Salvaging Bush's Mideast disaster

Salvaging Bush's Mideast disaster: "The real 'front line of the war on terror' is Palestine. By brokering a lasting peace, the U.S. can make up for Bush's colossal blunders."

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"As the Iraqi debacle lurches from dreadful to nightmarish, with 140,000 U.S. troops caught in a vicious purgatory, it is all too easy to forget that the real 'front line of the war on terror' is in Jerusalem, not Baghdad. The Israeli-Palestinian crisis is not a matter that America wants to deal with. There is zero debate about it in Congress, where unswerving support for Israel continues to be the only thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on. It divides the left. It is such an emotional, sensitive issue that most people don't even bring it up. And it's easy to simply dismiss it as intractable.

But like it or not, the fact remains that the now 39-year-long Israeli occupation of Palestinian land continues to be the most incendiary issue in the Arab-Muslim world, the single thing that most inspires hatred of the U.S. A U.N.-sponsored group recently found that tensions between Islam and the West are caused not by religion but overwhelmingly by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has acquired a symbolic significance larger than itself. The conflict affects virtually every problem in the region, including Iraq -- a fact recognized by world leaders from British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Jordan's King Abdullah to the leaders of France, Spain and Italy, who just presented their own peace plan. Until the U.S. brokers a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians -- and only America can do it -- we will stumble impotently around in the Middle East, despised by all except the corrupt despots we prop up, while the anti-American rage that breeds jihadists grows."

(Via Salon.)