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Analysis: Challenges Cloud Bush Mideast Mission

Council on Foreign Relations

January 7, 2008
Author: Michael Moran

This week, U.S. President George W. Bush turns his attention to the search for a comprehensive peace between Arabs and Israelis, flying to the Middle East as his own nation increasingly focuses on the question of who will succeed him. Like his predecessor, Bill Clinton, and his father, George H.W. Bush, the president enters his final year in office with newly minted peace negotiations under way. As he made clear in his January 5 radio address, Bush holds the view that U.S. security depends at least in part on solving the ancient enmity in the Holy Land.

Coming less than six weeks after the launch of the Annapolis peace process, much of the president’s agenda will be devoted to moving talks forward (McClatchy) between the Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have held follow-up talks aimed at advancing the Joint Understanding agreed to in November 2007 at Annapolis. Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security advisor, says three important changes in the Middle East provide reasons for optimism—most of all, “a dramatic change in the Israeli assessment of their strategic position and their long-term interests.”

White House optimism aside, doubts proliferate. Steven Erlanger, chief Jerusalem correspondent of the New York Times, tells CFR.org in a new interview that Israelis have little faith that Bush’s trip or the Annapolis process itself will bear fruit. In the Washington Times, Chuck Freilich, a former Israel national security adviser now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, judges the prospects for the Bush trip as being so poor that “the stage is set for dark comedy.”

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

Copyright 2008 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.