Andrew, the only advice–and I’m just reading your excerpt–he gives is convening an international conference. He says this will “address the root of the problem, namely to solve the issue of Palestine and to get the world behind the idea of the two-state solution.” This is either meaningless (everyone already supports a two-state solution) or hopeless at the moment (solving the Palestine problem). As I said in my first post, there won’t be any solution until Palestinian society has the will to create an effective, decent government (is that what you mean by “painfully elusive”?). It doesn’t have that will now, and an international conference is not going to create it out of thin air–much, though, we all wish it could.

You might be correct in your reading of the Lebanon situation unfortunately. We will see. But it does seem as though Israel might get the worst of all worlds here, unless some rabbit is pulled out of the hat at the U.N. I think Israel should have gone in harder on the ground from the beginning, and gone lighter on the air campaign. This still would have created all the political ill will, but would probably have done much more to bloody Hezbollah, something that the U.S. and moderate Arab governments wanted to see happen for entirely understandable reasons.

Of course, we have to consider the “complex, dangerous, and prolonged” struggle against Islamic extremism. The fight against Hezbollah, and by extension Syria and Iran, is obviously related to that struggle, which won’t be won, or much helped, with international conferences I’m afraid.