Rice stakes reputation on Mideast peacemaking

By Sue Pleming - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - 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.

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