Middle East peace has become a global problem

In the fall of 1991, I was an undergraduate student at Georgetown University, following the coverage of the Madrid peace conference. In the Spanish capital, the United States had managed to gather Arabs and Israelis around a table with the aim of ending what was then half a century of war and desperation, whose first victims were the people of the region, including the people of my country, Lebanon.

As I prepared to make my first official visit to Washington as prime minister of Lebanon, I couldn't help but reflect on the price the entire world has paid since the Madrid conference failed to bring peace to the Middle East and justice to the Palestinians.

Back in 1991, al-Qaida and its offshoots and emulators simply did not exist. But fanaticism and terrorism fed on the rage, frustration and tragedy that have replaced the failed peace. It has proved too easy to find desperate people who will do desperate things, and extremists have gained an ever-growing audience among Arabs and Muslims by asking one question: What have the moderates, the defenders of a negotiated settlement, ever achieved?

The sad answer is, nothing. Let no one be fooled: It is not that moderates — the overwhelming majority of Arabs and Muslims — have not tried. In 2002, representatives of the world's 300 million Arabs signed a peace initiative at a summit in Beirut. It offered peace to Israel in exchange for a Palestinian state and Israel's withdrawal to pre-1967 borders and the return of occupied Syrian and Lebanese land. This initiative was also adopted by the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents the world's Muslims, 1.3 billion people.

But the Arab peace initiative fell on deaf ears. The result was more war, more violence and more death, fostering more rage, frustration and despair. And now I can almost hear the heinous criminal minds that orchestrated terrorist attacks in New York, London and Madrid telling us all, "If you liked the past 20 years, you're going to love the next 20!"

Mideast peace is now a global problem. And global problems call for global solutions and global leadership. Today this leadership responsibility falls primarily on the United States. President Barack Obama understands well that extremism feeds on injustice. He also recognizes that despair can be exploited to serve sinister agendas. We applaud his determination to restore credibility to the Middle East peace process.