Pundits have had fun poking at the Bush-Blair concoction that the outgoing prime minister be reinvented through solving one of the world’s seemingly insoluble conflicts. Bush has proposed that Blair represent the "Quartet" -- composed of the UN, the US, Russia and the European Union -- in attempts to secure Israeli-Palestinian peace, with an official announcement coming tomorrow.

I have no way of checking this, but my suspicion is that President Bush is a keen fan of the Pointer Sisters. Only an early morning presidential workout to their hit song "I’m So Excited" that then embedded itself in Bush’s head, the way morning tunes tend to do, could possibly explain the phraseology he used yesterday to describe the Palestinian situation.

The Geneva Initiative came about soon after the breakdown of official Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations in early 2001. A group of former negotiators and public figures from both sides drafted a model peace agreement to show that there remained wide support among both Israelis and Palestinians for a solution based on two states for two peoples.

It has barely been noticed, but there has been a change for the better in the Bush administration’s thinking -- or at least talking -- about the Middle East. For the first time in six years, Washington is putting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations near the top of its agenda. For the first time, it wants those negotiations to address the fundamental political issues that divide the two sides and has begun to evoke the need to lay out what the administration calls a political horizon. And for the first time, it seems willing to take a risk.