Admitting One's Moral And Intellectual Bankruptcy

AP:

The Bush administration called Monday for an end to the new flare up in Mideast violence, saying Hamas has "once again shown its true colors as a terrorist organization" with attacks on Israel.

This is not how you mediate conflict.  All we're doing is further creating asymmetries by taking sides and denigrating a popularly-elected governing entity. 

There is nothing new under the sun or the blog and I have nothing new to blog about this so I'll just steal what I've written before.  Starting with Dr. Anthony H. Cordesman's book, Escalating to Nowhere: The Israeli-Palestinian War:

[T]he Israeli-Palestinian War has shown that each step of escalation leads to further asymmetries in tactics, weapons, and targeting. These asymmetries in turn convince the opposing side that the other’s actions are not only immoral and illegitimate, but that it cannot be trusted to move back towards peace.

To support the Israelis and Palestinians in their efforts to try new approaches, we need to address the asymmetries in our support. We should not take sides, favoring neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians. As President Carter and Governor Dean have suggested in the past, we must be even-handed in our handling of this conflict—both sides have to see good faith efforts on our part to represent their vital interests, otherwise we cannot act as honest brokers of peace.

This has been quite difficult for George Bush in light of his “with us or against us” worldview.  He was unable to recognize that Israeli extremism and Palestinian terrorism are two sides of the same violent coin. He refused to recognize that our cozy relationship with Israel, the billions in military aid to Israel and paltry, indirect economic aid to the Palestinians only furthers the perception that we are firmly in Israel’s corner. He needed to be truly pro-Peace.

President Obama will need to consider Einstein's definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Only then will the vicious circle be broken.  A peaceful world won't happen by itself, but a Department of Peace might help...

ntodd