Those dubious about prospects for peace in Lebanon under the auspices of a UN force had better pray for a natural disaster. That remark is not as heartlessly cynical as it may first appear, because according to the Friends' Committee on National Legislation, an anti-war lobby in Washington, there are four main reasons why wars end.
One side may suddenly gain a decisive military advantage, or both sides may become exhausted by the length and intensity of the fighting. Alternatively, outside mediation, arbitration or international pressure may halt the conflict. The most unexpected reason, however, is when a disaster of such monumental proportions occurs that the belligerents are overwhelmed.
The tsunami in Indonesia provides a good example, where a 30-year civil war had claimed 120,000 lives. Of course, it also took international assistance and mediation, but Indonesia no longer figures on the list of "active" wars.
God knows what kind of natural disaster would be required to shock the Middle East into resolving its disputes.
The letters page of this newspaper provides a synopsis of the classic positions held with regard to Israel and organisations such as Hizbullah and Hamas. In one view, Israel is a plucky little nation continually under threat from hostile neighbours whose one aim is to annihilate it. It is a bastion of democracy in an unstable region. In another, the atrocities committed by pro-Palestinian forces are excusable because of the injustices visited on them by an Israeli state backed in everything it does by the United States.
Still another view declares a plague on both houses, and sees a moral equivalence between both sides. Then there are the voices calling for peaceful resolution, and sadly, they are likely to be branded either as naive or appeasers.
Mr Chamberlain has a great deal for which to answer. His policy of appeasement, loosely translated as giving in to a bully, has meant that anyone who suggests that there are non-violent solutions to conflict is likely to be met with a sneering reference to the kind of people who negotiated with Hitler.
We all know where that led to, don't we? Terrorists, we are told, interpret any willingness to compromise as a weakness to exploit. It is only a resolve as fierce as their own that they understand, and that is why Mr Bush is the right president at the right time.
It appears that it is not only terrorists who interpret things according to their own lights. There is some scientific evidence that partisans, from whatever side of an argument, screen out anything which will contradict their point of view.
In fascinating research conducted at Stanford University, Mark Lepper showed that people watching presidential debates in the US routinely ignored negative performances by their candidate and saw the opposing side as more ideologically extreme than the evidence would suggest.
Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of California, hooked up Democrats and Republicans to brain-scanners, and showed them repeated pictures of John Kerry and George Bush. (Cruel and unusual punishment, anyone?)
When a disliked candidate appeared, more activity showed up in the areas controlling emotions. It appeared that partisans actively turned up their negative emotions when viewing the picture. These, and other studies, in one sense are not surprising. People tune out what they do not want to take into consideration. They are far more deeply influenced by emotion than our collective self-image as humans allowed us to believe until recently.
Yet people have always used emotion to win arguments. For example, reference to a figure like Neville Chamberlain and his initial relationship with the despised Hitler is designed to short-circuit reasonable argument.
However, there is some revisionism going on even with regard to Chamberlain, with some historians now arguing that his policies received widespread public approval from a population still scarred by memories of the first World War. Be that as it may, referring to those who wish to pursue peaceful resolution as appeasers or naive achieves little.
If the reasons the Friends' Committee on National Legislation give for the cessation of wars are right, those sceptical about peaceful solutions and diplomacy have little other cause for hope. A decisive Israeli military victory was always highly unlikely against an organisation like Hizbullah, because they have the peculiar status of being both a substitute for the state in the provision of services, and at the same time a military force that emerges from and disappears among the population.
Conventional military tactics simply do not work, no more than they work in the so-called war against terror. There is no protection against people who consider it an honour to die for a cause. Nor does fatigue with war appear to be a factor that will work any time soon.
Defiant Lebanese are returning to their devastated homes singing the praises of Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader. All we are left with is the painfully slow route of non-violent methods, concentrating on a just solution.
There has been a great deal of progress in the areas of both prevention of deadly conflict and easing of ongoing conflicts, in part because of shame over international failure to prevent genocide and war crimes in recent times.
For example, People Building Peace 2, a publication of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, outlines 60 civil society examples of peace-building.
The United Nations, though a flawed and weak institution, has provided some leadership in this area. Sadly, although the US has signed up to UN resolutions emphasising peaceful conflict resolution, the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war is the polar opposite of such a model.
Furthermore, the US current administration's choice to prioritise Iraq, Iran and the war against terror has resulted in the neglect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The current US administration is no different to any previous administration, in that it protects what it perceives to be US interests.
What is different about this administration is an unnerving degree of belief in military superiority as a means of bringing democratic institutions into being in other parts of the world. Yet in a world where war has changed beyond recognition, except for the fact that it is still the innocent who suffer most, such faith in military solutions may ultimately be more naive and deluded than those who put their faith in building peace by other means.
bobrien@irish-times.ie