Martin Woollacott of The Guardian makes a salient point about the way that Washington ignores reality -- and throws in a Vietnam analogy.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Marooned on his fantasy island, Bush stands firm America is not of course fighting in the Middle East, and this administration's refusal to fully engage is clear, yet most see success there as vital to its wider interests. If the question that the press in Vietnam initially raised through its reporting was "is this the right way to make war?" that for their successors in Israel and Palestine is "is this the right way to make peace?" The answer of the reporters today, with many nuances, is no, and they may be discreetly joined in that by diplomats and others. But this scepticism, as President Bush's speech this week makes clear, is not getting through to the centre. Elements of a response to reality mingle with elements of what was so evident during the Vietnam years - an insistence that reality conform to ideology or to the compromises worked out between Washington schools and factions, and anger at those who point out that it does not.

Thus the Bush administration does not ask whether it is possible that the Palestinians pass through the eye of the needle in order to attain the heaven of a state, it merely asserts that they must. It does not attend to the evident readiness of the Sharon government to sabotage any progress toward a political settlement, but assumes a goodwill in that respect which simply does not exist.