Here's my favorite joke:

A nighclub bouncer sees a drunk searching the ground under a streetlight.
He asks: "Did you lose something?"
"Car keys."
"Where's your car?"
"Over there across the street."
"Why don't you look near the car?"
"There's more light over here."

The current unfolding massacre in Gaza is a perfect illustration of this principle. If there is a solution to the problem of peace in the Middle East, it certainly is not to be found where anyone in power is looking.

The US, with typically bizarre logic, insists that Hamas must stop the Israeli bombing immediately. Performing the same action repeatedly expecting a different result, the popular definition of insanity, seems to be the only thing "on the table." We're searching for a peaceful solution, as long as we can look in the same old empty places.

Western media attention on the Israeli invasion of Gaza decodes the story in the murky light of the unquestioned rationales put forth by the people doing the bombing: "Self defense" and "Going After The Terrorists." And nowhere, on no channel, in no press conference do we hear anyone asking: "What is the US, who is footing all of the bills, doing to stop the killing?" One supposes everybody knows the answer to that one anyway.

We can only conclude that nobody is seriously interested in anything other than Secretary Rice's carefully phrased "sustainable and lasting" solution. That unquantifiable condition might be remembered as the one so successfully imposed the last time Lebanon was destroyed, by American made weapons, with American dollars, while Americans watched the unbelievable terror and distruction and did nothing but parrot the Israeli cover story about some "kidnapped" soldier. As with Gaza, Dr. Rice imposed this flexible precondition of "sustainability" on any solution, and blamed Hezbollah for the Israeli carpet-bombing of civilian population centers.

As to who will be left alive in Gaza after Dr. Rice's dreadful formula is satisfied - the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind. It begins to be clear that when it comes to solutions, "sustainable and lasting" is the new "final."

As in my favorite joke, you see, it's dark over where peace might lie waiting to be discovered. It could be lying right out in the open. But nobody is looking for it there. Much better to look where we already know the time-worn answers we'll find.