On May 15, President George W. Bush delivered a speech before the Israeli Parliament on the… On May 15, President George W. Bush delivered a speech before the Israeli Parliament on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence that has reignited a debate in this country over how to conduct diplomacy not only in the Middle East but also around the world.

Bush’s identification of those who would speak with “terrorists and radicals” as individuals who indulge in the “false comfort of appeasement” was seen by many in this country as a veiled attack on Sen. Barack Obama and his pledge to talk not only to our allies but also to our enemies and rivals.

Not only are Bush’s comments on appeasement deeply hypocritical, they are also shortsighted and embarrassingly narrow-minded.

This is, after all, the president who sent Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly and then Christopher Hill to conduct the six-party talks in Beijing in a successful attempt to establish a peaceful and secure relationship between North Korea and its neighbors.

This was diplomacy at its best, and it was conducted with a nation that sponsors terrorism, possesses nuclear weapons and ardently opposes U.S. national interests.

Diplomacy proved itself a successful tool of achieving foreign policy goals in the case of the six-party talks, so why is it not being used in the Middle East?

History has shown that even the most intractable terrorist conflicts founded on the injustices of hundreds of years can be solved successfully through engagement.

The perfect example is the Northern Irish peace process which tackled a sectarian conflict involving multiple nations, terrorist organizations and seven centuries of animosity. A power-sharing arrangement was reached in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement only after all the parties involved sat down together with a U.S. mediator and contact with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President Bill Clinton.

The Good Friday Agreement has held up for 10 years, and today a successful power-sharing government exists in Northern Ireland where once the only engagement between Protestants and Catholics was through violence.

But rather than attempt to replicate such successful diplomatic efforts in achieving peace in the Middle East, Bush has sought to score political points with his last supporters: Zionists who view the Bible as a real estate document and are unwilling to reach any territorial compromise with Palestinians.

What Bush’s speech signaled was that a meaningful peace process cannot begin until he is out of office and his influence is no longer felt in the region.

The peace talks that Bush held at Annapolis in November went nowhere because Bush allowed Mahmoud Abbas to masquerade as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority who refused to hand over power in free and fair elections last June, is just one more dictator in the mold of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak or Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf. Negotiating with him cannot be considered engagement with the Palestinian people.

True engagement in the Middle East will take courage, for it will require that the United States and Israel sit down and hold discussions with Hamas and Iran.

In such discussions it will be impossible to rely on the rhetoric of good vs. evil. Instead, it will have to be recognized that Hamas and the government of Iran represent real people with real grievances.

It is a hopeful sign that Israel is engaging Syria in peace talks, and it is equally positive that France is opening contacts with Hamas. But in order to establish peace in the Middle East it will take the active involvement of the next president of the United States not as a partisan for Israel but rather as a force for change.

And that is why Obama must not be derided as an agent of appeasement but rather as a man with the courage to abandon the shallow comforts of a militant foreign policy for the nuance of international diplomacy.

It took courage for Tony Blair to sit down with terrorists in Belfast in 1998, and it took courage for the United States to enter into talks with North Korea.

But rather than display such fortitude in the Middle East, Bush has found it easier to retreat behind a wall of rhetoric impenetrable by shades of gray.

In his speech to the Knesset, Bush described a Middle East 60 years from now that, overall, “will be characterized by a new period of tolerance and integration.” This is a dream that we can all share, but we must realize that such a future will not be achieved at the barrel of a gun but instead through close cooperation and understanding that must start with engagement. E-mail Giles at [email protected].