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 The planned three-day conference next week in Annapolis, Md., and Washington comes with just 14 months left in Bush's term and his legacy tarnished by the war in Iraq.
Pushing for an Israeli-Palestinian peace has preoccupied more than one U.S. president. President Clinton made it a top agenda item in the closing days of his presidency. But with the notable exception of President Carter, whose Camp David sessions in 1978 led to a peace treaty the following year between Israel and Egypt, presidential Mideast peacemaking has fizzled.
The U.S.-sponsored peace conference - first proposed by Bush last July - is designed to build momentum toward the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, suspended for the past seven years. The idea is to eventually establish a Palestinian state. Bush called on moderate Arab states to take an active part in promoting negotiations that could lead to "a final peace in the Middle East."
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insists the sessions will be "serious and substantive." Standing next to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank earlier this month, Rice said, "We frankly have better things to do than invite people to Annapolis for a photo op."
But chances for any breakthrough pointing toward that "final peace" seem slight. The two sides are far apart on many issues, and the Palestinians themselves are divided, with the coastal Gaza Strip under rule of militant Islamic Hamas and the West Bank controlled by the moderate Abbas.
"For both Bush and Rice, it's a bit of a long shot. And there is a bit of image-making there, especially since the president promised in May 2003 that he was going to give this the same attention he was giving Iraq," said David Mack, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the first Bush administration.
"But there is also some serious substance here: a conjunction of desire by both Abbas and (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert to show some progress," said Mack, the vice president of the Middle East Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
It might seem that Bush and Rice have little to lose in forging ahead with the conference, given the president's low approval ratings and the unpopularity of the war in Iraq.
Still, pressure has been building on the White House to produce real achievements
- or see the conference idea backfire.
The stakes for the session increased Friday when Saudi Arabia and other Arab states agreed to attend the conference. Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians had already accepted the U.S. invitations.
Saudi participation was deemed crucial. It is the most powerful Sunni Arab state that has not made peace with Israel and is a longtime U.S. ally. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is also the author of a dormant peace plan that the Bush administration has partly embraced.
Syria, a regime at odds with the United States, was also on the U.S. invitation list to Arab and Muslim countries
- although it had not accepted. Iran was not invited.
Failure to achieve concrete results would have "devastating consequences in the region and beyond," said a bipartisan group of foreign policy luminaries, including former White House national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, former House International Relations Chairman Lee Hamilton and former diplomats Lee Pickering and Carla Hills.
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 "The outcome of the conference must be substantive, inclusive and relevant to the daily lives of Israelis and Palestinians," they wrote in a letter to Bush and Rice last month.
Shibley Telhami, a Mideast scholar at the University of Maryland, agreed. "It would be a disaster if we fail. People know that, if this initiative is aimed to bolster the Arab moderates, and they fail after raising expectations so high, then Hamas wins without lifting a finger."
Dennis Ross, a former U.S. peace envoy and assistant secretary of state during the terms of the elder President Bush and Clinton, has urged Rice to change her goals
- and focus on finding a formula that will help Abbas persuade his people that he is capable of achieving Palestinian national aspirations, while Hamas is offering only failure.
Some Mideast analysts have questioned the amount of effort Bush will personally expend on trying to get long-suspended Israeli-Palestinian peace talks back on track. "If you listen to the administration in terms of what their priorities are in the Middle East
- aside from Iraq - you would gather that the confrontation with Iran and worries about Iran's nuclear capability are the most important priority," said Telhami.
Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said at this point the conference is clearly Rice's production. "It's her show. Bush is not the person convening it, not the person working the phones and twisting the arms."
He doesn't expect much to come from the conference. "It doesn't feel like the stars are aligned for this," Alterman said. "There's no momentum in the peace process right now. And it's hard to see how something at this level can start that momentum."
Even Rice has said that more important than the conference is what follows. "The day after is when you have to get down to the business of trying to come to an agreement," she said.
The inability of U.S. presidents other than Carter to successfully broker peace deals says more about the Middle East than it does about the presidents, said Leo Ribuffo, a presidential historian at George Washington University.
"Under the best of circumstances, it's very, very difficult. And Bush has been a lot less involved than Clinton and Carter. For Carter, it was an absolute central concern, and one he considered his major accomplishment," said Ribuffo. "Even so, it cost him a lot of political support."
Still, Princeton political scientist Fred Greenstein said, Bush "is down so low, there's hardly any reason for him to be cautious. It would be nice for him to be able to point to one genuine foreign policy success
- to harpoon the great white whale."
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EDITOR'S NOTE - Tom Raum has covered national and international affairs for The Associated Press since 1973.
[Associated
Press; By TOM RAUM
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