Seeking 'New Ideas' with the usual suspects ..

With U.S. Middle East peace efforts at an impasse, the Obama administration has sought new ideas from outside experts on how to advance the peace process.   One task force has been convened by Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley, former national security advisers to Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively, to offer recommendations on the Middle East peace process to the National Security Council.  A second effort, led by Martin Indyk, vice president of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, held meetings this week with senior NSC Middle East/Iran adviser Dennis Ross, Palestinian negotiator Maen Erekat and Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, among others. 

The solicitation of ideas comes as the administration’s peace efforts are “utterly stuck,” as one outside adviser who consults the administration on the issue told POLITICO Wednesday on condition of anonymity.  “There’s no pretense of progress. With the State of the Union coming up and the new GOP Congress, they are taking a few weeks [to regroup and solicit] ideas to push forward and … to give a real jump-start to what would be meaningful negotiations,” the adviser said.  Ross traveled quietly to Israel last week to seek more clarity from Israeli leaders on their security requirements and ideas for advancing the peace process....“There are three options that this administration can adopt,” former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer told POLITICO Thursday. “It can elicit an Israeli initiative. It can elicit a Palestinian initiative. Or it can develop its own initiative.”  “It’s had no success with the first two, and it hasn’t tried the third,” Kurtzer said. “So if it wants to try to develop an initiative, it’s got to come up with a substantive program that says to the parties, ‘When you get to negotiations, here are your terms of reference.’ … And they have to be relatively narrow terms of reference, so we don’t start from where we were 15 years ago.” Though the Israeli government has resisted suggestions that the U.S. administration present “an American plan,” Kurtzer argued that the U.S. experience to date has proved “there is no other option.” Without a process that will achieve Palestinian statehood, Fayyad and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “are vulnerable to being seen as policemen of the Israeli occupation,” he said. Support for Palestinian institution building, he said, “is like apple pie and motherhood — everybody is all for it. It can’t be the only thing out there.” ........

“There’s no such thing as a vacuum in the Middle East. You’re either moving forward or retreating,” Kurtzer said. “And when you have the Middle East in bad shape anyway — the Lebanon stuff is an indication it is getting worse — once there’s an admitted vacuum in the peace process, the Middle East gets worse. And the bad guys will take advantage.”