Who was responsible for inserting into the report of the Iraq Study Group the notion that "American success in Iraq depends in part on progress in resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict?" That question is answered substantially in an article by Nathan Guttman, "Baker Group Advisers 'Surprised,' 'Upset' at Report's Israel-Iraq Link," the Washington correspondent of The Forward, a non-Zionist Jewish weekly with much nostalgia for a time when there was a discernible Jewish working class with loyalties to socialism. Fortunately, that time is over. In any case, the question was not just Guttman's own.It had been circulating around Washington, most relevantly among the vast staff of the Commission chaired by Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton. This staff was more than curious because it had been a notion that had not really but put to them. At the same time, anyone who knew anything figured that this linkage between what Israel could do for the Palestinians and how all of the Arabs would respond favorably to the U.S. even on altogether remote problems was one of Baker's favorite tropes. And Hamilton's too. Pity any idea in Hamilton's head: it becomes mush. But Baker has a relentless fixation on the pushy Jews, and he has located those in the foreign policy establishment who also think that these people are the prime barrier to American primacy in the Middle East. This was the logic of the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference which, like Oslo and Camp David, produced nothing but a launching pad for more conflict. Guttman's dispatch is detailed and comprehensive. He points to Edward Djerejian, a long-time Baker patsy, and Christopher Kojm, a less long-time Hamilton patsy (imagine being an aide to an intellectual nothing), as the stealth inserters of the idea. Working staff, except for one or two also quoted in the Forward, were furious and, in fact, embarrassed. How, indeed, would a Palestinian state (if you can imagine it emerging from the Palestinian civil war that fast reminds us of Iraq) calm the waters of Babylon? The fact is that the Iraqi Shia do not care a fig for the Palestinians. On the contrary: they hate them as Sunnis and, worst of all, as collaborators with Saddam Hussein. The last is a rap that no will be able to escape.