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April 03, 2007
Gideon Levy has an op-ed on Condoleezza Rice's diplomacy in the Middle East in Haaretz:
It happens once every few months. Like a periodic visit by an especially annoying relative from overseas, Condoleezza Rice was here again. The same declarations, the same texts devoid of content, the same sycophancy, the same official aircraft heading back to where it came from.....Rice has been here six times in the course of a year and a half, and what has come of it? Has anyone asked her about this? Does she ask herself?
Levy goes on to ask:
It is hard to understand how the secretary of state allows herself to be so humiliated. It is even harder to understand how the superpower she represents allows itself to act in such a hollow and useless way. The mystery of America remains unsolved: How is it that the United States is doing nothing to advance a solution to the most dangerous and lengthiest conflict in our world? How is it that the world's only superpower, which has the power to quickly facilitate a solution, does not lift a finger to promote it?
Good questions.
The Washington spin is that Rice is at the center of a realignment of forces in the Middle East, building a united front of Arab moderates to stand alongside the U.S. and Israel against Iran and other "extremist" elements.Tony Karon observes at Tom Dispatch that:
In reality, if significant diplomatic maneuvering is currently underway in the Middle East, it is the work of the Saudis. The Saudi royals had grown so alarmed by the passivity and incompetence of the Bush administration -- and by the rising influence of Iran as well as Islamist movements in the Arab world (whose popularity and credibility is boosted by their willingness to stand up to Israel and the U.S.) -- that it launched an uncharacteristically robust diplomatic campaign on a number of fronts.
Karon adds over at Restless Cosmopolitan that what is interesting about the sudden public break from Washington and assertion of political independence by the “Arab moderates” that were supposedly the vanguard of Bush Administration Middle East policy Version 7.4, is that it is a profound vote of no-confidence in U.S. policy. The Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians could simply no longer sit back and watch the U.S. wreaking havoc throughout the region, because the resulting catastrophe would sweep away their regimes, too.
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In the end, there's only so much Danegeld they can throw at the Iranians. Persian ambition probably can't be sated, which is why all the Saudi money in the world can't get them what our carrier battle groups can get them: the Iranian Navy at the bottom of the Gulf.
Unfortunately, the Syrians and the Persians are prepareing for a second Lebanon War, so we see where diplomacy is going. Those carrier groups are there for a reason, my friend.