Laura King, writing for the Los Angeles Times (Feb 8, 2004)

Years before he became prime minister, Ariel Sharon was fond of taking visitors to a bare, rocky West Bank hillside overlooking Israel's narrow but densely populated coastal plain. There, in a set-piece speech, with wind-ruffled maps at hand, he would forcefully insist on Israel's need in the name of self-defense to hold fast to this piece of strategic high ground -- never mentioning that this same stony earth was the heartland of the Palestinians' dreamed-of future state.

Sharon, a lifelong military man, has always viewed the world from a battlefield perspective. But now, in what could be the twilight of his political life, his notion of how to hold the high ground -- that is, how best to defend the Jewish state against all threats -- has fundamentally changed.

Sharon's vision of a Greater Israel, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, has given way to acceptance of the idea that the Palestinians will one day have a state of their own on part of that territory. But the Israeli leader, ever the tactician, has clearly demonstrated that he wants that to happen on his own terms -- not those of the Palestinians, probably not those of the American administration, and certainly not those of the rest of the outside world.

This evolution in the 75-year-old Sharon's thinking found its latest expression last week in a dramatic initiative that could result in Israel relinquishing nearly all the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip -- which the prime minister once described as a crucial line of defense that Israel would never give up.

In the months before that, Sharon put residents of remote West Bank Jewish settlements on notice that their communities, too, were marked for uprooting. He indirectly floated the once-heretical idea of officially sharing Jerusalem with the Palestinians and last year spoke for the first time of the massive Israeli military presence in the West Bank and Gaza as an"occupation."

One Israeli columnist has dubbed it Sharon's"Dance of the Seven Veils" -- a series of carefully stage-managed, incremental pronouncements, often swiftly softened afterward by underlings to make them more palatable to right-wing political allies and a domestic audience left wary and embittered by more than three years of ferocious warfare with the Palestinians.

But however couched and conditional they might be, Sharon's statements of the last 18 months, taken together, amount to an utter transformation of his political persona.

The onetime champion of the Jewish settlement movement is now regarded by settlers as perhaps the greatest threat to its existence. The man who always held that force was the only language the Palestinians understood now speaks calmly and philosophically of the need for two bloodied peoples to simply separate from one another.

The old general who has played some part in every one of his country's wars since Israel's founding in 1948 stands ready, it seems, to cede battle-won territory without so much as a treaty in return.

"I think Sharon did realize in these last two years that for many reasons, that he simply will not be able to hold on to the territories," said Yoram Peri, a political analyst at Tel Aviv University."He didn't really change his mind on peace issues, but he is confronting reality. A field commander doesn't come out and say, 'I withdraw,' but instead he finds a way to do this to his best advantage."

During the same period, though, Sharon has also displayed his blunt-edged side, the one that years ago earned him the sobriquet of"The Bulldozer." Sharon has embarked on the construction of a barrier in the West Bank that Palestinians denounce as the baldest of land grabs. Under him, Jewish settlements have continued to grow, despite strong American pressure to halt the expansion.

He is widely blamed for helping engineer the fall of one moderate Palestinian Authority prime minister, and for doing little to help the Palestinian successor stave off what many predict will be a similar fate.

Perhaps most significantly, the Israeli leader -- even while pledging himself to an American-backed blueprint for peace based on the premise that Israel and the Palestinians will negotiate terms for Palestinian statehood -- has been steadily laying the groundwork for an Israeli-imposed solution that he calls his disengagement plan.

Under this strategy's still-emerging outlines, Israel would unilaterally withdraw to what it considers defensible borders -- defined at least initially, by all indications, by the more than 400-mile West Bank barrier that is still under construction -- and discuss statehood terms with the Palestinians only when the Israeli government is ready to do so.

The Palestinians fear that such a course of action will predetermine the outcome of any negotiations, and ultimately leave them with a territory so truncated and fragmented as to be a state in name only.

"Sharon will evacuate Gaza, if he indeed does so, believing that doing so will make it easier for Israel to hold on to large swaths of the West Bank," the respected Haaretz newspaper predicted in an editorial last week."There is no place for negotiations with the Palestinians in such a narrow perspective ... nor is there any room in such a perspective for a viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel."

