The Annapolis Farce: Selling the Same Promise Three Times

Andrew C. McCarthy, in “Farce:  Burying the Bush Doctrine in Annapolis,” writes that we are witnessing a farce:

Syria was beseeched to attend the farce even as it was working to throw into chaos the selection of a new Lebanese president to replace Emile Lahoud, the Syrian plant whose term was due to expire last week. . . . .  It has been over two years since President Bush and Secretary Rice made a show of demanding action on the U.N. investigation [of the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri] that has implicated top Syrian officials, including Assad’s brother and brother-in-law.  The result . . . is nothing. Meanwhile, Hezbollah, with Syrian backing, continues to threaten a renewal of the war it started against Israel in the summer of 2006.

Of course, the portrayal of Syria as a legitimate participant in a peace initiative is no more absurd than the participation of the Palestinians themselves.

Seduced by the fantasy of peace-loving Palestinians, the president and his top diplomats have made creation of a sovereign state for these blood-soaked jihadists the bedrock of our Middle East policy . . . Remarkably, the State Department tells the New York Times that its game-plan for the farce is to commit both Israel and the Palestinians “to carry out long-postponed obligations included in the first stage of the 2003 peace plan known as the road map.”

On the Palestinian side, the primary obligation was to end terrorism. That’s precisely the same promise the terror master and Palestinian founder Yasser Arafat gave to President Clinton after the first and before the second Intifada.

And it is precisely the same promise that Mahmoud Abbas gave to President Bush after the second Intifada. 

In his April 29, 2003 speech to the Palestinian Legislative Council, Abbas as Prime Minister intoned that he would fulfill the Roadmap exactly as written, with no reservations:

The government is committed to the Palestinian leadership’s official approval of [the Roadmap] reached after an in-depth and thorough review of it. . . .  [W]e will not negotiate the Roadmap.  The Roadmap must be implemented not negotiated.

Four months later, Abbas bragged in his September 6, 2003 address to the Palestinian Legislative Council that he hadn’t even tried to comply with the Roadmap and in fact had “overcome [the] obstacle” of the Roadmap’s insistence on dismantling terrorist organizations:

The roadmap says: all security services are under the control of the PM, but I didn’t even ask for the unification of the services; when I was asked, I said the unification of the efforts of all security services and not unify all security services; thus, what we demanded was coordination and nothing more between the security services, and when the Americans used to tell us the unity of the services, we used to tell them we don’t want this.

. . . the roadmap talks about the unification of the security services but we overcome this obstacle; the roadmap talks about striking and uprooting the factions and we overcome this obstacle too because we will not fall into this trap; we don’t want a civil war . . . 

After Arafat’s death, Abbas was elected as president, running essentially unopposed, and the U.S. again began pressuring him to dismantle the terrorist organizations, as he had agreed in the Roadmap to do, and he did nothing. 

The Israeli disengagement from Gaza gave him still another opportunity, and it is worth re-reading this August 17, 2005 interview between Secretary Rice and the editors of The New York Times about what was supposed to follow the disengagement:

QUESTION: . . . [Israeli] military officials are saying, that while this disengagement is taking place, Hamas is building up a popular army. It’s alleged to be training that army in Gaza, they — and preparing for more suicide attacks after the disengagement and stockpiling rockets.

First, the facts. What is your assessment of those assertions?

SECRETARY RICE: I don’t know how extensive the Hamas "preparations" have been, although we suspect that there have been some. I don’t know how to scale what you just said, but that there is some Hamas activity — that is true. But —

QUESTION: Some increased Hamas activity?

SECRETARY RICE: Yes, well, I don’t doubt that Hamas is trying to train and to increase its capacity. It would be one of the things that we’ve talked to the Palestinian Authority about is that Hamas very often uses periods of calm to try and enhance its capacity.

QUESTION: Its capacity to do what?

SECRETARY RICE: Its capacity to cause trouble. It’s a terrorist organization. But, of course, the Palestinian Authority is enhancing its capability as well in this period of time. That is why the continued security reform is important.

QUESTION: But in terms — excuse me for interrupting.

SECRETARY RICE: Yes, sure.

