Well, no, that's not exactly how it works. First, the regime in Cairo is weaker than it has been in a generation. The aging Hosni Mubarak is on his way out, and there remains considerable doubt whether his son Gamal will command enough loyalty from the army to succeed him. So Cairo is, like most of the Arab regimes, hedging its bets over whether it wants to back Abbas, and it is actively appeasing the newly empowered Hamas. No surprise there: Islamist forces are rising in all these Arab countries—in the most recent parliamentary election in Egypt in December 2005, the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas is a Palestinian spinoff of the Egyptian group) quadrupled its strength from 20 seats to 80. The upshot: getting the Egyptians to crack down on Hamas will require some high-level strong-arming from Washington, preferably by using the $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid as leverage. Both the president and Rice must deliver that message repeatedly.

The larger issue here is that if Annapolis is to produce something more than a piece of paper and a photo op, the groundwork has to be laid now. Washington can't simply let Abbas and Olmert haggle out issues that are so intractable it's unlikely either leader has the political strength to commit to them. For example, Abbas is going to have to accept a long-term Israeli military presence in his new state; Israel will never repeat the unilateral withdrawals it made from Lebanon and Gaza, which empowered Hizbullah and Hamas, respectively. Olmert, for his part, is going to have to confront final-status issues like handing over large parts of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, a move most Israelis will resist fiercely in the face of Hamas's continuing attacks. Yet right now U.S. officials say Olmert and Abbas are being left to figure all this out on their own. "We're not sitting in on that," says the administration official.

Both Ross and Miller applaud the Bush administration's eleventh-hour efforts to forge a peace at Annapolis after years of neglecting the Israeli-Palestinian issue. But both former negotiators are disturbed by the lack of intensive attention to detail by Bush and Rice. They point to the contrast with Secretary of State Jim Baker's efforts to convene the 1991 Madrid conference, which set the Oslo peace process in motion. That took nine months of frenzied diplomacy, with both Baker and President George H.W. Bush involved every step of the way. "The level of effort by the secretary of State was dramatically greater then," says Ross. There is also a cavalier expectation by the Bush administration that neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt will simply show up in Annapolis, though their leaders are notably cool to the conference. The point, however, is to get these officials not just to appear but to commit to specifics before they even arrive. "At Madrid there was a constant effort to work out the terms of the invitation letter," says Ross. "What you're trying to create is not just their presence so you have a nice picture but the reality of everyone signing up to certain set of commitments."

Every major peace process that has had any measure of success has benefited from intensive, high-level guidance by either the top cabinet official or the U.S. president himself. There was Baker at Madrid. There was Henry Kissinger spending several weeks shuttling back and forth to make peace between the Israelis and Arabs in 1973. Jimmy Carter took two weeks off in 1978 to devote himself to the Israeli-Egypt peace achieved at Camp David. Going further back, Woodrow Wilson spent six months in Paris to negotiate the Versailles Treaty in 1919, and Teddy Roosevelt closeted himself with Japanese and Russian delegates for a month in August 1905 to achieve his Nobel Prize-winning peace accord ending the Russo-Japanese war (eliciting Henry Adams's admiring comment that he was "the best herder of emperors since Napoleon"). There's no question Rice wants a deal of the magnitude of those agreements. "She's really committed to this," says Miller, "because in about a year she could join the company of the inconsequential secretaries of State. She needs to deliver something that she owns."

But even more important than that: Rice and Bush must at all costs avoid failure at Annapolis, which could make Hamas the dominant player in the Palestinian world for a generation and set off a new intifada. And if Condi is this distracted, wouldn't it be better to have someone working on it full time? There are several first-rate U.S. negotiators who are available these days: among them, Dennis Ross (though he's not looking for the job) and that consummate Bush family fixer, Jim Baker himself. For peace's sake, hire them.

© 2007