Rice Ends Her Tour With Modest Results Key Leaders in Mideast Are Weakened

By Thom Shanker

Halfway through his last term in office, President George W. Bush has sent his secretary of state racing across the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and Western Europe in a mission to restart peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, and to create a foundation of Muslim support for his new strategy in Iraq. Condoleezza Rice flies home Friday with just enough progress to shield herself from criticism that the trip was a bust: The Palestinian president and Israeli prime minister promised to join Rice for three-way talks within a month, and the Quartet of would-be regional peacemakers will convene in Washington in advance. Moreover, powerful Arab states gave their blessing, however reserved, to Bush’s initiatives to snatch victory from the growing chaos that is Iraq – though they committed nothing of their own to help that effort. Throughout a week of long flights leading into long nights of negotiations, Rice said the moment was right for progress, and that the Bush administration’s accelerated efforts could succeed in the Middle East, even though past presidents eager to burnish their late-term legacies usually fell short. With much of the region in chaos, Rice cited an oft-quoted Chinese aphorism that crisis and opportunity are a couple. But crisis rules the house today. Her Israeli and Palestinian negotiating partners are extremely weakened: President Mahmoud Abbas is gasping for political oxygen after the radical group Hamas captured the Palestinian Parliament. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is drooping at the polls, hurt by criticism of the war in Lebanon; some Israelis predict his time for negotiating with Rice may be short. So even if Rice has the vision to peer at a “political horizon” for Israelis and Palestinians, it may be impossible for her Israeli and Palestinian partners to walk sufficiently far and fast in that direction with her. But the White House is also struggling. Bush’s new plan for Iraq is meeting deep resistance from Democrats in Congress and some resistance even from the Iraqi prime minister over proposals that some administration officials and military officers concede may have come too late. Prime Minister Nuri al- Maliki of Iraq, a Shiite, may not have the capability to succeed in quashing anti-Sunni sectarian militias and forging a unity government, and he may not even have the will, some administration officials say. Rice said that great leaders divined the moment when geopolitical stars aligned, and rushed in then to take advantage. “You aren’t going to be successful as a diplomat if you don’t understand the strategic context in which you are actually negotiating,” Rice said. “There are a set of underlying relationships, underlying balance of power, leverage on different sides, and you have to recognize when you are in a position to then, on top of that, find a solution given the underlying balance.” The underlying balance in the Middle East and Iraq is shaky, but Rice insisted, “I tend to place a lot of emphasis on the fact that people see their interests differently now than they did five years ago or ten years ago.” She said the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon “was a major contributor to that shift in alignment” and makes a Middle East peace deal more promising, and that toppling Saddam Hussein, despite the severe violence within Iraq, removed what she called an “eastern front” against the Israelis. Looking more broadly across the region, in particular to the nations bordering Iraq and along the Gulf, Rice said she was trying to construct a geopolitical frame of moderate Sunni and Shiites into a stronger alliance against extremist Sunni and Shiites states, meaning Syria and Iran. But the United States’ Muslim allies in the region do not like being called moderate, as they see themselves as fervent in their religious belief. And some of the regional allies are split over how and whether to negotiate with Iran. “There’s still a tendency to see these things in Sunni-Shia terms,” Rice said. “But the Middle East is going to have to overcome.”

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