Diplomatic Dash

By Michael Grunwald

Israel has ended operation Winter Storm, pulling its troops out of the Gaza Strip after five bloody days and more than 100 deaths, but the real blizzard is yet to come. Condoleeza Rice is in the Middle East trying to revive U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations, but Hamas is still lobbing rockets into Israel, Fatah is refusing to talk to Israel, and Israel is preparing for war.

The situation looks grim, which is unsurprising because this situation usually looks grim, except when it looks promising, which is inevitably followed by its looking grim again. The terrorist group Hamas, which doesn't want peace, has everything to gain by instigating conflicts that radicalize Palestinians and force Fatah to choose between peace talks and popular support. And Israel won't tolerate rockets for long.

This is embarrassing for the Bush Administration, which launched a splashy effort to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last November. But blaming the Administration alone for this sad state of affairs is off the mark; it's hard to cure a patient who just doesn't want to be treated.

That said, it's worth recalling the contempt with which the Bush Administration viewed Bill Clinton's failed efforts to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To Bush's team, Clinton's desperate pursuit of a deal--his first-term Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, visited Israel 35 times--was a waste of presidential prestige. It smacked of utopian arrogance, as if Americans thought we could make a messy world behave the way we wanted it to.

But after 9/11, Bush stopped talking about a "humble" foreign policy and instead took out a dictator in Iraq and called for democratic elections throughout the Middle East. And when the Palestinians heeded those calls, Hamas won, a fresh reminder that the Middle East is especially lousy at behaving the way the U.S. wants it to.

The Secretary of State tried to explain the difficulties facing this round of peace talks: "We are three months into trying to resolve a conflict that has been going on for 50 years." In the Middle East, it's not just the fighting that's cyclical; it's also the desperate chase for an improbable resolution.