QUESTION: But if — we were just talking about moving from disengagement to the roadmap, does it continue —

SECRETARY RICE: Yes. That’s where I was going. That’s exactly where I was going. This comes to the fact that you cannot simply let a terrorist organization sit forever, that you cannot — that there is an obligation in the roadmap to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism, not just coexist with it.

QUESTION: Right.

SECRETARY RICE: And so that is one of the most important next elements. I know that the Palestinians have been concerned and so are the Israelis, to have calm in this period of time. It has been a good thing that thus far the Palestinian factions have more or less respected that calm, but that isn’t a substitute for the dismantling of the terrorist organizations, because as Abu Mazen himself has said, you can only have one authority and one gun.

QUESTION: Right.

SECRETARY RICE: So the answer to the question, what comes next, is that one of the obligations in the roadmap is that the Palestinian Authority should have unified security forces that are all under the authority of the Palestinian Authority and its leadership, its elected leadership. There will be elections in January. But the Palestinian Authority is going to have to deal with the infrastructure of terrorism, that’s one of its obligations.

QUESTION: So the — is it still then the U.S. position that disarmament, dismantling are the next steps for Israel in the expected steps on the right —

SECRETARY RICE: No, I’m not talking about a sequencing here because the roadmap is assiduously not sequencing one step after another. It gives, in parallel, certain obligations to both sides. And the obligation of the Palestinians has to do with the dismantling of terrorist infrastructure and organizations and they’re going to have to do it.

The Secretary of State thus said publicly — to the paper of record — that the U.S. had talked to the Palestinian Authority about Hamas’ use of calm periods to enhance its capacity, that there was a Roadmap obligation to “dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism, not just coexist with it,” that calm wasn’t a substitute for dismantling terrorist organizations such as Hamas, that what was to come next was the Roadmap obligation of unified security forces and dealing with the infrastructure of terrorism, and that this was not a sequential obligation that depended on any further Israeli action: “the obligation of the Palestinians has to do with the dismantling of terrorist infrastructure and organizations and they’re going to have to do it.”

And Abbas didn’t do it.

And Rice gave him still another chance. A month later, she had this exchange in a September 15, 2005  interview with the editorial board of the New York Post:

QUESTION:  At what point [does] the Administration insist that [Abbas] abide by the requirements to the roadmap, which is not temporary truce agreements but disarming and dismantling terrorist groups?

SECRETARY RICE:  Well, we are insisting on it every time we talk to him.  But you want him to be successful when he does it.  You don’t want him to go to dismantle Hamas and fail.  And so we’re trying to increase his capability on the security forces side to create better political conditions on the ground.  But there’s no doubt that they’re going to have to dismantle these terrorist organizations. . . .

QUESTION:  He has said, I mean, kind of recently, but at some point he has said he did not favor the idea of removing arms by force, you know, arms that are controlled joined by other Palestinians.

SECRETARY RICE:  Well, he has said that he believes that they can build a national consensus that there should be one authority and one gun.  What he’s not said publicly is what he will do if that fails.  But again, I don’t think this is — I do not think that he is confused about what it would mean for the long-term viability of the Palestinian Authority if Hamas has both political option and a violence option.  He can’t live with that either. 

It turned out he could live with both.  He again failed to take any action, despite the fact that, in Rice’s words, “we are insisting on it every time we talk to him.”

Four months after that, it was too late.  The Palestinians elected their premier terrorist organization to control their legislature.  Abbas then entered into a “unity government” with them.

Earlier this year Abbas’s forces were expelled from Gaza by his partners in his unity government after a battle that lasted less than a week. The only thing currently keeping him in power in the West Bank is the IDF.  And the U.S. State Department.

Now Abbas arrives in Annapolis ready to sell the Israelis and Americans the same promise for a third time:  He will (to use President Bush’s words in his November 25 Statement) “recommit to implementing” the Roadmap — with absolutely no possibility of dismantling terrorist organizations and infrastructure, either in Gaza or the West Bank. 

It is, as Andrew McCarthy notes, a farce.

UPDATE: Say, aren’t all of these guys the same ones who made the first two promises?