ANALYSIS-Rice stakes reputation on Mideast peacemaking

Thu Nov 29, 2007 10:41am EST


By Sue Pleming

WASHINGTON, Nov 29 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has put her reputation on the line by delving into Arab-Israeli peacemaking, a high-risk gamble that experts say will be hard to pull off.

Rice is expected to do most of the Bush administration's heavy lifting in negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians that were revived at a U.S.-hosted Middle East conference in Annapolis on Tuesday.

But skepticism is rampant over how far Rice will be able to go to get the deal both sides say they want in the remaining 14 months President George W. Bush has in office.

"The odds, it seems to me, on succeeding are very, very long," said Charles Dunbar, professor of international relations at Boston University.

"Clearly, this is an effort to give President Bush an achievement. It's heritage-building time," added Dunbar, a former U.S. ambassador to Qatar and Yemen.

Largely untested so far as a negotiator, Rice brings a usually cautious, measured, approach to diplomacy that experts say may not be suited to Middle East peacemaking.

"We have never seen her deeply involved in a process of this sort that allows us to judge her creativity and her capacity to think outside the box," said Marina Ottaway, director of Middle East programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think-tank.

GROUNDHOG DAY

Rice herself is fully aware of the challenges in resolving what has eluded her predecessors. At the end of the Israel-Lebanon war last year, she compared Middle East peace brokering to "Groundhog Day", a film in which the protagonist finds himself repeating the same 24 hours over and over again.

"It's like 'Groundhog Day' -- the next day you would come in and it had come apart again," said Rice, according to a transcript of an interview with USA Today in August last year.

At the end of Tuesday's conference, she listed the familiar difficulties ahead in tackling the core issues dividing the sides -- the fate of Jerusalem, the right of return of refugees, security and the borders of a Palestinian state.

"To be sure, the issues to be resolved between the parties are very challenging. If they were not, peace would have been made a long time ago. But difficult to resolve does not mean impossible to resolve," Rice said.

U.S. officials had sought every step of the way to lower expectations before the conference but now the bar has been raised and all eyes will be on Rice.

"You have a U.S. president and secretary of state who have put their reputations on the line for this (peace effort)," British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said. "It would be foolish to be anything other than cautious," he told reporters in Annapolis.

SHUTTLES

In the past year Rice has made eight trips to the region to try to lay the groundwork for Israeli-Palestinian talks. She has promised to use every ounce of her energy to shepherd a deal.

As she shuttles back and forth, a key question will be whether Rice will have the backing of Bush when it comes to taking hard decisions, especially those unpopular with close U.S. ally Israel.

"Shuttling backwards and forwards is not a necessary condition for success. An important condition for success in Arab-Israeli diplomacy has been having the direct support of the president," said Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Rice and Bush are struggling to create a legacy that is not defined by the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath and Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking could turn that around.

"In the game of importance on world issues, where would you put Israel and Palestine versus Iraq ... Palestine, my goodness, that is the big issue of the century," said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution.

"That is what they hand out Nobel peace prizes for," added Hess, a veteran staffer of the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and an adviser to former U.S. presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

But even if she fails, some analysts say the consequences will not be devastating for the 53-year-old Rice who would join a "distinguished crowd" of others who did not succeed.

"She is young, she has her health, she has a long way to go in terms of doing more with her life," Dunbar said. (Editing by Howard Goller)




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