Dunlop Auditorium was full of leaflets and yarmulkes last night as an audience of 300 people listened to former Special Envoy to the Middle East Ambassador Dennis Ross lecture about the Arab-Israeli conflict and the war on Iraq.
Under the Clinton administration, Ross was prominent in engineering the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, the 1997 Hebron Accord and the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. He was most recently involved in the Camp David talks between Yasser Arafat and Yehud Barak.
Ross began his talk by discussing the war on Iraq. He stressed that the war may be difficult and that the media was serving to create an artificial sense of euphoria.
"There was too much optimism after the first day or two, and there's too much pessimism now," he said.
"One thing I am convinced of," Ross added, "is that Saddam Hussein will not survive this war. We will be creating a seismic change in the Middle East."
After creating that change, Ross continued, the United States will need to stabilize Iraq internally.
"We need to turn the peacekeeping from an American endeavor to an international one," he said. "We need an international administrator to come in, and we need to have the beginnings of an Iraqi administration."
Still, he praised the Bush administration for its military successes, but said that "they don't do very well with hearts and minds," emphasizing that the United States needs to reach out to the alienated people of the Middle East.
Furthermore, he said the United States needs to concentrate on governmental reform in the Middle East and democracy.
"We can be true to ourselves," he said. "We can't be quiet when reformers are suppressed."
He then talked about American motivation for the war.
"Saddam Hussein is not an imminent threat; that is not why we had to do this," he said. "But Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons would, sooner or later, produce a nuclear war in the Middle East."
In Ross' opinion, while Saddam is in power, there is no effective way to stop him from producing nuclear weapons.
Ross then spoke about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"If there is one thing both the Israelis and the Palestinians understand, it is that the situation needs to change. These two and a half years have been a disaster."
He was also highly critical of Arafat and praised the new Palestinian prime minister.
"The Palestinians understand that there is no future with Arafat," Ross said.
He added that Bush's "Roadmap for Peace" may be a useful pretext to resume a diplomatic dialogue but is thoroughly flawed.
"Is the situation completely hopeless?" Ross concluded. "No. We need to stop the war process and start the peace process."
