As the good book says, God loves the sinner that repenteth even if he repenteth late -- so US President George W. Bush will probably win a smile from heaven for his belated call for a Middle East peace conference before the year is out. Sure, it's a bit late now for the president to be scrabbling to make amends for six-and-a-half years of at best intermittent attention toward the Israel-Palestine conflict.
But something is better than nothing -- even if British Prime Minister Tony Blair is probably a bit miffed that the proposed chair for this international powwow will not be him -- despite his new job -- but rather US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
What's made Bush see the light? In a word: Iraq. With his administration losing allies by the day because of its failure in Baghdad, Bush is desperate for something that might resemble a foreign policy achievement. More interesting is why the other participants expected at Bush's meeting will be there. Of course, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas could hardly stay away: they both want to prove that, with Hamas shoved to one side, they can move forward.
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But Bush also plans for neighboring states to come along -- Egypt and Jordan and perhaps others, too. Their motive is more intriguing and also comes down to a single word, a word that has increasingly become the critical one in the region: Iran.
The so-called moderate Arab states, those that lean towards the West, are petrified by the rise and rise of Tehran. Cairo, Amman and Riyadh fear both the Shiite ascendancy and surging Islamism that Iran represents, the latter of which, were it not so thoroughly repressed in their own countries, would badly threaten their regimes. Egypt does not want to see Hamas, partner of Egypt's dissident Muslim Brotherhood movement, take over the West Bank the way it has taken over Gaza any more than Israel or Fatah does.
This emergence of a common enemy has sparked a flurry of activity in the long stagnant Israeli-Palestinian conflict, much of it positive. In a bid to boost Abbas, to show he can get results that Hamas cannot, both Bush and Olmert have turned the money tap back on.
Israel is also set to release 256 Palestinian prisoners, including many who were involved in failed terror attacks. That's in addition to the new Israeli amnesty extended to 178 fugitive militants from the Fatah-aligned al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades.
Israel and Abbas will now cooperate on security too, all part of the strategy approved not only by Israel and the US, but also the EU and several Arab states -- of ensuring that West Bank Fatahland basks in the sunshine while Gaza's Hamastan remains in shadow.
As if to ram home the message, a delegation from the Arab League will make history next week when it visits Israel for the first time.
There are other motives at work in all this, of course, but Iran is a key factor. Reluctant to let Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pose as the Palestinians' champion and anxious to prevent the Palestinian plight from further radicalizing their own populations, these mainly Sunni, pro-Western states want to show they can deliver too. This is the window of opportunity through which Bush is pushing his conference.
These unexpected, happy byproducts of the Iranian threat should not obscure our view of the threat itself. As was reported this week, the notion of military action to prevent a nuclear Iran is under serious consideration in the White House -- with Bush apparently leaning toward Vice President Dick Cheney's view that it may be necessary to use force before they leave office in January 2009. The flock of US presidential candidates are all at pains not to rule out military action and so, strikingly, was David Miliband in his first interview as UK foreign secretary.
When the Financial Times offered him the chance to repeat the view that the use of force would be "inconceivable," he repeatedly declined.
Nowhere is the Iranian peril assessed more closely than in Israel, which would, after all, be target number one for any Iranian bomb. In several conversations with Israeli policymakers, they all described Tehran as the biggest single threat to their national security, ranking ahead even of the Palestinian conflict.
The latter can be contained and managed, they believe; but the Iranian threat is -- and they all used this word -- "existential." The way Israel sees it, the combination of a nuclear bomb and an ideology that yearns for a world without the Jewish state adds up to the threat of annihilation.
Even if Iran did not actually drop the bomb, it would still endanger Israel, argues Shmuel Bar of the country's Institute for Policy and Strategy. He dismisses the theory that crossing the nuclear threshold has a taming effect, often turning states into more responsible actors. Pakistan behaved much more aggressively in Kashmir after it got nukes than it did before.
Bar reckons that newly nuclear states believe they can act with impunity; he imagines Iran bullying its neighbors in the Gulf, driving up the oil price, preventing any of them so much as talking peace with Israel. Besides even if there is only a 2 percent chance that the responsibility theory is wrong and that Iran will remain untamed, "that is too big a chance for Israel."
As a result, the country is not ruling anything out.
The politicians will listen to the intelligence assessments, which, in contrast with the US and UK have not lost their credibility, and decide whether to strike. That decision will matter enormously, for then either Washington will block Israel or it will get out of the way -- or it will act itself.
As it happens, presenting it like this suits the US quite nicely. It can go around pressing the Chinese or Russians to act diplomatically on Iran or else, if they do not, then those crazy Israelis will act instead: it is the classic good cop, bad cop.
And yet, I do not detect any gung-ho Israeli desire to pounce. Several voices in the military and political establishment speak instead of pursuing diplomacy and precisely targeted sanctions to the very end.
They reckon that if the Iranian elite is denied international financial credit and the refined oil on which they rely, the regime could begin to crack under the strain.
The aim, one Israeli insider explained to me, is to have "the head of the Bank of Iran furious that his son cannot study at Harvard or his daughter at the Sorbonne" and venting his fury at Ahmadinejad and his nuclear policy.
"Iran is not North Korea," he argued -- there is a civil society and an elite which might pressure the leadership to drop the nuclear dream if it proved too costly. Even Iranian public opinion is tepid about nukes once the price gets too high.
Israel has other reasons to be wary. An air assault on Iran's nuclear sites would not be the clean, surgical hit on a single location that took out Iraq's plutonium reactor at Osirak in 1981. Tehran's uranium-enrichment centers are dispersed, hidden and protected.
Above all, Iran has the power to retaliate -- probably through terror cells that would hit Israeli and Jewish targets around the world, as they have in the past.
So Israel feels a sense of urgency, one that may not be shared anywhere outside Washington. It need not end in war. If China and Russia are persuaded to tighten sanctions still further, force can probably be avoided. But this decision -- whether it's resolved through war or peace -- may not be more than a year away.
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