Calling Henry Kissinger

George W. Bush dearly wants to leave behind a Palestinian state--and some measure of Mideast peace—as his legacy. And Condoleezza Rice, the president's alter ego on foreign policy, is determined to do all she can to make it happen. The secretary of State flies off to the region Thursday for another in a series of meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas—two politically weak leaders who, like Bush, would love to make a success of the planned peace conference in Annapolis, Md., later this fall.

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The problem? This isn't going to happen without high-level, full-time American mediation—as opposed to, say, sporadic visits. The issues are just too difficult. And Rice is just too distracted. Case in point: on her way to meet with Olmert and Abbas over the weekend, she'll spend two days in Turkey, trying to talk Ankara out of invading Northern Iraq to take out the thousands of Kurdish PKK rebels who have fled there. Rice will also participate in the second Iraq regional conference in Turkey. On top of that, she's now facing an angry revolt by her own State Department employees who resent her effort to order them to Baghdad. And she'll be bogged down with more blowback from the Blackwater debacle after a devastating report by her own envoys assigned culpability for such out-of-control security contractors to the State Department itself. Among the myriad other issues that are engulfing Rice: Iran's continued defiance, nailing down the North Korea nuclear deal and so on.

Condi Rice is a master multitasker, but she must perforce work on the Palestinian issue part time. Meanwhile other forces are at work around the clock undermining Palestinian statehood. The most dangerous of these is Hamas. Abbas, even if he agrees to terms with Olmert, doesn't control the security forces necessary to make the new Palestinian state work. Those belong to the more powerful Hamas, which wants no part of a pact with Israel. And new evidence is emerging that while Rice, the Israelis, Palestinians and Arab states are haggling over a piece of paper to come out of Annapolis—a joint statement—Hamas is building up its military at a great rate, in part to rain ever-more sophisticated rockets on Israel but possibly also for another onslaught on Abbas's Fatah base in the West Bank. Hamas would like nothing better than to make Abbas and Olmert look like fools by actively undermining whatever peace they achieve. "Hamas wants to demonstrate that Olmert has made a deal with a guy who doesn't control the guns, and it has the capacity to do so," says Aaron David Miller, a longtime U.S. Mideast negotiator and author of a forthcoming book entitled "Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace."

The weak link here is Egypt, which is looking the other way while Hamas uses its safe haven in Gaza to rebuild its military with an astonishing array of munitions and weaponry smuggled over the strip's border with Egypt. According to one Western security source, Hamas has brought in 1,500 new antitank launchers, 2,000 rockets, 8,000 rifles and 70 tons of explosives since the beginning of 2007. The group has also used the relative safety granted it by Israel's withdrawal from Gaza to reorganize its military along the regimented lines of Hizbullah. And in the last several weeks, Israeli officials believe that 80 Iranian-trained terrorists were quietly allowed through the border crossing near Rafaq.

Rice, asked about this growing problem at an Oct. 24 congressional hearing, said she had spoken to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak about it on her last trip. "We agreed that the United States would soon send a senior delegation to help with the Egyptians and the Israelis and the Palestinians to see what further steps might be taken to deal with the smuggling," she said. That "senior delegation," which is to arrive next week, consists of a deputy assistant secretary of State and a deputy assistant secretary of Defense. Officials on that level lack the status to influence leaders like Mubarak. U.S. officials also point out that David Welch, Rice's respected assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, is at work on this and other issues surrounding Annapolis full time. "There's a lot of handholding," says an administration official involved in the talks. "Look at [Rice's] travel schedule. She is spending a lot of time on this. I think she feels she's spending the amount of time she needs to."

Sorry, but it's just not enough. First of all, Welch—though a consummate, hardworking diplomat—is not senior enough to resolve such titanic issues on his own. "He's not engaging the leaders," says Dennis Ross, who for many years was senior U.S. Mideast envoy for both Republican and Democratic administrations and recently summed up the lessons he learned in a book called "Statecraft." "When I'd go out there I shuttled back and forth, seeing leaders 20 times in 10 days." Since the beginning, the Bush administration has had the disconcerting habit of simply stating its expectations of what other governments will do, then waiting for them to fall into line. Rice's statement to Congress was typical. "I believe that the Egyptians understand that it is not in their national interest to have the smuggling take place," she said.