Obama: Mideast Politics Just "Too Difficult"

As part of a high profile interview with Time Magazine, President Obama conceded that the expectations he raised for an imminent solution to the long-standing Palestinian-‘Israel' conflict were unrealistic, and that breakthroughs were unlikely, stressing that he overestimated its ability to persuade ‘Israelis' and Palestinians to resume peace talks.

"This is just really hard," Obama admitted, "even for a guy like George Mitchell." The president had suggested when he took office that the time was right for a two-state solution and that it would be a relatively simple matter to get the move started.

"I think that we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that," Obama said, adding that he thought think it is absolutely true that what we did this year didn't produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted, and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high," he said.

Despite brimming with confidence, the administration spent the summer pressuring ‘Israel' to freeze settlement expansion, only to give up in August amid growing political pressure. This led to enemy Prime Minister Netanyahu agreeing to restart the peace talks, but only so long as the Palestinians abandoned every single demand they had.

One year after taking office little has been accomplished, and officials at home and abroad are acknowledging that the prospect of peace talks starting any time soon is "slim" at best.

Yesterday Netanyahu even demanded that the Palestinians accept a permanent Zionist occupation as a prerequisite for the illegal entity to consider allowing a nominally independent Palestinian state in the West Bank.