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Maureen Dowd: Jump on the Peace Train

In her usual style and eye to matters, in her column in the NY Times "Jump on the Peace Train" Maureen Dowd reflects on the Annapolis conference and the role of Condi and George W:

"Condi doesn’t want to be Iraq.

She wants to be a Palestinian state. It has a far more hopeful ring to it, legacy-wise.

The Most Powerful Woman in the History of the World, as President Bush calls her, is a very orderly person.

Like her boss, she loves schedules and routines and hates disruptions. As a child, she was elected “president” of her family, a position that allowed her to dictate the organizational details of family trips, according to “Condoleezza Rice: An American Life,” a new biography by The Times’s Elisabeth Bumiller.

As an adult, Condi was worried about taking the job of top diplomat because it would mean traveling and being away from her things and habits.

So it is telling that in Annapolis she is running such a seat-of-the-pants operation, which seems designed to rescue the images of a secretary of state and president who have spent more time working out in the gym than working on the peace process.

W. couldn’t be bothered to stay in Annapolis and try to belatedly push things along and guide Israel with a firmer hand.

After subverting diplomacy in his first term, now W. does drive-by diplomacy, taking a playboy approach to peace. He wants to look like he’s taking the problem of an Israeli-Palestinian treaty seriously when his true motivation is more cynical: pacifying the Arab coalition and holding it together so that he can blunt Iran’s sway.

When they invaded Iraq rather than working on the Palestine problem, W. and Condi helped spur the greater Iranian influence, Islamic extremism and anti-American sentiment that they are now desperately trying to quell."

An interesting postscript: Buried in all the hyped-up news about the outcome of the Annapolis meeting and that Abbas and Olmert will seek some sort of resolution by the end of next year, Olmert has already subsequently announced that it is quite possible that that twelve month objective may not be met. The same old story - one very small step forward and two giant steps back!

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