Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Bashar Assad (AP)
If Saudi Arabia does in fact attend the international conference this fall, the Saudi leadership will essentially be putting its credibility on the line. The royal family risks undermining its own standing at home and across the broader Arab world if they send their own members to attend a peace conference that turns out to be nothing more than a publicity stunt and a heyday for speech writers. …
But the region is in desperate need of something more substantive than just an Arab-Israeli talkfest. The strains of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are now compounded with the chaos in Iraq and these two swamps are breeding extremists at an alarming rate. Perhaps nobody understands this better than the Saudis, and that is probably why they are willing to gamble on the prospect that the conference might achieve something. Access the full article>>