It’s worth recalling a few details of Annapolis’s origins in order that they may shed some light on what is happening, and not happening, this week. On July 16th, a few weeks after Hamas took Gaza by force, President Bush delivered a speech about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that announced the administration’s intention to hold a peace conference. He said:

The world can do more to build the conditions for peace. So I will call together an international meeting this fall of representatives from nations that support a two-state solution, reject violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and commit to all previous agreements between the parties.

When the list of Annapolis invitees was released last week, it became clear—to nobody’s surprise—that not one of those four requirements had been enforced. This nonchalant way of doing business in the Middle East has become a pattern for the Bush administration, especially when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the peace process. The administration has continuously reconfigured its principles and goals in order to elide intransigent problems.

In 2003, the administration committed itself to the Roadmap, which created a sequential, three-phase set of requirements whose fulfillment would allow the creation of a Palestinian state. When the Palestinians could not even begin to fulfill the first phase—waging an internal battle against terrorists and eliminating incitement—the Roadmap was simply ignored in favor of various other, more convenient, strategies, such as attempting to accomplish Phase 3 (”final status”) before Phase 1, and, today, the pursuit of a “parallel,” rather than sequential, process. In July, Bush said that a fall peace conference would concern itself with Palestinian institution-building, good governance, and Arab support for the peace process. Yet between then and now there has been virtually no progress on internal Palestinian reform, and no progress on cajoling “moderate” Arab states into attending a conference under the original conditions. As a result, the administration has simply discarded the original raison d’etre of the conference in favor of something else, a farrago of previous commitments and strategies. And so tomorrow, the deputy foreign minister of Syria will be in Annapolis representing a country that is at war with three American allies (Israel, Lebanon, and Iraq), that makes itself a base of operations for Hamas and a smuggling conduit for Hizballah, and that is allied with Iran. In being unable to distinguish between friends and enemies, the administration is sacrificing America’s long-term credibility for short-term accomplishments—and dubious ones, at that.

It has been said many times that the three main participants at Annapolis are politically weak. In this case, the prime reason for American weakness is not Bush’s domestic approval ratings, or our problems in Iraq, but rather the entirely legitimate perception of the Bush administration as an unreliable, easily-manipulated interlocutor.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 2:06 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.