Barack Obama said yesterday his administration will be “immediately engaged in the Middle East peace process as a whole.”  He is “determined to try to break a deadlock that has gone on for decades now,” and believes “if you look not just at the Bush administration, but also what happened under the Clinton administration, you are seeing the general outlines of an approach.”

The common experience of the two prior administrations actually teaches a different lesson.  In both cases, an American president — one Democratic, the other Republican — engaged in an extraordinary multi-year effort to create a Palestinian state as a solution to the Middle East situation, and each president left office with a new Middle East war on his hands.

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