Sharon has promised that he will move ahead with his plan only if the American-backed"road map" fails. But the peace plan has achieved no traction in the nine months since its launch, and with the U.S. election season in full swing, there is strong skepticism among both Israeli and Palestinian officials that the United States will play any significant role in coming months -- the window during which Sharon has indicated his government will begin to act.

The prime minister has directed his national security advisor, Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, to chart security lines that Israel can militarily defend until there is a Palestinian government in place with which Israel is prepared to negotiate. Israel refuses to have any dealings with the Palestinian Authority president, Yasser Arafat, and has indicated that if the appointed Palestinian prime minister is unable to act independently, it will not engage him in serious dialogue either.

Those close to Sharon insist that he is acting in the interests of peace, and that the land hand-overs he has outlined are wrenchingly painful to him.

"He is entirely sincere, and anyone who does not believe that does not understand his character," said Eli Landau, a businessman and a longtime close friend of the prime minister.

"I watched him through the years, saw how he nurtured and watched over every Jewish settlement, so to be prepared now to do what he is prepared to do is for him a real tragedy," Landau said."But now he is the leader. He stands at the top of the pyramid, and he can see this is the only way forward."

Sharon's defenders scoff at the notion that the prime minister's timing for unveiling the Gaza initiative is intended to deflect attention from his interrogation by police in connection with bribery allegations involving a failed development venture. Both the disengagement plan and the scandal have been in play for months, they point out, insisting that the timing is coincidental.

However, the possibility of a bribery indictment still hangs over the prime minister, a contingency that might drive him from office, throw the Israeli political scene into disarray and probably scuttle his initiatives of recent months -- particularly if his hard-line heir apparent, Benjamin Netanyahu, is to take the reins. A complicated nexus of factors helped nudge Sharon toward the view that Palestinian statehood was inevitable, analysts said.

In more than three years of fighting, it has become apparent to all that Palestinian militants cannot achieve anything approaching a military victory over a vastly superior Israeli force. But they can and do continue to strike Israeli cities and towns, using a seemingly inexhaustible supply of suicide bombers to kill and maim Israeli civilians.

A battle-weary Israeli public last year was intrigued by and surprisingly supportive of several unofficial peace plans calling for large-scale territorial concessions in exchange for peace with the Palestinians.

Also galvanizing debate in recent months has been the premise that Palestinians in the territories and Arab citizens of Israel, with their faster population growth rate, will soon outnumber Jews in the area comprising Israel proper, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A parade of prominent Israelis, led by former parliament Speaker Avraham Burg, have bluntly warned that demographics will eventually make it impossible for Israel to retain both its democratic character and its Jewish nature -- unless it relinquishes the Palestinian territories.

"Look, Sharon is not [Yitzhak] Rabin," said Peri, the analyst, who was a political advisor to the assassinated prime minister."Late in his life, Rabin realized that the Palestinians are a nation, that we have to deal with them as partners. Sharon has not changed on that issue, but this is a matter of realpolitik -- he sees what is happening, and his aim is to achieve as much territory as possible."

Despite the tremendous difficulties that lie ahead, there are strong indications that Sharon is serious about proceeding with the evacuation of Gaza settlements and, later, isolated West Bank communities.

Already, the government is minutely calculating the costs of relocating settler families -- an issue expected to figure soon in talks with the Bush administration.

Right-wing allies have not yet pulled out of Sharon's government, but say they will do so as soon as it becomes clear he intends to proceed with the pullbacks he has outlined. In a scene that would have been unthinkable just months ago, a crowd of Gaza settlers gathered Friday outside Sharon's sheep ranch in the Negev desert, shouting angry slogans against him.

The prime minister has also been seeking to marshal the support of the defense establishment, an arena in which he is supremely comfortable but whose leading figures were reportedly caught off guard by his proposed Gaza initiative. Hawkish Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz backs the idea, and although some high-ranking field commanders reportedly harbor reservations, they have been ordered not to air them publicly.

Military historian Meir Pail, a longtime observer of Sharon, believes that unilateral moves in the absence of a political agreement with the Palestinians are a long-term recipe for disaster. But he also says Sharon is likely to stay the course he has set for himself.

"The political question -- the lack of any agreement -- is very dangerous, and I'm talking as a military man when I say this," Pail said."But Arik Sharon is a tough guy, very thick-skinned, and he will carry through what he has set out to do.

"He's behaving very, very much like himself."

