It was painful to watch Condoleezza Rice tour the Middle East last week.

Her goal was to rally moderate Arab states against extremism in the region and against Iran’s nuclear program. She also wanted to bolster the pragmatic Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas against Hamas radicals.

But she came with nothing to offer and left with no results. Rarely has an American secretary of state looked so hapless.

At a time when American policy is failing in Iraq and flailing toward Iran, Rice’s trip shows why a shift of U.S. strategy is badly needed, soon.

The only way to break out of the present cycle of failure in the Middle East is to put the Israel-Palestinian issue back on the front burner.

When the United States invaded Iraq, many on the Bush team believed the road to Jerusalem (meaning resolution of the Palestinian issue) ran through Baghdad. They believed Iraq would morph into a pro-American democracy, which in turn would undercut the regimes in Syria and Iran. The Palestinians would have to accept whatever deal Israel offered, and the Bush team wouldn’t have to push the peace process forward.

Unfortunately, White House expectations proved to be 180 degrees wrong.

The chaos in Iraq strengthened Iran’s hand. Meantime, U.S. passivity on the peace process has boomeranged. President Bush’s endorsement of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was bound to strengthen Hamas, which could claim they’d pushed Israel out by force. Had the White House wanted to strengthen Abbas, it would have urged Israel to negotiate a withdrawal with him.

The downward spiral that followed in Gaza and the West Bank has endangered Israel and U.S. policy as well.

With no hope of occupation’s end, more young Palestinians are drawn to violence. Moderate Arab states can’t back U.S. policy while scenes of Palestinian suffering incense their people. They want Bush to follow up on his promises to promote a two-state solution.

Yet Rice brought no new peace initiative with her. Her most concrete idea was to urge Israel to reopen the Karni border crossing between Gaza and Israel, something she brokered almost a year ago.

It’s hard to believe the United States has nothing more to offer than this.

What’s especially puzzling is that, just last month, Philip Zelikow, counselor to Rice, indicated that U.S. policy was shifting. At a conference held by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, he advocated rallying Arab moderate states – whom he called “the coalition of the builders” – against “the coalition of the destroyers.”

For a moderate coalition to cohere, he said, its members must first see “an active (U.S.) policy on the Arab-Israeli dispute.” Such a policy, he added, was “essential” for Israel as well, if Israel considers Iran to be its greatest existential threat.

How better to undercut that threat than to move forward with a comprehensive peace process that leads to broad Arab recognition of Israel? Just this week, 135 former presidents, prime ministers and Nobelists called for such an effort. Yet Rice showed no sign that the White House considers Zelikow’s reasoning to be correct.

The Bush team also seems dead set against any Israeli response to the recent offer by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of unconditional negotiations. The latest call for such talks came last week in a Ha’aretz article by Labor MK Danny Yatom, ex-chief of the Mossad, and coauthored by Kadima party MK Moshe Amirav.

However, Israel’s largest paper, Yediot Ha’aranot, reports that Washington has warned Israel against holding talks with Assad, whom the White House seeks to isolate. Where is the regional U.S. strategy here?

If America’s goal is to isolate Iran, why not try to separate Syria from its Iranian ally? The mere fact of talks with Israel connotes recognition of the Jewish state.

If U.S. policy aims to rally Arab “builders” in the region, must it not consider the builders’ primary concern: resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute?

The oddest part of the U.S. reluctance to promote peace talks was summed up by Ori Nir, spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, sister group of the largest Israeli organization that backs Israel-Arab peace talks. “There’s a bitter irony here,” Nir noted. “It used to be that the United States was the one cajoling the Arabs and Israelis into peace talks. Now you have the United States doing the opposite.

“Is it in Israel’s interest to have broader talks towards regional peace?,” Nir asked. “The answer is definitely ‘yes.”‘ He’s right.