In Annapolis we will see no more than an extravagant media gimmick; an orchestrated performance whose Middle Eastern actors are taking part in it halfheartedly because 'the president expects it.'

I first heard about Condoleezza Rice in 1993. My teacher and mentor, Gabriel Almond, a key figure at Stanford University, was then vigorously working to get her appointed provost (the university's vice president for academic affairs). Asked if this wasn't an exaggerated promotion for a relatively unknown political science lecturer of 39, he replied, in Yiddish: "She is certainly not a great luminary, but her story is the American story."

Her father was a black clergyman from Alabama, who instilled in her values of nonviolence, hard work and culture (she excelled in piano and Russian). From a private high school she proceeded to a prestigious college, and from there to doctoral studies on the Soviet arms race. "And she is also a Republican," he added. "That will enhance Stanford's public image, and in fact our image in our own eyes."

Rice got the appointment and acquired national visibility. Almond later told me that he and his colleagues were disappointed with her performance. They discovered that her intellectual world was narrow, and that her management style was characterized by authoritarianism and arrogance.

However, her status among the American public grew. The media inflated her close personal relations with the first President Bush and his wife, which were formed during her middle-level service on the National Security Council from 1989 to 1991. "Kissinger in a skirt," she was dubbed. When the current President Bush was elected, he appointed her his national security adviser.

Thus, from the rarefied and protected atmosphere of Stanford and the house of the elder Bush, Rice found herself in the top ranks of a national strategy establishment inhabited by scheming backstabbers like Dick Cheney, the vice president. Her first test was September 11, the need to formulate a strategy against Al-Qaida and the slide to war in Iraq. Rice showed herself in all her intellectual frailty and character weakness, behaving as no more than a proficient technician. She had no cohesive worldview about international relations or the modes of action required by the state. Cheney had a cohesive worldview, and with it and his personal charisma he won Bush's heart.

Rice raised no questions; for example, about the lack of a connection between the struggle against terrorism and the old-new perception of Saddam Hussein as an enemy. After all, there was no evidence of a connection between Al-Qaida and Iraq (a fact that was well known from the outset), and this had nothing to do with Iraq's supposed possession of nonconventional weapons. Lacking an intellectual compass, Rice drifted with the prevailing winds and became, effectively, the minister of information for the war in Iraq.

The obsequious media made her think she could be the Republican candidate for president in 2008, and, accordingly, that it would be useful for her to accept the post of secretary of state. She followed Colin Powell, who concluded his term of office in 2005, after understanding that he had been misleading and misled on the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In time, Rice realized that Iraq was a bleeding quagmire that would not cover her in glory. She desperately needed an achievement, and so turned to the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is the real story of Annapolis: a story of fierce personal emotions, disappointment, affront and desperation.

But what action did Rice set in motion, and to what end? The action is not based on an American assessment that the conflict is ripe for resolution and/or that there are leaders in the region capable of deciding. In Annapolis we will see no more than an extravagant media gimmick; an orchestrated performance whose Middle Eastern actors are taking part in it halfheartedly because "the president expects it."

Rice, the proprietor, is pushing, because less than a year remains until the elections, and the two Middle Eastern players are lazy and weak. Weak but wily, so they will know how to finesse the conference, as they have already begun to show. So no one need worry, we are not about to see a conference of breakthrough or painful concessions, only a parody of Camp David 2000.

 
Emmanuel Sivan is professor of Islamic history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His research area is Contemporary Islamic Fundamentalism.

This was published November 23, 2007 in Haaretz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=927235

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