From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

Upon learning that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would become a new envoy intervening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a former senior Israeli intelligence official confided to an old colleague a two-word comment in English: “It’s nuts.” One can only imagine what the Palestinians said in private.

Rarely in recent history have a man and an assignment matched up as poorly as this one: an officious and deceitful Brit who collaborated on a disastrous scheme to invade an Arab country and who is blamed for the deaths of possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, now intervenes in another Arab land to get the Palestinians to shape up.

At least, the Palestinians and Israelis have been assured, Blair won’t be in charge of negotiating a peace settlement. That daunting assignment will be left to President George W. Bush and his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, two other widely despised figures in the Middle East.

Blair’s duties will be limited to shoring up Palestinian institutions, funneling international assistance to embattled Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and promoting Palestinian economic development, Bush administration officials have said.

Still, one has to wonder who comes up with these ideas. Is this envoy assignment just the latest Bush-Blair vanity play in the Middle East, treating a strategically vital region as a toy for their egos and a source of patronage plums for their cronies? Or are Bush and Blair really so self-absorbed that they think they’re the right guys for these sensitive jobs?

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