War and Peacemakers

In a Middle East slipping from war to war, sometimes it seems only the old are truly impatient for peace. Certainly none is pushing harder than the octogenarian King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. His cause as crown prince in the 1990s and as reigning monarch since 2005 has been to settle as many disputes as he can in this region of clashing faiths, millennial rivalries and chronic conflagrations. They are all related, as he sees it, from Palestine to the price of oil, from Iraqi death squads to Iranian nukes to the risk of global recession, each cancroid problem feeding off the other.

To encourage peace Abdullah has been willing, literally, to go where no Saudi monarch has gone before. Just yesterday he visited the Vatican for an unprecedented meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, and this only a year after Benedict's remarks about the violent heritage of Islam provoked storms of angry protest in the Muslim world. For a Saudi ruler whose official title describes him as custodian of the two holiest shrines in Islam, this was no small gesture. And it's not inconceivable that some day Abdullah could walk the hallowed precincts of Jerusalem. But at his age that would have to be soon, and soon doesn't look likely. No wonder he's impatient.

To navigate the diplomatic channels, Abdullah relies on American-educated Prince Saud al-Faisal, 67, who has been Saudi Arabia's foreign minister since 1975. Saud too speaks in tones of world-weary, war-weary impatience. "It's 70 years that we have been talking about talks of peace," he told me the other night. "It's high time we talked about peace."

In an elegant townhouse on a quiet back street in Paris, Saud was taking a break from Abdullah's European tour last Sunday evening and bracing for next week's summit of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Riyadh. The prince wore his at-home clothes, bare-headed in a white thobe and sandals, but with a tailored sport coat to ward off the chill of a décor that was heavy on cold white marble. We've talked several times in the past, but the conversation this week summed up frustrations that would try the patience of any would-be peacemaker.

I asked Saud why, when American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is putting so much effort into convening a Middle East peace conference at Annapolis, Md., at the end of this month, the Saudis have been reluctant to lend their support. "We believe it is a dangerous thing to have the conference and fail," said Saud. There has been so much failure and so much disillusionment already.

If the foreign minister's confidence in the miracle-working abilities of the Bush administration seems low, there are reasons. In 2002, as Palestinian suicide bombings left Israelis terrorized and enraged, Abdullah rammed a resolution through an Arab summit in Beirut that offered Israel peace with the whole Arab world if the Jewish state would withdraw to its borders from before the 1967 war and allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland or compensate them if they did not. The demands were the same as those presented for decades in United Nations Security Council resolutions, but the peace dividend promised to Israel would be much greater than before.

The Bush administration, impatient back then to launch its war in Iraq, brushed the Saudi offer aside. Bush wanted to bring down the tyrant Saddam Hussein and remake the Middle East with shock and awe—which he did a year later, but not as intended. Iraq is now a failed state, oil prices have hit stratospheric levels, and the mullahs of Iran—enriched and emboldened—menace the whole Middle East with their radicalism and their potential nuclear power. Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza resulted in the election there of a radical Hamas government that wants to see Israel cease to exist. And Israel's ill-considered all-out attack on Lebanon last year, whatever the provocation, only strengthened the political power of Iranian-backed Hizbullah.

Rice's Annapolis conference is an attempt to pull some sort of order out of all that chaos, perhaps in the form of a de facto anti-Iranian front among the putative peacemakers. Neither Tehran nor its friends in Hamas have been invited. But as for concrete negotiations? "Annapolis is part of a process," Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said yesterday. They're talking about talking again.

And, again, the Saudis' patience is strained. You ask a diplomat if he's setting preconditions and he'll usually say "No, that's what the other side is doing." But Prince Saud was pretty blunt on Sunday night. "The Israelis should stop building settlements" in the West Bank, he said. They should stop the building of the massive defensive wall constructed on Palestinian acreage. "It would be inconceivable to see discussion between the Palestinians and the Israelis about the return of territory and an ending of occupation at the same time the Israelis are acquiring more and more land," said Saud. "That is so self-evident that one could not consider it a condition."