Finally some sanity on the Middle East, specifically the Israel-Palestine issues. The ISG is absolutely correct that a majority in Israel as well as Palestine is tired of perpetual war and willing to make compromises for peace. Radical minorities in both countries must not be allowed to perpetuate the current untenable situation. Military occupation as a basis for expanding a country's territory is against international law, and Israel must recognize that land for peace is the only solution. People have to get past what reactions were to this or that proposal 10-20-40-50-75-90 years ago and demonstrate that they have learned something from the futility and destruction of the last few years.

Granted its vital that Democrats not try to score points by opposing the recommendation for establishing a viable Palestinian State as absolutely essential for resolving intertwined regional issues.

But saying the report is more "far reaching" than predicted isn't all that helpful.

It would be better to say that the report doesn't go far enough and should make it absolutely clear that the US has a strong national security interest in Israel accepting the 1967 borders as the basis for negotiations and spell out that further equivocation and attempts to retain territorial conquests by pointlessly prolonging the conflict at the expense of vital interests of the US and both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and the whole region will not be tolerated.

Not explicitly mentioning the international consensus that the 1967 borders must be taken as the agreed basis for negotiations is rather like Clinton's inability to say the words "Palestinian State".

By all means let the point scorers have time to adjust. But they should not have been left any wiggle room as to what they are required to adjust to.

Simply welcoming the recommendation puts far less pressure on the point scorers. They should be put on the defensive by attacking the report for not going far enough. Let them wiggle in defence of the report rather than against it.

PS I started downloading on the dot at 11am and have only read as far as p88 (of 142) so far before taking a break to checkout whether others who hadn't finished reading it were already pontificating.

Congratulations to both you and Ivo Daalder for not needing to actually digest what it said before telling everyone what to think.

MJ: I'm all in agreement with you, but the document is full of holes. OK, I'll give you one and you or others can comment on it.

If Israel is to agree to return the Golan Heights, it will ask the US to not only make friends with Bashar but GUARANTEE THE SURVIVAL OF HIS REGIME.

For, why in the world would Israel return a strategic piece of land to a regime that the US wants to change. Picture this, on monday the Heights go to Syria. Coup on tuesday. On wednesday Israel finds itself without the Golan Heights and facing a hostile Syria.

Now, if you can ever picture Bush making a speech about his new strategic alliance with Assad, well I have one of those bridges to sell...

Bush, or for that matter, Hillary, McCain, etc.

I realize this and my previous comment sound cynical, and I would like to find optimism.
But I am convinced that until the US admits defeat and leaves Iraq these recommendations are not worth the paper (pixels) they're printed on.

No time now, but later I want to bring up the absurdity of having the US train the Iraqis in counterinsurgency! The Iraqis might be the world's masters in counterinsurgency, while the US military is provably among the most inept. Saddam must be laughing so hard.

That sort of naivete is incredibly sad.

PS: 10 GIs died today! Poor kids. They chose the wrong day: no one's paying attention.

What does this have to do with fixing Iraq? Nope, good recommendation, wrong subject.

The ISG Iraq-specific recommendations are a recipe for more fruitless sacrifice by our brave soldiers. Embedding our folks in unreliable Iraqi units simply makes them vulnerable to massacre.

I don't see a good policy, but at least we shouldn't ask for more sacrifice from our troops unless we can articulate a worthy goal. Staying the course politically in Iraq while throwing our soldiers piecemeal into a maelstrom is really a bad idea.

You have to be kidding. This is the guy that once declared: "F-the Jews, they didn't vote for us anyway". And you want us to support his recommendations to throw Israel to the wolves? James Baker is a morally reprehensible individual. Certainly the james baker cabal, from encouraging Iraqis after the first gulf war to rise up against saddam and then abandoning them to their slaughter, to baker's otherwise "realist" policies of coddling dictators, was an abysmal failure. I don't know why anyone would see his ideas as the answer to the problems of the Middle East. At least the neocons ideas are based on moral convictions of wanting to bring freedom to people and standing against evil in the world, an idea liberals used to support until they decided to embrace the "realist" baker and company policies of coddling and befriending vile dictators. I find it ironic that those who believe we will have greater security by making deals with rogue, terrorist regimes are labeled "realists.

Israel and Palestinians (who acknowledge Israel’s right to exist)

Does Israel acknowledge Palestine's right to exist? Of course not, they build new settlements in occupied territory every day. Until we see expansionist Zionists (Jewish and Christian) the same way we see al Qaeda (a bunch of idiot religious freaks), there is no solution.

