Is Barack Obama finally going to 'impose a solution' on the Middle East?

Stephanie Gutmann
The Telegraph
16 April '10

For weeks now the White House has been dribbling out leaks suggesting that it is considering “imposing a solution” on the Israeli/Palestinian border conflict. How this would actually work on the ground is not clear to me. (Troops? Is Obama getting weally, weally mad this time? More attempts to send Bibi Netanyahu to his room without dinner?) And it’s probably not clear to the proposers either — but it certainly sounds decisive and like a radical change from previous administrations. (Also like a ridiculous diversion and expenditure for a country, America, whose citizens have said in poll after poll that they would like the president to focus laser-like on the economy.)

The speculation was that Obama would go to this drastic option only if he sincerely believed in “linkage” — the idea that the safety of American soldiers around the world and citizens on the streets of places like New York City somehow depends on a resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian border conflict. Does the president really believe this harebrained concept — which, as analyst Barry Rubin puts it, is mainly “used as an excuse by regimes who want to change the subject and by Islamist revolutionaries who want to manipulate it to help them seize state power”? Would he really be willing to encourage a theory which has ugly echoes to a movement in the 40s that held that the US had been dragged into a “Jewish war”?

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