Thinking about the chronic mess in the Middle East, it struck me that, for the last decade or so, no-one has known what to do about Iraq, but lots of people have been determined to do something.

On the other hand, everyone knows what needs to be done about Israel-Palestine, but no-one who matters has been prepared to do it.

The answer to the Israel-Palestine is simple and well-known and has been proposed many times over from the Clinton plan to the more recent Geneva Accord, which varies only marginally from Clinton. The elements are

• Two states with the 1967 borders, allowing modest adjustments but no net transfer
• Sharing of Jerusalem as capital of both
• Compensation of refugees from pre-1967, but no right of return

. The problem is that Sharon and Arafat are beholden both to the groups within their communities who would lose out (the Israeli settlers and the Palestinian refugees) and to outside ideologues with maximalist demands (Islamic rejectionists and American neocons like Daniel Pipes). This seems unlikely to change until the West presents them both with an offer they can’t refuse: either accept the Clinton plan (under a new name natch) in full and without negotiation, or face a withdrawal of all dealings with whichever side refuses it. And of course, that won’t happen as long as Bush is in office.

On Iraq, until the invasion of Kuwait, pretty much everyone in the West was happy to deal with Saddam as both a wealthy customer and the enemy of the Iranian mullahs. And there was fairly general agreement about throwing him out of Kuwait by force if necessary. From then until 2003, opinion has been divided into three camps regarding Saddam: forgive and forget, sanctions and containment, and war. Behind that was a debate about what should be done after a war, which is, of course, the relevant issue now. There are all sorts of options, none of them appealing from “cut and run” to “stay the course, for decades if need be”.