Tricky Mideast summit

OPINION:

Uncertainty hangs over the Middle East peace conference President Bush wants to convene in Annapolis, Md., in November. Analysts, meanwhile, are somewhat pessimistic at what they perceive as a last-ditch effort by the president at resolving the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian dispute before he leaves the White House in early 2009.

With time rapidly running out for his administration, Mr. Bush, ironically, finds himself in a situation similar to that which befell President Clinton during the waning days of his administration: Both men attempted to resolve the 60-year-old Middle East problem with too little time left on their White House clocks.

The complexity of the issues associated with the Palestinian question simply renders the logistics involved in any mediation time-consuming. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is on her fifth trip to the region since June. Henry Kissinger, when he was the top U.S. diplomat, undertook 36 visits to Damascus and an equal number to Israel in a single month to reach a breakthrough on the Golan.

“You can’t create a viable Palestinian State by the end of this administration’s time,” said Robert Malley, Middle East and North Africa program director with the International Crisis Group.

Not giving the problem the time needed was Mr. Clinton’s shortfall on Middle East peacemaking. Mr. Bush never expected to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, but in his efforts to extricate an agreement from the Palestinians and the Israelis regarding the future statehood for Palestine this late in his second term, the Middle East road map is taking Mr. Bush down that same torturous road it took Mr. Clinton.

Despite his familiarity with the issues and all the energy he devoted in trying to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute at the hastily arranged summit at the Wye River complex in Maryland, Mr. Clinton failed for basically two reasons. First was the lack of adequate preparation. Mr. Clinton tried to rush an agreement through Yasser Arafat, Palestinian Authority president, and Ehud Barak, Israel’s prime minister, hoping he could succeed in days where others had tried for decades.

Perhaps what contributed most to the failure of Mr. Clinton’s last-minute peacemaking efforts was that he chose to focus uniquely on a single aspect of a multifaceted problem.

Now, almost eight years later, Mr. Clinton’s mistake is about to be repeated by Mr. Bush and his administration. The mistake is that Mr. Bush, much like Mr. Clinton, is focusing exclusively on the Palestinian-Israeli aspect of the Middle East imbroglio while sidelining other important issues and their stakeholders.

One of the many intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stems from the fact that over the years the question of Palestine has morphed into a political Medusa, taking on many additional faces. The Palestinian issue is no longer a stand-alone problem; it has become intractably attached to other problems plaguing the Middle East. And for any solution to succeed, it must be a regional one. That makes mediation in this conflict much more complex.

For example, solving the Palestinian question while ignoring Syria’s demand for the return of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in the June 1967 Six-Day War, is unrealistic given the role Syria can play in the conflict, either in helping to resolve the crisis — or undermining a resolution to it.

Not taking into account other regional stakeholders in crisis invites failure. For the moment, the regional parties yielding enough influence are Syria and Iran. Both, for example, are in position to torpedo any accords reached at the negotiating table given their influence through proxy militias and alliances with other armed groups.

As one high-ranking Arab diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told this correspondent: “Reaching agreements in Annapolis is one thing. But if Syria stays away from the conference, as it said it would, implementing agreements on the ground can become very difficult.”

“The Syrians certainly have the capability to create mischief if things don’t go their way,” said the International Crisis Group’s Mr. Malley.

In seeking to differentiate himself from Mr. Clinton’s policies, Mr. Bush tended to ignore the Middle East and its problems. It wasn’t until the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on U.S. soil that the Bush administration woke up to the fact the Middle East cannot be ignored: In addition to the regional turmoil itself, continued unrest in the Middle East can have direct repercussions in the U.S. homeland. As Ziad Asali, the president of the American Task Force on Palestine, points out, “Solving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is in the national interest of the United States.”

Claude Salhani is editor of the Middle East Times.