(Especially coming from the man who wrote, for example, "The Perils of Peace." Warning: this article is in all caps. You may want to cut and paste it into an editor to get normal capitalizations!) Take, for example, this short judgment to which Podhoretz says he agrees:

C., another expert on the Palestinians who briefs us today, is less sympathetic toward them than B. seemed to be. Make no mistake, he warns us: Abbas and the others represent Arafatism without Arafat. The stubble may have been replaced by a clean shave and the kaffiyeh by a coat and tie, but Abbas himself is cut from the same cloth as the man he has replaced.

So why then does Podhoretz trust the disengagement plane? Perhaps some of the answer is here:

Here, I thought, the answer lay in what I had come to see as Bush’s characteristic modus operandi. Thus, just as he had challenged the UN to enforce its own resolutions on Iraq; just as, far from “rushing into war,” as his opponents charged, he had waited many months before taking action without the blessing of the Security Council; and just as he would later do in backing the negotiations aimed at keeping Iran from developing and North Korea from deploying nuclear weapons—so in this instance he was giving his critics every chance to show that they could attain the goals they claimed to share with him by means other than the use of force, or at least without rocking every boat in sight.

It was because I had come to place so much faith in Bush that I was able to overcome my misgivings about the road map. And it was partly because Sharon was also putting his money on Bush that I was ready to bet on Sharon. Unlike most Israelis, Sharon seemed to understand that the Bush Doctrine was already changing the entire context in which the Arab/Muslim war against the Jewish state had always been waged, and that in this new context, there were things Israel could do that it would have been too risky to do before.

and more specifically this too

To me, after almost four years of watching Bushin action, this seems wildly off the mark. Indeed, just as I would be flabbergasted if Bush were to break faith with his pledge to help sow the seeds of political and economic freedoms throughout the broader Middle East, so I would be astounded were he to renege on the preconditions he has attached to his support for a Palestinian state. And here a fascinating
irony occurs to me concerning my original misgivings about the road map.
I still think that the road map embodied an attempt by the usual suspects to sabotage the June 24 speech, but I now think that the joke may be on them. Yes, the authors of the road map did manage to reintroduce the old framework of “moral equivalence” that Bush had rejected on June 24. Nevertheless, the pretense that they were implementing his “vision” coerced them into including under phase I the demand that the Palestinian leadership “undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere.”
Beyond going after these individuals and groups, the Palestinian Authority was also required to mount “effective operations aimed at . . . dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.” Now, however, Abbas—who wants to negotiate with the terrorists of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and those connected with his own party—is asking to be relieved of the demand that he crack down on them immediately and hard. There can be little doubt that the authors of the road map would like to support him on this, but Sharon is in a position to rub their noses in their own words, and that is just what he is doing.
Something similar seems to be shaping up with respect to the borders of the future Palestinian state. Under the road map, as soon as it is agreed that both parties have met all their obligations under phase I, they enter phase II, which is supposed to culminate in “the creation of a Palestinian state with provisional borders.” But Abbas would like to skip over this stage as well, and go directly into phase III, when the “permanent-status agreement” is to be forged on “borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements.”
Here again, the authors of the road map would like to accommodate him, and here too Sharon is in a good position to see them hoist by their own petard.
The upshot is that unless Abbas amazes everyone by turning out to be willing and able both to undertake a genuine struggle against Palestinian terrorism and to speed up the pace of democratic reform, the process will probably get stalled in phase II. This will—just as Bush clearly envisaged in his June 24 statement—give the Israelis a chance to find out whether the Palestinians have truly decided to call off their war against the Jewish state before the most intractable issues get shoved onto the table.

