Dashboard

By Massimo Calabresi

Jimmy Carter has a mixed record on post-presidential peacemaking. He helped oust a Haitian dictator and set North Korea on a path to freezing its nuclear program in 1994 but later that year inked an unofficial cease-fire with Bosnian Serbs months before they slaughtered 8,000 Muslim civilians at Srebrenica. Now Carter has riled the Bush Administration by talking to leaders of the militant Palestinian group Hamas in Syria.

President Bush is trying belatedly to move an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal forward, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the U.S. asked Carter not to engage with Hamas' leaders because they support Israel's destruction. But critics say peace without Hamas could prove difficult, thanks to the parliamentary majority it won in January 2006. "I'm a free citizen," says Carter, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Peace, "and I decided that somebody should talk to Hamas."

Carter came away from his mid-April meetings with some apparent progress. Hamas leaders told him they'd accept a peace deal that included an Israeli state if Palestinians approved it in a referendum. But, as President Bush said Tuesday, "they say one thing and do another." In fact, America's diplomats are as worried about what Hamas will do in coming weeks as they were about the meeting with Carter last month.

Bush travels to Israel for the country's 60th anniversary May 14, and Israel has threatened to reinvade Hamas' Gaza stronghold if it launches new attacks. A Hamas-provoked Israeli incursion would undermine pro-peace players on both sides and enrage Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which are key to negotiations. And it would cast Carter's latest peacemaking mission into the loss column.