Perhaps the problem is that, unlike the western world, they've yet to experience war on so vast and horrible a scale as to make the idea unpalatable. They've had relatively small, regional conflagrations in the recent past, (and truly massive and horrible in their history) but nothing so terrible lately as to truly lay waste to a large part of the region, say on the scale of World War II. True, in much of the region, they've yet to reach the level Europe did before World War II, but there is enough industrialized and truly civilized territory that they could probably learn the same lesson. It may be that nearly every civilization/culture/region must experience something that horrendous to make them decide armed conflict of one sort or another is not the most viable and enjoyable method to resolve differences. They may actually be working towards bringing about that very thing now, though.
