Time for a little history lesson. How many last chances for peace in the Middle East have there been? Let’s find out!

Here’s Gregory Craig, an Obama advisor, speaking in Denver today:

“This is, maybe, a last chance this next term,” Mr. Craig said at a foreign policy forum in Denver yesterday morning. “Not only a last chance for a president of the United States to be relevant … but for the people in the region to reach an accommodation. … It’s one of these strange situations where we know what the answer is and the idea is getting people to it.” Mr. Craig’s comments suggest that if the presumptive Democratic nominee, Mr. Obama, wins in November, he would press quickly for talks among Israel, the Palestinian Arabs, and others in the region, such as Syria and Lebanon.

Here’s the last chance according to Salon, 2007–the Annapolis meeting:

George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert are letting what could be the last, best opportunity to resolve the world’s most dangerous conflict slip through their fingers. Unless both leaders somehow find the wisdom and vision to seize the moment, 2007 may be remembered as the year when the chance for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians slipped away for the last time.

And here’s Time also asking if Annapolis will be the “last” Mideast peace conference:

there’s reason to pay attention to the warnings this time. The 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel planted the seed for resolving the core of the conflict: the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Arab territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. But if the Annapolis conference fails to provide urgently needed nourishment, the two-state solution and its hope of peace may die forever.

And here’s Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister predicting that the Camp David summit, 2000, is the “last chance”:

The Camp David summit is the last chance for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. This summit must succeed; its failure is inconceivable and would cause overwhelming despair for the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.

And three years earlier, an Israeli daily was giving Arafat his “last chance”:

He has one last chance, in the run-up to the arrival of the US Secretary of State. If he now comes out aggressively and effectively against Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and carries out arrests on a wide scale, on the basis of the lists given to him by the Israeli GSS, it will be possible to salvage something from Oslo.

Should I continue?

I think you got the point. I do not mean to say that time has no meaning when it comes to the Israeli-Arab conflict, and that chances for peace have not been diminishing in the last seven years (I don’t think this is Bush’s fault, but that’s another matter). However, predicting that Obama’s term will be the last time in which peace can be achieved is, well, preposterous. When it comes to last chances in the Middle East, there is always good news and bad news. The good: the last chance for peace is rarely the real last chance. The bad: the last failure is also rarely the last.