This Middle East summit is a distraction that will achieve little

James Forsyth is sceptical about the prospects for the Annapolis summit and asks what Rice, Olmert, Abbas, Blair and the other protagonists can really hope to achieve — as the danger presented by Iran's nuclear ambitions grows ever more clear and present 1 t 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. Rather than burnishing their legacies, the two statesmen are struggling to pull together a quorum for a summit where getting the 'family photo' taken will be a real achievement.

The lead-up to the gathering in Annapolis, Maryland, has hardly inspired confidence. The Bush administration initially scheduled the event as a three-day meeting sometime in `fall'. At the beginning of this week the consensus was that it would be a oneday affair on Friday 23 November. By the time it was finally announced on Tuesday, it had morphed into an event on Tuesday the 27th with a dinner on the Monday night in Washington. This Thanksgiving summit is a very moveable feast.

The guest list remains far from certain too: invites were only officially sent out on Tuesday (the joke doing the rounds is that all the participants might end up staying in a room together — but by accident rather than design). The Israelis and the Palestinians will definitely be there, but questions remains about how senior the Saudi delegation will be, and whether the Syrians will turn up or not.

Of course, the fact that the Syrians are still on the list — despite the phenomenally strong evidence that the facility Israeli hit there in September was a nuclear one — demonstrates just how determined Rice is to make a go of this. But to many in Washington, the whole thing is a waste of time — a vain pursuit of a legacy at best, a distraction from more pressing matters at worst. One former Cheney staffer complains that the 'investment they have put into this has taken the energy out of other issues they should have paid attention to'. This is a frequent complaint. The crises in Pakistan, North Korea and Iraq spring to mind. Certainly, Rice has delegated much of the rest of her duties. John Negroponte, her deputy, is picking up Pakistan, Nicholas Burns, the under-secretary for political affairs, Iran and Christopher Hill North Korea. Philip Zelikow, her former counselor at state and her academic co-author, dismisses the charge, saying, 'I've heard that criticism no matter what's worked on.' That might be true, but rarely has America had so many balls up in the air. And rarely have the consequences of dropping any one been so dire.

The sceptics point out that President Bush seems conspicuously disinclined to put his shoulder to the wheel — and history shows that direct presidential engagement is a basic precondition of progress. Or they object that Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, is simply too weak to give much ground, and that Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian National Authority, is too weak to accept anything less than a lot. (Remember that Abbas controls less than half of what would be a Palestinian state, with Gaza under the control of Hamas, which refuses to recognise Israel and remains committed to its destruction.) Martin Kramer, senior Middle East adviser to Rudy Giuliani speaking as an Olin Institute senior fellow at Harvard, describes Annapolis as `the triumph of hope against experience. It is a case of repeating what's been tried before, in more favourable circumstances, without success.'

Even those who are supporters of Annapolis have low expectations. One retired senior State Department official who is in favour of the initiative says that the best case scenario is that 'all those who are invited come and they authorise some sort of followon process'. Another remarks that the very modest rabbit to be pulled out of the hat 'is to re-establish a formal diplomatic progress'.

If the bar is this low, the talks have a good chance of clearing it. Even a joint statement from Abbas and Olmert that falls far short of the high-water mark of late 2000 and early 2001 would be viewed as real progress. (There are murmurs that the two men have covered more ground than people realise.) Rice and Blair might not get the Thanksgiving Peace they would have wished for, but they will — with any luck — get the Annapolis Accords, or Heads of Agreement. They will want to get something.

There is even a cautious case to be made for optimism. The argument goes that the rise of Shiite Iran and its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah has rattled the more moderate Arab states, which will now act as a constructive influence on the process, bolstering Abbas against Hamas if and as he makes compromises. Mitchell Reiss, the head of policy planning at the State Department from 2003 to 2005, who has recently returned from the region, reports that `the concern over the power of Iran is palpable. This is not just over its rising geopolitical clout but what it can do in terms of domestic unrest in these countries, especially Saudi Arabia.'

