A few days before he returned to the United States, America's departing Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad made a farewell tour of Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region, the one part of Iraq where such a trip would have the feel of a victory lap. While Baghdad and the rest of Iraq have teetered on the brink of full blown civil war, the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq has remained an oasis of calm and prosperity. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the $200 million Ifraz water treatment plant – the second-largest U.S. reconstruction project in Iraq – Khalilzad called attention to the Kurdish exception. “Not all of Iraq is like Baghdad,” he said. The Kurdish north is “ a shining example of what the rest of Iraq could look like.”

But even here in the safest part of Iraq, the natives are restless. After Ambassador Khalilzad finished speaking at the Ifraz ceremony, Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), took the podium and launched a broadside against the central government in Baghdad. Iraq's Arab leaders have not delivered on their promises to Kurds – as spelled out in Iraq's constitution -- for economic and political control of their region and for the resolution of disputed territories such as Kirkuk, according to Barzani. “Our patience is not unlimited,” he said. “Every day that passes without solving these issues makes it more difficult to explain to our people why we are committed to this agreement.”

If you are reading the blog you probably already know this, but check out our stories about the latest Middle East happenings on time.com (I'm not going to offer programming notes every week, but this is a particularly rich set of pieces):

--Bobby Ghosh has a poignant piece from Iraq on the struggle of one man and his family to build a new life after the fall of Saddam Hussein; the man happens to be Yasser Hussein, one of our brave colleagues in TIME's Baghdad Bureau.

--Nick Blanford has an amazing story from Lebanon about his discovery of one of Hizballah's underground bunkers which enabled the Lebanese Shi'ite group to fire thousands of rockets into Israel during last summer's war. (I should have mentioned it before, but Blanford's recently-published Killing Mr. Lebanon is the definitive account of the Hariri assassination and the Middle East crisis it ignited. Read Jonathan Steele's review in the Guardian.)

--Jumana Farouky has a piece on how the Iranians are explaining this week's seizure of British sailors in the Gulf.

--Tim McGirk has a fascinating inside look from Palestine at the political misfortunes of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the wake of Condeleezza Rice's Middle East shuttle.

--Joe Klein has a column from Jerusalem on what he and Tim learned when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert invited them over to his residence for an interview this week--it seems he has a hankering to meet Saudi Arabian King Abdullah.

--Speaking of Abdullah, check out my analysis of the Arab summit in Riyadh and why Abdullah is saying those things about the U.S.

When I left Beirut earlier this month amid the early stirrings of spring, talk of a political settlement to Lebanon's political crisis was also in the air. But I've returned to find nothing happening. Downtown is still filled with the same bored protesters who've been camping out in refugee tents for almost a month now. The only thing that has changed is the weather.

The ongoing split is such that Lebanon sent not one but two delegations this week to the Arab summit: one camp led by Syrian-supported President Emile Lahoud, and the other by American-supported Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Even with two teams, and even with the Arab League pressing hard for a compromise, the trip produced nothing.

Which perhaps should be no surprise. So far no one has come up with a compromise for one of they key issues dividing the two sides: the fate of a proposed UN tribunal that would pass judgement on suspects in the 2005 assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri and the subsequent string of assassinations and bombings.

The government sees the tribunal as the only way Lebanon can free itself of Syrian intelligence forces, whom they accuse of being behind the attacks. But any diminution of Syrian influence in Lebanon would be bad news for Hizballah, the lead opposition group and anti-Israeli militia which is arming itself with weapons coming from across the Syrian border. If Hizballah gets any more power in Siniora's cabinet -- a re-allocation of cabinet seats is the focus of current negotiations -- then they would have the votes necessary to scrap the tribunal.

Meanwhile, the investigation into those killings proceeds, if slowly. While I was away in Kurdistan, the UN investigating commission released its latest report, which revealed some rigorous and high-tech gumshoeing the likes of which the Middle East has probably never before seen. Among other tactics, the UN team is building a 3-D interactive imaging system of the Hariri crime scene, and trying to match anomalies in the DNA from remains of the suspected suicide bomber to any specific populations in Lebanon and Syria, trying identify the killer's place of origin. More importantly, though the report doesn't name names, the commission appears to have ruled out any suspects other than Hariri's political opponents in Lebanon and Syria.

