Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies Danielle Pletka

Today, Secretary of State Rice will sit down with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a summit that's being advertised as the start of a new effort to outline a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. The meeting may be perfectly pleasant--but it's another triumph of hope over experience. And the thinking that led to this point portends disaster for the United States.

Olmert leads a government that may soon fall. Abbas speaks for no one but himself; the unity government he has agreed to lead with Hamas does not recognize the right of the State of Israel to exist. And the United States surely has other, more pressing challenges to face in the Middle East.

But Rice, Olmert and Abbas have persuaded themselves that there is, in the tired parlance of the committed peace-processor, a window of opportunity. For the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, the motive is straightforward political expediency. If you can't do anything else, why not engage in distracting diplomacy?

For Rice, there is another dynamic at play: The American secretary of state believes that a Sunni Arab world unified by fear of a radical Iran may finally force the Palestinians into peace with Israel. In other words, the Arabs will deliver the Palestinians, and the Americans will deliver the Israelis.

This is old think at its worst. Before 9/11, American policy in the Middle East rested on the premise that "moderate" Sunni states--like Egypt and Saudi Arabia--offered lasting stability in the region, by serving as a counterweight to states like Iran and Syria. George Bush repudiated that premise, insisting that true stability would flow from democracy.

Now, it increasingly appears that the Bush administration's democracy push is done. American diplomats are again talking up the important role of "moderate" or "reasonable" Arab states, ignoring the fact that most foreign fighters in Iraq are Saudis or that Egypt has launched an unprecedented crackdown on civil society.

In keeping with the effort to bolster the "moderates," the administration is trying to funnel $86 million to Abbas for his security forces. The fact that those self-same security forces are indistinguishable from the Fatah terror group known as the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and that Fatah itself pursued a policy of terror over peace throughout its tenure in power, has not slowed the administration's eagerness to engage in a new peace process.

The logic behind today's meeting is unclear. Clever State Department diplomats believe that by describing a "horizon," or shape to a future Palestinian state, they will undercut Palestinian rejectionists and, in turn, destabilize Hamas. But embracing one terrorist to weaken another is not a foreign policy strategy, it's just unprincipled gamesmanship.

Similarly, the Bush administration's new fondness for so-called moderate Arab states over extremists ignores all the lessons learned after 9/11. Al Qaeda and its ilk have a foothold in the Middle East because supposedly moderate dictators and autocrats deny people basic rights. Getting back into bed with those moderates at the expense of the 300 million people of the region is a terrible mistake for which the United States has paid dearly once already. Secretary Rice is looking for diplomatic successes in all the wrong places.

Danielle Pletka is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI.