Bush on the Battlefield

President Bush has been so heroic as a wartime leader against Islamist terror that we are rarely in a mood to cavil over his tactics in respect of the Arab war against Israel. And Israel has such a vibrant democracy that we are rarely in a mood to quarrel with its elected leadership. If Prime Minister Olmert wants to get up and declare that it is "inevitable" that Israel withdraw from the lands it liberated in 1967, he will have to face, in the voters of the Jewish state, a judgment a lot more important than ours. And if Mr. Bush reckons the time is right to adjust the conditions he established in the Rose Garden for meeting with the Palestinian Arab leadership, he certainly has his own bona fides.

So we question neither leader's motives when we say, count us among the skeptics in respect of Annapolis. The notion that Mr. Bush advanced yesterday — that we're compromising because "we must not cede victory to the extremists" — is one that we have heard for years from every left-of-center leader in Israel and Washington. The proposition that "the time is right because the world understands the urgency of supporting these negotiations" is one that has been voiced in advance of every one of the by now countless parleys on the Middle East. We recall one editorial in which the writer searched for "last chance" and Middle East peace and found something like 400 references — and that was 20 years ago.

The notion, however, that we have some kind of particularly fat chance at the moment because the Arab League is prepared to come to the table along with a prince of Saudi Arabia is almost insulting. The Saudi prince won't even shake the hand of his Jewish interlocutor. He'll pick up a whip to flay a woman who was raped. But he won't shake the hand of the prime minister of Israel. Mr. Olmert was quoted by ynetnews.com as huffing: "I represent the people of Israel and the State of Israel, a people with a magnificent history, and I will not put that honor up for sale. If someone doesn't want to shake hands with the people of Israel, I won't shake his hand." Forgive us, but it's almost painful.

Mr. Bush is portraying the American role as, effectively, a broker with equal convictions about, and passion for, achieving security for Israel and a sovereign state of the Palestinians. If there is any saving element to such a stance — and there is little — it is that America will remain primus inter pares, the sole judge of whether the sides are implementing the road map, though even that is iffy. Road Map implementation in the first phase rests primarily on decisive action by the Palestinian "Authority" to "dismantle the terrorist infrastructure," which the Palestinians can't do and aren't inclined to do anyhow — a detail that has vitiated the entire peace process since the beginning of Oslo.

* * *

The sad fact is that Annapolis is sideshow to a larger battle that has to be won before anything appropriate in the way of peace negotiations can take place between Israel and her Arab enemies. Yesterday, while everyone was focusing on Annapolis, Lieutenant General Lute, Mr. Bush's "tsar" for the Battle of Iraq, quietly announced, as our Nicholas Wapshott reported yesterday, that the administration and the Iraqis are about to commence talks on withdrawing American troops in advance of the end of the U.N. mandate in 2008. The important, the most urgent battle in the coming seasons will be securing the victory that our GIs have been crafting in on the battlefield there and advancing the spread of democracy in the neighboring lands. What peace can be established between Israel and her neighbors while a regime exists in Iran to stoke the arsenals of the terrorists in Gaza and Lebanon, the latter of which, our Benny Avni reported earlier in the week, is the more logical place for Annapolis to focus. Messrs. Bush and Olmert are, sadly, the only players on the Middle Eastern battlefield with the kind of credentials — democratic credentials — that really matter.