Haviv's Blog: Just how far would America go for Israeli-Palestinian peace?

George Bush's Middle East tour included a short sideshow visit to Israel, apparently to help Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to push forward the Annapolis process, which trudges forward against all odds and the predictions of no small number of analysts that there is little logic to a peace plan between domestically unstable and even despised leaders.

An American president's blessing can go a long way, since American commitment can potentially carry a financial and military robustness that cannot be matched by any other on Earth.

But, as Olmert struggles in the almost-constant grip of challenges to his power from the Left (Barak threatening to leave his government) and Right (Lieberman is already out and the rest of the Right is waiting in the wings), it is an open and crucial question just how much American help Olmert can reasonably expect. How far would America go to reify the Annapolis process? What price would the US be willing to pay to remove the Palestinian drama from being the wrench stuck in its Middle East policy?

"I'm convinced NATO would put boots on the ground in the West Bank," former US ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter told me Sunday on the sidelines of the Herzliya Conference. "The [NATO] secretary-general has indicated as much, and nobody complained."

Hunter, who served under Carter and Clinton and is a senior advisor at the RAND Corporation, added the all-important caveat, "Of course, this would only happen if it was part of the peace agreement, to guarantee Israeli security needs in the framework of that peace. If that's what it took to get the peace, the American [representatives in] NATO would push it."

Later that day, meeting former Bush-appointed US ambassador to the UN John Bolton at a Tel Aviv bookstore, I put the question to him.

"Of course not," he said immediately. "How would American troops in the West Bank be in America 's interest? We simply wouldn't agree to it."

Hunter served Democratic presidents, while Bolton was a prominent hawkish and conservative appointee of George W. Bush at the UN. ("I'm not a neocon," he explained at the meeting. "Neocons are liberals who were mugged by reality." Smiling: "I was never a liberal.")

It may be a personal difference between the analyses of two former senior diplomats, or something deeper. Is there a difference between Democrats and Republicans in the willingness to put boots on the ground in the West Bank as part of the concluding phases of Annapolis? Could the Democrats be more willing to commit troops to an unstable Palestinian territory than the Republicans?

Hunter insists the US would wait for the peace itself before inserting troops. Perhaps, then, the difference is between optimists who promise troops once the peace is in place, and pessimists who, thinking such a peace won't come so quickly, don't see a future that would justify such a deployment.