Well, you certainly talk the talk, but it seems to stop there. Where has Mrs Clinton been for the last 2 years? What in the world makes you think she is the world authority on the Middle East? She may have star power in America, but if you think she's got it in Israel or Gaza or in Hezbollah territory, you are as badly mistaken as Obama is. She doesn't even have it with the people inside the Beltway who are the opposition to Obama's position; the blindly pro-Israeli Jewish claque who forced the Bush administration into all of their Middle Eastezrn miscalculations. Sir, you live in a bubble. The reason for the mess is that everyone who makes American diplomatic decisions thinks like an American.

If you do not know your opposition from the inside you will neither influence nor defeat him. Hillary is star enough for Middle Eastern tough nut, macho politicians not to laugh at in public. She is just a bauble for them to make nice to for the press. But influence? Please. Bush' accolytes gained power in the M-E by being Israel's lap dog. Obama lost it by admitting in public that that policy had been a mistake. We've had 10 years of disastrous incompetence in the Middle East, because the only people who truly understand the region's mentality from the inside are the inside-the-Beltway hard-shelled Zionists. And unfortunately, they only understand the extremist Israeli position. There is no Arab counterweight.. There are no adults in sight to supervise or even to counsel the politicians who have destroyed us.

I would echo Anonymot's views, plus add that peace is impossible when (in the words of Israeli Labor) the Netanyahu government doesn't show a sincere interest in this Tango. To suggest the US has not made itself clear to Israel or somehow not expressed itself clearly about what is required to make progress towards peace is absurd -- stop settlements! The fact Israel has not responded or required multi-billion dollar bribes with assurances to even consider a temporary freeze on settlements is the real underlying problem.

The US has supported Israel and Israel has responded by pretty much doing whatever it wants. The Obama administration did block the Goldstone report for Israel. The Obama administration did block the worst of the fall out over the Turkish flotilla disaster issues Israel created for itself. The Obama administration did reiterate its unwavering support of Israel's right to defend itself. What was the response of Israel? Thanks, now we will get those settlements back and track and expanded. We will move more people into the West Bank. We will block Palestinians from building in East Jerusalem so we can build more homes for Israeli's there.

While the US has worked tirelessly to get the Arab's help to support the process, encouraged their talk with Hamas to reduce problems, try to built Palestinian infrastructure so they can actually have the infrastructure necessary for a state and reduced tensions on the ground, Israel has shown only a willingness to give an inch and demand a yard. There is only one solution to that behavior and the Obama administration has escalated pressure on Israel before it takes the last step -- initiating removal of US support for Israel.

When power and force are only used to further an agenda and a viewpoint, but not to solve problems the answer is not to support that power and force, but to limit it. No solutions to peace are possible unless both sides are interested in working toward that goal. If one side believes it doesn't really need to seriously address the peace process because it has the power and force to impose its will on the other without a peace, this is the stalemate that results. This is exactly the problem and everyone involved in the ME peace process knows it. This will be rectified by time, trust me on that.

On the substance of the main post here, while I'm not sanguine about Sec. Clinton's capacity to do the work on the Middle East that Kissinger and Baker did, she is the Secretary of State now. The Secretary of State should be running the show, not just serving as one member of a White House committee on foreign policy. Miller is quite right about this.

I think this most directly highlights the ineptitude of the Obama administration's foreign policy positioning, which seems to have remarkably little to do with his Secretary of State.

Whenever Obama is on the stage, he's calling the shots, gathering cheering crowds, and watching listlessly as seasoned diplomats run circles around him.

Whenever Clinton is on the stage, she's pushing the administration's message, with general success (though some of the positioning is off at times).

Frankly, the best move Obama has made from a foreign policy perspective is to name Hillary as his SOS. Nearly everything since has been mediocre to poor.

From Israel’s perspective, 2010 ended as it began, with much of the world spending far too much time obsessing about it, failing the Israel Rorschach test. Despite being a democracy, Israel, like all other collective human endeavors called countries, is imperfect. Some view its missteps in that context, understanding that liberal democracies are better than dictatorships not only because they give their citizens freedoms and dignity but because those freedoms sharpen their government’s and society’s self-correcting mechanisms. Too many others treat Israel as the international bogeyman, a monster nation, wherein each misstep proves its illegitimacy.

