US Secretary of State makes farewell tour of the Middle East

Just a year after the United States sponsored a Middle East Peace Conference at Annapolis, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is off to the region next week to meet with various parties in order to encourage them to press ahead.

Last year, America urged the parties to conclude a peace deal by the end of President Bush’s term of office but that doesn’t look likely now. Arabs and Israelis both agree on at least one thing and it is that the American timelines will not be met.

Rice will start her tour the day after America elects a new President. The election will undoubtedly impact on the parties’ views of what will be possible in the weeks and months ahead.

But the American election is not the only one at issue. Ms. Livni’s failure to put together a coalition means Israel will go to fresh elections in February. And Palestinians are also divided over who is in charge and some are calling for fresh elections. The Israeli elections alone should delay any peace negotiations until well into the spring of 2009.

Secretary Rice will visit Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian territories during her four-day tour. After soliciting views from Fatah Palestinians, various Israelis and Jordan’s King, Rice will huddle with representatives of the Middle East Quartet at Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh resort on the 9th of November. The Quartet, composed of the EU, US, UN and Russia, are unlikely to be able to offer much encouragement.

Meanwhile, Hamas and Fatah are scheduled to start reconciliation discussions in Cairo on the same day Rice meets on the Red Sea with the Quartet. These intra-Palestinian talks are very important. Hamas currently controls Gaza while Fatah has broader sway on the West Bank. Before Palestinians can hope to succeed in talks with the Israelis, they must have a clear idea of who is in charge and what they want.

The same applies to the Israelis. Political leadership in Israel is passing to a younger generation but lately they seem equally incapable of deciding who is in charge of their political future.

There will be no progress towards Peace until the two sides have determined who will speak for them and what they will say. America must do the same before it can help.

PRESIDENT BUSH TRAVELLS TO THE MIDEAST

President Bush and the First Lady arrived in Israel on May 14th at the beginning of a three-nation tour of the MidEast.

Upon arrival at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport the Israelis rolled out the red carpet. The embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres were there to greet him. In welcoming remarks Shimon Peres said President Bush may be the best friend Israel has ever had in its 60 year history. Wednesday night he held talks with Peres at his Tel Aviv residence and then addressed an international conference hosted by President Shimon Peres. There, President Bush said, "With every passing year, the bonds of friendship between America and Israel have grown stronger. America stands for peace, and so does Israel. And as we stand in peace, we must understand the realities of the world in which we live. We must be steadfast, and we must be strong in the face of those who murder the innocent to achieve their objectives. And in the long run, we share a powerful belief in a powerful weapon against the terrorists. We believe that the surest way to defeat the enemies of hatred is to advance the cause of hope through the cause of freedom; liberty as the great alternative to tyranny and terror." He also visited the Western Wall that evening with the First Lady.

Tomorrow, he and First Lady Laura Bush, makes a trip to Masada. Upon his return, he will speak to the Israeli Knesset. That evening, he will view the biblical Isaiah Scroll, the most complete and best-preserved of the Dead Sea Scrolls dating from 120 BCE. It has recently been put on display at the Israel Museum as part of the Nation’s 60th Anniversary events.

Security is tight for all these Presidential events. Traffic has been banned in the area around the President’s hotel and 14,000 Israeli police have been marshaled to help the Secret Service provide security.

Friday, President Bush finishes the mainly ceremonial trip to Israel and he flies in Air Force One to Saudi Arabia. There the President will hold talks with the aging King Abdullah. The visit officially is to commemorate the 75th year of formal U.S.-Saudi diplomatic relations. Talks are expected to focus on Iran. Saudi Arabia warned Iran today that they must be careful about their activities in Lebanon where their Shi’a surrogates, the Hizballah, fought sharp battles with Sunni and Druze forces in Beirut and Tripoli in the last week. President Bush is expected to ask the King to increase oil production. The Kingdom is currently producing 8.5 million barrels a day down from a peak production capacity of 11 million BPD. The President’s plea is likely to fall on deaf ears. The Saudi’s for their part will warn the President about the weakening of the U.S. dollar and its regional consequences.

From Saudi Arabia, Air Force One will make the short flight across the Red Sea to the Egyptian resort city of Sharm es Sheikh. There he and the First Lady will be the guests of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. He is also scheduled to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other Arab leaders, including Jordan’s King Abdullah, for substantial talks on regional issues. Topics will include the Israeli-Palestinian talks, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. Leaders from Iraq and Afghanistan are also reportedly coming to some of the meetings. He will also make remarks at the World Economic Forum on the Middle East. Once again security will be very tight as Egypt pulls out all the stops in deploying their best military and police assets.

It would not be impossible that there may be an unannounced visit by the President to Iraq on the way home. The President may see this as his best opportunity to say goodbye to the troops and to get a new update from General Petraeus, who will also soon leave Iraq to take command of U.S. Central Command.

