I have read little or nothing that makes me believe that Condi's Annapolis Mid-East conference, attempting to negotiate some progress on the Israel/Palestine imbroglio has any chance for breakthrough success. Most of the critical analysis tends to write it off as a last-ditch attempt by Secy. Rice to salvage something positive for her legacy - which currently looks to be in the very low historical tier of National Security advisers and Secretaries of State, given her godawful record of enabling the neo-con Iraq war crazies who have driven most of the administration's regional policy.
But the most interesting - and somewhat hopeful, if obliquely hopeful - analysis I've stumbled on to date is a piece by former National Security Council analyst Gary Sick (whose main claim to fame is as main proponent of the 1980 "October surprise" theory of Reagan campaign operatives collaborating directly with the Iranians to secure his election.)
Sick links the Annapolis conference to a strategy of counterbalancing Iran with a Sunni Arab regional coalition. I have no qualifications to judge Sick's analysis in depth, but it's well worth reading, here, at Tony Karon's "Rootless Cosmopolitan" blog.
Most notably, he suggests that we aren't likely to go to war with Iran in the near term, that there is a more nuanced strategy in Rice's sights and that realities on the ground in Iraq are, at least partially, driving a more multi-faceted and complex approach.
I don't expect a significant breakthrough toward a two-state solution to the seemingly intractable conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians (and between the Palestinian factions themselves), but Sick's analysis lends some measure of hope that, at the least, an attack on Iran isn't imminent.
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