Rice and Cheney and the Middle East

Ray · 11-26-2007, 23:34 PM

Quote:

Rice’s Turnabout on Mideast Talks

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: November 26, 2007

WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 — At President Bush’s first National Security Council meeting in January 2001, he announced that he did not want to be drawn into the shattered Middle East peace process, people at the meeting recalled, because he believed that former President Bill Clinton had pushed so hard for an Israeli-Palestinian accord that he made the situation worse.

Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld agreed with the president, while Secretary of State Colin L. Powell countered that even if the breakdown in peace talks during Mr. Clinton’s term helped lead to the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, the United States could not stay aloof.

Condoleezza Rice, the new national security adviser, kept silent, but privately she shared Mr. Bush’s views.

“There was absolutely no prospect of a Middle East peace process that was going to lead to anything,” she said in an interview in May about her thinking in 2001. “I just didn’t see it.”

Nearly seven tumultuous years later, Ms. Rice, as secretary of state, has led the Bush administration to a startling turnaround and is now thrusting the United States as forcefully as Mr. Clinton once did into the role of mediator between the Israelis and Palestinians. The culmination of her efforts occurs this week in Annapolis, Md., as Mr. Bush, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, meet to set the outlines of a final peace agreement before the end of Mr. Bush’s term.

For Ms. Rice, Annapolis reflects her evolution from passive participant to activist diplomat who has been willing to break with Mr. Cheney and other conservatives skeptical of an American diplomatic role in the Middle East. Mr. Cheney argued with Ms. Rice against a pivotal Middle East speech that Mr. Bush gave in 2002 in the Rose Garden, fought her on a host of other issues, including Iran and North Korea, and today surrounds himself with senior advisers dubious about the Annapolis meeting.

Many other Middle East experts remain unconvinced as well, particularly since the failure so far of the Israelis and Palestinians to agree on a joint statement to come out of the 40-nation conference has forced Ms. Rice to recast Annapolis as the start rather than the end of negotiations. Critics say she is organizing little more than an elaborate photo opportunity.

“This administration has too often engaged in stagecraft, not statecraft,” said Dennis Ross, who was Middle East envoy for Mr. Clinton and the first President George Bush. “One of the reasons there’s so much skepticism from people in the region is that they were led to believe that this was going to be a breakthrough.”

Ms. Rice’s thinking on the Middle East changed for several reasons, her aides said. She has been under increasing pressure to get involved in the peace negotiations from European and Arab leaders whose support she needs for the campaign of diplomatic and economic pressures on Iran. She considers it equally important, her aides said, to shore up the moderate leadership of Mr. Abbas, who is facing a sharp internal challenge from the more militant Hamas faction.

Not least, Ms. Rice’s supporters say, she is determined to fashion a legacy in the Middle East that extends beyond the war in Iraq.

Ms. Rice was able to engineer the administration’s shift in large part because of her extraordinarily close relationship with the president — Mr. Bush “loved Condi,” said Andrew H. Card Jr., the former White House chief of staff — and her ability to move him at critical moments. Mr. Bush, Ms. Rice insisted, is also fully committed to the Annapolis meeting.

“The president has wanted to see this happen,” Ms. Rice said in a recent interview. “We have discussions about how to do it — is the time right for this or is the time right for that? But this is the president’s issue as much as it’s mine.”

A Foot on the Brakes

Ms. Rice began her journey as a voice of caution in the first big Middle East crisis the White House faced, in the spring of 2002, when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up at a large Passover meal in an Israeli beach resort hotel. The militant group Hamas took responsibility, and Israel’s leaders, reacting with fury, sent troops and tanks to storm the Ramallah compound of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.

Mr. Bush responded by dispatching Mr. Powell to the region, even though both believed that there was little the United States could do. “The president said, ‘You’ve got to go, it’s going to be ugly, you’re going to get beaten up, but you’ve got a lot of fire wall to burn up,’” Mr. Powell recalled.

Ms. Rice, whose first trip to Israel was in 2000, stayed back in Washington to monitor and rein in Mr. Powell. She was the messenger for Mr. Bush, who had adopted his hands-off policy in Middle East negotiations not only because of Mr. Clinton but because he was reluctant to make too many demands on Israel at that point in his term. So as Mr. Powell traveled from fruitless meetings with Ariel Sharon, then the prime minister, in Jerusalem and Mr. Arafat in Ramallah, Ms. Rice was constantly on the telephone admonishing Mr. Powell to slow down to avoid putting too much pressure on Mr. Sharon, Mr. Powell recalled.

“She was conveying whatever angst existed in the White House that day,” Mr. Powell said. “It was cautionary and wanting to know what I was doing so she could report it to the president.”

By the end of the trip, Ms. Rice even rejected Mr. Powell’s idea of a peace conference in the region, but Mr. Powell dug in. “I finally told her, late at night, ‘You may not like it, but I’m the one who’s here, and I’ve got to say something,’” Mr. Powell said he told Ms. Rice. He announced the conference before returning to Washington, but without support from the White House, the idea was dead.

