A career in American diplomacy in the Middle East is a humbling affair. Whenever you heard well-meaning American officials speak of the birth pangs of a "new Middle East," you knew it was time to update the embassy's evacuation plans and re-stock its bunkers.

And if anyone in charge spoke of peace in Lebanon of all places, you knew to supplement the evacuation plans with an IQ test for anyone so detached from reality. For the history of American-Lebanese relations is one strewn with inflated expectations and deflated ambition. And not a few corpses.

This time, it could be different.

I spent almost two weeks in Beirut and Jerusalem on the eve of the Israel-Iran "12-day war." Compared to my previous 40 years visiting and living in those two cities, I sensed something new: an opportunity for true peace. Not just a cease-fire, not just an armistice, but the potential for a lasting peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon.

Some people on both sides countered that I was crazy. But no one made a good case as to why it is impossible. After all, there is an old Lebanese adage, "Lebanon will not be the first Arab state to make peace with Israel, but it will not be the last." As the regimes in Syria and Iran took over Lebanese decision-making on such matters from the 1980s until just a few months ago, that concept became something of a joke.

Iranian clerics and Syria's Assad family, through their Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, were the ones making life and death decisions of war and peace for all Lebanese. They were happy to stoke war with Israel in........

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