While George Bush waved as he headed off to Texas for a holiday, Tony Blairs office announced that he was delaying his holiday to help work out a UN resolution for a ceasefire in Lebanon.

"This is obviously a critical time. I think it is coming together. I think the remaining differences are very slight," Blair said. "The U.S., the UK, France and others have been working very hard to get agreement on a United Nations resolution and I am now hopeful that we will have such a resolution down very shortly and agreed within the next few days.

Not only clever, but correct. The resolution was, in fact, agreed to, but, expectedly enough, the warring factions immediately rejected it.

The development provides us with the occasion of ask if an optimist about peace in the Middle East can be seen, not only as clever, but deeply wise? Doubts intrude, since the history of that area of the world seems to indicate that the very idea of peace in the Middle East may be a contradiction in terms.

The area is, after all, one of the worlds clearest instances of H. G. Wells admonition that wars often occur when political and geographic boundaries are in disagreement, for instance, when nations are not divided by mountains, rivers, or seas, but only by lines drawn in such easily transgressed borders as those in sand. And what have we in the Middle East in area after area but trails in the shifting granules, along with the blood there intermixed, from this summer back to ancient Sumer.

To end on a wiser note from our cleverest monkey, he said a few days earlier that the conflict in the Middle East, along with other entanglements involving Muslim extremists, devolve to the need for "modernization within Islam" and whether Western values can "beat theirs."

Were not sure about the wisdom of the word beat, but he went on to say, "Even the issue of Israel is just part of the same wider struggle for the soul of the region. If we recognize this struggle for what it truly is, we would be at least along the first steps of the path to winning it. But I fear a vast part of Western opinion is not remotely near this yet."

He also noted, "Whatever the outward manifestation at any one time -- in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iraq, and add to that in Afghanistan, in Kashmir, in a host of other nations, including now some in Africa this everywhere is a global fight about global values.It's about whether our value system can be shown to be sufficiently robust, true, principled and appealing that it beats theirs."

Oh, well, wisely enough said to merit our appellation of Clever Monkey of The Week, even with the undiplomatic sledgehammer of a verb, beat.

This article was posted on August 28, 2006