Seth Coulter Welles, HuffPost
According to 29-year CIA veteran and former NSC official Bruce Riedel,
Wednesday's announcement of joint peace
negotiations between Israel
and Syria revealed President
Bush's diminished standing in Middle East
affairs.
"Think of the irony," Riedel said. "George Bush goes to Jerusalem last week. He
gives an impassioned
speech about never dealing with nasty regimes [that sponsor terror]. He
basically says 'don't make agreements that appease [them].' And less than a
week later, the Israeli government announces it is engaged in peace negotiations
with the Assad dictatorship in Syria.
We're talking about a rather distasteful regime that likely had a hand in the
murder of [former Lebanese Prime Minister] Rafik Hariri. I guess [Israeli Prime
Minister] Ehud Olmert didn't think the speech was meant for him."
Riedel, who served as a special assistant to the president until 2002 and is
now with the Brookings Institution, said the lack of weight accorded to Bush's
appeasement speech "shows more and more that the Middle East is not
listening to him anymore, as does the deal announced in Doha
for Lebanon
today." In that Doha agreement, the
Iranian-supported Hezbollah secured effective veto
power within Lebanon's
next cabinet -- an arrangement that is sure to frustrate any future efforts to
disarm the political party that the U.S. considers a terrorist
organization.
Turkey's
mediation of Israel-Syria talks has been "an open secret" in the
region for the last month, according to Riedel. "A lot of very serious
Israeli thinkers have felt for some time that the Syria
agreement could be a strategic way to break out of the logjam that Israel is
in," he said. "There's no holy Jerusalem
to contend with, no refugees. It's a simple land for peace swap, and everyone
knows what the price is: 100 percent return of the Golan Heights, in return for
which they would get a full agreement with Syria. ... If this works, it would
demonstrate that negotiating with Assad's Syria
can produce serious and important results for a democracy like Israel."
But not all observers are that optimistic. Independent analyst and Israeli
political adviser Dahlia Scheindlin cites a recent report by the War and
Peace Index that suggests Israelis are more willing to consider a compromise
over certain areas in Jerusalem than they are
likely to approve of any deal with Syria that involves relinquishing
the Golan.
According to that study, only 19 percent of Israelis support the idea of
giving up the Golan, while 40 percent are willing to consider giving up Arab
neighborhoods in Jerusalem.
"It's sort of counter-intuitive and surprising," Scheindlin said,
"you wouldn't think it would be quite so emotional. But the Golan has been
annexed for so long, it now feels like part of Israel. The people who live there
are considered regular Israelis, not settlers. Also, they've been through this
many times before. Talks start and end faster than you can say 'jackrabbit.' So
there's a lot of cynicism. While this story is leading the news today, it could
easily be gone tomorrow."