re: #5 lawhawk

Meanwhile, Tom Friedman, who used to actually do real reporting from the Middle East and made note of the Hama rules, now actively shills for the Saudis and claims that the solution lies in a 5-state solution, which completely ignores all the points Totten makes cogently in his piece. It’s more of what I’ve been saying for years. The diplomats engage in pseudorealism to make the facts fit their preconceived notions of what the outcome should be; when the fact disproves the notion (see attacks, kassam, et al.) they are ignored or minimized by the concerned diplomats who would rather see more rockets fall than have the “process” disrupted.

Meanwhile, it is further curious that Obama would lend his personal prestige to the Palestinian-Israel conflict so early in the first term. That’s usually the refuge of lame duck Administrations who go for legacy building knowing that everything else has failed prior to their own attempts. Obama is going to hamstring his foreign policy from day 1 by tying in to the non-starter of trying to wring a hudna out of Hamas (which everyone will coveniently call a ceasefire, but which requires Israel to cease, while Hamas fires).

Maybe President Obama believes his own press clippings? The folks he’s surrounded himself with claim that the Middle East is worse off because of the Bush administration’s inattention for 8 years to peace processing. The fail to ackowledge that the 8 years of peace processing (and ignoring Arafat’s perfidy and treating Netanyahu like a pariah) brought us the “Aqsa intifada.” If Bush had followed the same path as Clinton things would be a lot worse off now, than they are now. (Do you think Clinton would have allowed “Operation Defensive Shield?” Or would have allowed Israel to strike at Hezbollah as long as the Bush administration did? If you have any doubts go back to Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996.)