Wrap Up of a Busy Week in the Middle East

This last week has seen some interesting developments and the coming weekend may be a bit anti-climatic. Early in the week, US Vice President Cheney visited the region. He talked about oil, Iran, Syria/Lebanon, and finally the Palestinian/Israel situation.

In Yemen, Fatah and Hamas signed a reconciliation agreement. The Yemeni agreement is a framework for a dialogue between Hamas and Fatah that, in theory, returns the situation in both Gaza and the West Bank to the status that existed prior to June 2007. Supposedly, there are no preconditions to the start of the cooperation. The office of Palestinian President, Nabil Abu Rudaina, said that the deal would remain invalid until Hamas renounces its control over the Gaza Strip.

Thursday, seventeen of the Arab League’s 22 member states sent their Foreign Ministers to Damascus for preparatory talks ahead of this weekend’s Arab Summit. Syria called on the ministers to abandon the 2002 Arab peace proposal. In a major defeat to Syria, it was agreed at the meeting that the Saudi-sponsored peace initiative would remain the basis for Arab peace engagement with Israel.

Israel for its part announced that it was trying to restart peace talks with Syria. PM Olmert and another of his ministers separately told reporters about the new initiative.

Iraqi PM Maliki issued ultimatums to Shi’a militias in Basra to surrender within 48 hours and then backed up and extended it to ten days. It is unclear whether he had to do that because of political pressures or military exigencies.

Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice departed for the Middle East. She is scheduled to meet with Palestinian PM Mahmoud Abbas and other Arab leaders during her week-long trip. Abbas today met with Jordan’s King Abdullah ahead of his meeting with Rice and then went to Damascus.

Also today, Admiral William Fallon, the Commander of US Central Command stepped down after just one year on the job and into retirement following a long career. His public political statements and approach to Iran are believed by many to have been at odds with Washington’s civilian leadership. He was replaced temporarily by his deputy, US Army Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey.

Finally, the UN issued its 10th interim report by a panel headed by Canadian former prosecutor Daniel Bellemare saying a "criminal network" of individuals acted together to carry out the 2005 murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri and many other attacks against anti-Syrian Lebanese figures perpetrated between October 2004 and December 2005. Bellemare was appointed in November to replace the Belgian Serge Brammertz as head of the UN group working to uncover who was behind Hariri's death in a Beirut car bombing. Brammertz' German predecessor, Detlev Mehlis, implicated senior officials from Syria. Damascus has denied any connection with Hariri's death or 20 attacks against anti-Syrian targets in Lebanon.

All these events set the stage for another failed Arab Summit set to commence Saturday in Damascus. Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, Oman, Jordan, and Egypt will all send low-level delegations. Syria’s Foreign Minister inferred that those countries constituted an “American virus” and that their absence was a positive thing. In reality, it shows Syria’s increasing isolation, not only over Lebanon but also over its continued willingness to follow Iran’s lead at a time when the Arab states are nervous about Iran’s intentions in the region. The fact that Damascus trumpeted today’s arrival of the President of the Comoros Islands shows how desperate they are to give the appearance that a summit is actually taking place.

Day two of the Annapolis Talks

It appears that two days of talks in Annapolis have resulted in an agreement to agree. The Parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict have agreed to direct, near full-time negotiations on all issues until a final agreement is reached in 2008. Some of the future negotiating sessions will be hosted by Russia. President Bush has appointed retired USMC General Jones as his special representative to the two negotiating parties. (That should be a relief to MG Dayton who has been stuck with the job for the past two years.)

Agreeing to agree does not seem like a big success at first glance. But remember the Conference only lasted a day and a half and involved 40 disparate parties. It was a major accomplishment just to get them all to the table (Not quite all; Djibouti was invited but failed to attend.) Just getting people to agree who are the interested parties was a major event. Getting them to then actually participate was another. It was also an accomplishment to decide to negotiate about the issues - not to negotiate about what would be negotiated. It was a success to agree to negotiate all issues, including core issues such as Jerusalem and the Right of Return. In the past, those thorny issues have always be postponed for future talks. They have now agreed to talk directly about the tough things for the first time. To talk about all the issues all the time prevents one party or the other from using arguments of sequential nature to slow progress across the board.

Hopefully, General Jones will play a useful role in determining negotiation procedures and venues. Getting the parties back into talks again will be a challenge but it should be undertaken quickly to prevent forces opposed to conflict resolution from marshalling their forces and resources against peace. Setting up lines of communications between parties who are not used to talking is another valuable role America can play.

Annapolis appears to have been an agreeable success but it is only the first stop a new track towards peace. Many things can derail it. Let us hope that this effort makes farther down the tracks than past efforts and that it finally brings great peace, prosperity and understanding to the troubled MidEast.