Trouble Looming for Rice

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Rice’s “Sunni strategy” is running into trouble.Her idea was to bolster a ring of moderate Sunni Arab allies as a front-line defense against Iran’s regional ambitions. But the Sunnis don’t appear to be cooperating, and the proponents of the plan within the State Department are heading for the exits.This weekend, Iran’s Holocaust-denying president was fêted by King Abdullah, the Saudi monarch who rules the linchpin Sunni state in Ms. Rice’s attempted anti-Iran alliance. Meanwhile, Iran’s Sunni proxy in Gaza, Hamas, is divvying up key posts with Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party in a Palestinian unity government. The negotiations stem from a Saudi-brokered deal forged last month in Mecca, a pact that has worried Israeli leaders and some in Congress because it does not require Hamas explicitly to recognize Israel.The Saudi diplomatic maneuvers run parallel to key personnel shifts inside the State Department. On Friday, Ms. Rice named a Johns Hopkins University professor, Eliot Cohen, to be her counselor, a job held until January by Philip Zelikow, one of the main architects of the Sunni strategy. Another one of the boosters of the Sunni strategy, the current director of the State Department’s policy and planning office, Stephen Krasner, is said to be returning next month to Stanford University.Mr. Cohen intellectually is neoconservative. He was an early supporter of the military intervention in Iraq and came out against recommendations from the Iraq Study Group in December to launch negotiations with Iraq’s neighbors. At the same time, he has also pulled no punches in his criticism of the military occupation of Iraq and, in an interview published in January by Vanity Fair, predicted that the future in the Middle East carries many dangers as a result of the war.Last year, Mr. Cohen wrote a blistering critique of a paper by University of Chicago professor, John Mearsheimer, and a Harvard University professor, Stephen Walt, that contended the Iraq war was the result of the machinations of a widespread “Israel lobby” that stifled public debate on foreign affairs and skewed American foreign policy away from its national interest. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Mr. Cohen said the paper was anti-Semitic.On Friday, the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said he thought Mr. Cohen would focus largely on Iraq and Afghanistan. “He’ll be able to really look at our posture in both of those places and make an assessment for the secretary, and then, of course, come back and provide any suggestions … how we might change or adjust that posture.”Reports from the Saudi and Iranian press about the meeting between King Abdullah and President Ahmadinejad varied. Iran’s state-run press reported that the two nations agreed to be aligned against “foreign conspiracies,” a reference to the Iranian view that the growing tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims are a hidden American objective of the Iraq war.The Saudi press said the two sides discussed a political détente in Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed Hezbollah made a play in January to topple the Saudi-supported government of Prime Minister Siniora. Iran’s Foreign Ministry yesterday denied a report that Mr. Ahmadinejad agreed to a 2002 Saudi peace proposal with Israel whereby the Jewish state would relinquish all the West Bank territory it won in 1967 in exchange for wider recognition in the region.A research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Tony Badran, said he did not think the Saudis were reneging on their commitment against Iran. “The discussion with Saudi Arabia is not a sign of strength for the Iranians. I would say it is a sign of weakness,” he said. “The skeptics might say this is a way for the Iranians to neutralize the Saudis, but the Saudis have also managed to get consensus in the Gulf Cooperation Council and a new meeting of Sunni states in Pakistan that have worried the Iranians.”Mr. Badran said the meeting last week in Pakistan, the only Islamic state with a nuclear bomb, was significant because it did not include Iran or Syria. “There is too much Sunni resistance after the failure of the Hezbollah coup and the sanctions threat from the United Nations Security Council. Iran is on its heels,” he said.On CNN yesterday, the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said he was open to talks with his Iranian counterpart at a March 10 meeting of Iraq’s neighbors in Baghdad. But within hours, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said the Iranian ambassador had no intention of meeting with Mr. Khalilzad.

Trouble Looming for Rice

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