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Indyk: Bush Seemed Uninvolved in His Own Peace Conference

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Martin S. Indyk, Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, The Brookings Institution
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

November 28, 2007

Martin S. Indyk, who served separately as ambassador to Egypt and to Israel in the Clinton administration, says “my expectations were disappointed” by the lack of specificity in President Bush’s speech at the Annapolis Middle East peace conference. Indyk says: “You didn’t get the sense in any of his words or his body language yesterday that there’s a real commitment” to engage in the tough work necessary to reach a peace agreement by the end of his administration. Indyk adds there may be a better chance of Israel and Syria working out a deal rather than Israelis and Palestinians.

I have to say that never has a peace conference been preceded by so many bad reviews. I wonder what your impression of this big get-together was and whether it was as ill-fated as predicted.

Well, I think there were unrealistic expectations going into this meeting. It was designed to launch and bless the beginning of final status negotiations. And because it is the beginning of final status negotiations, it was never reasonable to expect that either side was going to make compromises ahead of time on the actual issues. The focus on a joint document was unfortunate, because it could only really produce procedural agreements: when to start, when to end, how to conduct the negotiations and so on. That’s exactly what was in the document. But I think where my expectations were disappointed was in President Bush’s speech, because that was an opportunity for the United States to give a sense to all of the parties that were assembled in Annapolis of an American view of where this process should end up.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.