Sundown: Clinton Criticizes Building

It is absurd for the administration to run frantically from Jerusalem to Ramallah to Riyadh to Cairo and back searching for a way to save peace talks that in its first utterances two years ago the administration itself torpedoed.

The Palestinians and Israel have had on-again, off-again negotiations for decades, most productively without US involvement (interference). Perhaps from an excess of naïveté by our new president (for whom I voted), or an excess of enthusiasm for opening avenues to the Moslem world in the aftermath of 9-11 and eight years of a Bush Administration policy gone wild; or perhaps from an overblown sense of identification with the Palestinians as “oppressed;” whatever the president’s reason, at their first meeting in the White House Netanyahu two years ago Netanyahu brought with him the America-neglected issue of the Iranian bomb, while the president trumped the prime minister with the non-issue of… But wait, of course the settlements are an important issue, but important as it has always been it was never previously an obstacle to the neighbors across the Green Line sitting at the same table and negotiating. In fact the issue of the settlements was, for the most part, already settled, at least between the neighbors. In fact most of the issues between the parties were already settled, at Camp David, with President Clinton, in 2000. Borders drawn, territory swaps agreed to.

Once our president made the settlements the center of his “peacemaking” efforts he all but scuttled any possibility for negotiations. He turned Israel into the obstacle, and left the Palestinians no option but to follow Obama’s lead and declare talks at an end until Israel publicly kowtows to the president, displays weakness in the face of an increasingly radical Middle East.

Before his execution Sadam Hussein was asked why, if he had no weapons of mass destruction in hiding did he not say so and avoid providing Bush the excuse to attack? His response, “We live in a