Too little, too late for Bush in the Middle East

Yesterday’s leading news item was President Bush’s announced intention to call a new Mideast peace conference, and invite Israel and her Arab neighbors to the table. I’m usually in favor of direct talks (especially when they come as such a marked break in America’s overall foreign policy, as is the case with this Administration), but in this case it appears that Bush’s proposed conference is so uniquely foreordained to fail, and the consequences of that failure will be particularly damaging to the longterm outlook for peace, that I can’t help but oppose it.

As has been said everywhere, Bush’s conference will lack legitimacy. Of course, "legitimacy" is a hard concept to pin down, but in this case the facts are pretty unequivocal. The last six years of American involvement in the Middle East have done little to signal the Bush Administration’s devotion to a fair and lasting peace for Israel and Palestine. On the contrary, it’s only now that the crown jewel of neoconservative foreign policy — the invasion of Iraq, eleven years in the making — has become his biggest political liability that Bush’s State Department is ready to commit to simply beginning a negotiation. On the Israeli front, American support has fallen firmly behind Israel, hardly faltering even as the IDF shelled Lebanon. Even if President Bush truly believes in his plan, he has given no signals at any cost to make the rest of the world think so.

In the same way, the reality of 2007 is that excluding Hamas from any talks on the future of Palestine fatally injures the talks’ credibility. This might have worked before 2006, but the elections in the beginning of that year, for better or worse, have earned Hamas the right to represent itself. To digress from the topic of the peace conference itself, I see Hamas as a symptom of how far we’ve gone astray in the Middle East, not as the Mideast problem itself. If NATO can’t permanently uproot extremists in Afghanistan, a belated military aid check to Fatah isn’t going to do it in Gaza. Meanwhile, excluding a legitimately (for some values of "legitimate," of course) major player will simply encourage it to influence the proceedings using violence.

Even without buying into the impolite-at-best idea that Arabs are somehow different than "us" and understand only power and honor, it’s clear that these talks won’t be getting off to a good start.

But what’s wrong with letting them continue, though they may never reach a fruitful conclusion? Surely, the field of international relations would collapse if we had to denounce every negotiation that appeared unfavorable at its outset. But in this case a failed negotiation is worse than none at all. The status quo is bad, with a civil war in Palestine drawing foreign fighters into Israel, but if talks are held and then collapse, not only will we have failed to prevent urban warfare, but we will have likely ensured that another decade, at least, goes by without a serious chance to solve the problem.

After Oslo, neither Israel nor Palestine was ready to make the serious concessions demanded by Bush’s earlier policy failure, the Road Map for Peace. Since 2002, Israel’s strategic position relative to Fatah has only widened, but the Palestinians can’t fail to understand that any concessions they might make at the bargaining table will only discredit them further among their would-be constituents in the Gaza Strip and likely set off more bombings. And once that’s done, who among Fatah’s up-and-coming younger generation will be ready to come back to the negotiating table in a few years’ time? To my mind, it’s better to grit our teeth, prop up Abbas (and believe me, I’m gritting my teeth just writing this), and wait until the United States’ own political climate permits a more evenhanded approach to solving the crisis.*

I’ll be the first to admit that the Middle East isn’t my first area of proficiency. Of course, the president has access to much more foreign policy expertise than I (and one of these days he might start listening to it!). Nevertheless, I can’t help but think that Bush’s plan is doomed from the start, and I only hope that the fallout from it will not be as long-lasting as I have predicted.

*I admit, this might take a while.