The team also asked for an extension to continue the hunt -- apparently the tense political and security situation here has made it difficult to hire Arabic translators. On Tuesday, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to give them until June 15, 2008 to finish the job. In other words, Lebanon's troubles are a long way from being over.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

Some perspective from here on the Iranian-British naval incident last weekend, which has now escalated into "the Iran hostage crisis":

Iran is not seeking a war with Britain. It's understandable that the British government sees the video of the British marines and sailors in Iranian custody as "completely unacceptable," but I see it as a sign that the Iranians want to send a political message and then be done with it. The video showed the Brits eating a meal and sitting around in a group, and it featured the sole British servicewoman "admitting" that they had strayed into Iranian territorial waters. That's vastly different from the images of blindfolded captives paraded before the cameras in a similar incident involving the British navy in 2004 and of course during the American embassy seizure in 1979. Iran's leaders want to send a message, but they are not suicidal. To send the message they saw an opportunity and took it to seize some British servicemen in a way they believed they could plausibly explain as justifiable.

The Iranian regime captured the British personnel to send Washington as well as London three messages, actually: 1) if you attack Iran, we have the capacity to threaten your interests in the Gulf and throughout the Middle East (via Iranian allies in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine); 2) if you continue to ratchet up U.N. sanctions to punish us for exercising our legal right to nuclear technology, you can expect some Iranian-inspired political blow back coming your way; 3) if you detain Iranian Revolutionary Guards officials in Iraq, as U.S. forces did in Erbil on Jan. 11, don't be surprised if Iran's Revolutionary Guards play tit-for-tat.

This incident is extremely delicate and dangerous. What should have been just a misunderstanding that was quickly resolved with a few harsh words has the potential to spin into a major crisis. The context is a U.S.-Iranian Cold War as both countries vie for power and influence in the post-Saddam Gulf. Worse, both countries are currently suffering from injured pride and both have track records of making miscalculations. Bush and Blair are smarting over the mess they made in Iraq; the Iranians are nervous about the saber-rattling against Tehran in some Washington circles, and feel aggrieved that the world is not taking Iran as seriously as Tehran thinks it deserves to be taken (over issues like Iran's nuclear rights, the capture of its officials in Erbil and the State Department's $75 million program to undermine the Islamic regime).

Iran will be irresponsible if it doesn't find a way to declare a small victory and quickly repatriate the British captives. It will be equally irresponsible if either Blair or Bush, accidently or on purpose, pushes the Iranian regime into a corner for the sake of placating home front constituencies that are demoralized by the Iraq fiasco. Any sort of aggression toward Iran is almost certain to strengthen the hard-liners at the expense of the pragmatists and make it more rather than less likely that the crisis will escalate and do so in unpredictable ways. (If nothing else, the U.S.-led war in Iraq has demonstrated that it is impossible to ensure a particular outcome if you start a shooting war in this geo-strategic region.)

The West should not lose sight of the real chance that has been appearing to engage Iran's pragmatists. There has been a struggle for influence within Iran's ruling establishment almost since the day Ahmadinejad entered office. While many of the long-term objectives are shared, what mainly divides the two factions--apart from the usual rivalry of politicians for domestic popularity--is that the hard-liners want to aggressively stand up to the West while the pragmatists believe it is in Iran's interests to be more accommodating. We cannot rule out the possibility that the Brits were seized precisely to tip the balance toward the hard-line camp--or if that wasn't the original intention, that the hard-liners will now try to make use of it to do so. Most serious students of Iranian politics agree that getting tough with Iran will result in the Iranian people uniting behind Ahmadinejad's hard-line rhetoric. I've met the Iranian president twice and he gives the impression of being a true-believer who will not react well to pressure. He is adamant that the U.S. (along with Israel) is run by an unjust government that has spread harm in the world. One of Ahmadinejad's engineering department colleagues at Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran (a fairly "Westernized" fellow who spent many years studying and teaching in the U.S.) told me last year: "He doesn't want war, but sometimes you have to fight for your rights. He is ready to die. He is that kind of man. He is a brave man."

The scenario to avoid is "Lebanon, Summer '06." The Iranian-backed Hizballah staged a raid into Israel and captured two Israeli soldiers. It seems that the group wanted to score some political points, and perhaps help out Iran, which was facing the prospect of U.N. sanctions at the time. But by Hizballah's own subsequent account, it misjudged that Israel would launch such a ferocious counterattack that caused massive damage in Lebanon and left more than 1,000 Lebanese dead. In turn, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert misjudged Israel's ability to fight Hizballah and was forced to withdraw from Lebanon without achieving any permanent aims or even the release of the two soldiers. He certainly didn't calculate that today, nearly eight months later, his approval rating would stand at something like 2%. Nor did Condi Rice imagine things would turn out this way when she described the Israel onslaught in Lebanon as the "birth pangs of a new Middle East."

