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Sunday 12 October 2008

Annapolis will achieve little

This Middle East summit is a distraction that will achieve little

The Annapolis Middle East summit won’t produce anything more than a commitment to hold another meeting. But the real worry is that Condoleezza Rice’s intense focus on the Israel Palestine question could distract her from more pressing matters in Iraq, Pakistan and North Korea.

Of course, the fact that the Syrians are still on the list — despite the phenomenally strong evidence that the facility Israeli hit there in September was a nuclear one — demonstrates just how determined Rice is to make a go of this. But to many in Washington, the whole thing is a waste of time — a vain pursuit of a legacy at best, a distraction from more pressing matters at worst. One former Cheney staffer complains that the ‘investment they have put into this has taken the energy out of other issues they should have paid attention to’. This is a frequent complaint. The crises in Pakistan, North Korea and Iraq spring to mind. Certainly, Rice has delegated much of the rest of her duties. John Negroponte, her deputy, is picking up Pakistan, Nicholas Burns, the under-secretary for political affairs, Iran and Christopher Hill North Korea. Philip Zelikow, her former counselor at state and her academic co-author, dismisses the charge, saying, ‘I’ve heard that criticism no matter what’s worked on.’ That might be true, but rarely has America had so many balls up in the air. And rarely have the consequences of dropping any one been so dire.

The sceptics point out that President Bush seems conspicuously disinclined to put his shoulder to the wheel — and history shows that direct presidential engagement is a basic precondition of progress. Or they object that Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, is simply too weak to give much ground, and that Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian National Authority, is too weak to accept anything less than a lot. (Remember that Abbas controls less than half of what would be a Palestinian state, with Gaza under the control of Hamas, which refuses to recognise Israel and remains committed to its destruction.) Martin Kramer, senior Middle East adviser to Rudy Giuliani speaking as an Olin Institute senior fellow at Harvard, describes Annapolis as ‘the triumph of hope against experience. It is a case of repeating what’s been tried before, in more favourable circumstances, without success.’

More articles from: James Forsyth | this section

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