ABSTRACT
Ironically, despite the seeming hopelessness of the Iraq situation, many voices in the Middle East still support an Israeli/Palestinian settlement. Jim Baker, as secretary of state under Father Bush, was not only instrumental in freeing Eastern Europe, in allowing the Soviet Union to collapse with some dignity, and in judiciously conducting the Gulf War of 1991, but he was intimately involved in attempting to bring peace to Israel/Palestine. President George W. Bush has been so enamored of his war-making capacities and so enchanted by the demands of the Israeli lobby that the hatred between those two peoples has festered almost to civil war there. It was Baker who designed, oversaw and carried to creative fruition the Madrid Conference in 1991, which made possible the 1993 Oslo Accords—which nearly resulted in peace between the Israelis and Palestinians over five years in the mid-1990s.
