Bush/Rice peace push floundering?

I know I haven’t written much about the– extremely belated and highly opportunistic!– Israeli-Palestinian peace “initaitive” that Pres. Bush and Secretary of State Rice have been pursuing ever since Hamas pushed the (US-backed) Fateh “Contra” units out of Gaza in June and Fateh’s PA President Mahmoud Abbas formed a rump PA government in Ramallah shortly afterwards.
The main reason I haven’t written anything until now is that I was very busy writing my latest book, which is on global issues, not specifically on Palestinian or even Middle Eastern issues. Then, too, the twists and turns in Palestinian politics are hard to write about clearly and succinctly. (I just finished writing a piece that is largely on this question, that “The Nation” commissioned from me way back when. It proved a more complex writing job than I expected– largely because of the need to whittle down into a limited number of words the huge range of factors that need to be mentioned.)
Anyway, right now I am supposed to be on vacation. Indeed, I’m writing this from the courtyard of beautiful small Pension in Granada, with views looking over toward the Alhambra. Hard to focus on the twists and turns of current Jewish-Arab politics, though I suppose that if there’s a good place to gain perspective on such matters– as well as to reconnect with the idea that there is a universe in which constructive Jewish-Arab cooperation is possible– then this might well be it.
So now, I’ve been reading a few news items on this topic that have piqued my interest; and yes, I do have a few thoughts.
Richard Boudreaux and Paul Richter have this piece in today’s LA Times. They write this from Jerusalem:

After prodding the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table for the first time in nearly seven years, the Bush administration now confronts a stalemate that threatens to undermine the latest peace initiative and further diminish American influence in the Middle East.
… The administration’s effort is hobbled by stark differences between two sides with weak leaders who face hawkish opposition at home and cannot even agree on what kind of joint document to strive for as a basis for the conference.
… On Monday, when the negotiating teams that Olmert and Abbas had appointed last week held their first working session, it was clear that the sides remained far apart. The talks were suspended, and the parties are looking to Rice and her team to bring proposals to bridge their differences.
But it remains to be seen whether the Americans will be willing to take such an activist role.
Bush, sympathetic to Israeli arguments that no outsiders should try to dictate the Jewish state’s security needs, has in the past directed Rice to leave it to the two sides to see what they could work out.
… If the sides are too far apart, he said, the administration might decide to delay the November conference to reduce its downside risk.
But that would create another risk. Propagandists for Hamas, Syria and other potential spoilers — the militant forces Bush is trying to weaken — would inevitably exploit a delay or any outcome that gave the Palestinians less than what Abbas seeks.
Abbas and his Fatah movement are preparing for such a letdown. One advisor said the movement was debating whether to continue with open-ended negotiations brokered by Rice or snub Washington by returning to a power-sharing deal with Hamas and even engaging in new armed attacks against Israel.
“The November meeting is going to be a threshold event for Abbas,” said Mouin Rabbani, a senior Middle East analyst for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. “If he doesn’t bring home the goods, he faces a crisis of credibility and will have to compensate by seeking agreements with rival Palestinian factions. He would be weaker, and Hamas would be stronger.”

I have huge respect for Mouin’s judgment. But I am not as certain as he seems to be that Abbas (Abu Mazen) would necessarily respond to a failure in November by going back into a coalition deal with Hamas– and one in which, this time around, his hand would be even weaker than it was during the last such deal, concluded under Saudi auspices in early February. After all, in the past, when political and diplomatic developments have not gone as he hoped, Abbas has on a couple of occasions merely retreated from public life, in a blue funk. And I think there’s a distinct possibility that he might do that again, if Bush and Rice prove themselves totally incapable of delivering anything worthwhile for him.
If Abu Mazen does respond in this way, that would of course provoke yet another huge internal crisis for Fateh. He might meanwhile be settling back into a semi-retirement in Qatar, where he spent many previous years of funkdom. (And as for being “President” of the PA? Well, let’s face it, the President of the PA doesn’t have any real powers anyway, apart from running some internal workings of the string of ghettoes into which the IDF has penned the Palestinians ever since Oslo. He probably would not miss the job.)
It is a very interesting time, right now, for the fate of the US’s until-now hegemonic role in the Middle East. More and more of the cards are getting stacked up against the US-Israeli alliance. This means, of course, that there’s a chance of some extremely rash action from one or the other, or both of them, as they chafe within the limitations that are increasingly building up around them.
There is, of course, a lot more to be said about this Bush/Rice peace “initiative.” For any number of reasons, I have always found it hard to judge that the initiative was serious, at all. Primarily because of the extremely opportunistic and reactive circumstances in which it was born. But also because this formula of simply having an extremely weak and widely repudiated (by his own people) Palestinian leader sit down with his people’s jailers and expecting the two “sides” to be able to reach anything like a sustainable peace agreement is pure pie in the sky. (“Like putting a kindergarten child into the ring with a sumo wrestler and expecting a fair fight,” in the memorable words that Palestinian human-rights lawyer Jonathan Kuttab once used.)
That approach of keeping the negotiations determinedly “bilateral” between the two sides, along with the approach of seeking to negotiate in the first instance only an interim deal or even, heaven forfend, another airy-fairy “Declaration of Principles”, was completely discredited by the failed record of the diplomacy of the 1990s. If that record showed anything it showed that:

1. Diverting the negotiating energy into interim deals, or even interim-of-an-interim deals, while leaving the final status undetermined– as happened at and after Oslo– is a clear recipe for uncertainty on all sides, tension, violence (on all sides), failure, and disappointment.
2. The outlines of a politically sustainable final agreement are already fairly well known– though the balance of forces between the two sides has shifted somewhat away from Israel’s favor since the (non-governmental) “Geneva Accord” was concluded at the Track Two level in 2003.
3. Left alone, the two sides cannot negotiate a sustainable agreement. This is especially the case if, while it claims it is “leaving the field clear for bilateral negotiations”, the US continues to shovel huge amounts of nearly unconditional political, military, and financial aid into Israel.
4. The principles of international law– including the Geneva Conventions’ provisions against the building of settlements in occupied land and the general principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force– have just as much relevance in the Palestinian arena as anywhere else, and indeed can provide useful signposts to the content of a legitimate and sustainable final peace agreement.

(Meanwhile, if anyone is interested in the views and judgments on the Palestinian issue of an increasingly deranged Tony Blair, you can read them here. Among the inanities he mouthed there were this: “If you cannot reach a deal with the current Palestinian leadership … then the Palestinian with whom you will be able to reach an agreement has not yet been born,” and this: “He said that he took on the role of helping resolve the conflict in June because of ‘my sense of a mission’.” Nonsense on stilts, Tony dear. Go home and apply some cold compresses to your fevered brow.)