The year began with Israel still smarting from the Goldstone Report’s censure of its war of selfdefense against Hamas rockets in Gaza. In many ways, it was nothing new. Only one nation is regularly censured by the UN’s so-called Human Rights Council. And only one country has its right to selfdefense so scrutinized and constricted by the international community.

We did not need this year’s revelations of the massive casualties that resulted from American firepower in Iraq to know that modern armies cause much damage. To be frank, given Gaza’s density and volatility, it is a tribute to IDF discipline that thousands more people did not die.

Nevertheless, intelligent defenders of the real Israel were honest enough to admit that the IDF, like all armies, inevitably erred occasionally, and should learn from its mistakes. There is a reason why William Tecumseh Sherman said “war is hell” – even a century before our age of hi-tech weaponry that kills en masse, and immoral enemies who hide behind mosques and hospitals, behind the skirts of old ladies and the uniforms of schoolgirls.

But the Goldstone Report treated Israel as bogeyman, ignoring the context, minimizing the years of rocket fire it endured and the harshness of Hamas’s Islamist, anti-Semitic exterminationist ideology. In fact, critics could argue that Israel failed to fulfill its basic obligation to defend its own citizens by waiting so long before attacking.

Once again, its enemies forgot that in a democracy criticism in context is often absorbed and taken seriously, but extreme, unreasonable criticism overrides a democracy’s self-corrective mechanism, triggering an equally essential self-protective response.

The year ended with the stench of former president Moshe Katsav’s rape and sexual harassment conviction, again proving that Israel is a real democracy – with real problems balanced by an admirable ability to confront and correct them. These episodes frequently have their ambiguities and politics does intrude. A recently released tape suggests the relationship between Katsav and his accuser “A” was more layered.

And yes, voices on the far Left again proved their hypocrisy by delighting in his conviction but laughing off the sex crimes of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange – the documentarian Michael Moore dismissed those accusations as “a bunch of hooey,” prompting Katha Pollitt of the leftist periodical The Nation to complain that “when it comes to rape, the left still doesn’t get it.”

Yet, the fact that Katsav was found unanimously guilty by a three-person court headed by an Arab, Judge George Kara, proved that Israel is a pluralistic democracy with rule of law, and the “boys-will-be-boys” locker room ethos of yesteryear will not pass muster today.

Nevertheless, this Christmas season brought the usual condemnations – including some egregious extremes. In uncovering too many leftists’ blind spot regarding the serious charges against Assange, Pollitt discovered that the accusation that the Assange case’s “Miss A” is a CIA “honey trap,” came from one Israel Shamir, who also peddles anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist canards willynilly. Shamir claims Jews control the media and the banks, charging that “Palestine is not the ultimate goal of the Jews; the world is.”

Pollitt laments: “We have now produced on the Left an echo chamber like that on the far right, where the scurrilous charges of marginal fanatics are disseminated through electronic media and end up, cleansed of their original associations, as respectable opinion.”
In Quebec, a different manifestation of anti-Israel absurdity played, courtesy of the increasingly marginal, ridiculous BDS movement – they call it boycott, divestment, sanctions, we call it blacklist, demonization and slander. Anti-Israel activists targeted one family-owned shoe store, Le Marcheur on Montreal’s fashionable St. Denis Street, for selling Israeli-made Beautifeel shoes. A member of Quebec’s National Assembly, Amir Khadir, joined the protests. Uncowed, the simple store owner Yves Archambault stood up to Khadir, one of Quebec’s most popular politicians, and won.

The Quebec media mocked Khadir as le fanatique, unfairly picking on a family-owned business in his own district, whose interests he is supposed to represent. Most Quebec opinion-makers dismissed Khadir’s tired claim to be protesting “apartheid” as poppycock. Jewish and non-Jewish Quebecois responded with their own, informal “buycott,” swarming the store, buying many more shoes, Israeli and otherwise, from the Archambault family thanks to the protesters.

