Washington
It is not to be. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a more than passable classical pianist, had blocked time in her summer diary for a pleasant meeting with some of the 700 music students attending classes and performing at the Aspen Music Festival and School.
President Bush has other ideas. Instead of the cool breezes of the Rocky Mountains, Rice will find herself in the hotter-than-hot Middle East, attempting to bring an end to the two-front war in which Israel finds itself engaged which, in past flare-ups, has been bad news for the Israelis.
Rice presides over a department that traditionally holds that almost any deal is better than no deal at all. The President is hoping that his Secretary of State and long-time foreign policy adviser can bring that bureaucracy to heel. A President who reacted to the September 11 attack on his country by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and is committed to fundamental change in the Middle East, is not inclined to advise Israel to be ‘restrained’. After all, America’s only ally in the region has already tolerated a rain of 800 Hamas rockets in the past year alone, as well as continuous shelling of its northern cities by Hezbollah.
What the President hopes to avoid is a repetition of past cycles, which have run something like this. Hamas makes life dangerous and miserable for Israelis by lobbing rockets into civilian areas, and sending in suicide bombers, some so young that they didn’t know quite what to do with the 72 virgins that many Muslims believe await these martyrs in heaven. Hezbollah bombards Israel with its Iranian- and Syrian-supplied Katyusha rockets, of which it has about 12,000, and more advanced versions based on Chinese technology, while 2,000 UN peacekeepers remain sublimely indifferent to a breach of the peace they are supposed to keep.
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