Diplomatic disappointment

This week sees a flurry of diplomatic activity on the two Bush administration 'legacy' issues in the Middle East: Iraq and the 'peace process'. 

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice goes to Bahrain on Monday for a meeting of Gulf, Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers to discuss the two issues before they all decamp to Kuwait the next day for one of a series of meetings of regional states on Iraq.  The Iraqis will try to encourage their Sunni Arab neighbours to stop 'sitting on the fence' and open embassies in Baghdad.  Whether these neighbours will be able to overcome their security concerns as well as their political concerns about getting too close to a US-backed Shia government is less certain.  The meeting in theory provides Rice with another chance to engage her Iranian counterpart, but she is unlikely to seize it.

On Sunday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is off to Moscow to discuss a possible follow up to the November Annapolis conference in Moscow in June.  He then goes to Washington to meet President George Bush on Thursday before Bush himself goes to the Middle East in May. 

Current US diplomacy seems utterly uninspired.  Bush and Rice's conversion to such energetic, if unfocused, peace process shuttling is a bit of a mystery.  The Annapolis process never stood a chance in current circumstances, and its lack of any progress over the last five months is now starkly obvious.  So why the repeated Rice visits that deliver at best marginal improvements on micro issues?  Has the administration fallen prey to naïve optimism?  Or a cynical miscalculation that Arab allies would be more cooperative on the administration's higher priority Iraq stability and Iran containment objectives if it 'showed willing' on the Palestinian question?