Can Obama envoy George Mitchell kick-start Mideast peace?

Colleagues ask: If the former Northern Ireland peacemaker can't do it, who can?

By Mark Rice-Oxley | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the February 9, 2009 edition

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LONDON - Few people can kick off a résumé like this: "1995-99: solved one of the world's most durable and intractable conflicts."

So when President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were casting around for a peace envoy for the Middle East, George Mitchell was the obvious choice.

Who better to deploy than someone experienced in the tortuous dealmaking that defused a comparable crisis and steered Northern Ireland toward a (sometimes frosty) civility?

Mr. Mitchell, a former US senator, was renowned in Northern Ireland for his patience, doggedness, pragmatism, willingness to listen, determination to get things done, and knack of leaving his own ego at the door.

The envoy – who returned last week from his first trip to the Middle East as Mr. Obama's envoy – is only too aware that his experiences in the British province will only take him so far. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a lot further from reconciliation than Ulster was in the mid 1990s. Even at its worst, Belfast never looked like Gaza City. But those who know him or have worked with him say his personal qualities suit him for the role of honest broker.

"He comes across as somebody who is modest, unassuming, doesn't throw his weight around," says Adrian Guelke, a professor of politics at Queen's University, the Belfast institution where Mitchell also happens to be chancellor. "He's self-deprecating, makes jokes against himself. He comes across as somebody who doesn't have an exaggerated sense of his own self-importance.

"He's prepared to listen, to take a lot of time with people."

For Gerry Adams, the Irish republican nationalist leader whom Mitchell steered toward eventual accommodation with pro-British Protestants, it was his attention to detail and refusal to be deflected by dirty tricks and endless, tedious procrastination that enhanced his reputation.

"I found him to be good-natured, humorous, and tolerant," Mr. Adams opined recently. "It is this experience that will stand him in good stead as he embarks on his journey to the Middle East."

Mitchell's initial role was more facilitator than enforcer, a go-between for the British and Irish as they explored the formulae and principles that would end up in the pivotal 1998 Good Friday Agreement. It was only later, with the agreement in jeopardy, that he exercised more muscular diplomatic skills, cajoling the parties to stick to their commitments.

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