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo

A Syrian friend (and former student of mine) arrived in Beirut today for a week of business journalism training sponsored by an American newswire. At the last minute, the company bizarrely pulled funding for her accommodation, expecting her to pay at least $100 a night for a hotel room from her $200 a month salary (which is about average by Syrian standards.) So she's crashing at my place.

Though the trip is off to a bad start, I still figured she would be excited to run around bad old Beirut, or at least see the sights. This is the first time in her life she has been to Lebanon, even though Damascus is just two hours away by car, and even though she's 28 years old. (This is somewhat like living in New Jersey without ever visiting New York City.) Instead, she moped around the apartment.

Suddenly, I sensed a teaching moment. I've been trying to pass on a few ideas for good journalism and good living to my Syrian students. Two techniques -- which I myself learned in journalism school -- are particularly relevant to someone visiting a new country for the first time. One is called a Beat Note -- a list of story ideas, people to contact, events to attend; it's a way of turning a world of possibilities into a plan for action. The other is called an Airplane Theory. It's the idea or hypothesis you form about a place before you get there (sometimes at the last minute on the airplane) which you begin to test out as soon as you arrive.

So where's your Beat Note and Airplane Theory? I asked my friend. Syrian and Lebanese politics and culture are intimately and sometimes uncomfortably linked, and surely she as a Syrian journalist would want to run off and see the important recent political landmarks herself? The Hizballah protest campgrounds, the bombed out craters in south Beirut leftover from the summer war with Israel, the tomb of Rafik Hariri -- just a few examples that immediately came to mind. "I can't think of anything," she said. "I know there are nightclubs, but I don't want to go to nightclubs."

So as usual, the lesson here is one I have to keep learning myself. People who have lived their entire life in a totalitarian country don't become savvy travelers on their very first foreign junket. They've lived in a world of limited possibilities and limited horizons which they accept because there isn't another choice. When they step out of that darkness, they don't start checking off a To Do List. They blink.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

Some observations on the Egypt section of the State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2006, released on March 6:

--A read through the very extensive Egypt report gives some useful perspective to the deep concerns over President Hosni Mubarak's proposed constitutional amendments, which were approved in an Egyptian referendum on Monday. (See my time.com story on the referendum.) Many of the concerns focus on amendments related to police powers and supervision of elections, areas that come in for strong criticism in the State Department report.

--The report's summary of human rights in Egypt:

"The government's respect for human rights remained poor, and serious abuses continued in many areas. These included limitations on the right of citizens to change their government; a state of emergency, in place almost continuously since 1967; torture and abuse of prisoners and detainees; poor conditions in prisons and detention centers; impunity; arbitrary arrest and detention, including prolonged pretrial detention; executive branch limits on an independent judiciary; denial of fair public trial and lack of due process; political prisoners and detainees; restrictions on civil liberties--freedoms of speech and press, including internet freedom; assembly and association; some restrictions on religious freedom; corruption and lack of transparency; some restrictions on NGOs; and discrimination and violence against women, including female genital mutilation."

--POLICE POWERS: The new amendment to Article 179 gives constitutional authority for the president to exercise broad police powers in fighting terrorism, which human rights groups say would enshrine the 26-year-old State of Emergency in the constitution to perpetuate political repression. The State Department report describes a state security apparatus that already commits widespread abuses including torture and operates under a Penal Code that broadly defines terrorism as including acts of "spreading panic and "obstructing the work of authorities." It says that detentions under the Emergency "frequently were accompanied by allegations of torture" and that the government used the Emergency to restrict freedom of speech and of the press. The report says the government detained as many as 10,000 people without charge on suspicion of terrorism or political activity. The detainees ranged from Muslim Brotherhood activists to secular government opponents including Internet bloggers. "Security forces continued to mistreat and torture prisoners, arbitrarily arrest and detain persons, hold detainees in prolonged pretrial detention, and engage in mass arrests," the report says.

