Is it me, or is this just plain crazy?

Secretary of State Colin Powell appealed to both sides Sunday not to let the talks fail again. “What we have to do now is to make sure we don’t allow this tragic, terrible incident to derail the momentum of the road map,” Powell said on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to the Gaza attack.

The attacks on Israelis will stop if and only if the Palestinians in general want them to stop. When the terrorists lose the support of the population among which they are hiding, they will be caught, thus preventing further attacks.

Simple, no? Too simple, but basically true.

The obvious solution, then, is to try to separate, politically, the general population from the terrorists. But you can't do that unless you impose a cost on the general population in the event of further attacks. One that the general population is unwilling to bear. So what does Powell propose? Continuing to reward Palestinians with Israeli concessions in the face of continued attacks. No negative consequences whatsoever.

Sorry, Colin, but there have to be serious negative consequences imposed on the Palestinians for the continuing deadly antics of Hamas, Hezbollah, et al. What those consequences are should be left to the Israelis. After all, they are the ones who are dying.

I am not suggesting that I would go along with a plan to nuke Ramallah in retaliation for the murder of an Israeli, but to say that the Israelis should pay no heed to those men with bombs and guns over there in the corner and just continue on their merry way following the roadmap for peace makes no sense whatever to me.

I hear over and over again that we can't let the terrorists derail the process, that the failure of the negotiations means the terrorists will have won. I expect to hear that from the people in whose name the terrorists are acting. If they support the terrorists, they will be in favor of extracting any and all possible concessions from Israel by any means available. If they don't support the terrorists, they will be in favor of extracting all possible concessions by means of negotiation. But that requires the continuation of the negotiations. In either case, therefore, they want the negotiations to continue.

From any other perspective, however,