[The_Rorschach]

I'm with Abby on this one Blanco, Abbas wasn't any better than Arafat. Placing him in charge of the Road Map to Peace would have been just as great a mistake as the US made in making Hussein the Vice President of Iraq after the coup of '68.

Personally, if you are interested in my political prediction of the year, I see all of this as moot. With American soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we have easy launching points into Iran, Syria and Pakistan which silently scream the ramifications of continued compounded wide-scale engagements in the ME by those hostile to an Israeli presence. I think that will go further towards seeing peace in the ME than any mere road map and the accompanied political pleasantries. Considering the ease with which the US took out the fourth largest world military, even a silent threat carries great weight in this volatile region.