Bush and Abbas meet..and Bush calls Arafat II `a man of peace'.

First Bush calls says that the UN was priviledged to have Kofi Annan to serve for ten years..now he says that Mahmoud Abbas is `a man of peace' and that he will push for Palestinian state .






Both of which are proof that Dubbya has learned very little about some things in the last 6 years.

Just as Kofi Annan was symptomatic of the terminal problems with the UN, the Palestinians are symptiomatic of the problems with Middle East peace.

The real ramping up of the conflict occurred after Bill Clinton talked Israeli Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin into the notion that empowering Yasir Arafat and allowing him to create a terrorist enclave right next door to Israel was somehow going to lead to `peace' for Israel and the Palestinians.

For a lot of people, both dead Jews and dead Arabs, the peace was terminal, if you know what I mean.

Until Oslo, there was actually a chance that the conflict would `age out'. Israel had peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, a stalemate with Syria, and Arafat was a forgotten murderous has been thug rotting away in Tunis. Bill Clinton, with the willing assistance of Yitzhak Rabin and the Leftist Israeli Labor Party changed all that, with the result that there has been a generation and a half thoroughly indoctrinated by Arafat on the necessity of killing every Jew in Israel, no matter how corrupt, violent and futile their lives are in the meantime. And Abbas,`the man of peace' was along for the entire ride.

The only chance for a second viable Palestinian Arab state in the tiny area we're talking about (Jordan is the first Arab Palestinian state, established in 1923, ruled by the Hashemite dynasty and 80% Palestinian) would be for the Arabs to drive the Jews into the sea or for the Palestinians to live in total peace and harmony next door to Israel, and to have an almost complete economic union with the Jewish State. Thanks to Mr. Bill, Rabin and especially Arafat, that isn't going to ever happen, not in our lifetimes.

As a matter of fact, putting a second impoverished Palestinian State with people raised on Jew hatred, Islamism and violence from their earliest beginnings next door to Israel is a sure bet for continued war in the Middle East. There is no way that peace can result from that attitude, no matter what kind of papers get signed or how much land changes hands.

Of course, there is a way to end the Arab Israeli conflict, or at the very least clarify the issues involved and reveal who the really intransient and aggressive parties are.

But that would involve actually confronting the real issues: Jerusalem, the refugee problem and the fact that a second Arab Palestinian state exacerbates the conflict rather than solves it.

The answer's a little lengthy - and I promise I'll get to the details tommorow or Friday.