--TORTURE: The report says that "torture and abuse of prisoners and detainees by police, security personnel, and prison guards remained common and persistent." It says that domestic and international human rights groups reported that the State Security Investigations Service, police, and other government entities continued to employ torture to extract information or force confessions. The report cites a study by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights documenting past cases of torture and death in police stations: 156 cases of torture between 2000 and 2004 (75 nonfatal) and 59 cases (38 nonfatal) between April 2005 and April 2006. The EOHR report says that detainees were kicked, burned with cigarettes, shackled, forcibly stripped, beaten with water hoses, and dragged on the floor.

--IMPUNITY: Calling impunity "a serious problem," the report says that "a culture of impunity militated against systematic prosecution of security personnel who committed human rights abuses." It cites numerous instances of the government failing to investigate or punish acts of serious police abuse. For example, it says that the government failed to conduct any public probe or disciplinary proceedings in the case of 11 citizens killed by security forces during 2005 parliamentary elections. The report says that for the 11th year the government declined to permit an inspection visit by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, or to allow some international human rights groups access to Egyptian prisons and detention facilities. On a more hopeful note, however, the report cites several landmark instances in which police officers were in fact charged and convicted of abuses.

--ELECTION SUPERVISION: The new amendment to Article 88 raises concerns because it eliminates judicial supervision in favor of oversight by a new supreme elections council. The State Department report cites the government's controversial effort to prosecute two leading judges who alleged election fraud in the 2005 parliamentary polls. The case prompted large demonstrations in which hundreds of people were detained. The report notes that while the government backed away from harsh treatment of the dissident judges--a disciplinary court exonerated one and rebuked the other--parliament nonetheless approved a new judicial law that was widely seen as diminishing the judiciary's supervisory role in elections.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo

It was an untimely embarrassment for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Today of all days, when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in town to crank up the latest Arab-Israeli peace initiative, thousands of rightwing Jewish settlers decided to march into the West Bank and re-claim Homesh, an illegal hilltop settlement emptied out, with much trouble, in 2005. This can't have pleased Ms. Rice. As part of the latest peace plan, she is leaning on Olmert a little harder than usual to start dismantling Jewish outposts inside the Palestinian territories, not letting settlers grab back old ones.

But Olmert's trajectory in the polls is similar to a man who has taken a tumble off a skyscraper and is just inches from hitting the pavement. Olmert's approval rating is down to 2%, according to the latest polls. And so, cornered between an irate Ms Rice and the ugly certainty of Israeli soldiers tangling with Jewish activists, many of them teenagers and young orthodox families, Olmert and his army chiefs reached an awkward compromise with the right-wingers: they could march up to Homesh but they couldn't stay.

The simplest solution, you would think, would be to use troops and police to keep them away. But the settler activists numbered around 3,000, and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) said it was worried that they would try to reach Homesh along the back roads that wind through Palestinian villages where furious locals might be tempted to kidnap the settlers or shoot them dead.

The deal, according to Olmert, was that the settlers could make a symbolic entry into Homesh and then turn around and leave.

But the settlers had other plans. The trooped up to Homesh with sleeping bags, tents and plenty of attitude. Thirty families said they were coming to re-colonize the settlement, and by mid-morning an Israeli flag was rippling atop a water tower in the chill Sumerian winds. “Even if we're evacuated, we'll return the next day,” one organizer vowed.

In the Knesset, leftist parties were outraged that Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz had buckled to the settlers' demands. "The defense minister is turning IDF soldiers, against their will, into accomplices to a crime," Knesset Memmber Zahava Gal-On from the leftist Meretz party said. "Instead of the IDF enforcing the law and preventing the settlers from reaching Homesh, it is ensuring their security and facilitating their arrival."

But for Olmert, better the wrath of Ms. Rice and Knesset members than a head-bashing showdown between the army and Jewish settlers. Still, it can only convince the Americans and the Arabs that Olmert is too politically frail to make the bold moves required for peace.
--by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem

Gamal Mubarak and several senior National Democratic Party officials invited me along with a dozen or so other foreign journalists to the NDP's HQ on the eve of the constitutional referendum. Their bottom line message: the 34 proposed constitutional amendments are a milestone on the road to political reform, though more needs to be accomplished. They stressed their view that this is a serious referendum based on two years of planning and debate, not a sham vote as critics have charged. Perhaps in response to the domestic and international criticism, party officials passed out a press release that I later found on the NDP's English website, entitled "How The Amendments Promote Democracy." [On Sunday, President Mubarak addressed the nation and repeated that the amendments were a major step toward democracy.]

