What’s the Point?

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
12 October 09

George Mitchell spends lots of time traveling from Middle East country to Middle East country processing the peace. In Saudi Arabia he went in search of cooperation for a deal. Nada. In Syria he pledged his commitment to the peace process. He goes to Egypt. Not much support for peace in any of those places.

Mitchell, at a September 22 briefing following the president’s meeting with Mahmoud Abbas and Bibi Netanyahu, told us:

We do not favor more negotiations for the sake of negotiations. We do not believe in an endless, unlimited, unfocused process. We believe that the purpose of negotiations is to get a result, a positive result. We want more peace and less process. And so we are trying to launch – re-launch negotiations at the earliest possible time, but under circumstances in which there is a reasonable basis to believe that they can be successful.

The president expressed, we were told, that he was “impatient” with the lack of Middle East progress.

So Mitchell hits the road. How’s he doing? Here he is on October 8, following a meeting with the Israeli President Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman: “We’re going to continue with our efforts to achieve an early relaunch of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, because we believe that’s an essential step toward achieving the comprehensive peace to which I earlier referred.” Like Avis, he’s going to try harder.

On October 10: “It has been and remains an important objective of American policy and of President Obama and the secretary of state personally to achieve comprehensive peace in the Middle East,” Mitchell explained in yet another trip to Cairo.

And now we hear that his latest visit has accomplished nothing.

So when does Mitchell pack it in if he doesn’t favor negotiations for the sake of negotiations? He seems to have nothing to show for all his journeys. His incessant invocation of Obama’s and his commitment to peace is now like white noise — a buzz in the background you can safely ignore. The purpose of all this? Well, Obama snagged a Nobel Peace Prize for caring so much and for supposedly reactivating diplomacy. But if diplomacy has accomplished nothing more than racking up air miles for George Mitchell, maybe it’s time to give it a rest.

Related: Fatah Cools on Obama and Mitchell

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