Paul Waugh, writing in the Independant (London) (Feb. 7, 2004):

ONE WAS faced with an enemy that had the biggest army in history, had overrun half of Europe and was bombing British cities on a daily basis.

The other was faced with an enemy that couldn't use its air force in its own airspace, was crippled by sanctions and possessed weapons that it now turns out were more imagined than real.

Most historians wouldn't dare to compare Winston Churchill's wartime leadership with Tony Blair's experience in the run up to the war on Iraq.

Although Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein were probably equally deranged, it is difficult to find any serious academic who would agree that the two posed similar threats to Britain.

But after a week in which the Government's case on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction appeared once more to be embarrassingly thin, it was perhaps not surprising that some cabinet ministers lashed out in frustration to defend the Prime Minister.

The exasperation of Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for Environment, with stories about the details of the so-called 45-minutes claim finally spilled over when she made the comparison between Mr Blair and his predecessor of 60 years earlier.

The final straw appeared to be Michael Howard's call for Mr Blair's resignation on the grounds that he had not known MI6's assessment that Saddam's chemical weapons were for the battlefield and not cities hundreds of miles away.

Ms Beckett, who fairly represented many of her colleagues' anger at the Tories' move, said that it was"nit-picking of the highest order"."Do you suppose Winston Churchill went round asking precisely the kind of munition they had in the Second World War and would that have been a valuable use of his time?" the Environment Secretary asked.

Unfortunately for Ms Beckett, there were plenty of people ready to step forward to declare that, yes, of course Churchill would have done precisely that.

Even more unfortunately, the former prime minister's grandson just happened to be Nicholas Soames, the shadow Secretary of State for Defence.

"Margaret Beckett has the impertinence to invoke the name of Winston Churchill in the same breath as Tony Blair, saying that Churchill would never have considered it his responsibility to have been informed of details of munitions and weaponry. She could not be more wrong. This is ignorance of the first order.

"My grandfather was obsessed with military detail and would have regarded it as his solemn duty as Prime Minister to have ensured that the reasons for going to war were detailed, valid, legal and honourable, and above all accurate," Mr Soames said.

"Blair and the No 10 machine were so obsessed with spin and hype that they were ignorant of, and disinterested in, the hard military realities. The difference between these weapons matters very much indeed in any careful and detailed military assessment."

It is true that Churchill frequently tried to micromanage many aspects of the military effort, from the response to the V1 and V2 rockets to equipment in the Far East.

The historian David Starkey told The Independent:"Unlike Mr Blair, Churchill had been a soldier and knew all about weapons. He also, of course, had Lord Cherwell as his special adviser and was kept right up to date with all the latest information."

He added:"Churchill actually worked - he didn't spend his time sitting on a sofa.

"It seems that this government has more in common with the Ottoman empire in decay - while the Ottoman empire was ruled from a divan, this government is ruled from a sofa."

Brad Knickerbocker, writing in the Christian Science Monitor (Feb. 4, 2004):

Fighting for the "little guy" against wealthy, powerful interests has been a staple of American politics since the first New England patriots railed against King George III's tax policies.

Today, in similar manner, the leading Democratic presidential contenders are trying to present their effort as a populist uprising against a plutocratic administration in which wealth is the basis of power. They remind voters incessantly that while Vice President Dick Cheney's old firm got large contracts for work in Iraq (some of them without bid), 3 million jobs have been lost on President Bush's watch. Or that the drug industry, oil companies, and HMOs are profiting at the expense of average Americans. Or that paychecks for middle-class and lower-income workers have lagged in comparison with managers and executives at the upper end of the pay scale.

It's not exactly class warfare, since unprecedented numbers of Americans now own stock and therefore are capitalists. But the rhetoric has taken a decidedly populist turn.

Does this message resonate with Americans, especially those who have yet to choose sides in the presidential race? A recent Time/CNN poll has 57 percent of the public (and 63 percent of independents) agreeing that Mr. Bush "pays too much attention to big business."

"A lot of Democrats see this as a new Gilded Age, with a widening gap between wage earners and the elites," says Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin. "Clearly, this sort of heightened populist rhetoric responds to [the perception that] the Bush administration is a throwback to the days before the New Deal. Bill Clinton, to a degree, revived that in 1992."

It didn't work, however, for Al Gore in 2000 (although there were other factors, like renegade Ralph Nader, not to mention a controversial Florida vote count). So why should it work for a Democrat this time?

