THE PATH STARTED IN THE OVAL OFFICE:

Path to Peace Runs Through Palestine: Iraq may grab the headlines, but conflict with Israel still drives Arab anger in the region. (David Hirst, December 22, 2004, LA Times)

Since Yasser Arafat's death, there has been a shift of international attention away from Iraq to the other, older, most imperishable of Middle East crises. Tony Blair has urged the reelected President Bush to revitalize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which he called "the single most pressing political challenge in our world today," while British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has called it more important than Iraq itself. [...]

There were plenty of warnings before the invasion that it would only inflame the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Blair himself clearly saw it would have been a very good idea to pave the way for the invasion with a serious attempt to persuade the Palestinians that redress was finally at hand. But the neoconservative hawks who drove U.S. policy reversed these priorities; the road to Jerusalem, and peace in the Holy Land, lay through Baghdad. So what, for Blair, would have been merely prudent risk-avoidance before the war now, in his postwar revival of it, looks more like a desperate bid to salvage what can be salvaged from a grim predicament that seems to get grimmer by the day.

Bush did promise last month to invest political capital in the other Middle East crisis. But he was distinctly noncommittal about how. In any case, the whole history of Israeli-Palestinian peace-seeking suggests that of all American presidents, Bush — who has been blindly, unquestioningly supportive of Ariel Sharon's right-wing policies — is just about the least likely to listen, in a productive way, to what Blair or even his own Pentagon advisory board have to say.

This is all so confusing. The President said true peace between Israel and Palestine would have to wait until a democratioc leadership replaced Arafat, but that in the meantime Mr. Sharon should go ahead with unilateral imposition of borders while we dealt with Saddam. Saddam and Arafat are gone. Bush and Sharon remain. Peace is at hand. But Mr. Hirst says the President should have listened to folks who counseled the opposite at every step?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 22, 2004 8:47 AM