The Condi Shuttle

What fresh ideas did Condi Rice bring on her third trip to the Middle East this year? That's a good question.

She insists that she has not asked the Arab states to amend their 2002 Arab peace initiative at the Arab summit this week in Riyadh. But she would like them to re-launch it in a way that suggests more active Arab involvement in the broader Arab-Israeli peace process. In other words, she doesn't want the Arabs merely to sit back as spectators until the Israelis and Palestinians have finally made peace together. She is searching for some sort of mechanism that brings the Arabs more actively on board. Broadening her peace efforts to include the Arab states has twin advantages: it could encourage the Israelis and Palestinians to get more serious about reaching a final settlement of their dispute, and it could speed up the conclusion of a final comprehensive peace for the whole region.

What Rice told reporters on Friday before leaving Washington:

But I would hope that that initiative would be offered again and offered in a way that suggests that there might be active follow up to the initiative, not just to say here's an initiative. But to at least begin to discuss and think about how it might be actively followed up so that it becomes a part of supporting an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict now, not at the end of the process and that's the discussion I want to have with them.

That is a fair and reasonable position. The question is what more can the Arabs do right now beyond reiterating what they consider to be a major olive branch: full peace with all the Arab states and Israel in exchange for Israel's withdrawal from occupied Arab territories. The Arabs would probably agree to a mechanism such as an international peace conference. But it is the U.S. and Israel, not the Arabs, who have always preferred bilateral to multilateral negotiations. If Rice is hoping that she can get Saudi Arabia, which authored the 2002 peace initiative, to start publicly talking with Israel by itself as a gesture toward Israel, that would be a great step but is probably wishful thinking.

Daniel Kurtzer, one of America's finest diplomats until his recent retirement (he served as U.S. ambassador to both Israel and Egypt, among other posts), floated an idea an Op-Ed in the International Herald Tribune last week.

Perhaps out of frustration with Washington's failure to jump-start full-scale peace negotiations, or out of a belief that a U.S.-backed international rather than purely American effort will have a better chance of success, he calls for the international Quartet to convene preliminary talks among the main parties to discuss whether the Arab peace initiative opens up options for peace negotiations. Sounds like a promising idea. If nothing else, it would help keep up the momentum that Rice began with the shuttle diplomacy she launched in January. After doing little to mediate the Middle East conflict for six years, it is important that Rice doesn't lose interest or courage.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo