The failed marriage broker

THE UNITED STATES has been spectacularly unsuccessful in the role of marriage broker. The Bush administration desperately plotted an arranged union between Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto, a former failed prime minister and heiress to a political dynasty. Musharraf agreed to drop a bundle of corruption charges against her so that the bartered bride could return from exile. But then the reluctant groom declared an emergency, and put Bhutto under house arrest for a while, giving her a chance to be compared to Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi as a prisoner of wicked generals.

Last weekend, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte flew to Islamabad to persuade Musharraf to drop his emergency, and get the marriage back on track. But Bhutto said she no longer considers Musharraf a suitable boy. And he, in turn, made it clear that he was not going to be dragged to the altar even if the Bush administration holds a shotgun to the seat of his pants. At this writing he isn't willing to end the emergency, either.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice keeps returning to the Middle East, urging a political marriage between Israel's Ahud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. She is hoping for, if not a wedding, at least an engagement party in Annapolis, Md., later this month. I was amused to learn that her somewhat feckless diplomacy has created a new verb in Hebrew: "lecondel." According to Steven Erlanger of The New York Times, it means "to come and go for meetings that produce few results." The word is based on Rice's first name.

Neither the bride nor the groom has prospects for a successful marriage, however, and they are unwilling to publish the banns. Olmert and Abbas are said to have a rough understanding of where they are headed, but neither is willing to commit it to writing or say it in public lest they be accused of making concessions. So it is hard to see how any kind of lecondeling will lead to "I do" even if the two do manage to get to the church on time.

Olmert is under a criminal investigation for allegedly improper behavior when he was trade and industry minister, and newspaper photographs last week showed police officers carting off cartons of evidence after related raids. One hates to think of the prime minister's office being taped off as a crime scene.

In addition, Olmert's political popularity is lower than President Bush's, lower even than that of the Democratic Congress. It is doubtful that he can come up with a dowry of enough meaningful concessions.

As for Abbas, it is difficult to see how he can be said to represent the Palestinian people. Having crippled him by insisting on Gaza elections, which produced a Hamas victory, the United States is now trying to pretty him up. But his political writ does not run to Gaza where Hamas and Abbas's followers continue to kill each other.

The mother of all failed marriage brokering, however, has to be the administration's efforts to bring Sunni and Shia together in Iraq. Having held elections, in which the majority Shi'ites chose a government heavily influenced by Iran, the Americans, as later in Gaza, didn't like what democracy wrought. All those purple fingers for nothing.

At first the White House viewed Iraq's Shia in a romantic light, according to the New Yorker's George Packer. In his book, "The Assassins' Gate," he writes that "Shi'ite power was the key to the whole neoconservative vision for Iraq." There was even a weird hypothesis, "one of the more curious subplots of the Iraq War. . . that went high up the policy chain at the Pentagon." It was, according to Packer, that somehow "Shia and Jews, being oppressed minorities in the region, could do business," perhaps leading to Iraqi recognition of Israel. The Pentagon's poster child, Ahmad Chalabi - a Shi'ite - encouraged this thinking.

Now, after years of unsuccessfully trying to lecondel Shi'ites and Sunnis to embrace, the administration seems to be throwing its weight behind the Sunnis, arming their tribes ostensibly to fight Al Qaeda, but it is the Shia that will one day pay a price.

Relations with the democratically elected Shi'ites have sunk so low that some Americans are saying that the Iraqi government is more of a problem for American hopes for Iraq than Al Qaeda or even Iran. It's beginning to look as if even marriage brokers have divorces.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.