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3 Condi's free ride in the Middle
East By Tony Karon
They must serve up some pretty powerful
Kool Aid in the press room down at Foggy Bottom
(aka the Department of State), judging by US media
coverage of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's
latest "Look Busy" tour of the Middle East.
Rice's comings and goings have long been
greeted with a jaded disdain by the Arab and
Israeli media. As Gideon Levy wrote
plaintively (and typically)
in Israel's Ha'aretz last August:
Rice has been here six times in the
course of a year and a half, and what has come
of it? Has anyone asked her about this? Does she
ask herself? It is hard to understand how the
secretary of state allows herself to be so
humiliated. It is even harder to understand how
the superpower she represents allows itself to
act in such a hollow and useless way. The
mystery of America remains unsolved: How is it
that the United States is doing nothing to
advance a solution to the most dangerous and
lengthiest conflict in our world?
The
fact that - this time - Rice professes to be
advancing just such a solution has hardly
convinced Middle Eastern scribes. As Beirut's
liberal Daily Star put it in an editorial,
"Already this is Rice's fourth Middle East tour
aimed at reactivating a stalled peace process, but
so far the only measurable progress she has
achieved has been racking up extra mileage on her
airplane."
Mainstream US media outlets
were alone in their willingness to swallow the
preposterous narratives offered by Rice's State
Department spinners on the significance of her
latest diplomatic efforts. For months, we have
been reading a fantasy version of American
diplomacy in which Rice was at the center of a
realignment of forces in the Middle East, building
a united front of Arab moderates to stand
alongside the US and Israel against Iran and other
"extremist" elements.
Recently, we were
asked to believe that Rice was now about to head
back to the region to choreograph a complex and
dramatic diplomatic dance that would include such
"challenges" as "trying to get the Saudis to talk
to the Israelis". Perhaps none of her aides
bothered to let her in on the open secret that the
Saudis have been doing that for months - and not
under the tutelage of, or at the prompting of, the
secretary of state either.
On the eve of
her departure, the Washington Post informed us,
Rice would remake the peace process via a new
math: 4+2+4. This was cute jargon for grouping
various discussions among the Israelis and
Palestinians, the "Quartet" (the US, the European
Union, the UN and Russia), and an "Arab Quartet"
comprising Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the
United Arab Emirates. By Monday last week, only
three days later, however, the new math had
mysteriously disappeared - as if Rice had suddenly
entered a world of innumeracy - replaced by
"parallel discussions".
With the Israelis
unwilling to talk to the Palestinians about the
"contours of a Palestinian state", each side was
instead to discuss such things separately with
Rice in a kind of diplomatic confession booth.
For anyone disappointed by the sudden
demise of "4+2+4", Condi assured all involved that
"we'll use many different geometries, I'm sure, as
we go through this process". A day later, the
trip's crowning achievement was reported by the
New York Times: "After three days of shuttle
diplomacy between Israeli and Arab cities and a
late night of haggling, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday that she had
persuaded Israeli and Palestinian leaders to hold
talks twice a month." But not, it turned out, on
the "final-status issues" - the contours of a
Palestinian state. They would simply chat to
"build confidence", while, presumably, regularly
reentering her confession booth.
As
Lebanon-based Jordanian journalist Rami Khouri put
it:
To overcome the chronic stalemate of
bilateral Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, [Rice]
is now expanding this into a trilateral failure,
as the principal parties who won't talk to each
other only to talk to her. It's hard to decide
if this is a comedy or a horror
show.
It may be a sign of the contempt
with which the Bush administration treats the
American media that Condi expects such a
Pollyannaish pantomime to be reported as if it
were history-in-the-making. And it may be a mark
of the naivete with which much of the US media
have, over these past years, chronicled Condi's
adventures that, in fact, it is reported as if it
were history-in-the-making. The secretary of state
has not only chalked up the miles in the air
recently, in media terms here in the US, she's
invariably been given a free ride.
Whose diplomacy is this anyway?
In reality, if significant diplomatic
maneuvering is currently underway in the Middle
East, it is the work of the Saudis. The Saudi
royals had grown so alarmed by the passivity and
incompetence of the Bush administration - and by
the rising influence of Iran as well as Islamist
movements in the Arab world (whose popularity and
credibility is boosted by their willingness to
stand up to Israel and the US) - that it launched
an uncharacteristically robust diplomatic campaign
on a number of fronts.
The Condi-spun
media tends to explain this as the Bush
administration coaxing Riyadh's royal wallflowers
onto the
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