To: stockman_scott who wrote (26077 ) 4/19/2002 12:44:37 PM From: Win Smith Respond to For all their criticism of American zigzagging, Mr Bush's European critics need to recognise that this is a president improvising responses to a baffling crisis. It would be wrong to confuse his immediate plan to achieve quiet—by piling pressure on Mr Arafat to call off the intifada—with his longer-term thinking. Mr Bush has, after all, spent the past weeks stating more plainly than any predecessor that America wants an independent Palestine and Israel back more or less to its 1967 border. My gut take is that [Warren's] analysis is based at least as much on wishful thinking as inside dope. That is, I doubt the administration actually has such a carefully worked out plan and/or will be able to stick to it in the way the author suggests. My sense is that they're winging it more than they, or their supporters, would like to admit. I cut them some slack on this, however, because the problem is so difficult that nobody has any good answers to it. As far as I can tell, everybody--in both Israel and America--is flying blind on this one. Don't know enough about what's going on in the Arab or Palestinian camps to judge whether they know what they're doing either, but I doubt it. #reply-17232320
