All of Washington is in an uproar because the President made a speech today referencing Israel's 1967 borders. Since you come here for my fresh insights into The Crisis in the Middle East, and because there aren't any new Maid Scandals today, allow me to point out that it's often overlooked by the foreign policy community that most people have no idea what they are talking about.

For example, why can't they come up with a less inherently ambiguous phrase than "Israel's 1967 borders?" The borders changed right in the middle of 1967. If they would use self-explanatory phrases like "pre-1967 borders" (or "1966 borders") versus "post-1967 borders" ("1968 borders"), I could tell what they were talking about without going and reading news articles that include paragraphs that could have been cut and pasted from articles written during the Bush Administration (either one).

A reader has a suggestion: If Israel is supposed to go back to its 1967 borders, can America go back to its 1965 borders? Please?