The British newspaper The Independent speculates that the Annapolis conference may be a “Mission Impossible”, largely due to a number of deficits it attributes to U.S. President George W. Bush:
“Mr Bush needs to throw his weight behind the new peace efforts; not just through the intermediary of Ms Rice, however close to him she is, but personally – and constantly. Follow-through has never been his strength, be it in the absence of planning for post-invasion Iraq, or in the failure to make sure the proper aid was reaching New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Second, many doubt he will put enough pressure on the Israelis to make the painful concessions needed for a settlement to be credible in the eyes of the Palestinians. Mr Bush may be the most instinctively pro-Israeli President ever (though he has yet to visit Israel in his near-seven years in office). Those inclinations have only been reinforced by the ‘war on terror’. Soon after the September 11 attacks, Mr Sharon convinced him that Palestinian attacks on Israel were part and parcel of the global struggle with militant radical Islam. As a result, the onus hitherto has always been on the Palestinians to show progress on security, before anything was required of Israel. Making matters worse was Mr Bush’s lack of knowledge and sense of history. Flynt Everett, once the top adviser to Ms Rice on Middle East matters, but now a strong critic of the President, last week related how at a 2002 meeting in the White House situation room, he heard Mr Bush say that as soon as the Palestinians had a democratically elected government, their leadership would be ‘less hung-up’ on issues like borders and the status of Jerusalem. Mr Everett was astounded. It was, he told the Washington Post last week, ‘one of the most profoundly ignorant statements anyone has ever uttered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’.” The Independent’s pre-Annapolis assessment is here.