One major difference: Mr. Gore was warning against the theoretical threat of a corporate takeover of the White House. This time, Democratic contenders say there's solid evidence that such a takeover already is under way.

 

Tim Rutten, writing in the LAT (Feb. 4, 2004):

[Mel] Gibson has allowed himself to be characterized as a Catholic and has reinforced that impression by seeking the Vatican's approval of his film and then publicizing a purported papal endorsement. Reams of sympathetic publicity continue to describe Gibson as "a devout Catholic."

In fact, he is not. Catholics belong to churches that recognize the pope as their religious leader. If you don't, you're not a Catholic. It's as simple as that. What Gibson would rather not discuss is his membership in a schismatic group that has appropriated various pious practices and sacramental rites from preconciliar Roman Catholicism, but which rejects the contemporary church's leaders and teachings. Among the most important of those teachings is a complete rejection of any interpretation of the Passion that attributes a particular or continuing responsibility for Christ's execution to the Jewish people.

Because Gibson attends -- indeed, finances -- a church that rejects such teachings, other questions arise: For instance, in an interview with commentator Peggy Noonan to be published in the forthcoming Reader's Digest, Gibson says, "My dad taught me my faith, and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life."

Fair enough, but Hutton Gibson -- the filmmaker's father -- is a well-known Holocaust denier.

Reader's Digest declined to make a full text of the interview available to The Times, but in the brief promotional excerpt released this week, Noonan is quoted as asking, "You're going to have to go on the record. The Holocaust happened, right?"

Gibson replied, "Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union."

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, responded that "reading this, I have to conclude that, at best, Mr. Gibson is ignorant and, at worse, he is insensitive. War was not the cause of the Holocaust; Jews died because of who they were. The Holocaust is different in kind from other historical tragedies because it's about people being slaughtered for who they were. Comparing it to the famine in the Ukraine, which was terrible, is nonetheless ignorant and insensitive."

Foxman also said he was "troubled by the cavalier way in which he treats the question of his father's influence. I respect people who respect their elders. But Mr. Gibson says his father never lied to him and yet he has been lying for years to the world about the Holocaust. Saying everything his father said is true puts him in a very strange position, since his father is a public Holocaust denier."

From NPR (Feb. 5, 2004):

The flu epidemic of 1918 ranks with the Black Death of the Middle Ages as one of the deadliest contagions of all times. The virus swept across the Earth, killing an estimated 20 million people in little over a year. In the United States, more than half a million people died from the illness between September 1918 and June 1919. To this day, no one knows why the virus was so deadly.

Called the Spanish flu, the illness started with aches and fever. As the disease progressed, its victims' faces turned dark, the soles of their feet blackened and they coughed blood. In days, sometimes hours, those infected essentially drowned, their lungs heavy, sodden and engorged with a thin, bloody liquid.

Nearly everyone caught the flu in 1918 in some form; 2.5 percent of its victims died, making the strain 25 times more deadly than any flu before or since.

The flu left behind many questions: why was it so deadly, why were young, apparently healthy people particularly affected, and why did it never reappear? Researchers continue to look for those answers, and two studies published this week in Science magazine shed new light on the killer strain's origins. Analysis of a protein coating the virus suggests it started out as an avian virus. Another study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , shows that combining pieces of the 1918 strain with a mouse flu virus results in a very lethal flu.

As NPR's Richard Knox reports, the findings trouble health officials who worry a similar scenario is developing in Asia. The region is currently battling a massive avian flu outbreak, which has infected hundreds of millions of birds and killed 16 people. So far, evidence suggests the virus isn't easily spread among humans. But health officials fear the bird virus might combine with a human flu virus, unleashing another potentially uncontrollable pandemic among people.

Adam Clymer, writing in the NYT (Feb. 5, 2004):

Democrats who once rebelled at having their presidential choices dictated by big-city bosses seem to have cheerfully handed over that power to small-town Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire. And this year New Hampshire may have subcontracted its role to Iowa.

How else can John Kerry's five victories, with about two-fifths of the total vote on Tuesday, be explained? After all, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey, only about one-third of prospective voters in those primary states said they knew enough about the Democratic candidates to make an informed choice. What the voters did know was that Mr. Kerry had won in Iowa and New Hampshire, and that polls showed that he was winning or gaining in their states. ...