Taken together, apparently Podhoretz is saying that President Bush has lowered the bar somewhat for the Palestinians. If they can't even manage the lowered expectations here, there won't be Palestine. So he sees them as being constrained by Sharon's and Bush's maneuvering. I can't be that positive. At least it doesn't look that way to me. It seems to me that he's taken all the available evidence, suggesting that there's no way to trust the PA and says that he trusts President Bush and PM Sharon more. At the very least there's extreme cynicism at work here - despite Israeli efforts the PA will never merit anything more than Gaza.
(Another disappointment with the article is that he makes his Israeli daughter's opinion a focus of the article. It is, however, his American son-in-law's views that would be wonderfully helpful. Elliott Abrams is one of the administration's point men on the Middle East. Obviously, even if Podhoretz knows what Abrams knows, he probably couldn't reveal it.)
Another pundit (whom I've discussed at length earlier) who has shown a lot less skepticism toward unilateral disengagement than I expected is Charles Krauthammer. Three months ago Krauthammer was dismissing Mahmoud Abbas as "Arafat's Heir," but more recently in "Israel Draws the Line" he declared Israel's pending retreat from Gaza as a victory - for Israel:

Last Sunday Israel crossed two Rubicons. The Cabinet decided once and for all to withdraw from Gaza and dismantle 25 settlements -- 21 in Gaza and four in the upper West Bank. Yet, had Israel done only this, it would be seen, correctly, as a victory for terrorism, a unilateral retreat and surrender to the four-year intifada. That is why the second Israeli decision was so important. The Cabinet also voted to finish the security fence on the West Bank, which will separate Israeli and Palestinian populations and create the initial border between Israel and a nascent Palestine.

The fence decision makes clear that the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza is only part of a larger strategy, the first serious strategic idea Israel has had since its period of utter confusion and demoralization at the beginning of the 2000 intifada. The idea is this: Israel must (unilaterally, if necessary) rationalize its defensive lines -- in order to (1) protect its citizens, (2) permanently defuse the Palestinian terrorist threat and thus (3) open the door to a final peace.

Except using the fence as a border and recent adjustments to that border gives the Palestinians more territory than they would have gotten from Sharon without the violence. So it's a little difficult to say that the unilateral withdrawal does not constitute a surrender to terror. In other words is imposing borders on the Palestinian such a severe cost that they will see this as a cost of their decade of perfidy?
Jeff Jacoby for one in "Retreat from Gaza is a victory for terrorists" points out:

Listen to Ahmed al-Bahar, a top Hamas operative. ''Israel has never been in such a state of retreat and weakness as it is today following more than four years of the intifadah," he exulted last week. ''The withdrawal marks the end of the Zionist dream and is a sign of the moral and psychological decline of the Jewish state."

Like Podhoretz and Krauthammer Jacoby sees Bush and Sharon on the same page, but not in a good way. In a subsequent column, "Does Israel want Arab Democracy?" Jacoby faults both the President and the Prime Minister for failing to demand this:

But there was little in their words or body language to suggest that this democracy talk was anything more than lip service. An Arab Palestine in which ordinary citizens could freely criticize their rulers? In which political power wasn't monopolized by terrorist groups? In which the government didn't stoke the fires of anti-Semitism in order to deflect attention from its own corruption? In which there was freedom of speech and conscience? In which the outcome of elections wasn't predetermined? No -- that sort of genuine and vibrant democracy seemed far removed from anything that Bush or Sharon was expecting, let alone demanding, from Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.

In this way, he seems to be confirming what Podhoretz writes. The difference between Jacoby and Podhoretz would appear to be that the former hopes that the Palestinians will change but if they don't, Bush won't press Sharon to go further; the latter feels that both leaders intend to go further regardless of Palestinian compliance.
Daniel Pipes, too, is deadset against the withdrawal from Gaza. He puts most of the onus for this decision on Sharon, "Ariel Sharon's Folly" and follows up some reasonable questions from his audience in "The forcible removal of Israeli's from Gaza" and in his blog.
In a sense, a surprising partial concurrence to Podhoretz can be found in the latest by Jim Hoagland, "Balancing Act in Gaza":

But the Israeli leader also started to fill in his vision of what the withdrawal means -- and does not mean -- for resumption of negotiations on a final peace settlement. The Palestinians will have to "create the conditions" for future negotiations by establishing near-perfect security conditions, even though Israeli forces could not accomplish that through the occupation of Gaza.

