Is This Trip Necessary?

By Mark A. Heller
Published: January 6, 2008
Courtesy Of: IHT

TEL AVIV: If Bush truly wants his nine-day excursion to the Middle East to make a difference, he should consider going to a place that is not on his announced itinerary - Iran.

...as Bush embarks on a nine-day excursion that will take him to seven different destinations in the Middle East and the Gulf, there is good reason to wonder if this trip is really necessary. There are no major agreements to sign, no negotiations needing only a final presidential push to succeed, not even - barring an unannounced detour to Iraq - any troops to be visited and praised. And given the nature of a traveling president's retinue - hundreds of advance people, security details, advisers, journalists, friends, supporters and assorted other hangers-on - this will hardly be a carbon-neutral event.

It could be argued, of course, that there is nothing like a presidential visit to buck up friends and allies, especially those under domestic stress. Both Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, will bask in the limelight of a media extravaganza. And if Bush manages to organize a three-way meeting, he will certainly be able to claim that he has achieved the mission's declared purpose of sustaining the momentum generated by the Annapolis summit meeting in November.

Bush's visit will also be the third in a series of monthly landmarks (Annapolis was the first, the international donors' conference in Paris in December was the second) that provide Olmert with a persuasive excuse to delay a large-scale offensive against the Hamas government in Gaza that nobody (with the possible exception of Abbas) really wants but that might not otherwise be avoidable given the ongoing Palestinian rocket attacks against targets in southern Israel.

It could also be argued that the visit will allow Bush to service important ties with oil-rich partners in the Gulf and especially to reassure those in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait unnerved by the suspicion that the recently released National Intelligence Estimate has undermined the chances of effective U.S.-led containment of Iran.

Still, there is no reason to believe that any of these meetings will leave a footprint in the region lasting longer than a couple of days. If Bush truly wants this trip to make a difference and contribute to his legacy, he should consider going to a place that is not on his announced itinerary - Iran.

Not that the welcome mat has been laid out in Tehran. True, there is some indirect evidence that important elements in the Iranian establishment value the legitimacy that a presidential visit would confer: Both reformists and conservatives have stepped up their criticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his minions in advance of approaching elections, and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has just declared that he is not unalterably and forever opposed to renewal of ties with the United States.

But the regime in general appears to be riding high, and there is not much chance it would agree in advance to satisfy what has been the American condition for engagement - suspending uranium enrichment. Without that, any American démarche, not to speak of something as dramatic as a presidential visit, risks looking very much like surrender - which is precisely why the idea seems so unthinkable.

But in the wake of the national intelligence report (and until a different one comes along), the United States has no credible threat of military action and not much in the way of diplomatic leverage, either with Iran or with the rest of the world whose cooperation it needs. All those things could be restored by the gesture of a presidential visit, or even just the unconditional offer of one.

The presence of Bush in Tehran might accelerate changes in Iranian policy on nuclear and other matters in order to consolidate the reintegration into respectable international society that it promises. And even if that doesn't happen (or if the offer is rebuffed), it would at least cut the ground out from under those who insist that the only thing standing in the way of Iranian cooperation has been American refusal to engage.

Either way, the result could change the course of the region and the world - which is more than one can expect from what currently looks like just another trip to the mall.

Mark A. Heller is director of research at the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University.