The Bush administration might have continued with bursts of attention followed by drift had it not been for the looming war in Iraq. By June 2002, Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice realized that before the Europeans and Arabs would support an American-led invasion, the administration would have to prove that it cared about more in the Middle East than the security of Israel.

Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice began to engage in a major rethinking. The result was a speech, a major departure in American policy, that called for Palestinian elections and demanded the ouster of Mr. Arafat before the United States would support a Palestinian state. Ms. Rice saw it as the beginning of a notion that one day there could be a democratic Arab Middle East, but Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney, who were strongly opposed to anything that might require Israel to accept a Palestinian state that could become a source for terrorism on its border, objected.

At a National Security Council meeting a few days before the speech, Mr. Cheney spoke up. “There was just a sense of was the president inserting himself in something that he didn’t have an answer for, and that was possibly going to make things worse or certainly not make them better?” Ms. Rice said, recalling the nature of Mr. Cheney’s doubts. Mr. Rumsfeld eventually agreed with the speech, but the vice president was still opposed on the day that Mr. Bush delivered it, June 24, 2002.

“I think he just thought the president shouldn’t be giving a speech on the Middle East, which kind of implied that if something happened, we might re-engage,” Ms. Rice said. Mr. Cheney declined to comment on Ms. Rice’s remarks.

Detoured by Iraq

Over the next year, the peace efforts languished as Ms. Rice and Mr. Bush focused on the coming invasion of Iraq. When Israeli tanks and troops surrounded Mr. Arafat’s compound again in September 2002, this time in response to back-to-back suicide bombings, Ms. Rice viewed the siege as damaging to the administration’s campaign to enlist support in the Arab world for the war in Iraq. In a White House meeting with Dov Weissglas, then a senior adviser to Mr. Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, Ms. Rice demanded, successfully, that the Israelis withdraw.

“She said in her way, politely but very firmly, that the United States was trying to put together the coalition prior to the invasion of Iraq, and our operation at that time was very disturbing,” Mr. Weissglas said in a recent interview.

It was not until the eve of the war in March 2003, and then only under pressure from Tony Blair, the British prime minister, that the White House finally endorsed the “road map,” a peace plan of incremental steps that was to lead to a Palestinian state in three years. Mr. Bush said he was adopting the plan because the Palestinians had slated Mr. Abbas to take the job of prime minister and negotiate with Israel.

By the spring of 2004, when Mr. Bush agreed to support a plan by Mr. Sharon to withdraw Israeli settlers and forces from Gaza, Mr. Sharon asked for something more that set off a huge fight within the administration: American recognition that Palestinian refugees and their descendants who had fled in the 1940s would have a right of return to a new Palestinian state, but not to Israel itself.

Ms. Rice agreed that allowing Palestinians to return to Israel would overwhelm the Jewish population and effectively obliterate Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. Mr. Cheney and his allies supported Mr. Sharon’s request, but the State Department had always taken the position that the issue — with the final borders of a Palestinian state and how Jerusalem might be shared by the two sides — should be decided through negotiations, not by fiat from Washington.

Aware of the debate within the Bush administration, Tzipi Livni, now the Israeli foreign minister but then the minister for immigrant absorption, went to plead her case to Ms. Rice in Washington. “I had the opportunity to convince Rice,” Ms. Livni said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year.

Ms. Rice said she understood the issue was “very, very core” to Ms. Livni, and acknowledged that Ms. Livni’s appeal “was taken into account in the president’s words” when Mr. Bush made a pivotal announcement, in April 2004, that any “just, fair and realistic framework” for Israel would mean that Palestinians would have to settle in their own state — an enormous benefit to Mr. Sharon.

A Reckoning Point

When Ms. Rice became secretary of state in the second term, she told Mr. Bush in a long conversation at Camp David the weekend after the 2004 election that her priority would have to be progress in the Middle East. It was a turning point in more ways than one; Mr. Arafat died a few days later. Although Ms. Rice said in an interview that she had set no conditions when she took the job, her aides said that she had known that her relationship with the president would give her far greater influence to push an agenda, including peacemaking in the Middle East, than Mr. Powell’s.

Accordingly, Ms. Rice spent much of 2005 working on the Gaza withdrawal that she thought would contribute to stability. Instead, it was seen as so emboldening the radicals that in early 2006 Hamas won a landslide victory in Palestinian elections over Mr. Abbas and his governing party, Fatah.

Ms. Rice, who had heralded the election as a symbol of the new stirrings of democracy in the Middle East, was so blindsided by the victory that she was startled when she saw a crawl of words on her television screen while exercising on her elliptical trainer the morning after the election: “In wake of Hamas victory, Palestinian cabinet resigns.”

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s not right,’” Ms. Rice recalled. When the crawl continued, she got off the elliptical trainer and called the State Department.

