We’ve got a mighty envoy

Michael Hirsch of Newsweek, fresh off of mocking Rudolf Giuliani’s foreign policy team and misidentifying them, now has a solution to the problems in the Middle East. The President needs an envoy. A peace envoy. See if you can figure out what’s wrong from the following two excerpts.

Sorry, but it’s just not enough. First of all, Welch—though a consummate, hardworking diplomat—is not senior enough to resolve such titanic issues on his own. “He’s not engaging the leaders,” says Dennis Ross, who for many years was senior U.S. Mideast envoy for both Republican and Democratic administrations and recently summed up the lessons he learned in a book called “Statecraft.” “When I’d go out there I shuttled back and forth, seeing leaders 20 times in 10 days.”

and

Every major peace process that has had any measure of success has benefited from intensive, high-level guidance by either the top cabinet official or the U.S. president himself. There was Baker at Madrid. There was Henry Kissinger spending several weeks shuttling back and forth to make peace between the Israelis and Arabs in 1973. Jimmy Carter took two weeks off in 1978 to devote himself to the Israeli-Egypt peace achieved at Camp David. Going further back, Woodrow Wilson spent six months in Paris to negotiate the Versailles Treaty in 1919, and Teddy Roosevelt closeted himself with Japanese and Russian delegates for a month in August 1905 to achieve his Nobel Prize-winning peace accord ending the Russo-Japanese war (eliciting Henry Adams’s admiring comment that he was “the best herder of emperors since Napoleon”). There’s no question Rice wants a deal of the magnitude of those agreements. “She’s really committed to this,” says Miller, “because in about a year she could join the company of the inconsequential secretaries of State. She needs to deliver something that she owns.”

Hirsch is drawing on the experience of two “peace envoys,” Dennis Ross and Aaron Miller and yet, when he lists those major peace processes he left off the crowning achievement of their careers: The Camp David summit in July, 2000. Gee why wasn’t that mentioned, wasn’t it a rousing success given all the time and effort expended by these two highly successful peace envoys? The summit ended with a major peace agreement between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak. Didn’t it?

It didnt? What? Despite being offered over 90% of the territory he demanded, Yasser Arafat chose not to accept a deal. Two months later he unleashed an all out war against Israel.

And while neither of the two was involved in the meeting in Geneva, their boss, President Clinton traveled there as an envoy from PM Barak of Israel offering President Assad a nearly complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan. President Clinton was rebuffed by Assad.

The whole eight years of the Clinton administration – of which both Ross and Miller were a part demonstrated the futility of an administration devoting so much of its resources and political capital to bring peace to the Middle East. Will a peace envoy really make a difference? Here’s Hirsch again:

So Cairo is, like most of the Arab regimes, hedging its bets over whether it wants to back Abbas, and it is actively appeasing the newly empowered Hamas. No surprise there: Islamist forces are rising in all these Arab countries—in the most recent parliamentary election in Egypt in December 2005, the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas is a Palestinian spinoff of the Egyptian group) quadrupled its strength from 20 seats to 80. The upshot: getting the Egyptians to crack down on Hamas will require some high-level strong-arming from Washington, preferably by using the $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid as leverage. Both the president and Rice must deliver that message repeatedly.

Egypt the first Arab state to make peace with Israel is now noticeably lax in preventing Hamas from obtaining weapons. Diplomacy is what’s needed? Or is there a fundamental weakness in the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, if Egypt can’t be counted on 30 years after its signing?

I subscribe to the latter. The goal of peace is a very attractive one. But working hard for it won’t make a difference, the conditions aren’t there.

Israel has come far in the past 20 years. (And I’m not saying that I approve.) The idea that a Palestinian state would be a good thing was the province of the extreme Left in Israel twenty years ago. Now nearly everyone serving in Knesset, no matter how far to the right, considers a Palestinian state an inevitability.

If you look at the so called moderates of the Palestinian Authority you see no such regard for Israel.

Longing for a peace envoy misses the point. The Arab world isn’t ready for peace and no matter the rank of the diplomat, that won’t change for the near future.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.