You broker it, you buy it.

• Author: Garfinkle, Adam
• Position: US policy on the Middle East

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.

The current common sense also builds prediction onto interpretation. The United States has now taken up two of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu's peace process demands: that the by-now counterproductive incremental logic of the Oslo process give way to immediate negotiation over final status issues such as borders, refugees, and Jerusalem; and that the Palestinian fulfillment of its security-related obligations precede such a negotiation. But Washington has done so, it is believed, only to "get at" the rectification of Israel's own sins, which the administration is said privately to view as equal to if not greater than those of the Palestinian Authority (PA). So if the PA does take its security commitments more seriously, it will mark the opening act of a drama scripted to pass quickly into a withering, though of course well intentioned, barrage of U.S. pressure on Israel. As an old friend puts it: Before you knife someone in the back, you first have to get behind him.(1)

Opinions divide over whether the coming U.S.-Israeli ordeal, like many before it, will be on balance a good thing for Israelis, Palestinians, and the United States; or, more pointedly, over whether it will be good for only some of the above. Many influential observers -...