“I said, ‘What happened in the Palestinian elections?’” Ms. Rice recalled. “And they said, ‘Oh, Hamas won.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, Hamas won?’”

Ms. Rice’s credibility was further damaged when she delayed calling for a cease-fire as Israel plunged into a two-front war in Lebanon and Gaza that summer. By the end of 2006, with the peace efforts in shambles and the administration’s time running out, Ms. Rice began to pick up the pieces.

Over Christmas, she took home reports written by the State Department historian on previous American efforts toward a peace agreement in the Middle East, and met alone in her Watergate apartment with Ms. Livni. There they worked out an ambitious plan to get Mr. Olmert to meet with Mr. Abbas, not on the incremental steps of the road map, but on the big “final status” issues of a Palestinian state.

Since then, Ms. Rice has made eight trips to the region, and her supporters say she remains determined against the odds. “She knows very well if she doesn’t do anything, she will be Iraq,” a European diplomat and a friend of hers said.

Mr. Weissglas had another interpretation. “I don’t think she’s led by the desire to get a Nobel Prize for Peace,” he said. “But I think she truly believes in the last five years conditions have changed on both sides that enable now a step toward a final resolution.”

Both articles are adapted from “Condoleezza Rice: An American Life,” by Elisabeth Bumiller, to be published next month by Random House.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/wa..._r=1&ref=world

An interesting backgrounder to the Middle East peace process.

With Syria agreeing to join the Peace Talks, the situation looks bright, but one wonders if there will be anything concrete coming out of this summit. One may not be optimistic, but one can surely be hopeful.

HAMAS holds the key and they are surely not being invited or are they? If not, who is representing their views.

I heard an interview of one of the Hamas leaders on BBC's Hard Talk. If that is their official view, then one wonders if peace will ever come to the Middle East.

Ray · 11-26-2007, 23:41 PM

Quote:

Syria Is to Attend Talks in Annapolis

U.S. Plays Down Any Focus on Golan

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 26, 2007; Page A10

JERUSALEM, Nov. 25 -- Syria plans to send a deputy foreign minister to the U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace conference in Annapolis this week, government officials in the Syrian capital of Damascus said Sunday.

The announcement, carried by news agencies in Damascus, amounts to a diplomatic compromise by the Syrians, who had demanded that the return of the Golan Heights from Israel be placed on the meeting's agenda in return for their participation.

It is unclear how that issue will be addressed at the one-day conference Tuesday, so Syrian officials decided to send a delegation led by Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad to express its reservations.

Most other Arab countries, including influential Egypt and Saudi Arabia, will send foreign ministers, in a higher-level show of support for the Bush administration's effort to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace before it leaves office in just over a year.

The meeting is designed to inaugurate the first formal Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations in nearly seven years.

White House officials reacted coolly to the news of Syria's acceptance and sought to play down any hope that the status of the Golan Heights would be a focus of the discussions. Briefing reporters, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said that the invitees were welcome to raise whatever issues they liked but that the focus of the conference would be Israeli-Palestinian peace.

"They were invited to come," Hadley said. "We will see what they have to say when they get here."

Also in Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni met over lunch at Rice's residence.

The Bush administration has sought to rally Arab support for the meeting, particularly among Sunni Arab countries that, like Israel, fear Shiite Iran's rising influence in the region. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are two such countries without formal diplomatic ties to Israel that will attend.

President Bush said in a statement Sunday that "the broad attendance at this conference by regional states and other key international participants demonstrates the international resolve to seize this important opportunity to advance freedom and peace in the Middle East."

But pre-conference talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators did not produce a joint statement outlining the peace process to follow this week's largely symbolic gathering. The failure highlights how contentious the talks will be when participants take up issues such as the final borders of a Palestinian state, the status of Jerusalem and the right claimed by Palestinian refugees to return to homes inside Israel.

Even though a majority of the 22-member Arab League agreed to attend, Arab officials have expressed deep reservations about how much the conference will achieve, given the late hour of the Bush administration's diplomacy and the violent divisions within the Palestinian electorate.

Syria, whose Alawite-led government is an ally of Iran, has been even more reluctant to accept the U.S. invitation. Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war, later annexing it in a move not recognized internationally.

President Bashar al-Assad's government said it would come to the conference only if the territory's return received serious attention, a request the Arab League made in a letter to the Bush administration last week.

"Israel hopes that this is an indication of a change in the regime's orientation," said Mark Regev, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman. "But we'll have to wait and see."

Long a symbol of secular Arab nationalism, Syria is also important in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of its relationship with Hamas. The armed Islamic movement seized control of the Gaza Strip in June from forces loyal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate Fatah leader who supports peace talks with Israel and plans to attend the Annapolis meeting.

Hamas's exiled political leader, Khaled Mashal, lives and works in Damascus. Israeli and U.S. officials have called on the Syrian government to close the Hamas office -- and those of other armed Palestinian movements there -- as proof of its desire to begin new peace negotiations with Israel.

