"Condoleezza Rice says there is no substitute for creating a Palestinian state."-- from a reader

Of course there is. The "substitute" consists of ceasing to prate about "solutions" to situations to which there is no "solution" but merely amelioration, and that amelioration can only be achieved by making it absolutely clear to Arab peoples and regimes that Israel is not only more powerful, but overwhelmingly and obviously so (and ten or twenty or thirty billion of the $880 billion squandered in Iraq, if it were spent on military aid to Israel, would have done it for the next decade), so that the doctrine of "Darura" (Necessity) could be invoked by those leaders to explain their refusal to participate in the violent Jihad.

As to the other instruments of Jihad, like Infidel lands elsewhere, the Israelis must first learn about Islam. Those who are hopeless, such as Olmert and Peres and Peretz and Barak and others, need to be kept out of office. And the Israelis must start to talk openly about the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyyah and Muslim attitudes toward treaties made with Infidels. Refraining from doing so, on the theory that this will prevent any improvement in the situation, and that it is always better to play the game of "Let's Pretend" with Muslims, is foolish an dangerous. Let all Infidels understand this. It need not begin with the government of Israel, but other Infidels should not pretend that the case of Israel, and what menaces it, is different in kind from what they face. This is a problem, a problem that some may attribute to the great success Arabs and Muslims have had in redefining that Lesser Jihad as merely a case of "two tiny peoples, each struggling for its homeland" and, as a corollary, the nunc-pro-tunc backdating of a deliberately-created "Palestinian people" to fit that "tiny peoples" bill. There are those who, for example, even if they see the light on Edward Said as to his "Orientalism," persist in believing that "on 'Palestine'" Said "was correct, when it would be easy to show the grotesque distortion of the truth that is on every page of "The Question of Palestine."

Christopher Hitchens, Said's old and still loyal friend, is a good example of this. Hitchens likes to think of himself, with his stout defense of Tarbaby Iraq, as a brave soul, someone Who Has Broken With the Left, Who Speaks Truth to Power (god, what an intolerable phrase that has become), when in truth, he is merely a mountebank, about to get his Support-for-Staying-In-Iraq comeuppance, and a suitably large egg deposited on that faccia-da-schiaffi face.