The NDP officials gave us a look at their "war room;" the center of the party's "get out the vote" effort, it is a conference hall filled with banks of telephones where rows of party workers are keeping tabs on the poll situation across the country through direct contacts with local party officials.

For his part, Gamal Mubarak took us through the steps leading to the referendum, beginning with the President's re-election announcement in July 2005 when he laid out a program for political reform. "If we manage to get the yes vote we worked for tomorrow, this will constitute a very important milestone in our reform process, political reform in particular," Mubarak said.

He added: "We are aware of the criticism and the skeptics out there. We are aware of the views that have been put forth by different political forces, opposition forces whether in parliament or outside the parliament... We are delivering on our campaign promises. We have a lot of indications, and we have a lot to show, that we are delivering on what we promised. Obviously we are facing some challenges, we are facing some setbacks in certain areas. In some spec areas, we hoped to achieve results quicker."

Mubarak said he was referring to the fact that the results of economic reforms take time to trickle down, but he then acknowledged shortcomings in political reform as well.

He said: "Democracy is an evolving process, you know that. And I think we are moving in the right direction. As I said, we might be moving slower than people expect. We might be moving slower than actually we expect. But what is important for us is we are moving in the right direction. Achieving progress, moving from one milestone to the other... You are right. We still have a way to go. So if you get a [referendum] turnout of 20, 25, 30 percent and you say, 'What is the point of having that?,' that's not the kind of attitude that we take. We think we are achieving progress and we think we are moving in the right direction and we know we still have a way to go. We strongly believe that if this package goes forward tomorrow, this is going to be a very important milestone towards further steps in political reform."

Here is what Mubarak said responding to specific criticisms:

PROPOSED AMENDMENT TO ARTICLE 88 UNDERMINES EGYPTIAN ELECTIONS BY REMOVING JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT:

"If you compare it to the existing article, it does have much more detail, much more guarantees, much more specifics on how the process of running elections and supervising the elections should be. It does relegate to the power of the legislation to set up more details. But it does enshrine very important guarantees and very important responsibilities for the judiciary within the new drafting of the article. The drafting that we have does provide guarantees that are not in the existing article."

PROPOSED AMENDMENT TO ARTICLE 179 ENSHRINES DRACONIAN EMERGENCY LAW POWERS INTO THE CONSTITUTION:

"This is not something unique to Egypt. All countries, especially in the past four or five years, that have went forward to try to put legislation to deal with terrorism, had always had to draw a very fine line, a balance, between powers to combat terrorism and between not infringing civil liberties. Go back and we have seen and we have followed the discussion in each and every country... We believe that this article... offers guarantees and will offer judicial supervision on any powers being given to the authorities to combat terrorism."

PROPOSED AMENDMENT TO ARTICLE 5 RESTRICTS POLITICAL ACTIVITY BY BARRING RELIGION-BASED PARTIES:

"There is nothing new in that language. This language of prohibiting the formation of political parties based on religion is and has been for a very, very long time enshrined in our legislation. This goes back in our political discourse years and years and years and years back. We never had that notion. What the President had in mind is to elevate that principle, that very important enshrined principle in our political system from a long time ago, into the constitution."

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo

No wonder Egyptian officials are so testy. Rarely has a Western Arab ally been so slammed by Western governments, think tanks and media as President Hosni Mubarak's regime has been the last few days. Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit's words burned of anger on Saturday when he blasted Condi Rice for interfering in Egypt's internal affairs. "It is unimaginable that someone would speak about and judge an Egyptian internal political process before it even starts," Abul Gheit said.

Abul Gheit was referring to the national referendum being held on Monday on 34 proposed changes in the Egyptian constitution that Mubarak has heralded as a "historic step" toward full democracy but that Egyptian opposition groups label a sham intended to line up Mubarak's son Gamal to be the next president.

Here's what Mubarak's foreign critics are saying now (I'll present the Egyptian government's take on the matter soon):

-- Rice on Friday:

"I'm really concerned about it. You know, the Egyptians set certain expectations themselves about what this referendum would achieve. And we-- the hope that it would be a process that gave voice to all Egyptians, you know, I think there's some danger that that hopes not going to be met. And the abbreviated timetable is a problem, and we will see what ultimately comes out of it. But, you know, I've said many times that we continued-- and by the way, I will talk about it when I'm there, meet with the leadership and with my colleagues because Egypt is an extremely important country in the Middle East; one of the key countries in the Middle East. And as the Middle East moves toward greater openness and greater pluralism and greater democratization, Egypt ought to be in the lead of that. And it's disappointing that this has not happened. Now some good things have happened. The contested presidential elections suggests to me that you will never have a presidential election in Egypt like the old elections. That is something that will never go back, and so we have to remember that there are ups and downs in these things; ebb and flow. But yeah, this is a really a disappointing outcome and we will talk about it and hopefully it will turn out better than is expected. But right now I'm concerned that it won't."