Hamas leaders, now running a parallel administration in Gaza, have warned Abbas not to make concessions to Israel in Annapolis.

Formally known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization by the Bush administration and Israel. It was not invited to the conference and is planning a counter-demonstration this week that it had hoped Syria would attend.

"Syria feels it is under pressure from the world community, and the U.S. in particular, so if the Golan is on the agenda they will come," said Ahmed Yousef, a senior Hamas official in Gaza. But, Yousef said, "Syria, like the other Arab countries, knows this will not be a historical event, only a show."

"This is like cycling without the chain attached -- a lot of effort and not one inch progressed," he said.

Staff writer Michael Abramowitz in Washington contributed to this report.

washingtonpost.com

Will Syria be representing the Hamas' views?

Ray · 11-26-2007, 23:50 PM

Quote:

Don't ignore Hamas

Hamas won't attend this week's peace talks, but it can still sink them.

By Yossi Beilin

from the November 26, 2007 edition

Hamas's victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections in January 2006, and its violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in June, were very bad news for those who believe in Israeli-Palestinian peace. But as Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) prepare to launch formal negotiations on final status – for the first time in seven years – Israel should seek to reach a cease fire with Hamas as soon as possible.

This is not an easy position for an Israeli to take. Hamas is a religiously fanatical organization that has used the worst kind of terrorist violence against Israelis. That Hamas won parliamentary elections does not automatically render it politically legitimate. Democracy is about more than winning elections, and Hamas's violent takeover of the Gaza Strip was a flagrant demonstration of its readiness to defy democratic principles.

But politics is full of paradoxes, and Hamas's takeover of Gaza did create an opportunity. Put schematically, as Gaza fell to the "bad guys," the West Bank was reclaimed by the "good guys," who quickly distanced themselves from Hamas and set up their own pragmatic (in some ways, liberal) government. For Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas could now be recast as the politically sanitized partner that Mr. Olmert had insisted he so dearly wanted.

Yet even as the new status quo has allowed Olmert and Mr. Abbas to embark on a serious process, it also presents both leaders with unprecedented challenges. Hamas's control of Gaza gives it a political and geographical platform from which to disturb – even to spoil – any peace talks. Already Hamas permits the constant firing of Qassam rockets into Israel, and it threatens to carry out suicide bombings inside Israel. If it continues to be sidelined, Hamas will probably try to thwart the upcoming meeting in Annapolis, Md., and the process the participants hope to ignite, by escalating the violence to such a degree that the parties will find it difficult even to meet, let alone negotiate peace.

In other words, precisely because Israel and the PLO are ready to sit down and talk, Hamas cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, a broad coalition has formed of those who believe that it not only can be ignored but should be. This coalition includes the majority of Arab states, which support an embargo on Gaza for fear that Hamas's political success there would strengthen radical Islamism in their own countries, as well as in the US, the European Union, and the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, which is determined to force Hamas to admit failure and give up power.

Against such a broad coalition, it is hard for an Israeli to talk about engaging Hamas, let alone about a cease fire. But unlike many others, Israel cannot afford to pretend that Hamas does not exist. Hamas is our next-door neighbor, not that of Washington or Brussels or (with all due respect to Egypt's sensitivity to the dangers of fundamentalist fervor) Cairo. We are responsible for the lives and security of our citizens, whether they live within range of the Qassam rockets or in the bustling centers of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Israel also continues to share residual responsibility for the welfare of the 1.4 million Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied for nearly 40 years. The fact, moreover, that Israel continues to exercise control over all but one of Gaza's entry and exit points, as well as over its airspace and sea territory, places additional responsibilities on it.

Given that the current policy of containment has not quelled the violence across its border, Israel should opt for another way. The only option that I see serving the cause of peace is to enter into a dialogue with Hamas through a third party in order to reach a cease fire. Such an agreement would include the total cessation of mutual violence; arrangements at the border to allow goods and services to pass in and out of the Gaza Strip; the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier abducted in June 2006; and a commitment by Hamas to prevent all attempts to undermine this week's meeting in Annapolis and the resulting process.

The prospects for making progress on peace will be greater if we establish peace on the ground here and now.

Yossi Beilin is a member of the Israeli Knesset and chairman of the Meretz-Yachad Party. He is a former justice minister as well as the architect of the unofficial Geneva Initiative, a comprehensive and detailed draft agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. ©2007 The Washington Post.
Don't ignore Hamas | csmonitor.com

What are the options of ignoring Hamas?

Can there be any worthwhile peace if Hamas, which has been democratically elected, be ignored?

A very tricky questions and one wonders what are the options!

Ray · 11-27-2007, 00:24 AM

James Carroll

The Boston Globe

Obstacles and opportunity for Mideast peace

By James Carroll
November 26, 2007

OBSTACLES abound. When representatives of more than 40 nations convene in Annapolis tomorrow, hoping to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, there will be many reasons for pessimism.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas presides over a fractured people, with Hamas ready to spoil any agreement. Qassam rockets fired from Gaza remind Israelis what a hostile Palestinian state could do from the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is politically vulnerable to extremist figures on the Israeli side who want no concessions.

Olmert last week promised to suspend construction in settlements near Jerusalem, but the endless expansion of Jewish settlements in Palestinian areas remains a paramount impediment to any agreement - exactly as it was intended to be. In the Knesset, a law advances that forbids any compromise on the status of Jerusalem.

The last thing Palestinians need is a high profile peace conference that debates abstractions while ignoring the crushing realities of life under a brutal occupation. Issues of free movement within the territories, the crippling isolation of Gaza, malnourished children, Israeli readiness to punish a population for actions of individuals - such matters must be not be left to the distant by-and-by.

Principal Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, meanwhile, have struggled even to define what the Annapolis meeting aims to accomplish. For all of these reasons, polls suggested last week that, while strong majorities of Israelis and Palestinians both firmly approve of the conference, majorities also doubt it will achieve results. A punditry consensus is skeptical. Obstacles abound, to repeat, and so does pessimism.

There is another way to look at Annapolis, even without donning rose-colored glasses. First of all, it is crucial to think of this meeting as the beginning of something, not the end. It can be the launching of a multipart dynamic that takes on a life of its own, opening into unexpected realms of possibility. For all of the factors weighing against progress, several important ones push in a positive direction.

Chief among these is the international character of the conference. What the presence of those representatives from the more than 40 countries means is that the world community is now pressing for resolution of this problem and looking for ways to support it.

Such broad internationalization has been the key to peace in the past, most notably in Europe, where hardly anyone remembers when Germany and France were mortal enemies. The internationalization of Middle East reconciliation efforts can break the choke hold that has suffocated not only Israeli and Palestinian impulses, but those of the heretofore ineffectual negotiating partners, especially the United States.

The active Arab commitment to this resuscitating of the peace process is the single largest reason for hope. A historic transformation of the Middle East dynamic became possible when the Arab League issued its own parameters for peace in 2002, with Arab nations affirming in advance any negotiated settlement to which Israelis and Palestinians could agree. This removed an obstacle that, for example, was one of the major reasons Yasser Arafat could not quite close the Clinton-brokered deal at Camp David in 2000.

Bill Clinton's example suggests another reason for hope. After seven years of drift, during which Palestinians embraced suicide bombing and Israeli settlements vastly multiplied, Clinton focused his famous laser on the Middle East only in the last year of his term. Obviously, he was desperate to rescue his own legacy, and nearly did.

The so-called Clinton parameters - a two-state solution, with Israel recognized, most Jewish settlements dismantled, some territorial adjustments, compromise and compensation on the refugee issue, and Jerusalem the capital of both nations - still define a mutually understood final agreement.

Now George W. Bush is in Clinton's position. He, too, hopes to rescue a legacy, and has a year in which to do it. Indeed, the political woundedness of all the key figures, from Bush and Condoleezza Rice to Abbas and Olmert to the leaders of extremist-threatened Arab regimes, gives each one a transcendent motive to make peace.

And every player knows that, when a new administration takes office in Washington in 2009, another period of drift will almost surely begin, with the status quo rampant once more.

Which brings us to the final reason for hope. The status quo is now universally recognized as catastrophic for everybody. "Unless a political horizon can be found," Olmert said last week, "the results will be deadly." Deadly to a two-state solution, Palestinian hope, and Israeli democracy. Deadly to the world. By comparison, all obstacles to peace are minor.

"Obstacles," as Emerson insisted, "exist to be overcome."

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
Obstacles and opportunity for Mideast peace - The Boston Globe

A summation.

Ray · 11-27-2007, 00:26 AM

Quote:

To Annapolis - without illusions

By Shlomo Avineri

There is something delusory about the range of reactions being heard in Israel ahead of the Annapolis conference. The extreme right refers to it as to an approaching Holocaust and warns of dangerous concessions. The extreme left sees it as the last chance for Israeli-Palestinian conciliation and threatens that if it does not produce the hoped-for peace, the situation will deteriorate into chaos.

Both of these apocalyptic forecasts are groundless. Annapolis is nothing more than an attempt to institutionalize the change that has taken place in the atmosphere between Israel and the Palestinians and to try to find a way out - as modest as it may be - of the freeze that resulted from the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit and the second intifada. In addition, Annapolis is an attempt to rescue something of the prestige of President George W. Bush, whose road map has not led anywhere to date.

