Get your head out of Sharon's ass Safire!

Is that Bill Safire a schmuck or what? In today's NYT, he extolls Bush for this quote:

"Achieving peace in the Holy Land is not just a matter of pressuring one side or the other on the shape of a border or the site of a settlement. This approach has been tried before without success. As we negotiate the details of peace, we must look to the heart of the matter, which is the need for a Palestinian democracy."

Of course this is rhetorical wink wink nudge nudge, for Israel has something close to carte blanche--if not the thing itself--and the Palestinians need to pick a leader who will take the best deal Israel is willing to offer which is usually no deal at all. Oh yes, we're on a road to nowhere. Also, what Bush and Safire fail to mention is that Arafat, horrible as he was, was democratically elected in 1996.

Democracy in Palestine does not automatically mean a peace deal. Israel needs to be willing to dismantle the majority of the settlements in the West Bank or offer some kind of compensation to the Palestinians in exchange for those it intends to keep. Safire seems to think that a Palestinian East Jerusalem is off the table, and it probably is. But not because Arafat decided to go to war, which is Safire's explanation, but because Ariel Sharon sabotaged the peace talks to get himself elected.

And I don't want to hear any more about violence. There's commensurate violence on all sides. (Even that is a little unfair to the Palestinians since they've lost three times more people than the Israelis in the last intifada but I'd rather not count bodies.) The ridiculousness of the road map is that it required that Palestinians denounce violence but it didn't have a similar provision for Israelis. And that's my rant on the Middle East.