An Annapolis quid pro quo?

For the last few months, we’ve been reading article after article about what is coming to be known as the Annapolis folly: The conference where nothing will be accomplished, where the U.S. knows that going in, and where the futility of the conference is doing nothing to stop Condi Rice and George W. Bush from insisting there will be a peace conference, and it will be substantive, no matter what all the players say to the contrary. It’s a trip down the rabbit hole to those of us who have seen this same thing happen over and over again, and the why is the most puzzling of all. Really, why would the administration move forward with a conference that is clearly going to fail in all of its goals? And why, on the eve of the conference, did the WaPo quote sources that say that Bush will not strong-arm Israel into an agreement?

Rice said publicly this week that her goal is to wrap up a peace deal by the end of the Bush presidency. But people who have spoken to Bush in recent weeks say he has made it clear that he has no intention of trying to force a peace settlement on the parties. The president’s fight against terrorism has given him a sense of kinship with Israel over its need for security, and he remains skeptical that, in the end, the Palestinians will make the compromises necessary for a peace deal.

It’s almost as if Bush is simply going through the motions of a peace agreement, without really wanting to establish a Palestinian state. But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either.

And then we have an article in Ha’aretz about the Israeli attack on the Syrian nuclear site, which says that it wasn’t a reactor. A chemist who worked on the Dimona nuclear reactor says it was a bomb factory, and Syria had the ready-made material already purchased from North Korea.

“In my estimation this was something very nasty and vicious, and even more dangerous than a reactor,” says Even. “I have no information, only an assessment, but I suspect that it was a plant for processing plutonium, namely a factory for assembling the bomb.”

In other words, Syria already had several kilograms of plutonium, and it was involved in building a bomb factory (the assembling of one bomb requires about four kilograms of fissionable material).

[…] What reinforces Even’s suspicion that the structure attacked in Syria was in fact a bomb assembly plant is the fact that the satellite photos taken after the bombing clearly show that the Syrians made an effort to bury the entire site under piles of earth. “They did so because of the lethal nature of the material that was in the structure, and that can be plutonium,” he said. That may also be the reason they refused to allow IAEA inspectors to visit the site and take samples of the earth, which would give away their secret.

Here’s my theory: Perhaps the utter futility of the conference can be explained by a simple quid pro quo. The Bush Administration is fully aware of what was bombed in Syria. Aviation Week says that American information was passed on to the Israelis before the raid, information that helped Israel choose its target. Perhaps the Administration is playing a bit of a double game here: Set up the conference, let Rice push the Israelis as hard as she likes, making the U.S. look good in Arab eyes but in reality having no intention of throwing Israel to the wolves, as some people think is happening.

Of course, this theory goes utterly to the dogs if it turns out that there are teeth behind any Annapolis proclamation.

And just to play devil’s advocate, using Occam’s Razor, let me also say that one reason I’m not really worried about the conference is that it’s so obviously going to fail. I don’t see how anything at all can come of it. There will be no third (or fourth, or fifth, I’ve lost track) intifada. Hamas is hamstrung by the security improvements that Israel has made over the past five years. There can only be an actual war, which I don’t believe Hamas is ready to launch, especially since their Iranian masters haven’t okayed it. Ditto for Lebanon and Hizballah.

I think what is going to come from Annapolis is a whole lot of hot air and nothing substantive. Condi Rice is going to look like an ass. She can join the ranks of all the other Secretaries of State who couldn’t solve the Israeli-Arab problem.

Of course, until the non-Arab, non-Muslim governments recognize that the real problem is the Muslim refusal to allow a Jewish state in “Muslim” lands, there will never be a solution. Not that I think there will be a solution even afterwards. But at least people would be calling it what it is. It’s no longer territorial, and it probably never was. It’s a religious war.