The difference between the two is that Hoagland would have the President press Sharon on further "peace moves" regardless of the success of the Gaza experiment.
It would appear that Ehud Ya'ari, hardly a rightist doesn't see or expect much change in the PA in "Plus ca change"

Even the aides inside the chairman's bureau in the Muqata'ah in Ramallah have not changed. There's Nabil Abu Rudeina, Arafat's shadow, now sticking to Abu Mazen, who would like to get rid of him but isn't doing anything about it. And there's Arafat's longtime secretary, Dr. Ramzi Khouri, who Abu Mazen wants to send to Beirut as the PLO ambassador, but that is a matter for the distant future, and Khouri is being very careful that in the meantime nobody grabs his seat next to the new power that is. And this is true for a number of other courtiers of the departed ra'is.

And if that's the way things are inside the personal bureau of Abu Mazen, it's easy to understand why there are no changes in the other echelons of the governmental pyramid. Everything remains as it was, although the slogans and the guidelines from above are different. All of the Arafat old-timers are still in place, pretending that they've been waiting all their lives for the advent of Abu Mazen but at the same time being very careful not to look as if they're critical of their old boss. Gen. Mussa Arafat, nephew of the former leader, is currently the chief player on the Palestinian side in security coordination with the Israelis in the Gaza Strip. His counterpart in the West Bank is Gen. Hadj Ismail, who over the last 20 years has become an object of scorn and mockery in the eyes of his men. And this is the picture in the civilian administration as well. The beneficiaries of the long-standing patronage system have held on to their jobs and titles and powers; only the trickle of cash from above has been halted because unlike Arafat, Abu Mazen is not in the habit of paying bribes to his subordinates.

Finally there's the talk of whether or not Bush and Sharon were on the same page. All the above writers seemed to say that they are, at least for now. The prevelant wisdom though is that they are not seeing eye to eye and that they perhaps don't even like each other.
Typical of the latter view is this article from the Economist:

GEORGE BUSH extended his highest honour to Ariel Sharon on Monday April 11th, by having the Israeli prime minister come to talk at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The meeting was cordial—though the two men are rumoured not to like each other, Mr Bush said he looked forward to showing Mr Sharon around the ranch, and Mr Sharon invited the president to see his own farm in Israel. But the talks come at a time of high tension.

Perhaps the most tireless purveyor of the conflict between the two has been Aluf Benn of Ha'aretz. Take for example, "Instead of Friendships - Disagreements":

The news conference George Bush and Ariel Sharon held at the U.S. president's ranch felt like there was something a little off. Instead of conveying friendship and partnership, the two leaders exposed their disagreements. The tremendous effort invested in flying the prime minister here, in staging a fabulous photo op, and in tedious preparatory talks by aides, was overshadowed by arguments over construction in the settlements and the way to get the peace process moving after the withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria.

But does this really square with what we have seen. Robert Baehr writing in The American Thinker, "Media-Hyped Rift" ( via RCP ) writes:

So settlements were only mentioned in point 8, and even on this one, President Bush chose to reiterate that the US did not believe it was realistic for Israel to return to the 1949 armistice lines were a final status deal to be realized this time around between Sharon, and the media's new champion, the “moderate” Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. If the President has turned on Israel because of the issue of settlements, one might wonder why Palestinian Prime Minister Ahemd Qurei immediately attacked Bush for his statement on the issue.

(Baehr draws on HonestReporting.com's "'Showdown' at the Crawford Corral?" for some of his arguments.)
So do I think that Bush and Sharon are at loggerheads? No. Do I know what they intend past the withdrawal from Gaza? Alas, no. But then I'm not convinced many outside of the two principals know that either.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.