Give Annapolis a Chance?

In preparing for the Mideast conference in Annapolis, Maryland, this week, Jerusalem Post columnist and deputy managing editor Caroline Glick took some questions from National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez Monday morning.

Glick, a senior Middle East fellow at the Center for Security Policy, is author of the upcoming book (March), The Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad will be released in March. All Glick clicks are available at www.carolineglick.com.

Caroline Glick: It is hard to see any positive outcome from the Annapolis conference. Some have argued that the conference will make clear the distinction between states interested in peace and states uninterested in peace. But it is far from clear why this is the case. Indeed, one of the basic flaws inherent in the Annapolis conference, and indeed in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent frenetic pursuit of Palestinian statehood is the complete absence of moral distinctions between states committed to the ideals of peace, freedom, and fighting terror and those committed to jihad, tyranny, and hatred.

To take just the most obvious example of Rice’s moral equivalence, she upholds Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his Prime Minister Salam Fayad as moderates who seek peaceful coexistence with Israel. Yet the fact is that neither Abbas nor Fayad have taken any steps that could be considered conducive to peace. They joined a unity government with Hamas in March and would have remained Hamas’s junior partner in that Saudi-brokered governing arrangement had Hamas not decided to oust Fatah forces from Gaza in June. Fayad has continued to pay the salaries of the Iranian-trained Hamas army in Gaza since the terror group’s takeover of the area just as he pays the salaries of Fatah terrorists in the West

Lopez: All things being what they are: If there’s a single good that can come of this conference, what would you urge the U.S. that it be?

Glick: The only good thing that can come from this conference is that President George W. Bush recognizes the harm that Rice is doing to the U.S.’s national-security interests by undermining the Bush doctrine. From the six-party talks with North Korea to her bizarre and dangerous decision to attempt to appease Iran by holding talks with the millenarian theocracy in Iraq; supporting the EU’s failed nuclear diplomacy and authorizing the U.N. Security Council to (mis)handle Iran’s nuclear-weapons program; to her seeming obsession with establishing a pro-Iranian, jihadist Palestinian state before the end of the Bush presidency; to her unpardonable neglect of Iraq, Rice has taken a knife to everything Bush has staked his presidency on.

If the failure of Annapolis causes the president to distance himself from Rice and end her foreign-policy supremacy, then in retrospect, the conference may have been worth the effort.

Lopez: What’s the Bush legacy in the Mideast likely going to be?

Glick: If Bush reins in his appeasement-mongering secretary of State and returns to the guidelines for U.S. foreign policy that he set out in his first term, then his will be a revolutionary legacy of freedom in the Middle East. The promising situation in Iraq, if allowed to progress will indeed bring about the first Arab democracy. Were the president to liberate the Palestinians from the tyranny of their terror leaders and antagonists in the Arab world, he could set the conditions for true peace between them and Israel. If he were to reignite his call for freedom and empowerment of liberals in the Arab world and if he were to make good on his pledge to support Iranian democracy activists, he would leave the region and the world safer, freer and less threatening than he found them when he assumed office.

If, on the other hand, he continues to empower Rice to undermine all he has fought for his legacy will be one of cowardice, betrayal, and failure.

Tomorrow its' Annapolis...

Before this, there was Wye River...

And before Wye River there was Oslo...

And who can remember what was before Oslo, and who can tell me what any of these summits or agreements have changed? The Arabs still long for Jewish blood, even at the cost of the blood of their own children. Nothing that happens tomorrow will change that, and President Bush and SoS Rice have undertaken a fool's errand.

The real question still remains. Why would President Bush do a 100% about face on foreign policy and simply allow Condi to provide moral equivalency of the 60’s oppression of African-Americans to the bloodthirst Palestinians? If anything, the Black Panthers failed in their attempt to use violence to earn equel rights, but Martin Luther King succeeded peacefully. So again, WHY!?!? Olmert is no better. What is wrong with these people? Is Arab perception more important that national security?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.