Rice Reaches for Legacy in Mideast Talks
By ANNE GEARAN
The Associated Press
Tuesday, November 20, 2007; 9:12 AM
WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump says she can't close a deal. The pope politely declined to meet with her, saying he was on vacation.
When Condoleezza Rice travels overseas, the local papers don't do big photo spreads anymore. At home, Rice is feuding with congressional Democrats and scrambling to counter recent embarrassments including the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians by the State Department's hired bodyguards.
The rock star diplomat has become the workaday American secretary of state, with all the advantages and all the baggage that the title and Rice's long association with President Bush and the Iraq war entail.
Rock star diplomat? Where do they find these people? And it isn't just the AP. This "Condi's legacy" theme is everywhere.
While the Bush administration has worked to suppress expectations for the Middle East peace conference Tuesday in Annapolis, observers say the professional and political stakes for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are much harder to minimize.
An outcome resembling success could restore some of the former Stanford professor's diplomatic credibility, they say, and perhaps add a line to her career's postscript that doesn't contain the word "Iraq."
Something less than success could extinguish whatever progress she has fostered as the president's top diplomat in the past three years, and perhaps worsen relations with a part of the world considered vital to American security and foreign policy.
"She's about a year or so away from being judged as a kind of inconsequential secretary of state," said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert and adviser to six secretaries of state, and a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
A year or so away? My God.
And even here.
- REPUTATION AT STAKE
An ardent football fan, Rice is hoping to rewrite her legacy in the next 14 months, beginning with what amounts to a Hail Mary pass this week at a Mideast peace conference that she has organized in Annapolis, Md.
More than any other Bush administration initiative, the conference to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace is Rice's, with Bush mostly supporting from the sidelines. Rice has traveled to the Middle East eight times this year to assemble the conference and has staked her reputation on its outcome.
''This is basically her baby,'' said William Quandt, a University of Virginia scholar who worked on the first Camp David peace talks under President Jimmy Carter.
Rice's effort got a boost Friday, when Saudi Arabia and several other Arab countries grudgingly said they would attend the meeting. That could give Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, both of whom are weak politically, some cover to make compromises.