In a Daily Star commentary, "Is a New War in the Middle East Becoming Inevitable?" Volker Perthes, chairman and director of Berlin's Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, suggests there are burning embers beneath the burgeoning plume of smoky rhetoric emanating from the Middle East that could suddenly erupt into an ragin inferno of regional conflict:
Fouad Siniora, Lebanon’s former prime minister, is a thoughtful man with deep experience in Middle Eastern politics. So when he speaks of “trains with no drivers that seem to be on a collision course,” as he recently did at a private meeting in Berlin, interested parties should probably prepare for unwanted developments. Of course, no one in the region is calling for war. But a pre-war mood is growing.
Four factors, none of them new but each destabilizing on its own, are compounding one another: lack of hope, dangerous governmental policies, a regional power vacuum, and the absence of active external mediation.
He goes on to describe those issues in detail, but also highlights another reason why things could quickly get out of hand:
Twenty years ago, in the weeks that preceded Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, many observers saw signs of a looming crisis. But Arab and Western players somehow managed to convince themselves that things would not get out of hand.
That crisis, and others before and since, showed that tensions in the Middle East rarely dissolve with the passage of time. Sometimes they are resolved through active diplomatic intervention by regional or international players. And sometimes they are released violently.
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