I don't think we disagree too much. Basically any open discussion of an ethnic conflict that doesn't filter the participants is going to attract some flies. Doesn't mean you can't have better discussions in other venues or make an effort to ignore the idjits.
Do you have a link on this? I was largely not publicly aware during the beginning of the Bush administration due to hardcore personal reasons. I hate saying "link plz" but I do not doubt you and I want to be read up.
Some quick links from old NYT articles.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05E5DC1531F93AA35751C0A9679C8B63http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E2D91E31F934A1575BC0A9679C8B63http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0DEFDF1130F932A3575AC0A9679C8B63From Ron Suskind's
The Price of Loyalty:
President Bush echoed this view: "We're gong to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on the Mideast conflict. We're going to tilt it back toward Israel. And we're going to be consistent
"Clinton overreached, and it all fell apart. That's why we're in trouble," Bush said. "If the two sides don't want peace, there's no way we can force them.
Then the President halted. "Anybody here ever met [Ariel] Sharon?
After a moment, Powell sort of raised his hand. Yes, he had.
"I'm not going to go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon," Bush said. "I'm going to take him at face value. We'll work out a relationship based on how things go."
He'd met Sharon briefly, Bush said, when they had flown over Israel in a helicopter on a visit in December 1998. "Just saw him that one time. We flew over the Palestinian camps," Bush said sourly. "Looked real bad down there. I don't see much we can do over there at this point. I think it's time to pull out of that situation."
And that was it, according to O'Neill and several other people in the room. The Arab-Israeli conflict was a mess, and the United States would disengage. The combatants would have to work it out on their own.
Powell said such a move might be hasty. He remarked on the violence in the West Bank and Gaza and on its roots. He stressed that a pullback by the United States would unleash Sharon and the Israeli army. "The consequences of that could be dire," he said, "especially for the Palestinians."
Bush shrugged. "Maybe that's the best way to get things back in balance."
Powell looked startled.
"Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things," Bush said.
Basically the Bush administration scrapped the Clinton roadmap and pulled back from the peace process (other than Powell strongly criticizing Israeli operations in Gaza that June (July?)).
That continued for four or five years. In 2005 Karen Hughes, who had been appointed to be America's public relations maven in the middle east (because all we needed was better messaging, and even for that we didn't need someone with any regional expertise), reported back to Bush that everybody in the region thought Palestine was the #1 issue and that the US wasn't helping.
Thanks to her status as a close friend of Bush,
the administration started getting more involved.
They made new Palestinian elections a condition for negotiation, because they only wanted to negotiate with parties who had the authority to make a deal.
Only
the US didn't count on Hamas winning. They also only wanted to negotiate with parties who would make certain concessions (like recognizing Israel) right off the bat.
So then the administration turns to
proxy forces and violence to solve the problem, stoking a fight between the Palestinian factions. Which winds up leaving Fatah in charge of the West Bank and Hamas in charge of Gaza (which Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from a couple years back and which isn't nearly as important to Israel or the settler movement as the West Bank).
There was
a high profile summit in Annapolis in November 2007, which represented the US finally getting involved in the process again, but it was too little too late. By then Bush and Olmert were basically lame ducks with low approval ratings, and the administration was (and is) still excluding Hamas, Iran, and Syria from the talks.
So it's basically a big clusterfuck. There's no deal in place. There's no framework for a deal. There's no process that will lead to a framework for a deal. There isn't even the groundwork that can enable a process which could produce a framework which might end with a deal.