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President Barack
Obama is embarking on something I’ve never seen before – taking on two
Missions Impossible at the same time. That is, a simultaneous effort to
heal the two most bitter divides in the Middle East: the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Shiite-Sunni conflict cantered in
Iraq. Give him his due. The guy’s got audacity. I’ll provide the hope.
But kids, don’t try this at home.

Yet, if by some
miracles the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that opened in Washington
on Thursday do eventually produce a two-state solution, and Iraqi
Shiites and Sunnis do succeed in writing their own social contract on
how to live together, one might be able to imagine a Middle East that
breaks free from the debilitating grip of endless Arab-Israeli wars and
autocratic Arab regimes.

Obama deserves
credit for helping to nurture these opportunities. But he, Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the
Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and the newly elected leaders of
Iraq need to now raise their games to a whole new level to seize this
moment – or their opponents will.

Precisely because
so much is at stake, the forces of intolerance, extreme nationalism and
religious obscurantism all over the Middle East will be going all out
to make sure that both the Israeli and Iraqi peace processes fail.

The opponents want
to destroy the idea of a two-state solution for Israelis and
Palestinians, so Israel will be stuck with an apartheid-like,
democracy-sapping, permanent occupation of the West Bank. And they want
to destroy the idea of a one-state solution for Iraqis and keep Iraq
fractured, so it never coheres into a multi-sectarian democracy that
could be an example for other states in the region.

I hope that one of
my personal rules about the Middle East is proved wrong – that in this
region extremists go all the way and moderates tend to just go away.

Obama was right to
keep to his troop-withdrawal schedule from Iraq. Iraqi politicians need
to stand on their own. But this is tricky. The president will not be
remembered for when we leave Iraq but for what happens after we leave.
That is largely in Iraqi hands, but it is still very much in our
interest. So we need to retain sufficient diplomatic, intelligence,
Special Forces and Army training units there to promote a decent
outcome; because all the extremists are now doubling down.

Last week,
insurgents aligned with al-Qaida boasted of killing 56 innocent Iraqis.
On Tuesday, Palestinian gunmen murdered four West Bank Israeli
settlers, including a pregnant woman; Hamas proudly claimed credit. In
Israel, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who heads the largest ultra-Orthodox party,
Shas, used his Shabbat sermon to declare that he hoped the Palestinian
president and his people would die. “All these evil people should
perish from this world … God should strike them with a plague, them
and these Palestinians,” Yosef said.

Trust me, this is just the throat clearing and gun-cleaning. Wait until we have a deal.

Even if Israel
agrees to swap land with the Palestinians so that 80 percent of the
Jewish settlers in the West Bank can stay put, it will mean that 60,000
will still have to be removed. It took Israel 55,000 soldiers to remove
8,100 Jewish settlers from Gaza, which was never part of the Land of
Israel. Imagine when today’s Israeli Army, where the officer corps is
increasingly drawn from religious Zionists who support the settler
movement, is called on to remove settlers from the West Bank.

None of this is a
reason not to proceed. It is a reason to succeed. There is so much to
hate about the Iraq war. The costs will never match the hoped-for
outcome, but that outcome remains hugely important: The effort to build
a decent, consensual government in Iraq is the most important democracy
project in the world today.

If Iraqi Sunnis,
Kurds and Shiites can actually write a social contract for the first
time in modern Arab history, it means that viable democracy is not only
possible in Iraq, but everywhere in the region.

“Iraq is the
Germany of the Middle East,” says Michael Young, opinion editor of The
Beirut Daily Star and author of a very original book about Lebanon,
“The Ghosts of Martyrs Square.” “It is at the heart of the region –
affecting all around it – and the country’s multi-ethnic,
multi-sectarian population represents all the communities of the
region. Right now, what is going on in Iraq represents all the worst
trends in the region, but if you can make it work, it could represent
the best.”

The late Israeli
leader Yitzhak Rabin used to say he would pursue peace with the
Palestinians as if there were no terrorism and fight terrorism as if
there were no peace process. That dual approach is one that Iraqi,
Arab, Palestinian and

Israeli moderates are all going to have to adopt.

I hope the forces of moderation are up to it.

© 2010 New York Times News Service