Anyone who expects Annapolis to lead to an agreement is ignoring the situation on the ground. The gaps between the relatively moderate Israeli stance, which is represented by the Olmert-Barak government, and the relatively moderate stance represented by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, are still too profound. Even a consensual declaration of principles is apparently unattainable: In any declaration of principles, the Palestinians will demand that Israel agree, more or less, to a return to the 1967 borders and to turning Jerusalem into the capital of the two states. It is hard to imagine that the Israeli government would be willing and able to do so at present. Although we can reasonably assume that a future settlement, if it is in fact achieved, will follow those guidelines, an outright declaration to that effect by Israel is not politically feasible at the moment.
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The same is true regarding Israel's demand that the Palestinians give up the right of return and recognize Israel as the Jewish national state. It is hard to see the Palestinians capable of doing this at present. This said, it is clear that such a concession and such recognition will be a crucial element of a future agreement. Israel has already twice, at Camp David in 1978 and in Oslo in 1993, recognized the legitimate rights of the Arab-Palestinian nation, and it was the mistake of both Menachem Begin and Yossi Beilin not to demand the same recognition from the Palestinian side. It is clear that in the final analysis, such Palestinian recognition will be required, as the basis of the principle of dividing the country and of "two states for two nations."

Above all else hovers Hamas' control of Gaza: The infighting between members of Fatah and Hamas is not exactly the ideal backdrop for a historic conciliation between Israel and the Palestinians. It is clear that first the Palestinians have to reach an internal national understanding among themselves - one not determined by violence.

What can nevertheless be expected of Annapolis? First, something has already been achieved. After almost six years in which Israeli and Palestinian leaders have not spoken to each other, in recent weeks they have been meeting regularly. Perhaps they have not yet reached agreements, but the fact they are talking is in itself an achievement that should not be made light of.

That is what will happen in Annapolis as well: An international event in which Israeli and Palestinian leaders meet is no small achievement after the humiliating failure of Camp David 2000. We can assume that Annapolis will not be merely a photo-op, but that an agreement will be reached about issues that have to be discussed. We can reasonably assume that work groups will be established, as happened after the Madrid Conference, and that they will be required to report on their progress to another meeting of the conference plenum. We can also expect concrete steps by Israel such as the dismantling of illegal outposts and the removal of checkpoints, and a fight against the terrorist gangs by the Palestinians.

It is in fact a modest endeavor, and certainly not the End of Days. But after the collapse of the Oslo Accords and what seemed to be a rift that could not be mended, this is a certain and significant achievement. Only in this way, step by step, will peace ever be established in our region.

To Annapolis - without illusions - Haaretz - Israel News

From Israel.

Ray · 11-27-2007, 00:29 AM

Quote:

Nov 25, 2007 21:06 | Updated Nov 26, 2007 11:30
The Region: Inviting a bull into the china shop

By BARRY RUBIN

What would you do if your foreign policy agenda had these priorities:

• get Arab and European support for solving the Iraq crisis;

• mobilize Arab and European forces against a threat led by Iran and its allies Syria, Hamas, and Hizbullah;

• get Iran to stop its campaign to acquire nuclear weapons;

• reestablish American credibility toward friends and deterrence toward enemies;

• reduce the level of Israel-Palestinian conflict.

That pretty much describes the US framework for dealing with the Middle East nowadays.

The Annapolis conference is not going to contribute to these goals. Its most likely outcome is either failure, or a non-event portrayed as a victory because it took place at all.

No one is going to say, We are so grateful at the US becoming more active on Arab-Israeli issues that we are going to back its policies on other issues.

On the contrary, the conference is more likely to show the inability of the US to produce results, thus undermining belief in American leverage in the region in general. It shines the spotlight on the most divisive issue, the great excuse for not doing more to help US efforts, raising its prominence.

WHAT MOST of Washington simply fails to understand is that any real demand for Palestinian or Arab concessions will be fodder for radical groups and frighten Arab regimes, pushing the latter away from support for America rather than toward it. And any Israeli concessions obtained by this process will not satisfy their demands, either.

Despite thousands of claims by lots of famous people, national leaders and respected journals, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict will not make radical Islamism or terrorism go away.

Would you like to know why? Because even if this issue could be solved - which isn't about to happen for reasons requiring a different article - doing so would necessitate a compromise including an end to the conflict, acceptance of Israel and compromises by the Arab side.

These steps would inflame the extremists and make any Arab rulers who accepted them vulnerable to being called traitors. It would increase instability in the Arab world, also by removing the conflict as a splendid excuse and basis for mobilizing support for the current rulers. Arab politicians understand this reality; most people in the West don't.

Such considerations are accurate analytically, but the conference will take place anyway. It has been reinterpreted by the US government as the opening of a long-term process rather than its culmination. The analogy is with the Madrid meeting of 1991 - which started a nine-year-long, failed peace process - rather than the Camp David summit of 2000, which marked its breakdown.

GIVEN THE fact that the meeting is going to take place, and one would like to see as little damage result as possible, what is the worst mistake that could be made to ensure that an already difficult situation becomes worse? Answer: Invite Syria.

Let's remember a few things. The meeting was called to deal with the Palestinian issue. Bringing in the Syrian question is going to destroy that focus. Palestinian leaders know this to be true and are no doubt horrified by Damascus getting equal time.

