This morning the president

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This morning the president announced that the confirmation of a Palestinian prime minister with “real power” would trigger the release of the White House’s long-awaited ‘road map’ for Middle East peace. The appointment of Abu Mazen as prime minister, announced last week, is definitely a positive development. Abu Mazen, a key architect of the original Oslo Accords, is unquestionably one of the good guys. And the release of the road map is good too, though Bush advisors had recently been spreading the word that the road map was dead. The real story here, however, is the unmistakable cloud of desperation and bumbling that surrounds this announcement.

Little more than a week ago, when the scope of the diplomatic train wreck wasn’t quite so evident, the White House floated word that the whole Middle East peace process was on ice until we’d finished everything we were going to do in Iraq.

What’s so sad and revealing and pathetic about this is that it’s only at the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute that the White House realizes that the Israeli-Palestinian situation is one of the moving parts involved in dealing with Iraq. On the whole world stage we’re watching the president and his crew driving at eighty miles an hour into a brick wall called reality. Too bad we’re in the car with them.

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