Missouri may be the best example from Tuesday's primaries of the voters' choosing on the basis of front-runner status. Neither Mr. Kerry nor any other candidate had campaigned in the state until a week ago today, assuming that Dick Gephardt, the native son, had it locked up....

Oddly enough, it was Missouri that helped start the process that led to this spate of bunched-up primaries. At the boss-dominated 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, Missouri's delegation was controlled, absolutely, by Gov. Warren Hearnes. Some of the meetings that had elected delegates were held in secret. One was held at night on a speeding bus. In that case it was impossible for supporters of Eugene McCarthy to participate.

In reaction to the behavior of Governor Hearnes and the other bosses, a party commission headed by George McGovern wrote the new rules that substantially survive today. It said its objective was to give Democratic voters a"full, meaningful and timely opportunity" to participate in the nomination process. Those rules encouraged states to hold primaries.

 

Ginia Belafante, writing in the NYT (Feb. 1, 2004):

Americans have historically maintained a high regard for complementarity in public marriages. The impish are better served by upright spouses than by charmingly impudent ones; the ponderous enlivened by the light of heart; the swaggeringly confident (Franklin Roosevelt) humanized by the sheepishly less self-assured (Eleanor).

Mitigating Kennedy's overweening passion was his wife's remove. Hardly a union of opposites, the Clinton marriage failed to satisfy. Politicians, particularly those aiming for highest office, score a public relations coup when their partners are perceived as completing them.

Though the value of her unbridled volubility has been the subject of debate since her husband's entry into the presidential race, Teresa Heinz Kerry has unquestionably animated the Massachusetts senator's bid for election. A foil to his stiffness, she is the sort who is happy to tell an interviewer - as she did on CNN Tuesday night - that her husband learned of his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire while in the bathroom. In the first instance Ms. Heinz Kerry delivered the news while he was shaving, and in the second instance as he made his way out of the shower.

In her stylishness and social facility, Ms. Heinz Kerry bears at least some likeness to Grace Goodhue Coolidge, the wife of Calvin Coolidge and a woman with the flapper-era equivalent of an enormously high personality rating. As a vice-presidential wife in the early 1920's, she had already become one of the best loved figures in Washington. As first lady, in a coy act of protest against Prohibition law, she named her collie Rob Roy after the Scotch cocktail.

"Coolidge was so incredibly laconic,'' noted Carl Sferrazza Anthony, a historian of first ladies and their political roles."His whole public persona was built around this idea of silent Cal.

"He was shy to the point of not really wanting to talk in public, and she had so much personality and warmth. He desperately leaned on her social ease, and she offset his peculiarly cranky way."

What is expected of someone bound by wedlock to a presidential contender has evolved as women's roles have changed. Though Eleanor Roosevelt addressed the Democratic National Convention in 1940, calling on her party to nominate her husband for a third term, she worked largely in the background, contrary to current assumption, during her husband's two previous bids for the White House.

Wives first assumed a highly visible role in presidential politics in 1960, at a time when middle-class women had become the country's most important consumer targets. On the occasion of his wife's funeral in 1993, Richard Nixon privately remarked that he felt unpopular on the campaign trail but always knew that"everybody liked Pat." Republicans, in fact, built a whole merchandising effort around Mrs. Nixon, distributing buttons and other paraphernalia that read"A Winning Team: Pat and Dick Nixon," or"I'm for Pat."

Jacqueline Kennedy wrote a column in the fall of 1960, distributed by the Democratic Party, in which she discussed health care, education and the atomic bomb. As the wife of the vice-presidential candidate, Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson traveled 35,000 miles stumping for various Democratic contenders. In 1964, with her husband running for president, Mrs. Johnson embarked on a train called the Lady Bird Special and toured eight Southern states to seek support for her husband.

During the women's movement of the 1970's, the voting public paid increasing attention to what a candidate's wife could bring to the table. Rosalynn Carter independently promoted the welfare of the mentally ill during her husband's presidential campaigns. While immersed in the Iranian hostage crisis during his 1980 re-election effort, Jimmy Carter sent his wife as one of his surrogates to campaign in the New Hampshire primary.

Today, as the debate around Mrs. Dean indicates, spousal involvement seems a cultural imperative - as long as the spouse does not appear to be doing so in service of her own ambitions.

