WASHINGTON - President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tonight welcome the delegations from more than 40 countries to kick off a one-day Mideast summit in Annapolis, Md., tomorrow, even as critics say the Bush administration has left itself too little time to secure a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.
Bush will host Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at a rare White House meeting today, which will be followed by a dinner at the State Department hosted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for tomorrow's participants. Invited guests include representatives from Saudi Arabia and Syria, two countries whose governments had been reluctant to attend the meeting, saying they feared it would not produce results. Syria announced its participation yesterday.
Bush administration officials have hailed the meeting as a historic opportunity to create a Palestinian state by the time Bush leaves office in 2009.
"Everybody understands the importance of making this work," Rice told reporters last week. "I've said several times since that failure isn't really an option here and it's within everyone's power to make this succeed."
But critics say the Bush administration's efforts may have come too late in his administration, and note that both Olmert, facing criticism for his leadership during the 2006 Lebanon war and for past business dealings, and Abbas, who controls only a portion of Palestinian territory, may not have the political clout to make painful concessions.
"Time is running against him," Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at George Washington University, said of Bush. "He has less political capital in his bank. In a sense, it really was quite late in this agenda."
As of yesterday afternoon, Olmert and Abbas had not yet agreed on a joint statement of principles to present at the conference, which US officials hope to unveil in Annapolis. Invitations to the meeting were formally issued only last week, and yesterday State Department officials were still working with their Israeli and Palestinian counterparts to finalize the agenda.
Critics also note that the meeting is only one day, unlike earlier efforts under Presidents Clinton and Carter, during which Israeli and Arab negotiators spent more than a week holed up in secluded compounds trying to broker agreement on thorny issues. Among those confronting Abbas and Olmert: the borders of a Palestinian state, the status of Jerusalem, measures to ensure Israel's security, and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to homes they left decades ago.
But Bush administration officials say Annapolis is not meant to be a forum for negotiation. Instead, it is meant to show broad international support for the negotiations that Olmert and Abbas have already promised to begin.
National security adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters on a conference call yesterday that the meeting was meant to "showcase an opportunity" to solve the decades-long conflict.
He said the Annapolis meeting would begin with speeches by Abbas and Olmert, in which they would declare their intentions to broker a permanent peace in the coming year, as well as a speech by Bush that will pledge his personal support for this effort and outline a broad vision for a future Palestinian state. During the meeting, Hadley said, the Palestinian delegation and former British prime minister Tony Blair, now an international envoy to the Palestinians, would report on their progress building Palestinian institutions in the West Bank.
In the afternoon, he said, the delegations, particularly the Arab states, would have a chance to make speeches about their own vision for a permanent peace in the region. Syria is widely expected to bring up the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau that Israel captured from Syria 40 years ago.
Hadley expressed optimism that this part of the meeting would later lead to separate peace negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
"What is following on from Annapolis is a step towards a comprehensive peace on a variety of separate tracks," Hadley said, adding that the willingness of Arab states to attend was one reason for optimism about the chances of success.
The participation of the Arab states is considered key to the peace process, offering Israel hope that resolution of the Palestinian issue could lead to a comprehensive peace with countries that have so far refused to recognize its existence. The lack of Arab participation in earlier peace efforts under Clinton is widely seen as one cause for its failure.
The meeting already received a boost with the promised attendance of the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, a key powerbroker in the Arab world who is influential with Palestinian leaders, and the deputy foreign minister of Syria, a country that has supported militant Palestinian groups and is a key ally of Iran, now seen as the main adversary of the United States and Israel in the region.
However, one key player that will be absent tomorrow is Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that won a landslide victory in the parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006. The United States and the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist organization and have refused to fund the parts of the Palestinian government that Hamas controls or deal with its leaders until the group recognizes Israel and renounces violence.
Indeed, the Bush administration's current efforts have only been possible, US officials say, because Abbas stopped trying to form a unity government with Hamas after the group took control of the Gaza Strip by force in June. The move by Hamas left Abbas in control of only the West Bank, and ended all attempts at reconciliation between the two Palestinian parties.
Shortly after the Hamas takeover, Bush and Rice announced that they would try to restart peace negotiations between Israel and Abbas in an effort to bolster the moderate leader by proving to Palestinians that he can deliver a Palestinian state.
The move to push for peace talks was a dramatic reversal for the US administration, which had avoided the issue since Bush took office.
Many former diplomats, including Rice's mentor, Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, have warned the administration that Hamas can spoil the prospects for peace by escalating attacks on Israel, unless it is somehow included in the peace process.
But yesterday, Hadley said that Hamas's refusal to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel had excluded the group - and the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza - from the talks that would form the basis of a future Palestinian state.
He said Gaza would one day become a part of any future Palestinian state, but that it would only happen when Hamas lost power or changed its ways.
"We are talking about a two-state solution, not a three-state solution, but how that is going to come about will depend on the Hamas leadership and the choices of people in Gaza," he said.
Last week, Hamas denounced the Annapolis meeting and said Abbas has no mandate to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinian population.
Still, administration officials say the time is ripe for peace talks, with a Palestinian and Israeli leader who are committed to making the difficult compromises necessary for arriving at a final settlement.
Hadley said that, either at Annapolis or shortly afterward, Olmert and Abbas will announce a timetable for future talks on the core issues that divide them. The two parties will also decide what role they want the United States to play in the negotiations, he said.
That hands-off style has disappointed critics who believe that both Clinton and Carter achieved gains by playing a forceful and active role in negotiations.
Still the meeting could succeed if the administration is prepared to provide the difficult diplomatic assistance in the months to come, said Aaron David Miller, who served as an adviser to six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations.
"They deserve credit" for planning the Annapolis meeting, said Miller. "But before anyone is getting in the peace process hall of fame, they are going to have to do a lot more."