But that's just the start of the problem. Run your eye back up the page to the five points listed as priorities for US policy.

Iraq? Syria is the main sponsor of the terrorist insurgency. It has a deep interest in ensuring that no moderate, stable, pro-Western regime takes root in Syria.

The radical alliance? Syria is a leading factor in the problem, a partner with Iran for 20 years. Anyone who believes that Damascus can be split from Teheran understands nothing about the mutual benefits Syria gets from the alliance - far greater than anything the West could possibly give to its dictator President Bashar Assad.

Iran's nuclear ambitions? The day Iran gets atomic weapons will be a great day for Syria, ensuring its strategic protection, damaging Western influence, and helping the radical Islamist cause that Syria backs.

American credibility? It undermines years of US efforts to pressure Assad away from radical adventurism. Syria can now show that it can kill Americans soldiers in Iraq, murder democratic Lebanese politicians, foment Hamas's takeover of the Gaza Strip and sponsor Hizbullah's effort to seize power in Lebanon - all without incurring any serious risk or cost.

ON THE contrary, Syria is now making demands on the US for concessions in order to entice it to show up. This is happening at the very moment when plans for an international trial of Syrian leaders for political assassinations in Lebanon are gathering momentum, as Syria's campaign to install a puppet government in Beirut has just been foiled.

Is the conference's purpose, however ill-conceived, to make progress on Arab-Israeli peace and strengthen the Palestinian Authority? Having Syria present lets in the main Arab sponsor of Hamas, a state working tirelessly to throw out the current Palestinian leadership and raise the level of Arab-Israeli violence.

Believing Assad really intends to negotiate peace seriously is folly enough. But inviting Syria is the equivalent of inviting Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida to an anti-terrorism conference.

The writer is the author of The Truth About Syria.

The Region: Inviting a bull into the china shop | Jerusalem Post

A very interesting view from Israel!

Ray · 11-27-2007, 00:36 AM

Quote:

The Middle East as Moscow's ticket to global relevance

By Konstantin Eggert
Commentary by
Monday, November 26, 2007

Russia's foreign policy has acquired a certain swagger during Vladimir Putin's presidency. In Moscow these days it is fashionable to talk about the "rebirth of Russian power" and "doing away with the legacy of the 1990s," a decade when Russia supposedly played second fiddle to the Americans and Europeans in global affairs. Speaking earlier this year at an annual security conference in Munich, Putin said that his country's foreign policy is and will remain "independent." But what exactly does independence mean in an increasingly interdependent world? And what does it mean for the Middle East?

"Independence" in these circumstances means "independence" from Western, especially American, influence. This message plays well to Russia's domestic audience, ever nostalgic for the Soviet glories and deeply anti-American. With regard to the Middle East this means inviting Hamas to Moscow, continuing arms sales to Syria, carping on about the United States' failure in Iraq, and above all, acting as a chief international advocate for Iran.

Putin, always astute with regard to public opinion, plays well to anti-American prejudices in the Middle East, especially during his recent tour of the Gulf states. The message is cemented by a new satellite channel Rusiya al-Yawm - an Arabic version of Russia Today, a Kremlin-sponsored propaganda station.

There are underlying reasons for this behavior. They have more to do with what goes on in Russia's neighborhood than with Russia's interests in the Middle East, which, compared to those of the US, remain relatively modest. After the 2004 "orange revolution" in Ukraine, Russia's political class began to perceive the US as the chief cause of Russia's waning influence over the former Soviet republics. The Kremlin is convinced that the US is out to squeeze Russia out of the post-Soviet space and, if the appropriate chance presents itself, to push through regime change in Moscow itself. Hence the unofficial doctrine of creating as many problems for Washington as possible, in order to weaken America's focus on the former USSR and show a bit of muscle too.

This trend is strengthened by the conviction that the current American administration is so deeply bogged down in Iraq and so unpopular at home, that it makes the task of checking US power easier.

At the same time, Putin is careful not to overstep the invisible boundary that separates competition from open conflict. He knows only too well that Russia's political and economic resources are vastly inferior to those of the US, especially if it should come to a political standoff in the Middle East. So, on the one hand, the Russian president goes to Tehran to talk with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - something no other Group of Eight leader would do today. But on the other hand, he quickly invites Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Moscow in order to share his Iranian impressions with him. As always with Putin, he leaves everyone guessing whether he has passed on some important message or was just balancing the act.

Putin seems to have a weak spot for Israel, partly because most ex-KGB people are in awe of Israel's muscular policies and power, and partly because the number of Israelis with Russian roots has become a political factor that Moscow would be unwise to ignore.

However, what is the substance of Russia's Middle East policy? In fact, Moscow's biggest desire (to use the words of a senior European diplomat in Moscow) "is to keep a place at the top table of world politics." Being active in the Middle East provides one such opportunity at very little expense because Russia's real political and economic interests lie elsewhere, namely in the post-Soviet space, Europe and China. The Middle East hardly makes it even to the top five of Russia's foreign policy priorities.

