The problem with common sense is not only, as Voltaire said, that it is not so common, but that it is often wrong. Much analysis of the recent shift in U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict is a case in point. While some of its errors reflect recent misjudgments by U.S. policymakers, others are wholly original--and the combination has begun to elicit some of the most seductive, but worst policy advice on the Middle East that any administration has received in years. As a result, it is not obvious whether it is the peace process that stands closer to the well worn "edge of the abyss", or U.S. policy toward it.
The usual cast of policy experts on this topic overwhelmingly agrees that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's August 6 speech presages a far more active and substantive U.S. role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations than has been the case since the August 1993 signing of the Oslo accords. That role, it is said, has come none too soon, for it is understood as an act of contrition for excessive U.S. diplomatic passivity since the brokering of the Hebron accord of January 15, an achievement widely hailed as having saved the peace process largely because it presaged greater U.S. involvement.
