There’s nothing like a good solidly-positive headline to make the day start out right.

Today’s was, “Mitchell, Netanyahu fail to agree on settlement halt.”

That’s unmitigated good news – which was essential to balance off the totally depressing headline down the page, “Hillary Clinton to visit Israel.”

Please. Just stay home. Leave us alone.

I’m not happy with Bibi’s partial or temporary -- or whatever it is today –“settlement freeze”, but he did say something that made sense. As you know, the Arabs in the form of Abu Mazen -- who, when he doffs the terrorist robes calls himself “Mahmoud Abbas” – continue to insist that they won’t sit down for “negotiations” until Israel imposes a total “settlement freeze”, including in Jerusalem.

So Bibi, in speaking to his cabinet said, “In any case, I will not agree to enter into talks whose results are defined and known in advance. That’s what negotiations are for and we are willing to begin right away.”

Right! The Arabs have gotten into the bad habit of demanding everything they want as a precondition to negotiations. “We won’t sit down to negotiate until Israel does x, y, and z”.

That’s hardly rational. Why would Israel agree to anything like that? Once Israel satisfies their growing list of pre-negotiation demands, what’s the point of negotiating anything else? It’s over – except as a man I was interviewing yesterday said, “All that would remain to be determined is who turns off the lights on the way out.”

The Community Organizer and most of Europe continue with their dangerous preoccupation with a “settlement freeze” which, as they all know, is nothing short of an end-run to bring about Israel’s demise, without having to come right out and say that’s what they want.

So it’s good to see that the mainstream press is finally starting to print a few articles detailing the many and sundry ways the Community Organizer is screwing up the world.

Two such pieces on his Middle East policy appeared in the last couple of days –
In US News and World Report, Mort Zuckerman, ZOA, wrote, “Obama is Fumbling a Chance for Middle East Peace”

http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/mzuckerman/2009/09/14/obama-is-fumbling-a-chance-for-middle-east-peace.html

Zuckerman notes that by Obama’s promising the Arabs everything, without making demands for parallel concessions, meant only that the Arabs’ list of demands grew. They believed the Community Organizer would hand them Israel on a silver platter – he’s trying, he’s trying – so they feel no need to do anything to promote peace themselves. In Israel, what results from Obama’s policy is a energized population against him and his policies, of whom only 4% think Obama is good. We then become disinclined to agree to anything Obama wants and are much more willing to elect Israeli governments that will stand up to him.

The Arab response to Obama’s policies is to become more and more intransigent, unwilling to agree to anything, because they still believe victory (“victory” to the Arabs is the end of Israel, not an end to hostilities) will be handed to them without concessions on their part. Why compromise, when they’ll get it all anyway?

So exactly the opposite of what Obama intended – if you assume his drive for “peace” was the cessation of hostilities, as compared to the end of pesky little Israel – has happened.

In the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens wrote, “Obama Is Pushing Israel toward War”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB40001424052970203917304574410672271269390.html

In short, because it’s now completely obvious that the Community Organizer has no intention whatever of stopping Iran, we’ll be forced to do it ourselves. We don’t have any choice – so we’ll have to go it alone.

That’s dangerous to the world, of course, because we don’t have the resources – let alone the clout – to do it as well as the US does. But if the US prefers to court the Iranian madman and believe his lies, then we’ll have to go it alone.

That’s what Israel is for: to allow us to choose our own destiny, not to be herded into the ovens and crematoria like last time.

In short, as Daniel Pipes wrote today, “The Obama administration has established an alarmingly naïve and dangerous record on Arab-Israeli issues, leading me to worry about spectacular policy failures ahead,”

Another headline also caught my eye: “Americans losing faith in Obama” – it recounts how American voters are increasingly disappointed in Obama, because they voted for him, believing he’d bring “change”, and they aren’t getting it.

That’s not true, of course. They wanted “change” – they got it.

All during the campaign, we were warning people, “Not all change is for the better.”

As the old adage goes, you have to be careful what you wish for. You might get it.