Behold our Middle East policy!

This is President Bush’s answer to David Gregory’s question today at the news conference, which I referenced earlier.

Let me make an additional point about this answer. We know the president isn’t very articulate in news conference settings. But national leaders don’t have to be articulate to be good leaders. In fact there have been a number very good ones who could scarcely speak coherently for thirty seconds.

But if you watch this passage I think you see something different. Namely, that pretty much everything that’s happened over the last three years, and certainly over the last three months has just gone in one presidential ear and out the other. He is, in both the deepest and most superficial sense, out of it.

TPM Reader AS on the unfolding disaster …

Via Kevin Drum, I read Mona Charon’s recent post about dual loyalties and Jewish Americans. Now I have a ton of Israeli colleagues, and I’ve talked about this a bit with them. Almost all of them believe that the past six years were a huge missed opportunity, in that Hizbullah’s build-up in Lebanon was unchecked.

Oddly enough, only a few seem to share my view that this traces back (at least in part) to Bush’s stupid move in dropping Clinton’s peace moves. The military option Israel is exerising now is driven by frustration, not any real plan for victory. Leadership by the US over the past six years might have done much to limit Hezbollah’s strength there, and avoided the current crisis–or at least, made the current crisis one that the Lebanese could have managed themselves.

Some of my Jewish American friends express this, but not all. And I’ve yet to read any American journalist (bloggers included) clearly express this point: that anybody with Israel’s long-term well-being at heart really sees the current US administration as an unmitigated disaster. They won’t achieve the lasting peace that Israel needs, in fact they will probably end up undoing the past couple of decades of prosperity in Israel.

Whether or not Bill Clinton’s specific proposals were the best idea or not, they led to genuine dialogue. Whether Arafat was sincere or not, he was still talking, and others in the region were participating. Bush, having been let into the China shop, is now doing what he does best.

I’m looking forward to your hearing your views on this.

It actually goes way beyond the incoming administration’s decision to ignore the Israel-Palestine track from the get-go, though that has played a very big part in this unfolding disaster. The Bush administration has always seen the situation in Israel-Palestine as essentially a side issue in the larger context of the Middle East, one to be solved through overthrowing regimes either in Baghdad or Damascus. The Israelis and the Palestinians themselves had already done quite a lot to make a mess of things by January 2001. But by comparison with today things six years ago seem almost idyllic.

The thinking of the Bush administration was that the Clinton folks had put tons of time into the Peace Process and what had it gotten them? Just a big headache and no achievements, either political or substantive.

But what I think you learn when you watch the region over time is that things can always get worse. And quite a lot of effort is often required to keep things on the barely tolerable level of miserable without slipping into the truly horrible. To prevent going from one to the other is a job of international management that really a greater power alone can accomplish. Us. Us with the Europeans. Probably also the Russians and even the Chinese. Easy? No. Do these different countries have different agendas, not all of them wholesome? Sure. But that’s life. Or rather, that’s running the world.

Is this crisis the Bush administration’s doing? No, it has deep roots that go well beyond it. Would things have gotten quite this bad if the administration hadn’t basically ignored these problems for six years and simultaneously blown up the Fertile Crescent? No way.

This is the Bush administration’s apocalypse. We are, to borrow the phrase, just living in it. But then, that’s quite bad enough, isn’t it?

From Haaretz …

Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, underwent a series of tests at a Tel Aviv hospital on Friday after complaining of abdominal pain.

The IDF chief was later declared healthy and allowed to go home, the army said.

An IDF spokesman said Halutz had been taken to hospital with stomach pains and had undergone tests. He was released later on Friday after doctors found nothing wrong with him.

“There is nothing wrong with his health,” the spokesman said earlier.

TV reports said the 58-year-old Halutz, who has been leading Israel’s 17-day war against Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas, was also complaining of exhaustion.

Officials at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital said he was sent home after several hours with a recommdentation that he rest and eat properly. The military said Halutz was given a clean bill of health.

Haaretz: “Israel finds itself in an odd position – hesitating in Lebanon as the U.S. pushes for more.”

Man walks into Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building, announces “I’m a Muslim American; I’m angry at Israel,” then opens fire.

1 dead. At least 5 wounded.

Late Update: The emails we get. This one from GS: “Yes Josh. And in 1994 Barush Goldstein assassinated 27 innocent people while they were praying. Were you making a point or helping to keep score? You disappoint me.”

Later Update: The AP is now reportedly disputing the quote. I’ll update when I hear more.

