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Middle East: Time running out

Editorialises The Boston Globe:

"Seeking to lift the economic boycott of his people by creating a national unity government joining his secular Fatah movement to Hamas, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Tuesday: ``To maintain the status quo is impossible." Abbas was alluding to a political deadlock. To break that deadlock, he has broached various moves -- dissolving the Hamas government, calling a referendum, or forming a government of non political technocrats.

Whatever choices Abbas and his compatriots make, he evoked a larger truth when he recognized that the status quo cannot be maintained. This is a truth that applies not only to Palestinians, but also to Israel. Indeed, the untenable quality of the status quo is becoming a premise of statecraft from Beirut to Baghdad and from Tehran to Cairo. And if President Bush were attuned to such realities, he too would realize that all parties, including the United States, will be imperiled if they do not halt the region's present drift toward disaster."

As the editorial explains, here, time is running out in the Middle East unless all "involved' parties, including the US, do something to bring stability, and hopefully peace, to the region.

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