Analysis: Odds for a successful summit?

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 (UPI) -- Uncertainty hangs over the Middle East peace conference President Bush wants to convene in Annapolis, Md., in November. Analysts, meanwhile, are somewhat pessimistic at what they perceive as a last-ditch effort by the president at resolving the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian dispute before he leaves the White House next year.

With time rapidly running out for his administration, Bush, ironically, finds himself in a situation similar to that which befell President Clinton during the waning days of his administration: Both men attempted to resolve the 60-year-old Middle East problem with too little time left on their White House clocks.

The complexity of the issues associated with the Palestinian question simply renders the logistics involved in any mediation time-consuming. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is on her fifth trip to the region since June. Henry Kissinger, when he was the top U.S. diplomat, undertook 36 visits to Damascus and an equal number to Israel in a single month in order to reach a breakthrough on the Golan.

“You can’t create a viable Palestinian State by the end of this administration’s time," said Robert Malley, Middle East and North Africa program director with the International Crisis Group.

Not giving the problem the time it needed was Clinton’s shortfall when it came to peacemaking in the Middle East. Bush never expected to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, but in his efforts to extricate an agreement from the Palestinians and the Israelis regarding the future statehood for Palestine this late in his second term, the Middle East road map is taking Bush down that same torturous road it took Clinton.

Despite his familiarity with the issues and all the energy he devoted in trying to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute at the hastily arranged summit at the Wye River complex in Maryland, Clinton failed for basically two reasons. First was the lack of adequate preparation. Clinton tried to rush an agreement through Yasser Arafat, then president of the Palestinian Authority, and Ehud Barak, then prime minister of Israel, hoping he could succeed in days where others had been trying for decades.

But perhaps what contributed most to the failure of Clinton’s attempts at last-minute peacemaking efforts was the fact he chose to focus uniquely on a single aspect of a multifaceted problem.

Now, almost eight years later, the mistake committed by Clinton is about to be repeated by Bush and his administration. The mistake is that Bush, much like Clinton, is focusing exclusively on the Palestinian-Israeli aspect of the Middle East imbroglio while sidelining other important issues and their stakeholders.

One of the many intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stems from the fact that over the years the question of Palestine has morphed into a political Medusa, taking on many additional faces. The Palestinian issue is no longer a standalone problem; it has become intractably attached to other problems plaguing the Middle East. And for any solution to succeed, it must be a regional one.

That is what makes mediation in this conflict so much more complex.

For example, solving the Palestinian question while ignoring Syria’s demand for the return of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in the June 1967 Six-Day War, is unrealistic given the role Syria can play in the conflict, either in helping to resolve the crisis -- or undermining a resolution to it.

Omitting to take into account other regional stakeholders in the Middle East crisis is an invitation to failure. For the moment, the regional parties yielding enough influence are Syria and Iran.

Both Iran and Syria, for example, are in position to torpedo any accords reached at the negotiating table given their influence on the ground through their proxy militias and alliances with other armed groups.

As one high-ranking Arab diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity told this correspondent, “Reaching agreements in Annapolis is one thing. But if Syria stays away from the conference, as it said it would, implementing agreements on the ground can become very difficult.”

“The Syrians certainly have the capability to create mischief if things don’t go their way,” Malley said.

In seeking to differentiate himself from Clinton’s policies, Bush tended to ignore the Middle East and its problems. It wasn’t until the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on U.S. soil that the Bush administration woke up to the fact the Middle East cannot be ignored, because besides the turmoil it can cause in the region, continued unrest in the Middle East can have direct repercussions in the U.S. homeland.

As Ziad Asali, the president of the American Task Force on Palestine, points out, “Solving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is in the national interest of the United States.”

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(Claude Salhani is editor of the Middle East Times.)