A Rorschach test exposes the viewer more than the object. The real Israel is not a fragile state. It is a robust democracy living in a tough neighborhood, thriving on the historical stage, sometimes acting nobly, sometimes brutishly, but impressively capable of self-criticism and self-correction. Democrats can recognize their own countries’ strengths and weaknesses in its reflection.

The phantom Israel is conjured up by extreme critics in an overwrought state who make wild accusations and are so blinded by hatred they ride roughshod over innocents, principles, their own obligations, their own self-interest. And they jump from criticizing particular actions to making gross generalizations about a group. We call that bigotry. And when directed against Jews, we call that anti-Semitism.

Mr. Miller cites concisely the possibility (or lack of) for change in the ME today but it is not the bureaucratic structure of the approach or the gender of the SOS (despite being a strong figure) but the content and seeming lack of temerity of the tactics the US team employs with it's Israeli counterparts. Mr Miller recognizes former S'sOS Baker and Kissinger for the US's previous successes in the region. Both of these men and the administration's they represented were not timid in making aid to Israel contingent on advances in US interests including concessions in the ME peace process with the Palestinians. These contingencies are a significant piece of negotiating power not employed in recent years which has arguably led to a reinforced Israeli right and the diminishing and/or flight of the dovish left. With the rising global economic order of nations not necessarily aligned with the archaic US desire of spreading post WWII Wilsonian democracy, the realist FP approaches of a Baker or Kissinger would seize on the immediacy of the need for resolving these decades old issues to move to a new position of American influence in order to reinforce old (Russia) and foster growth with the necessary alliances (Turkey) in the ME. Employing such strategies in shaping a myopic Israeli leadership by empowering a forward looking, less ideological Israel with such a strategy would fit the bill. Israeli security and growth currently lies in it's relationship with politically similar governments in the EU and that of the US. That support should be reinforced.

The US is not short of talent for difficult tasks, such as that of supremo for the negotiations. The essential requirement is that the US have a clear view of its own interests and aims in the negotiation.

The issue for Americans is not whether they hate Jews or Arabs, identify with the children of Israel in the Old Testament, love Israelis or judge harshly the actions of Israeli governments or Palestinian leaders. It is what is good for the USA in the overall context addressed by other articles in this and previous issues of FP.

America faces a world in which it is still dominant but other powers have improved their relative positions and will probably continue to do so. The threat is not so much power politics as that the norms of the international system will deteriorate while America’s dominance wanes and it becomes more reliant on these norms. The US needs to shore up world rules it will find benign.

More than ever the US has to uphold the norms, notably that all people (including Israelis and Palestinians) have equal rights and dignity, no state (not even Israel) has greater rights than the others and territory cannot be acquired by military conquest or dominance. Of course there have been breaches of these norms, but they have been relatively few and widely condemned. All the more reason to uphold the norms. The US would do itself and the world order great damage if it were party to a deal that condoned continuing breaches of these vital principles. Moreover the rest of the international community would have every reason to treat such an agreement with contempt and to increase their cynicism about America’s claim to moral high ground. Israel’s security would not be enhanced and the Palestine issue would continue to fester -- and to be exploited by Al-Qaida and other thugs.

The starting point for the Administration should be that in the interests of the United States Israel cannot "offer" to the Palestinians any territory beyond the 1967 ceasefire line because that is not Israel’s to dispose of. Any adjustments to that line should require the consent of both parties. Any IDF presence beyond that line should be subject to agreement by the Palestinian party. Israeli citizens beyond that line are entitled to the protection of Palestinian law and Palestinian law enforcement agencies but they are also subject to Palestinian law. Any special provisions for them are matters for agreement between the Israeli and Palestinian governments. Israel and Palestine are each entitled to designate any part of their own territory as their capital or they can agree on a special status for the whole of Jerusalem which can be capital to both states. The very few surviving Palestinians who were driven out of Israel in 1947 have a right to return (which most are not likely to exercise). But their descendants have no right of residence there and both have such property rights as may be recognised by Israeli courts, not more. And so on, applying the long-established international rules which the United States sees as the norm everywhere else and would like to see applied to itself.

