At a minimum, however, they must launch a serious negotiating process that would point clearly — preferably with a target date — to the end of the conflict and to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
"A cease-fire agreement is not likely to hold, even if leaders want it to, because there will be tremendous structural pressures unless you have a serious political process that begins to change the situation on the ground," said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland.
"In the midst of a serious budget process that affects the lives of all New Yorkers, it is counterproductive, disingenuous and dangerous to play games by announcing a so-called newly discovered crisis of the day," the governor's spokesman, Joshua Vlasto, said in a statement.
It was obligatory for Swedish intellectuals to be on the side of the Viet Cong and opposed to American power if they wanted to be regarded as morally serious, a process that reached its culmination when the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh and drove out all the inhabitants they did not kill.
So step one on the nomination process is to work with Senator Hatch and Senator Leahy to put these reforms in place, is to convince members of the Senate we're serious about a process that will get rid of the old bitterness of the judicial process.
In a report delivered to Congress on Monday, the inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found serious flaws in the process that led to 15 decisions related to policies on endangered species.
No side announced any immediate plans to resume talks, and Mr. Arafat's declared intention to unilaterally proclaim a Palestinian state on Sept. 13 imposed the next serious deadline on a process that has seesawed from hope to despair and back since the Oslo agreements were signed in 1993.
So it's back to the drawing board, this time with a sharpened understanding that social change, serious social change, profoundly serious social change is never a process that takes place overnight.
