With an Arab-Israeli peace conference now virtually certain to take place, what are the prospects that it will actually produce something?
American, Arab and Israeli diplomats are not hiding the fact that they really have no answer to that question. Their attention has been so focused on the exhausting effort to organize the conference that little original or in-depth thought has been given to what can realistically be achieved once the parties get to the table.
Few diplomats doubt that when the conference opens here on Oct. 30, it will appear at first blush to be a breakthrough to a dead end. Syria, Jordan, the Palestinians and Lebanon are expected to demand territory occupied by Israel. Israel will decline. The Arabs will call for American pressure on Israel. Israel will say this is not what the conference was supposed to be about, and the whole enterprise will explode in a cacophony of conflicting demands and finger-pointing. A One-Act Play?
So Act One is already written. The question, American officials say, is whether there can be an Act Two.
"One should not predict the demise of this conference too quickly," said Stephen P. Cohen of the Montreal-based Center for Middle East Peace. "The same combination of international pressures which forced the parties to the table in the first place will apply to keeping them there after it starts. It is not going to be easy for anybody to just walk away."
In seeking to organize the conference, the United States was initially driven by President Bush's desire to prove that the Persian Gulf war could produce something beyond the destruction of half of the Iraqi Army and the restoration of the Kuwaiti monarchy, American officials say.
The peace conference, which Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d discussed with Spanish officials today on a stop here on his way home from the Middle East, has been arranged totally at the initiative of Washington, and not through the efforts of the Middle East parties themselves.
After nearly eight months, the United States appears to have succeeded in persuading Arabs and Israelis to come to the table by manipulating pressures on the participants that grew out of the end of the cold war and the end of the gulf war.
The splintering of the Soviet Union left Syria an orphan, desperately interested in a new relationship with Washington and ready to pay for it by agreeing to direct talks with Israel. Pressures on Israel
An influx of Soviet Jewish emigres left Israel so strapped for cash to take care of them that it could not afford to spurn the Bush Administration's demand for a peace conference. The Iraqi missile attacks on Israeli cities during the gulf war drove home to Israelis as never before the need to end the regional conflict.
Jordan and the Palestinians were left economically impoverished and diplomatically isolated by their support for Iraq in the gulf war. When the Bush Administration offered them a parole on the condition that they attend the conference on the United States' terms, they seized the opportunity.
Adding to the pressures were the end of the cold war and the new relationship between President Bush and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, who are expected to meet in Madrid before the conference convenes. The new cooperation between Moscow and Washington in the gulf war also gave Mr. Baker unparalleled tools for diplomatic maneuvering in the Middle East.
The Soviet Union, for instance, was ready to squeeze the Syrians and Palestinians on Washington's behalf and to restore relations with Israel to promote the conference. The Saudis, who were beholden to Washington for the American role in the gulf war, used their influence with Damascus.
Such tools can build a conference. Can they build peace agreements?
Neither Lebanon nor Syria, nor Jordan or the Palestinians, is approaching the talks with the philosophy that inspired President Anwar Sadat of Egypt to make peace with Israel in the late 1970's. That philosophy was based first on a gesture of complete reconciliation -- which in Mr. Sadat's case meant coming to Jerusalem -- and then an offer of full security guarantees in return for an Israeli withdrawal from all lands occupied in the 1967 war. The Least Contact Possible