I guess nobody consults the Palestinians on these matters. FWIW, I am for a single state solution, which of course, was the original zionist goal in 1947. A 2 state solution is basically another term for imposed borders. The ISG is sooooo intellectual they said nothing new, all they did was re hash old talking points with all of their 79 recommendations.

My 70 year old mother says: "This is not the America I grew up in"

Thanks for your response. I think you know more about the history than I do. I was born in 1961, so I only know about the original zioinsts from reading histories. My impression was that before the UN gave them the charter, the zionists were fighting the Ottomans, Palestinians and British to create an Israeli state.

A quick study on the inernnets gave me a different view. It appears modern Zionism started in the 1830's and grew to a large movement by the turn of that century. My advocation of a single state is essentially the position many Zionists held from 1830 until 1936 or 1939 after the Arab riots.

"In 1936 serious Arab rioting broke out, and in response the British authorities held the unsuccessful St. James Conference and issued the MacDonald White Paper of 1939, severely restricting further Jewish immigration.

The British Labour Party supported Jewish immigration. A December 1944 Labour Party conference issued a public declaration in support of a Jewish majority in Palestine, and in favor of the population transfer of Arabs out of Palestine. "Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in ... The Arabs have many wide territories of their own," the statement said. [25] British historian Martin Gilbert writes that this was the view held, not only by the Labour conference, but also by several senior Labour figures, including Clement Atlee, Herbert Morrison, and Ernest Bevin, who were members of Churchill's War Cabinet. It was civil servants, Gilbert writes, who controlled the day-to-day immigration policies, and their priority seemed to be to prevent Jewish Holocaust survivors from reaching Palestine and to halt the formation of a Jewish majority there. [25]"

From: Gilbert, Martin. Dearest Auntie Fori: The Story of the Jewish People. HarperCollins, p. 242.

Then in 1948 they went to the world to ask for and justify the removal of christian Arabs, and Palestinians from the newly found State of Israel:

"The majority of the Arab population having either fled or been expelled during the War of Independence, Jews were now a majority of the population within the 1948 ceasefire lines, which became Israel's de facto borders until 1967. In 1950 the Knesset passed the Law of Return which granted all Jews the right to immigrate to Israel. This, together with the influx of Jewish refugees from Europe and the later flood of expelled Jews from Arab countries, had the effect of creating a large and apparently permanent Jewish majority in Israel."

Above from UN documents titled: General Progress Report and Supplementary Report of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Covering the Period from 11 December 1949 to 23 October 1950
http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/93037e3b939746de8525610200567883!OpenDocument

So it appears that you have sparked some research by me. However, you still don't sway my opinion that a two state solution, while seemingly inevitable, is another way to keep Palestinians from their original lands and Israelis in occupation of lands stolen from beyond the 1948 charter.

I spent 4 hours reading great old historical material trying to be convinced of your argument, but alas, I was not.

My 70 year old mother says: "This is not the America I grew up in"

OK, I will agree to disagree. But I would like to add you have made some good points with this last comment.
2 questions:
Is Jimmy carter getting so much grief over this latest book because of the usual AIPAC issues, or is his advice that way off?

What is dhimmis, dhimmitutde? It appears Hebrew, and seems a derivitive of diminuitive.

My 70 year old mother says: "This is not the America I grew up in"

Jimmy is getting grief for reasons that are both of his doing and and for reasons that are not. First, yes, there is an "AIPAC" issue. Jimmy is being slammed for being "one-sided," i.e., not presenting the Israeli case fairly. But while he does dwell on one side at the expense of the other, I don't blame him because it's ok to point out the injustice one side only so long as the long term solution advocated is sustainable (which to me means along the lines of the Accords).

My problem with Jimmy is that he is blinkered by his past. He dealt as President wiht the first right wing government of Israel in its then thirty year history. The leaders of that government (i.e., Menachem Begin) actively lied to him about their intentions with the settlements, and his obsession with that experience seems to be what has led him to his belief that all will be well if the Israelis just return to the pre-1967 border. The problem is, of course, that the Palestinians don't just want the pre-1967 border. The issue is the pre-1948 border and he doesn't seem to get that.

Dhimmi is the Arab word for a non-Muslim in Muslim countries. In earlier centuries, it meant a pretty cruel legal servitude. That's not the case now, but all you have to do is see the status of non-Muslims in countries where the overwhelming majority are Muslims (not too far from the status of women) in order to get a sense of what it means today.