This, Reiss thinks, has made the Arab world much more prepared to assimilate Israel into the region not because they have any greater love for Zionism but because they are afraid of something worse.' Arab support for Abbas should help counterbalance the criticism he will attract for attending a summit that will not deliver much immediately. The Saudis will also be keen to make the diplomatic running to prove to their own people that, for all Tehran's tub-thumping, the House of Saud remains the pre-eminent diplomatic force in the region. Equally, America, by engaging with the peace process, shows Arab states that it is not deaf to their concerns, making it easier to keep the coalition together against Iran — or so the theory runs. At the same time, the American naval build-up in the Persian Gulf continues; reassuring Israel that America is preparing itself to act if necessary. There is more than a grain of truth to the journalistic description of Annapolis as the Summit of All Fears.

Zelikow, who argued inside the administration for greater American engagement with the Israel–Palestine issue, cautions those who are tempted to dismiss the whole thing. 'There's a lot going on beneath the surface,' he says. 'The world doesn't know what's been said in conversations between Condi Rice and Tzipi Livni [Israeli foreign minister], Rice and Abbas, Rice and Olmert.' He argues that the high level of American engagement, and the decision to break away from the constraints of the 'Road Map', provides the opportunity for progress. He is also confident that his old boss has won her internal battles. When I asked him if the administration had a unified position on this issue, he replied, 'Increasingly, it does,' before hastily adding, `the Secretary of State does speak for the President on this.' He argues that the weakness of Abbas and Olmert means that 'you need American leadership'. But while America can take the horses to water, it can't make them drink — as Bill Clinton found out to his immense frustration at the end of his presidency. Despite his mastery of detail and his unstinting efforts, he could not persuade Arafat to accept an agreement. Interestingly, though, Clinton records in his memoirs that he thinks Abbas would have taken the deal.

One of the things that makes Annapolis such an odd meeting is that we already know the outlines of the agreement that the two sides are working towards: they are retracing their steps more than anything else. As Daniel Levy, an Israeli negotiator at the 2001 Tab a summit that came so close to success, and the son of Lord Levy, observes, 'This is just the stunningly boring and frustrating thing about this conflict: we know what the solutions look like. The outlines are there.' He notes that 'all the commitments that will be made at Annapolis were made four years ago', but that commitments without political will achieve nothing. He complains that Blair's jobs initiative, worthy as it may be, 'is learning nothing from experience'.

Even if Annapolis does kick-start a negotiating process, the chances of success are slim. Levy, looking on the bright side, jokes: 'It's the same odds that the Israelis score a lastminute goal against Russia. Unlikely, but it could happen.' It seems doubtful, though, that the people of the Middle East will get as lucky as Steve McClaren. The Palestinians do not yet have the institutions required for effective statehood, and it is hard to see how Blair can help build them while they themselves are engaged in their own civil war.

Hamas is still a rejectionist force and, in these circumstances, Abbas cannot, even if he wanted to, make the compromises necessary for peace on issues such as right of return and the Jewish identity of Israel. With Ehud Barak looking to outflank Olmert on the right, disengagement from Gaza bringing not peace but a Hamas enclave, and the political uncertainty created by various corruption scandals, it is far from certain that the Israeli leadership can deliver an agreement on settlements and Jerusalem.

The Bush administration's supposed commitment to getting the job done before it leaves office is unrealistic. It will almost certainly be left to the next president to try and broker a peace deal — yet again. Then, the issue becomes whether a new administration is prepared to risk its first year being sucked into the vortex of Middle East peacemaking with no guarantee of success: unlikely, to say the least.

A permanent peace between Israel and Palestine with two democratic states living securely side by side is obviously to be wished for in its own right. It would also remove at least one cause of grievance in the Muslim world. But the idea that it would prompt jihadis from Waziristan to Whitechapel to lay down their arms is fanciful and fails to appreciate the true extent and nature of the Islamist agenda.

Annapolis will, barring disaster, be the start of a process. But the prospects for peace in the foreseeable future are dim. There is a risk, as the former Cabinet secretary Lord Butler said of Blair in Northern Ireland, that the process becomes everything, and you pay too high a price to keep it moving. The biggest danger, though, is that Rice's negotiating skills and energy will be so consumed by this quest for the ultimate diplomatic achievement, that gains in Iraq are squandered. If that were to happen, it would make this event an even greater tragedy — and one with worse consequences for the Middle East and the wider world — than Arafat's refusal to say yes in 2001.