It looks like we might get Benjamin Netanyahu back in Israel here pretty soon. According to most polls his Likud Party would win handily in the next elections, which might come in about four months if current would-be Prime Minister Livni, of the Kadima Party, is unable to form a coalition government. The major obstacle to this is the ultra-right wing Shas Party. The major sticking point-the status of Jerusalem. Shas demands that it not be divided and remain totally under Israeli control. Livni, a former Mossad agent, has pledged to work toward peace with the Palestinians be negotiating a withdrawal from East Jerusalem and the West Bank, in return for guarantees of Israeli security.
She won the last election, held in the aftermath of the resignation of Ehud Ohlmert, but she did so by the skin of her teeth, by just something like 500 votes.
Whoever the next president is, he is going to have a full plate of Middle East delicacies by the time he unpacks and settles in. I can pretty much envision the two different scenarios. Obama will send Joe Biden on a "fact-finding" mission, and within a few months a "peace deal" will be agreed upon, complete with a signing in the White House Rose Garden that will all fall apart in a matter of months, not years.
McCain will probably send Joe Liebermann, who will use pretty much the same approach, though there is less likely to be any artificial and pretentious "peace" deals.
This is going to turn into a big mess and there will be no easy answers, nor in fact any answers for a good time to come.
So why are we involved? The answer to this, of course, is that this is yet one more example of a fucking European mess that the US is expected to clean up, and which we will be excoriated for not doing so-by Europeans as much if not more than anybody else.
I have an idea. The European countries should take in nine or ten million more Arab/Muslim refugees. Really, they should.
