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The Next President's Mideast Mess
(Politico) Robert Satloff - What is remarkable is that Barack and Bibi had such a deep well of mistrust of each other from the very start. Here, the original sin was, in my view, the Obama administration's refusal to affirm what insiders call "the Bush-Sharon letters" of April 2004. This was a set of understandings worked out between George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon that injected realism into U.S. peace diplomacy by recognizing that there would be no return to the 1949 armistice lines but that a resolution to the conflict would be governed by "new realities on the ground." That was a euphemistic reference to the existence of a substantial Jewish presence in blocs of settlements just east of the 1967 Green Line. The writer is executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.