America can't do it all

For anybody at the United Nations who might think its "strategy" for bringing Iran to heel is working, allow us to let them in on a little secret:

• Photos

Associated Press

President Bush and Turkish President Abdullah Gul shake hands at the White House in Washington. Bush met with the Muslim nation's leader Tuesday in advance of Bush's extended trip to the Middle East.

It's not.

Whether it's through useless sanctions or the U.N. weapon of choice -- the strongly worded memo -- the United Nations is ill-equipped to deal with Iran's belligerent behavior. If anything, Iran gets steadily worse. That fact gets proved every time the rogue Mideast country bares its fangs at the rest of the world.

This time it happened in the Strait of Hormuz, where five small Iranian boats Sunday harassed three U.S. Navy ships and threatened to blow them up. The boats -- believed to be part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's navy -- dropped boxlike objects in the water in the ships' paths, then radioed the ships to threaten that the frigate, cruiser and destroyer would explode.

The boats came within less than 500 yards of the U.S. formation, and the Navy was on the verge of opening fire when the boats backed off.

And opening fire is precisely what Iran wanted. What better international incident to give excuse for any deadly-force retaliation against the United States?

Iran's twisted naval provocation was a two-for-one deal. Not only did it showcase the nation's defiance against the West, it also tweaked the nose of President Bush, who today begins his first major trip to the Middle East. Iran's message: Any attempt at a diplomatic solution in the Mideast won't work, because we won't let them work.

Bush's itinerary begins with Israel and the West Bank, but much of the trip will be spent in Egypt and in comparatively stable oil-rich states on the Arabian Peninsula that are just across the Strait of Hormuz from Iran -- and the security of that strait is crucial to one-fourth of the world's oil.

Don't wring your hands if Bush doesn't come away with a slough of concrete diplomatic victories. At the very least, his Mideast tour will set a tone, and send a message to Iran's neighbors that peace can be theirs if they collectively reach for the opportunity within their grasp.

As diligently as America labors toward peace in the Middle East, at some point responsibility will have to fall upon the nations in that region to band together against Iran and rampant terrorism, in ways in which America isn't well-equipped. As Johns Hopkins University professor and Mideast expert Fouad Ajami rightly points out, "America can provide the order that underpins the security of the Arabs, but there are questions of political and cultural reform which are tasks for the Arabs themselves."

The final answer for Mideast peace doesn't lie in the United States, or in wet-noodle U.N. sanctions. It lies among the people in the Middle East who want order and peace badly enough to fight for it themselves.