Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt – When U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived for a dinner Thursday evening with the world’s leading diplomats, the man who was supposed to sit across from her, Iranian Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki, had just left the building.
It was another missed opportunity at a critical moment for Iraq’s future. The failure to start serious talks with Iran on cooperation to contain the Iraq civil war could be a metaphor for the Bush administration’s repeated attempts to rescue its often obscure policy from disaster.
The four years since President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” have been a legacy of blown chances, ineffectual plans, surges and course corrections that have always gone wrong, critics say.
Now it is 2007, and “everybody’s got a plan. And none of it is memorable,” said Judith Yaphe of the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
With 20 months left in Bush’s term, his Iraq policy may be at its final crossroads.
The president and the Democratic- controlled Congress are sparring over a bill to fund U.S. forces in Iraq.
Militarily, the “surge” of U.S. troops into Iraq has failed to dent the overall level of violence.
On the diplomatic front, Rice engineered a course change that positions the U.S. to negotiate with Syria and perhaps Iran, two of Iraq’s key neighbors, but it remains to be seen whether the U-turn is in time to make a difference.
Although many countries announced plans to forgive Iraq’s debt, the country’s neighbors didn’t rally in common cause during the two-day conference in Sharm el-Sheik. Saudi Arabia’s Sunni royal family has been cool to the Shiite Muslim-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, seeing it as a proxy for Iran.
The lack of progress may account for the unusual announcement midway through the talks that Vice President Dick Cheney, who’s not known as a champion of diplomacy, will travel to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates starting Tuesday, for talks on stabilizing Iraq.
But at this late stage, for real progress to be made, almost everything would have to go right in Iraq.
“We have reached a critical juncture,” Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said in a brief interview. “We cannot afford to lose. And we cannot afford to give people false expectations.”
