Soccer Dad

Cooking rice

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.”

(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 is conclusion on close observation of the Secretary.

Crossposted on Yourish.

israel, peace process.