U.S. President Barack Obama had worse failures to address in his Jan. 27 State of the Union message, but a few days before he owned up to the most foolish miscalculation that his administration had made in its first year in power. In an interview with Joe Klein of Time magazine, he confessed that he had not understood the obstacles to an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
"The Middle East peace process has not moved forward. . . . For all our efforts at early engagement, (it) is not where I want it to be," Obama said. "If we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high."
But why didn't he anticipate them? Is there really nobody in Washington who could have told Obama the truth about the Middle East? Every non-American commentator who knows anything about the region has been saying for the past year that there is absolutely no chance of a breakthrough in the "peace process" at the present time. In fact, it is probably dead for a generation.