Most Americans have a partiality for Israel. They need not worry. In such a negotiation the Israeli hand is still far stronger than that of the Palestinians and the Israelis are champions. Israel does not need Big Brother from Washington to play its cards or to give it extra aces. Israel would emerge from such negotiations with its long-term security greatly enhanced, with consequent benefits for its internal affairs.

Miller is closer to recognizing the problem when he comments that both Israelis and Palestinians regard the conflict as basically existential in nature. For both groups, the issue is whether Jews will have the political, civil, and human rights Arabs claim for themselves but insist on denying to non-Muslim peoples. Israeli Jews insist on "Yes;" Muslims insist on "No." For people who believe in human equality, rights, and the rest of the liberal agenda, the problem thus lies on the Muslim side, and always has.

Can Clinton devise a poposal that will lead Muslims to recognize that non-Muslim people are entitled to be respected as equals to Muslims? Maybe, but certainly not if she, like the rest of the Obama Administration, doesn't recognize this as the central issue. There is no evidence that Obama is ready to face up to this; if he had, we would have heard a strong response to Abu Mazen's insistence that under no circumstances will the Palestinians ever accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state of Israel, even after the much-reviled Bibi Netanyahu accepted the need to establish a Palestinian state.

Recognition that this is the core issue rules out the so-called "one-state" solution so beloved by the Islamists who blog here, which is basically nothing less, or more, than a ploy by Muslims to deny any rights to Jews. Jews had no rights in the Muslim countries where the ancestors of the majority of Jewish Israelis once lived, and then the local Muslims expelled them and stole their property. There is no solution as long as Muslims, and their apologists on blogs like this, continue to insist that that is their right as Muslims. This is the scenario that is currently playing itself out in Egypt, where a similar fate awaits the Copts, for whom the country is named, and in Iraq where the future of Iraqi Christians looks especially bleak.

Remove the issue of denying rights to Jews, and the need for a Palestinian state evaporates; it would serve no purpose because to this day spokesmen for them acknowledge there is no real difference between them and Syrians and the othe Arabs of the eastern Mediterranean.

Once this issue is removed, the path to a solution becomes fairly clear: Egypt annexes Gaza and exerts control over Hamas. Jordan and Israel negotiate a border between them that resolves the settlement and refugee issues. Since Jordan already has a capital, there will be no further reason to reject Israel's decision, fully in accordance with international law, to name its own capital: Jerusalem. Jordan could agree to the demilitarization of the West Bank, thus precluding the need to have the IDF maintain a presence in the Jordan Valley.

This is the road not taken. Nearly a century of effort has been wasted seeking solutions at Israel's expense when no concession short of its ceasing to exist will satisfy the Arabs. The Muslims need to change their attitudes toward non-Muslims, and that will lead to a solution. Unless they do, a solution is probably not possible, Sect. Clinton or no Sect. Clinton.

There's still hope for Barack Obama's plan for Mideast peace in 2011. He just needs to let a strong woman step up to the table. I think this most directly highlights the ineptitude of the Obama administration's foreign policy positioning, which seems to have remarkably little to do with his Secretary of State. Whenever Obama is on the stage, he's calling the shots, gathering cheering crowds, and watching listlessly as seasoned diplomats run circles around him. Whenever Clinton is on the stage, she's pushing the administration's message, with general success (though some of the positioning is off at times). "And what has worked in the past -- which really is prologue on this issue -- is a structure run by the secretary of state who (through an envoy with a team) is empowered by the president to craft a workable strategy and implement it. That empowerment must be real and direct: Friends and foe alike must know that it's the secretary of state who really is authorized to speak for the president best blog software. While it's his policy, she is the go-to address. Any daylight between them is bad for business. " If one side believes it doesn't really need to seriously address the peace process because it has the power and force to impose its will on the other without a peace, this is the stalemate that results. This is exactly the problem and everyone involved in the ME peace process knows it. This will be rectified by time, trust me on that.