This Middle East summit is a distraction that will achieve little

The Annapolis Middle East summit won’t produce anything more than a commitment to hold another meeting. But the real worry is that Condoleezza Rice’s intense focus on the Israel Palestine question could distract her from more pressing matters in Iraq, Pakistan and North Korea.

It must all have been so different in their dreams. Scroll back to January 2005, the aftermath of the Iraqi elections and the beginning of President George W. Bush’s second term: if, back then, Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice had contemplated a Middle East peace summit to be held in late November 2007, they would surely have dared to imagine a Thanksgiving Peace to match the Good Friday Agreement.

It would have been the capstone to Blair’s peacemaking efforts and a vindication for his post-9/11 closeness to President Bush. The ‘hand of history’ would have been lifted from his shoulder and replaced by the touch of greatness. The remainder of the promised full third term would have been a triumphant march to the finish line; not even Gordon Brown could have rushed the blessed peacemaker out of Downing Street.

For Rice, it would have been the fulfilment of her second-term dream of creating a new international order to replace the one that she, against type, had helped to rip up with the invasion of Iraq. A Secretary of State who had brought peace to the Middle East might not have been able to resist the entreaties of the Republican party to run for the presidency against Hillary, and the journey that had started in segregated Alabama could have ended in the Oval Office.

But, instead, Blair is already out of office, desperately seeking redemption as an envoy to the Middle East, and Rice is trying to avoid another war in the region before she too departs the scene.