When Condoleezza Rice is in her well-appointed suite on the seventh floor of the State Department, we now know what she does — nothing. At least such was the premise of much of the coverage of the run-up to her trip to the Middle East. It was assumed that if Rice weren't shuttling from capital to capital in the region, she must have been sitting idle, watching the coverage of the crisis on cable TV.
Now that Rice has departed Washington, she will be portrayed again as doing nothing, although in a different venue, so long as she doesn't join the calls for an immediate Israeli cease-fire. For much of the media and the foreign-policy establishment, the only U.S. posture that constitutes real action in the Middle East is "evenhanded" pressure leading to the immediate cessation of whatever hostilities happen to have broken out.
Such commentators are caught in a 1970s time warp where the only template for U.S. Middle East diplomacy is Henry Kissinger shuttling around the region in the wake of the 1973 war, negotiating the disengagement of the Israeli and Arab forces. But what might have made sense more than 30 years ago — when it was nation-states clashing, with the dangerous Cold War competition between rival superpowers in the background — needn't apply to an Israeli fight with a terror group acting as a proxy of an Iran bent on regional hegemony. Those who criticize the Bush administration for its lack of diplomacy are missing a diplomatic strategy notable both for its boldness and its subtlety.
It is bold because the U.S. doesn't just want to freeze the Lebanese status quo in place again, but see Hezbollah diminished so that the democratic government in Lebanon is strengthened and Iran's influence in the Arab world weakened. Allowing Israel more time to pound Hezbollah, therefore, isn't heedless warmongering, but a step toward a well-considered endgame. It is a version of the Clinton administration's Balkan gambit in the summer of 1995 of quietly encouraging the Croats to pursue an offensive against the Serbs, on the (correct) theory that it would create the conditions for a sustainable settlement. War is always politics by other means, and the current Israeli attacks have an ultimate political and diplomatic purpose.