--Jennifer Windsor, executive director, Freedom House, on Friday:

"These changes remove any question about the intentions of the Mubarak government to stifle independent voices in Egypt."

--"Democracy Demotion in Egypt," Andrew Exum and Zack Synder, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, on Friday:

"...these 'reforms' will serve only to strengthen the ruling party's stranglehold on Egyptian politics and send Egypt farther down the road toward authoritarian rule."

--"Baathism on the Nile," Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark Middle East blog, on March 21:

"This is a travesty, a crude mockery of promises of political reform, and something which deserves widespread international mockery and condemnation."

--Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, deputy director, Middle East and North Africa program, Amnesty International, on March 18:

"The proposed constitutional amendments would simply entrench the long-standing system of abuse under Egypt's state of emergency powers and give the misuse of those powers a bogus legitimacy. Instead of putting an end to the secret detentions, enforced 'disappearances,' torture and unfair trials before emergency and military courts, Egyptian MPs are now being asked to sign away even the constitutional protections against such human rights violations."

--"Constitutional Autocracy," editorial in Washington Post, Sunday:

"The package essentially will make the "emergency laws" that have underpinned Mr. Mubarak's regime a permanent part of Egypt's political order."

--"Egypt's Constitutional Amendments," Nathan J. Brown, Michele Dunne and Amr Hamzawy, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on Friday:

"Taken together, the amendments and process by which they were passed constitute an effort by the Egyptian regime to increase the appearance of greater balance among the branches of government and of greater opportunities for political parties, while in fact limiting real competition strictly and keeping power concentrated in the hands of the executive branch and ruling party."

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo

What fresh ideas did Condi Rice bring on her third trip to the Middle East this year? That's a good question.

She insists that she has not asked the Arab states to amend their 2002 Arab peace initiative at the Arab summit this week in Riyadh. But she would like them to re-launch it in a way that suggests more active Arab involvement in the broader Arab-Israeli peace process. In other words, she doesn't want the Arabs merely to sit back as spectators until the Israelis and Palestinians have finally made peace together. She is searching for some sort of mechanism that brings the Arabs more actively on board. Broadening her peace efforts to include the Arab states has twin advantages: it could encourage the Israelis and Palestinians to get more serious about reaching a final settlement of their dispute, and it could speed up the conclusion of a final comprehensive peace for the whole region.

What Rice told reporters on Friday before leaving Washington:

But I would hope that that initiative would be offered again and offered in a way that suggests that there might be active follow up to the initiative, not just to say here's an initiative. But to at least begin to discuss and think about how it might be actively followed up so that it becomes a part of supporting an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict now, not at the end of the process and that's the discussion I want to have with them.

That is a fair and reasonable position. The question is what more can the Arabs do right now beyond reiterating what they consider to be a major olive branch: full peace with all the Arab states and Israel in exchange for Israel's withdrawal from occupied Arab territories. The Arabs would probably agree to a mechanism such as an international peace conference. But it is the U.S. and Israel, not the Arabs, who have always preferred bilateral to multilateral negotiations. If Rice is hoping that she can get Saudi Arabia, which authored the 2002 peace initiative, to start publicly talking with Israel by itself as a gesture toward Israel, that would be a great step but is probably wishful thinking.

Daniel Kurtzer, one of America's finest diplomats until his recent retirement (he served as U.S. ambassador to both Israel and Egypt, among other posts), floated an idea an Op-Ed in the International Herald Tribune last week.

Perhaps out of frustration with Washington's failure to jump-start full-scale peace negotiations, or out of a belief that a U.S.-backed international rather than purely American effort will have a better chance of success, he calls for the international Quartet to convene preliminary talks among the main parties to discuss whether the Arab peace initiative opens up options for peace negotiations. Sounds like a promising idea. If nothing else, it would help keep up the momentum that Rice began with the shuttle diplomacy she launched in January. After doing little to mediate the Middle East conflict for six years, it is important that Rice doesn't lose interest or courage.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo