Conned No More?

I shall let you follow the link and be as gobsmacked as I was at who was the author of this:

William Hague has made a highly important intervention on the perils facing the Middle East peace process in the wake of the recent turbulent political unrest in Egypt.

For the past thirty years Egypt, under President Hosni Mubarak, has acted as a vitally important bulwark in the West’s numerous attempts to cajole the Israelis and Palestinians to make peace. Mubarak has rigorously observed the peace treaty his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, signed with Israel before being gunned down by a Islamist gunmen in 1981. And he has used Egypt’s considerable influence in the region to support the Palestinians in their attempts to attain statehood, as well as hosting delicate negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials.

But with Egypt no longer in any position to focus its attention on the peace process, it is important that other countries, particularly the US, fill the vacuum. When he made his famous Cairo speech in June 2009, Barack Obama said he wanted a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians to be his main foreign policy objective. But he has been outplayed and outwitted by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who appears to have little interest in such a deal.

But with reform movements erupting throughout the Middle East, Israel should wake up to the fact that is very much in its interests to strike a deal with the Palestinians before it is too late. Failure to make peace could lead to more radical governments taking power in countries like Egypt – governments that are less committed that Mr Mubarak has been to making peace with Israel, and who may want war instead.

Of course, the Muslim Brotherhood has absolutely no intention of waging a suicidal war against Israel, and in any case fully accepts that it will never govern on its own. Nor would such a war be any problem of Britain's, anyway. But this article seems to suggest that the ruinous colonisation of the SIS by half-educated, downmarket adolescents is coming to an end, and that the grown-up, scholarly gentlemen are back in charge. Not before time.