Editorial in the WSJ (Feb. 2, 2004):

Was John Kerry brainwashed? That's what we've been wondering as the new Democratic frontrunner struggles to explain his off-again-on-again-off-again support for confronting Saddam Hussein.

Some of our readers may recall that"brainwashing" is the word that turned the late George W. Romney into a footnote in American political history. In the summer of 1967, the Michigan Governor was the leading contender for the 1968 GOP Presidential nod. Then he told a Detroit television station that during a trip to Vietnam he had had"the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get" regarding the increasingly unpopular war. Romney was quickly laughed out of the race.

Now Mr. Kerry seems to be concocting his own Romney-like rationale for changing his mind on Iraq, specifically on weapons of mass destruction. Back in 1991, the Massachusetts Senator opposed President George H.W. Bush's U.N.-backed effort to drive Saddam from Kuwait. But on October 11, 2002 he nonetheless voted to give the current President Bush the unilateral authority"to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate."

So why did the Senator later vote against the $87 billion appropriation to finish the job in Iraq (and Afghanistan), while accusing Mr. Bush of pursuing a" cut-and-run" strategy? Well, he now claims, he was"repeatedly misled" about Iraq's weapons by Bush officials including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell. And he is demanding an investigation.

But is it really likely that this savvy Washington insider was hoodwinked? As an 18-year member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has spent plenty of time thinking about how to handle Iraq. He also had privileged and direct access to U.S. intelligence, the same data that led President Clinton into a military confrontation with Saddam in 1998, which was the same year"regime change" became stated U.S. policy after Mr. Kerry allowed the Iraq Liberation Act to pass the Senate with unanimous consent.

Presumably, similar intelligence played a role in Senator Kerry's speech on October 9, 2002 that"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force -- if necessary -- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction [our emphasis] in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." If Mr. Kerry was misled into believing in such a threat, so were the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Madeleine Albright and Senator Carl Levin, all of whom made similarly unequivocal statements on the matter.

Nor does it appear to have been any contrary evidence that started Mr. Kerry's drift back into the antiwar camp. Rather it was the sudden traction Mr. Dean was getting with his antiwar message that led Mr. Kerry in January 2003 to start accusing Mr. Bush of a"rush to war." These days Mr. Kerry has more or less adopted the entire Dean line, decrying as"fraudulent" a coalition that includes most of our key allies from World Wars I and II.

Mr. Kerry has an explanation for all this, sort of. He says Saddam should have been evicted from Kuwait but voted"no" on the first Gulf War to give the former President Bush more time to amass domestic support. He says his"yes" vote in 2002 was premised on this President Bush attracting more international help. He didn't, he told Rolling Stone, expect Mr. Bush to"f -- it up as badly as he did."

Hell, we might curse too if we felt obliged to offer up such a tortured rationale. We're not the only ones who've noticed. Washington Post columnist David Broder, no Republican shill, recently suggested to Mr. Kerry that it would be difficult for him to explain to voters that"your 'no' [in 1991] did not mean no, and your 'yes' [in 2002] did not mean yes."

The Occam's Razor explanation, it seems to us, is that the former Naval Lieutenant tacks with the political winds -- and not just over the course of years and months but of days. The liberal New Republic magazine recently republished two Kerry letters to the same constituent in 1991, one appearing to support the Gulf War, the other to oppose it.

We think Mr. Kerry knows full well that there was no Administration conspiracy to mislead anybody this time around. Intelligence on Iraq was indeed faulty, as weapons inspector David Kay told Senators last week. But Mr. Kay was emphatic that any mistakes were not because of Administration pressure. Meanwhile, the prior occupant of the White House continues to believe the WMD existed. The Portuguese Prime Minister says Mr. Clinton told him recently"he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime."

All of which raises the vital question of Mr. Kerry's constancy and character. In the Romney era, at least, some sort of consistency on matters of war and peace -- or at least a plausible explanation for a change of heart -- was considered a prerequisite for would-be commanders-in-chief. Shouldn't it still be today?

George Bisharat, a professor at the University of California's Hastings College of Law, writing in the LAT (Jan. 25, 2004):

Although Israel has claimed that Palestinians willingly abandoned Palestine after being urged to leave in radio broadcasts by Arab leaders, a review of broadcast transcripts by Irish diplomat Erskine Childers in 1961 revealed that Palestinians were exhorted by Arab leaders to stay, not leave their homes. In fact, Yigal Allon, commander of Palmach, the elite Zionist troops, and later Israeli foreign minister, launched a whispering campaign to terrorize Palestinians into flight.