Even Later Update: AP now saying the quote is verified.

Late, Late Update: Police news conference to be streamed here at 11 PM Eastern.

McClatchy’s Strobel:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush say they’re not pressing for a quick cease-fire in Lebanon because they want a lasting peace instead.

However, the administration’s fundamental assumptions – that it’s impossible to get both a quick end to the killings and a durable peace, and that a cease-fire would be a step away from real peace rather than toward it – are open to question.

The logic, such as it is, employed by Bush and Condi is that since cease-fires have been broken in the past, it is the cease-fires themselves that are the impediment to peace. No cease-fires ergo no broken cease-fires. It’s sort of like saying that red lights are the reason drivers run red lights. Remove the traffic lights and, presto, drivers aren’t running red lights anymore. Just ignore the carnage at intersections.

Headline of the Day: ‘Stenholm lobbying for horse-meat industry’

I didn’t even know there was a horse-meat industry. All you horse-meat lovers can eat well this weekend ’cause Charlie Stenholm’s got your back.

Jack Abramoff’s old firm, Greenberg Traurig, is reportedly “deep into settlement talks” with the Alabama-Coushatta, one of the Indian tribes Abramoff bilked. The Alabama-Coushatta did not name Greenberg Traurig as a defendant in a civil RICO lawsuit it filed earlier this month in Texas against Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and others, but that could change if a settlement isn’t worked out.

The lawsuit also provides fresh evidence of a closer connection between Greenberg Traurig and Michael Scanlon than the law firm has ever acknowledged. Scanlon was Abramoff’s close partner in many widely criticized lobbying practices. He pleaded guilty last year to bribing a congressman.

Greenberg has always maintained that Scanlon, who ran a Washington-based public relations company called Capital Strategies, was not a Greenberg employee. But, according to the suit, internal Greenberg e-mails showed that Scanlon “billed hours to tribal clients through Greenberg and that members of the law firm, including attorneys Kevin Ring, Shawn Vasell, Stephanie Leger, Todd Boulanger and others, fabricated hours and time entries for Scanlon.”

I would imagine that no law firm accused of civil racketeering wants to take the case all the way to trial, regardless of the merits.

Hezbollah agrees to proposed peace plan?

The Lebanese cease-fire plan, reached at a meeting on Friday night, calls for an immediate cease-fire, the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails and the return of two Israeli soldiers held by Hezbollah.

The plan also calls for the return of displaced Lebanese to their homes, negotiations between Israel and Lebanon concerning the disputed Sheeba farms now under Israeli control, the disclosure of maps showing Israeli minefields near the Lebanese border, the deployment and strengthening of the Lebanese army and the expansion of the U.N. force in the south.

While Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire with Israel and an increased international presence in southern Lebanon, the group objected to “a robust force” of international peacekeepers in the region, the sources said.

Hezbollah did not specifically agree to disarm, as Israel has demanded, the sources said. The plan does, however, call for the Lebanese military to take control of southern Lebanon, along with the U.N. force, which implies that the Hezbollah militia would not operate there.

It also calls for the implementation of the Taef accords — which ended the Lebanese civil war in 1990 — which includes the disarming of all militias, the sources said.

Hezbollah representatives told the cabinet it had reservations about the nature of an expanded international presence in the south, the source said.

Hezbollah wants only an expansion of the current UNIFIL mission with the same mandate.

They don’t want a “robust force,” the source said.

“The force must be more robust, otherwise there’s no sense in it,” one of the high-ranking Lebanese officials told CNN.

The question of what to do about the two Israeli soldiers being held by Hezbollah was not discussed at the cabinet meeting, the sources said.

The proposal, developed by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, is the official position of the Lebanese government and is intended to be presented to Rice on her arrival in the region.

Rice told reporters on her plane early Saturday that she has only read news reports about the proposal but it appeared to have “some very good elements.” She called it a “positive step.”

Developing . . .

Time for some context on the current turmoil in and around Israel. This passage from Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty has special resonance given current events. The scene is the White House Situation Room in January 2001, where Bush is meeting for the first time with his National Security Council, 10 days after taking the oath of office. Bush has just asked who in the room has met Ariel Sharon:

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 [Paul] 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.

[Colin] Powell said such a move might be hasty. He remarked on the violence on the West Bank and Gaza and on its roots. He stressed that a pullback by the United States would unleash Sharon and 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 some things back in balance.”

Powell seemed startled.

“Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things,” Bush said.

With that, the rest of the meeting was devoted to Iraq.