The upcoming visit by Condoleezza Rice to the Middle East is laden with symbolic dates. The US secretary of state's trip starts on Nov. 5, just a day after the US election that decides the successor to George W. Bush. It marks one year after Bush hosted talks in Annapolis, Maryland, between Israel and the Palestinians in an effort to revive the peace process, and will come during the start of reconciliation talks between rival Palestinian movements, Hamas and Fatah, in Cairo.

The Rice tour in its entirety is emblematic of the Bush presidency's meager and when he did step in, counterproductive involvement in the Middle East conflict. In eight years of office he failed miserably to land a peace deal between Palestinians and Israelis. He could not establish or even help set up a Palestinian state, never got near such a goal, and would not stop the erection of the wall of separation or Jewish settlements, both of which drastically narrowed the land where such a state should be.

Bush's Middle East file was instead filled almost entirely with Afghanistan, after which came Iraq and most recently Iran. Palestinians never really figured and when they did they were an afterthought. It was always much more about Israeli security than Palestinian land.

It did not stop at that. Bush helped oversee the beginning of the Palestinian split from within. After the last Palestinian elections, praised worldwide for how democratic and fair they were, and which Washington sought, certain powers, most noteworthy and ironically being the US, decided to impose a blockade in order to prove that the party that was elected was incapable of administrating the affairs of the occupied territories. The chief crime perpetrated involved more than the refusal to honor the will of the Palestinian electorate. It also entailed embroiling the Palestinians in an internal conflict that escalated into bloodshed. It cast to the wind all criteria for differentiating between disputes between a people under occupation and their conflict with the occupation itself. There is no need to enumerate all the well known reasons why Israel is so important to the US; the aspect that concerns us is that the Palestinians always end up short, including the years Bush was around. His stance toward the Palestinians never once wandered toward affirmative action because of the internal mechanisms of American politics. Inside the US, Israel always wins. When it comes to US foreign policy, change is limited to national interests, and these are set by the establishment and the special interests groups that surround it. This is hardly a surprise. It is sound politics if you are a US politician, but it is ruin if you are Palestinian. Because Bush, as like all his predecessors, failed to deliver, and because so many factors favor Israel, Bush's one-year deadline for peace, which was doubtful from the beginning, never came close to being met.

Rice's visit is too late, in fact so late that when she starts it, Bush will be in theory, if not in practice, out of office. So what is a soon-to-leave state secretary in an out-of-work administration doing in the Middle East right now, after the damage has been done and no time or will to repair the harm done? The visit is pointless and like so much of George Bush's presidency, aimless.