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Iraq and coming out pointing fingers at our Israel-Palestinian policy. According to the report, the U.S. cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability. True, America’s credibility in the region would be strengthened if we could get Israel and the Palestinians to ease their standoff and get on with a peace deal. But if this was a strategy to success in Iraq, it needed to be in place in 2002, ahead of the Iraq invasion. To view resolving that intractable, decades-old conflict as a strategic path to solving today’s Iraq crisis attempts to present the obvious as a new idea. We might as well say democracy would flourish in the Middle East if we could eliminate poverty, strong-arm dictators and religious fanaticism.