly) peace to Europe right up until WWI, is what is needed in the Middle East.

The Brussels-based International Study Group appears to agree with him.

A diplomatic effort involving all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council is the only way to stop Iraq falling apart in a religious, Sunni-Shia conflict that could spark a regional conflagration, an influential non-governmental organisation warned yesterday.

The Brussels-based International Crisis Group's (ICG) findings will make even more grim reading for the White House than this month's report from the American Iraq Study Group, as President George Bush struggles to come up with a strategy change.

Iraq, says the ICG's report, faces "complete disintegration into failed-state chaos" ­ and the solution does not lie in the transfer of responsibility to the fragile government of Nouri al-Maliki, as envisaged by the Bush administration and even by the study group led by the former secretary of state James Baker and the former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton.

To do that, argues "After Baker-Hamilton: What to Do in Iraq", would mean " expanding forces that are complicit in the current dirty war and for speeding up the transfer of responsibility to a government that has done nothing to stop [that war]."

The ICG, whose mission is to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts, takes issue with advocates of a "surge" in US troop strength in Iraq and declares that there can be no military solution, only a political one. Instead the ICG wants the "big five" permanent members of the Security Council and Iraq's six neighbours to form an "international support group" ­ but not with the exclusive aim of propping up the Maliki government. "It must support Iraq ­ which means pressing the government, along with all other Iraqi constituents, to make the necessary compromises."

What would such a "concert" have on its agenda? Well, Col. Lang has a few ideas but whatever the initial agenda every participant would have to be ready for some serious horsetrading and would have to be ready to emulate the Red Queen, being prepared to consider six possibilities they believed impossible every morning before breakfast. It would be a slim hope, but the alternative is no hope at all of averting chaos and bloodshed.

Col. Lang, while believing a "Concert of the Middle East" is neccesary, has little confidence it will happen: "The president's repeated statements about the "ideological" nature of the war leave no room for the bargaining and compromise inherent in diplomacy, alas."