During his confirmation hearings for secretary of state, John Kerry advanced an ambitious plan for Mideast diplomacy that hardly got any ink from most media, yet portends a potentially grand failure for his tenure as America's top diplomat. Kerry told lawmakers that it was his "prayer" to get Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table because the regional and even global stakes in achieving a peace settlement couldn't be greater. In other words, solve that conflict and the world will become a better, safer place. Here is how he put it: "So much of what we need to aspire to achieve and what we need globally -- all of this is tied to what can and doesn't happen with respect to Israel and Palestine." To illustrate his point, Kerry mentioned such challenging issues as rising jihadist threats in the Maghreb (North Africa), and sectarian conflicts in South Asia, the Persian Gulf and "elsewhere." What Kerry embraced in these few sentences is a thoroughly discredited...(Read Full Post)