It did not take very long for the euphoria that the Annapolis peace summit instigated among those naïve enough to believe that the Middle East dispute could be resolved before President Bush left office to dissipate. In a matter of weeks the mood in Washington has changed drastically, going from one of hope to one of trepidation.

Of late, as the violence in Gaza keeps escalating and relations between Syria and Saudi Arabia have soured over political divergences on how to deal with the Lebanese political crisis, that glimmer of hope has given way to fears that the conflict may grow and in the process drag other countries into the morass.
With that in mind President George W Bush has dispatched his secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to the region, where she will try to extinguish some of the fires before they get completely out of control. Rice will try to convince the Palestinians and the Israelis to resume peace talks.
Rice, however, is at a disadvantage given that both she and her boss are going to be out of office in less than a year. In the past, regimes who disagreed with Washington’s policies simply waited out the sitting president’s term.
Furthermore, recent history has shown that any attempt at peacemaking requires long-term commitments from the United States, the only country powerful enough to push through a quantifiable peace initiative in the region. But that requires commitment, perseverance and time, elements which this administration lacks.
For the sake of comparison, when Henry Kissinger, as secretary of state, tried to negotiate an armistice on the Golan Heights in the wake of the October 1973 war, he undertook no fewer than 36 visits to the Syrian capital and an equal number of visits to Beit-ul-Moqaddas — with a few side-trips to Cairo; all in the space of one month. With all the best intentions in the world, an occasional visit to the region as has been Secretary Rice’s modus operandi, is highly unlikely to yield any tenable results. It may put out a fire or two, temporarily.
What is needed is immediate action to prevent the crisis from growing and at the same time an initiative to find a long-term solution to the conflict. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made it known last week that he was calling off peace negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert after Israeli forces pursued a series of raids into Gaza that killed and wounded scores of Palestinians.
Once again, Israelis and Palestinians are caught in an infernal cycle of violence in which there appears to be no end in sight. Israel’s strong-arm tactics are meant to break the will of Hamas. The Islamist group finds its movements restricted to Gaza and hemmed in by Israel to the north and east, while the Mediterranean Sea to the west is patrolled by Israeli gunboats, and the one-time hermetically sealed frontier with Egypt, which of late has become, well, not as hermetic as was initially intended. But in this game of who will cry uncle first, Hamas doesn’t seem quite ready to holler. Reports from Gaza say that after every Israeli raid Hamas organizes victory parades to show the Israelis they are still in the game.
The war against Hezbollah in 2006 left the Israeli prime minister in poor standing and today he finds himself as one of the most unpopular leaders the young state of Israel has ever had. That was on the Lebanese front.
On the front with Gaza the situation doesn’t get much better. Hoping the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied strip would have been followed by a period of non-violence, if not peace, instead what ensued was a situation far more explosive than ever. And that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime in the immediate future. At least not for the better.
(Source: khaleejtimes.com)