Nor were we simply unintended victims of a war launched by the Arab states against Israel. As far back as the late 19th century, leaders of Political Zionism (the movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine) advocated "transfer" of the Palestinians, by force if necessary. In 1948, Jews owned only 11% of the land allocated by the United Nations to the Jewish state -- not enough for a viable economy. As David Ben-Gurion said in February 1948 before he became prime minister of Israel: "The war will give us the land. The concepts of 'ours' and 'not ours' are peace concepts only, and in war they lose their whole meaning."

Zionist leaders knew that an Arab minority of 40% would challenge the Jewish demographic dominance they sought. Hence, nearly half of the Palestinian refugees ultimately expelled were forced out before the Arab states attacked Israel in May 1948. Israeli historian Benny Morris documented 24 massacres of Palestinian civilians, some claiming hundreds of unarmed men, women and children, during subsequent fighting. Thousands more Palestinians were, like the residents of Majdal (now Ashkelon) -- a southern coastal city 15 miles north of the Gaza Strip -- chased across the border into Gaza after the armistice of 1949.

Palestine had to be "cleansed" of its native population to establish Israel as a Jewish state. Ironically, those who today protest that the return of the refugees would destroy Israel unwittingly confirm this viewpoint, for the refugees are simply the Palestinians and their offspring who would have become Israeli citizens had they not been exiled.

Israel's denial of responsibility for the refugees and rejection of their repatriation (intransigence that was condemned early on by a U.S. official as "morally reprehensible") is nearly as offensive as the original expulsion itself. Israel welcomed immigrant Jews from all over the world but shot Palestinians who tried to return to recover movable property, harvest the fruit of their orchards or reclaim their homes. Oxford professor Avi Shlaim concluded in his book "The Iron Wall" that "between 2,700 and 5,000 [Palestinian] infiltrators were killed in the period 1949-56, the great majority of them unarmed."

Nothing the Palestinians had done merited this treatment, something the international community has consistently recognized. A 1948 U.N. resolution recognizing the Palestinian right of return has been annually -- and almost unanimously -- reaffirmed ever since. The Palestinian right of return is also supported by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The two-state solution envisioned today would probably ameliorate the conditions of the one-third of the Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There, Palestinians face incessant military attacks that have demolished homes and orchards and killed an average of nearly 70 Palestinians per month over the last three years. A smothering matrix of closures, curfews and checkpoints restricts movement and has caused unemployment to soar to more than 70% and threaten Palestinian children with malnutrition. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers, shock troops in the grinding 36-year campaign to seize and colonize yet more Palestinian land, speed through the West Bank and Gaza Strip on "Jewish only" roads. The oppressive features of Israeli military occupation were entrenched long before Palestinians resorted in the mid-1990s to the desperate -- yet still indefensible -- tactic of suicide bombings to slow the colonizing juggernaut.

But this two-state solution would not address the concerns of 1.2 million Palestinians living in Israel as second-class citizens. Palestinian citizens there possess formal political rights -- that much Israel can afford after expelling most Palestinians in 1948. But these Palestinians have restricted access to land (most real property in Israel is owned by the state or the Jewish National Fund and is leased to Jews only). They are also forced to carry identity cards that brand them as non-Jews, and they cannot serve in the armed forces (the key to many benefits in Israeli society). Palestinian towns and villages are starved of resources, with many lacking connections to the country's electrical or water systems. Government policies, from immigration to family planning, are designed to counter the "demographic threat" Israelis fear in the higher birthrate of Palestinian citizens. Israeli law enshrines the principle that Israel is the "state of the Jewish people," and it lacks firm guarantees of the legal equality of all citizens.

Nor would the two-state solution fairly redress the rights of diaspora Palestinians -- permitting us only return to a new, already overcrowded and underfunded "statelet" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

There is no bar to implementing the Palestinians' right of return. If there is room in Israel for a million Russian immigrants (including many non-Jews), there is room for those Palestinians who would elect return over other legal options. The sole obstacle is Israel's desire to maintain a "demographic balance" favorable to Jews.