Israel Matzav

Rice consults with a dhimmi

US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has been meeting with former US Presidents Dhimmi Carter and Bill Clinton to discuss their experiences in brokering 'peace talks' between Israel and the 'Palestinians.'

The State Department also reported that Rice has recently conferred with former UN Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, as well as her predecessors James Baker, Henry Kissinger, and Madeline Albright.

Rice has stated that she intends to devote the rest of the 14 months remaining in her term to establishing an independent Palestinian state while ensuring Israel's security.

I guess she was not real successful here last week. YNet has a Reuters report with more details:

Rice invited Carter, a vocal critic of Bush administration policies, to the State Department on Wednesday where the two discussed his Arab-Israeli peacemaking efforts in the 1970s, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said on Friday.

Their talks were "good and cordial," he said. They focused on the Middle East and not Carter's recent criticism of President George W. Bush's policies in Iraq and elsewhere.

A Soviet specialist, Rice also telephoned another former Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who tried, and ultimately failed, in his eight years in office to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together.

"She's trying to draw on the historical record and the experiences of others to see -- see what she can glean and how that may be applicable to the current day," McCormack said.

"She is a student of history and has a keen appreciation for how we can apply the lessons of history, what we can learn from those who have gone before us," he said.

Other sources of advice have been former U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross and ex-secretaries of state James Baker, Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright. Rice meets frequently for lunch with Albright, whose father taught Rice at Denver University.

Dhimmi Carter and James Baker can only be bad news for Israel.

Meanwhile, DEBKA reports that President Bush is less keen than Rice about the Annapolis 'conference' mugging.

DEBKAfile’s Washington sources disclose that this week Bush questioned Rice on the prospects of the Annapolis meeting. “Can you do it?” he asked. “I’m trying,” she replied, thereby acknowledging it was far from being in the bag.

The president was already skeptical, but he cooled further to the conference plan, those sources report, after listening to two American-Jewish delegations who visited the White House last week.

Both voiced concern about Rice’s Middle East policies and the goals she was setting for the conference. They stressed that her expectations of the Palestinians were not only unrealistic but beginning to pose a threat to Israel’s national security.

Bush assured the delegations that he would not let the conference descend into a platform for anti-Israel resolutions that prejudiced Israel’s security.

The reason why Secretary Rice has so far not sent out invitations to the event, which was originally scheduled for late November, is that the State Department is still at sea over the Arab participants and their ranks.

A question mark hangs over Saudi attendance, although Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak passed a message on to Rice when she visited Cairo earlier this month that Riyadh had no interest in the Annapolis event. He told her that if the Saudis stayed away, so too would most other Arab and Muslim governments.

...

The Secretary of State’s most extreme antagonists go so far as to accuse her of putting her personal ambition to pull off diplomatic feats ahead of America’s national security interests.

Some sources in the Middle East ascribe her intense drive for a conference in Annapolis to the same motive.

And if she puts diplomatic feats ahead of America's national security interest, she certainly puts it ahead of Israel's. But President Bush's heart is apparently still in the right place. If the 'conference' does not happen, he will find his legacy elsewhere.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:45 PM