Pat Dollard | Young Americans

I hope they’re planning an “end around” involving very high flying stealth type aircraft with bunker-busters on board.

Having depicted the wide Arab participation in Tuesday’s Annapolis summit as a sort of victory for Middle East moderation over Iranian opposition, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will hold his second private White House meeting of the week with President George Bush on Wednesday to try to translate the summit’s momentum into a more effective effort to thwart Teheran’s nuclear drive.

At a briefing prior to the Annapolis gathering, Olmert noted to The Jerusalem Post that the Iranians had made clear that they wanted their presumed allies to stay away and were “furious” about the high Arab turnout. Some 20 Arab and Muslim countries sent foreign ministers or other senior ministers to the gathering - including the Saudis and, most gallingly for Teheran, Syria, which dispatched its deputy foreign minister, Faysal Mekdad.

The Iranians wanted the Arab world to stay away, Olmert said, “and now see even the Syrians coming.”

But Syria has stressed that it only came to Annapolis to ensure that its demand for the Golan Heights remained prominent on the Middle Eastern negotiating agenda. Damascus was testing “Washington’s seriousness about working for peace this time. Its previous intentions have deluded us,” according to the Syrian daily Tishrin.
And Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal told reporters on Monday that his country’s presence had no connection to any American hope of galvanizing a post-Annapolis wider consensus against Iran’s nuclear drive.

“We have to worry about Israel first,” Faisal said, and deal first with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was a separate priority, he said, from the question of “whether Iran is developing weapons of mass destruction or interfering in Iraq.”

Olmert had been saying consistently up until the last few months that he was confident Bush would find the means to stop Iran before leaving office. In an interview with the Post in September 2006, for instance, asked whether he felt that Bush would, one way or another, stop Iran from going nuclear, Olmert replied succinctly, “I believe so.”

He elaborated that Bush “has the courage. There is no one in the world today who has greater courage and determination, and a sense of mission about these issues.”

At this week’s briefing, however, Olmert was more circumspect, saying only that Bush was “doing a lot on the Iranian issue” and that he and the president had been discussing it “for a long time.”

(JPost)