By TONY KARON
Time
"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is in the Middle East, hoping to bolster Arab moderates — foremost among them beleaguered Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — and revive the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The unstated objectives include helping to topple the Hamas-led government elected by the Palestinians in January, and seeking to rally moderate Arab regimes against Iran. So what are her chances of success? Let's just say it's probably easier finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than finding any Arabs or Israelis optimistic over Rice's prospects.
Pro-U.S. Arab leaders, including Abbas, have suffered acutely from the Bush Administration's Middle East policy, with their influence at home and abroad declining in the face of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its backing for Israel's actions in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon. The simple math of Middle East politics today is that the there's an inverse proportionality between the closeness of Arab leaders to the United States and their distance from public opinion in their own countries. That much was clear when some Arab officials pointedly criticized Hizballah for initiating the summer's hostilities with Israel, but were then forced to retract as their citizenry cheered for Hizballah.
In other words, the current Israeli government has nothing to offer Arab moderates. Nor, for that matter, does Condi Rice.
The Israelis will be the first to tell Rice that, nice fellow and peacenik though he may be, President Abbas has negligible power on the Palestinian street, even over his own Fatah movement. He's never been a particularly decisive leader, and Rice's efforts to bolster him through public praise and symbolic photo opportunities may have the reverse effect — given the crisis in the Palestinian territories right now and the anti-American sentiment it has engendered, the demonstrative but empty-handed U.S. support for Abbas may be a political kiss of death."
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