Will she, or won’t she?
Right now it appears if she will: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, after waiting long enough so that some analysts contend she was waiting to give Israel maximum time to inflict maximum damage Hezbolllah, is getting ready to finally visit the Middle East in what in modern times has been called “shuttle diplomacy.”
Not that it impresses everyone. For instance, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (in the for-pay-only part of the paper’s website) writes, in part:
As USA Today noted about summer movies, the hot trend in heroines “is not the damsel in distress. It’s the damsel who causes distress.�
Uma, Oprah. Oprah, Condi.
The more W. and his tough, by-any-means-necessary superbabe have tried to tame the Middle East, the more inflamed the Middle East has become. Now the secretary of state is leaving, reluctantly and belatedly, to do some shuttle diplomacy that entails little diplomacy and no shuttling. It’s more like air-guitar diplomacy.
Condi doesn’t want to talk to Hezbollah or its sponsors, Syria and Iran — “Syria knows what it needs to do,’’ she says with asperity — and she doesn’t want a cease-fire. She wants “a sustainable cease-fire,’’ which means she wants to give the Israelis more time to decimate Hezbollah bunkers with the precision-guided bombs that the Bush administration is racing to deliver.
But, in reality, is that intrinsically an evil thing? The use of surrogates by nations (and political candidates) is not new. For instance, in the current Middle East conflict it’s believed by everyone who does not believe that the Easter Bunny hides eggs in their houses that Hezbollah is a surrogate for bigwigs in Iran. The New York Times gives these details about Rice’s upcoming trip:
In Israel, Ms. Rice will confer with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader.
In the weeks ahead, she said, the United States plans to contribute “direct humanitarian assistance� to Lebanon.
The goal of her trip, she said, is to work for a “lasting and sustainable end to the violence� that has lasted for some two weeks and has already killed hundreds in Israel and Lebanon, where Israeli forces are seeking to crush the militant Islamic group Hezbollah. There are no easy answer, she said, “nor are there any quick fixes.�
“We do seek an end to the current violence, and we seek it urgently,� the secretary said at a news briefing in which she offered more determination than specifics. “More than that, we also seek to address the root causes of that violence so that a real and endurable peace can be established.�
The question then becomes: what are these “root causes?” Each side or sympathizers of each side will fill in the blanks there. But one clear meaning is that the adminsitration and Irsael see that there is a window of opportunity on striking a stunning body blow to Hezbollah…and, thus, Tehran’s state-managing from afar. MORE:
Ms. Rice said the United States was calling again for the “immediate release� of the two Israeli soldiers abducted in a raid into Israel by members of the radical Islamic group Hezbollah, the event that touched off the latest upheaval.
While urging Israel to show “the greatest possible care� so as to minimize civilian casualties, Ms. Rice repeated Washington’s oft-spoken position that Israel has a right to defend itself. She said she would not speculate on whether the call-up of some military reserves in Israel signaled an intention to wage a long ground campaign in Lebanon.
“The Israelis have said that they have no desire to widen this conflict, and I take them at their word,� she said.
Dowd doesn’t see Rice as leaving from a position of strength:
W. continues to present simplicity as clarity. When will he ever learn that clarity is the last thing you’re going to find in the Middle East, and that trying to superimpose it with force usually makes things worse? That’s what both the Israelis and Ronald Reagan learned in the early 1980’s when they tried disastrously to remake Lebanon.
The cowboy president bet the ranch on Iraq, and that war has made almost any other American action in the Arab world, and any Pax Americana that might have been created there, impossible. It’s fitting that Condi is the Flying Dutchman, since Lebanon represents the shipwreck of our Middle East policy.
The Financial Times notes that Rice has roadblocked the neocons:
The Bush administration has given full backing to Israel’s offensive but, at the same time, Ms Rice has kept at bay pro-Israel neoconservatives who want the conflict broadened to encompass Syria and Iran, specifically the latter’s nuclear ÂprogÂramme. Washington’s reluctance to extend its military further stems almost exclusively from its failures in Iraq, say analysts. On the other hand, the administration is reluctant to enter into any form of negotiation with Damascus or Tehran.
But just as President George W. Bush sees US credÂibility at stake in a forced withdrawal from Iraq, his administration supports Israel’s desire to prove its strength. A pullout from Gaza and Lebanon would be seen in the Arab world as a sign of weakness, said Dennis Ross, the former US envoy to the Middle East. Israel has to establish a detÂerrent and show Hizbollah “they pay a terrible price,” he said.
Meanwhile, Democrats have made it known that they’re not impressed with Rice’s agenda or the amount of time it took here to come up with it:
U.S. Senate Democratic leaders on Friday called on President George W. Bush to send a high-level special envoy to the Middle East to work with allies and negotiate an end to the fighting between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen. Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a letter to Bush they were “surprised” that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice planned only a brief stop in the region next week.
“The United States needs to step forward and do the hard diplomatic work required to put in place a sustainable settlement and prevent a return to the status quo ante where Hizbollah attacked Israel at will,” they wrote.
“Unfortunately, the architecture that you have constructed to deal with the Middle East is not adequate, as it does not allow for the kind of high level and sustained involvement that is required,” they added.
They urged Bush to appoint a high-level envoy “without further delay,” adding Israel had the right to defend itself and that they supported Israel’s efforts to eliminate the threat posed by Hizbollah.
And the Detroit Free Press also blasted Rice’s pace of diplomacy:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is going to the Middle East war zone next week.
Next week?
How many people will die in the meantime? How many homes and businesses will be destroyed with each passing day? As Rice was planning to dine Thursday night with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York, how much closer were other nations to jumping into this fight between Israel and terrorist guerillas hiding among the civilians of south Lebanon?
What has so preoccupied American foreign policy that the only nation that can possibly stop the Middle East bloodshed will wait until next week to dispatch its top diplomat?
For the sake of the suffering civilian populations in Lebanon and Israel, for the sake of the children in the bomb shelters and hospitals and early graves, for the sake of stability in a critical region at a critical time, the United States should have by now had its best negotiators on the ground in the Middle East, calling meetings, working shuttle diplomacy, seeking answers, getting Israel to back off and the Lebanese government to stand up before this conflict widens.
The liberal magazine The Nation is critical, too:
After a week of dithering, the Bush Administration has finally decided to send Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Middle East. But when Condi arrives on Friday, ten days after the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah began, she won’t try and push for an immediate ceasefire.
In 1993 and 1996, Secretary of State Warren Christopher launched a vigorous push for diplomacy that quieted fighting between the Israeli army and Lebanese militants. But today, according to the Wall Street Journal, Bush and Rice “have no intention of launching a similar round of diplomacy to end the current fighting. Visiting Damascus is out of the question. And a cease-fire isn’t their most pressing aim, they say.”
No, Condi’s belatedly stopping by “to build support for the effective crippling of Hezbollah.” An ambitious goal, but shouldn’t an end to the violence come first?
As the WSJ notes, the continued Israeli bombing and recent incursion into South Lebanon will likely only strengthen the standing of Hezbollah and Iran, while weakening the fragile, anti-Syrian, government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. If Hezbollah attacks Tel Aviv and Israel responds by hitting Syria, the entire region could go up in flames.
Still, it’s no secret that the Bush administration is not doing foreign policy in the way it has been conducted for many years. It is a high stakes gamble on several fronts — and now we need to add the Middle East to another, new bet. And, as in the other bets (which might not seem quite so wise now, in retrospect), the stakes are extremely high.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.