Given the unlikelihood of any substantial result emerging from the upcoming Annapolis summit David Brooks, in Present at Creation, asks why Secretary Rice would expend such energy in putting the darn thing together.
It’s slightly unfortunate that the peace process itself is hollow. It’s like having a wedding without a couple because you want to get the guests together for some other purpose. But that void can be filled in later. The main point is to organize the anti-Iranians around some vehicle and then reshape the strategic correlation of forces in the region. Iran has done what decades of peace proposals have not done — brought Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Palestinians and the U.S. together. You can go to Jerusalem or to some Arab capitals and the diagnosis of the situation is the same: Iran is gaining hegemonic strength over the region and is spreading tentacles of instability all around.
Yikes. The peace conference is a sham. It’s an attempt to organize the nations of the Middle East against Iran. Preposterous! And John Podhoretz agrees and demonstrates why this is absurd.
What, specifically, does the status of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship have to do with that urgent and pressing need? The honest answer is: Very little. Unless, that is, you accept the contention that the “moderate†states need and deserve some face-saving bribery in the form of Israeli concessions to get them to act reasonably in concert against Iran. But if they are so worried about Iran, why would they need face-saving bribery, especially considering David’s concession that “there is remarkably little substance to [the peace process] so far. Even people inside the Israeli and Palestinian governments are not sure what’s actually going to be negotiated and what can realistically be achieved.â€
(But then again, even though other Arab nations feared Saddam, the United States wouldn’t bring in Israel as an ally during the first Gulf War. So it is possible that Arabs would demand a bribe to join in an initiative with their own self interest in mind.)
But then I saw this article. (h/t Israel Matzav, but in a different context) David Samuels who had recently interviewed Dr. Rice in the Atlantic wrote Condi’s Shame, an assessment of what he saw in his interview with her.
Based on my own interviews with Rice, and my analysis of what she has said about the conflict over a long period of time, I have concluded that Rice is an agnostic on the subject of Israeli-Palestinian peace – but she believes very strongly that the appearance of an active effort to cut a deal is important to America’s interests in the Middle East. The paradox of Rice’s conduct is that she is taking the role of an activist secretary of state while believing very strongly on an intellectual level that events are driven by underlying historical circumstances and currents on which our actions and desires can have only a very limited effect. She has repeatedly stated that the deal cut between East and West Germany and the Soviet Union to end the Cold War would have been impossible even a few years earlier. She told me more than once that it seemed quite possible that historical circumstances may not be ripe for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Samuels, then, comes to a conclusion that’s consistent with that of Brooks. He only leaves out the speculation about the ultimate end of the Annapolis conference. He only allows that she sees arranging the conference to be in America’s interest.
Shrinkwrapped is dismissive of Secretary Rice’s efforts.
If Rice truly believes she can compel or create a breakthrough she is already lost; if she believes that it is better to convene a conference based on lies and obfuscations than to tell people the truth, her conference will surely fail. The truth is that only the Arabs can force the Palestinians to make the concessions necessary for Peace and there is no indication that the Saudis, Egyptians, Fatah, or any other actor is ready, willing, or able to make the mental leap required for peace. All else is rationalization.
Bookworm Room though argues that necessity might well be the mother of the conference.
Nevertheless, this is certainly not a wacky idea, and it does reflect an impulse to bring some central stability to a region that will become entirely unbalanced if the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis does in fact ascend to real power, rather than stopping at the noises of power, along with the violence of terrorism.
Daled Amos, though clearly sympathetic to Podhoretz, makes a similar observation to mine.
Why would there be a need to bribe the alliance to do something that natural self-interest should make natural and automatic? Then again, natural self-interest did not keep the Arabs out of the Nazi fold during WWII either.
I’m not sold on the Brooks/Samuels argument. However Samuels is somewhat more convincing in that he’s basing his conclusion on close observation of the Secretary.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
Perhaps they do not intend to do anything about “Palestine” but are just pretending that is the subject so that they can actually have a secret agreement on Iran. This would come out when all of a sudden, everyone who was at the conference turns around and takes care of the problem. It is not a matter of bribery but a matter of not broadcasting it. Consider what the NY Times did to top secret anti-terrorist programs.
I think the attack on Iran will take place after the November 2008 election. Assuming things stay pretty much the same until then.
George W. Bush has been pretty adamant about refusing to allow Iran to get nuclear weapons.
He was pretty adamant about not allowing a genocide in Darfur too. Of course, nobody shouting for doing something about Darfur would accept the only rational thing to do to stop it, to wit overthrow the vicious Sudan Islamist government that ordered the genocide in the first place, or at least beat the crap out of them until they cry uncle and agree to stop their criminous activities. Suggest that to Mia Farrow and watch her recoil in horror.
As to the Annapolic Conference, my take on the reasons for it is simpler. The Bush Administration is exhausted. Seven years of vicious partisan warfare against it, plus the stress of fighting a real war at the same time, have left it totally whacked out. All Bush has the strength to do now is carry on with the Iraq Campaign and, maybe, do something drastic about Iran before he leaves office.
The result is that the purveyers of Conventional Wisdom have floated back to the top. Rice is as susceptible to the bureaucrats flogging CW as Powell was, it seems. And the most conventional of CW at Foggy Bottom is that we have to make the Arabs happy by leaning on Israel to get some kind of Israel-Palestinian Arab peace agreement. Where CW rules in foreign policy malevolent stupidity follows. That, I believe, is the genesis of this futile, false, posssibly disastrous conference.