Russia's favorite scenario for the region is for low intensity crises to continue as long as possible without them spiraling out of control. Whether on the Iranian nuclear program, Lebanon or the Palestinian issue, one thing Moscow dislikes is taking decisions, especially on whether to side with the West or to confront it. The former is unacceptable, the latter impossible. Taking a quiet step aside might turn out to be the most probable scenario.

Konstantin Eggert is Moscow bureau editor for the BBC Russian Service and member of the

Royal Institute of International Affairs. This commentary first appeared at bitterlemons-

international.org, an online newsletter.
The Daily Star - Opinion Articles - The Middle East as Moscow's ticket to global relevance

The Russian angle!

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11-27-2007, 00:24 AM	#4 (permalink)
Ray Postmaster General *Military Professional* Join Date: 08-20-03 Posts: 26,149 Country:	James Carroll The Boston Globe Obstacles and opportunity for Mideast peace By James Carroll November 26, 2007 OBSTACLES abound. When representatives of more than 40 nations convene in Annapolis tomorrow, hoping to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, there will be many reasons for pessimism. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas presides over a fractured people, with Hamas ready to spoil any agreement. Qassam rockets fired from Gaza remind Israelis what a hostile Palestinian state could do from the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is politically vulnerable to extremist figures on the Israeli side who want no concessions. Olmert last week promised to suspend construction in settlements near Jerusalem, but the endless expansion of Jewish settlements in Palestinian areas remains a paramount impediment to any agreement - exactly as it was intended to be. In the Knesset, a law advances that forbids any compromise on the status of Jerusalem. The last thing Palestinians need is a high profile peace conference that debates abstractions while ignoring the crushing realities of life under a brutal occupation. Issues of free movement within the territories, the crippling isolation of Gaza, malnourished children, Israeli readiness to punish a population for actions of individuals - such matters must be not be left to the distant by-and-by. Principal Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, meanwhile, have struggled even to define what the Annapolis meeting aims to accomplish. For all of these reasons, polls suggested last week that, while strong majorities of Israelis and Palestinians both firmly approve of the conference, majorities also doubt it will achieve results. A punditry consensus is skeptical. Obstacles abound, to repeat, and so does pessimism. There is another way to look at Annapolis, even without donning rose-colored glasses. First of all, it is crucial to think of this meeting as the beginning of something, not the end. It can be the launching of a multipart dynamic that takes on a life of its own, opening into unexpected realms of possibility. For all of the factors weighing against progress, several important ones push in a positive direction. Chief among these is the international character of the conference. What the presence of those representatives from the more than 40 countries means is that the world community is now pressing for resolution of this problem and looking for ways to support it. Such broad internationalization has been the key to peace in the past, most notably in Europe, where hardly anyone remembers when Germany and France were mortal enemies. The internationalization of Middle East reconciliation efforts can break the choke hold that has suffocated not only Israeli and Palestinian impulses, but those of the heretofore ineffectual negotiating partners, especially the United States. The active Arab commitment to this resuscitating of the peace process is the single largest reason for hope. A historic transformation of the Middle East dynamic became possible when the Arab League issued its own parameters for peace in 2002, with Arab nations affirming in advance any negotiated settlement to which Israelis and Palestinians could agree. This removed an obstacle that, for example, was one of the major reasons Yasser Arafat could not quite close the Clinton-brokered deal at Camp David in 2000. Bill Clinton's example suggests another reason for hope. After seven years of drift, during which Palestinians embraced suicide bombing and Israeli settlements vastly multiplied, Clinton focused his famous laser on the Middle East only in the last year of his term. Obviously, he was desperate to rescue his own legacy, and nearly did. The so-called Clinton parameters - a two-state solution, with Israel recognized, most Jewish settlements dismantled, some territorial adjustments, compromise and compensation on the refugee issue, and Jerusalem the capital of both nations - still define a mutually understood final agreement. Now George W. Bush is in Clinton's position. He, too, hopes to rescue a legacy, and has a year in which to do it. Indeed, the political woundedness of all the key figures, from Bush and Condoleezza Rice to Abbas and Olmert to the leaders of extremist-threatened Arab regimes, gives each one a transcendent motive to make peace. And every player knows that, when a new administration takes office in Washington in 2009, another period of drift will almost surely begin, with the status quo rampant once more. Which brings us to the final reason for hope. The status quo is now universally recognized as catastrophic for everybody. "Unless a political horizon can be found," Olmert said last week, "the results will be deadly." Deadly to a two-state solution, Palestinian hope, and Israeli democracy. Deadly to the world. By comparison, all obstacles to peace are minor. "Obstacles," as Emerson insisted, "exist to be overcome." James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. Obstacles and opportunity for Mideast peace - The Boston Globe A summation.

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