KEEP HOPE ALIVE (YOURSELVES) :

No details, No Hope : The president's Middle East speech called for all the right things. But he offered no plan to achieve them. (Gershom Gorenberg, June 30, 2002, LA Times)

If you missed President Bush's speech on the Middle East conflict, it's not hard to find out what's in it. You can read the full text on the White House Web site. But to assess the long-awaited policy statement, it's actually more important to look at what isn't in it. The short answer is hope. For those who live in the Mideast and for Americans who care about what is happening here, the speech contained almost nothing that could lead to a peace initiative with a chance of succeeding.

This may come as a surprise to Mr. Gorenberg, but if the Palestinians want hope for the future and peace with Israel they're going to have to take responsibility for themselves. Perhaps it would be helpful for all these confused liberal commentators to think of Mr. Bush's speech as a foreign version of Welfare Reform. We're weaning the Palestinians off of a dependence on the American government to do all the peace-making for them. We're telling them that it's a new era of responsibility. We're saying that we believe that they and must do for themselves. Liberals didn't like it when we did that with welfare recipients either, but it worked. Just maybe this can too. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 30, 2002 8:26 AM