KEY POINTS:
This week, dignitaries from more than 50 countries and institutions are gathering in the small, pleasant city of Annapolis, on the shore of Chesapeake Bay, near Washington, DC.
They are coming in the cause of what has been the graveyard of many a diplomat's career: Middle Eastern peace.
It is the first gathering of such a scale since 2000, when the peace process last collapsed. Now the Annapolis summit is being held against a backdrop of Hamas rule in Gaza, war in Iraq, Iran's nuclear programme and a power vacuum in Lebanon.
Optimists are not thick on the ground.
But the fact that the Annapolis summit is taking place at all is down to one woman: United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She is also - apart from the ordinary men and women of the Middle East - the one who is most hoping for genuine progress. Amid the ambassadors, princes, ministers and think-tank experts it will be Rice who will be really biting her nails.
For Annapolis represents a last chance for a woman who is in many ways the final survivor of the Bush Administration to have any meaningful international reputation left.
Her conservative colleagues - Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes - have all left the scene ignominiously. It is becoming harder to imagine they once thought their beliefs had not only changed America, but would also transform the world.
Only Rice remains as someone the world looks up to. She is seen now as the opposition to Vice-President Dick Cheney, whose hardline attitudes on fighting Iran remain unchanged despite the quagmire of Iraq.
It is Rice who has persuaded Bush that the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians is in America's interest as much as winning in Iraq.
It is Rice whom many in the international community still admire as a woman of sharp intellect, whose role as the most powerful black woman in the world should go down in history.
Yet without success at Annapolis that role is likely to be seen as a failure. For the truth is Rice has been intimately involved in Bush's foreign policy from the beginning.
She was America's National Security Adviser when 9/11 happened. She was part of the chorus trumpeting the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein. On her watch, North Korea became a nuclear power.
The odds may be long that good will come out of the Annapolis talks, but Rice has placed her bet on the table. Her reputation is at stake and with the clock ticking on the last year of the Bush presidency it is probably her last big gamble.
America's 66th Secretary of State has a first name that seemed destined to make her a great diplomat. Her parents fashioned Condoleezza from the Italian "con dolcezza", which means "with sweetness".
But she was not obviously destined for such high office.
She was born in 1954 in the heart of the segregated Deep South. Her home town of Birmingham, Alabama, was split along racial lines and Rice grew up in an environment where whites used different restaurants and blacks were forced to sit at the back of buses.
She experienced racial discrimination of the most petty but devastating kind: being denied hotel rooms, barred from a circus and told to change in a storage room at a department store, not a whites-only changing room.
She also had a violent brush with naked racism in 1963 when a bomb at a Birmingham church killed four young black schoolgirls, including one of her classmates. Rice herself heard the blast. Years later she remarked: "It is a sound I will never forget."
But such circumstances did not propel Rice into the civil rights struggle, despite being the daughter of a preacher when church leaders were defining the fight for black rights. Rice's family was far more conformist.
Her father, the Rev John Wesley Rice, was a Presbyterian whose doctrine was to work hard. To study hard. To be twice as good as white people.
So, as a child, Rice faced the strange prospect of her father standing guard over their home with a gun while she fervently practised the piano inside.
The lesson he taught - working hard in the ruling system and not fighting it - was to be the key to her success in the Republican party.
And work hard she did. At age 3 she was learning French, figure skating and ballet. She showed talent for the piano (and still plays in a chamber orchestra) but gave up on her goal of becoming a professional pianist because it would be too difficult to make a living.
Instead, she discovered a new passion: Cold War politics. In 1967 her family moved to Colorado, where Rice would later attend Denver University.
A lecture by Josef Korbel, the father of Bill Clinton's future secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, on the Soviet Union had Rice captivated.
She did a PhD on the military and politics of Czechoslovakia and seemed destined for an academic career as she headed for Stanford University as a professor.
She rose rapidly, becoming provost: simultaneously becoming the first female, first black and youngest person ever to hold that esteemed title.
She seemed the consummate academic, confident and bright and easy to get along with.
"What gets you is how brilliant her mind is," said one former student.
While at Stanford, Rice flirted with politics. In 1982 she changed her registration from Democrat to Republican.
The switch served her well and she became special adviser to President George H. W. Bush in Soviet matters - just as the Berlin Wall was falling.
Through the elder Bush she met his son and by the time "Dubya" was running for the presidency Rice was at his side as a foreign affairs specialist.
When he won, he appointed her National Security Adviser.
To outsiders, the close relationship between the "frat boy" President from a wealthy, white New England family and the hardworking black woman from Alabama seemed odd. But it has never appeared so to Rice.
Her relationship with Bush is famously close (she once inadvertently referred to him as her "husband": something, given Rice's single status, that raised an eyebrow or two).
But it is a relationship based on Rice's fierce personal loyalty to Bush.
Indeed, many believe she would have preferred not to take on the State Department and go back to Stanford, but did so only because Bush asked her.
But Bush's relationship with Rice does puzzle many of her fellow black Americans. Almost 90 per cent of blacks vote Democrat and Bush's botched response to Hurricane Katrina seemed ambivalent at best to the needs of New Orleans's poor.
Rice has been harshly examined in the black press. One magazine, the Black Commentator, described one Rice speech on black issues as "more than strange" and evidence of "profound personal disorientation".
Some African-Americans see Rice as either betraying her race or ignoring it. Not surprisingly, Rice has never shied away from defending her background or citing civil rights leaders as heroes.
Yet Rice is probably right to be colour-blind when it comes to her own race. She should be judged by her achievements, not her skin colour. But that is where Rice's problems begin.
Rice was National Security Adviser when al Qaeda hijacked four planes and crashed them into New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Just a few weeks earlier, an intelligence report to Bush had warned that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack the US, possibly by hijacking aircraft. Rice had judged the report full of old news.
She then became a fervent supporter of the invasion of Iraq.
In an influential CNN interview in January 2003, just weeks before the invasion, she warned of Saddam's nuclear ambitions by saying notoriously: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
The month before she wrote an editorial for the New York Times entitled "Why we know Iraq is lying."
Yet we now know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and - four years later - the war she helped launch still rages.
In the meantime, North Korea has tested a nuclear device and Iran seems hell-bent on obtaining one.
At the same time, America's push for democracy in the Middle East has ended up with voters (in Palestine and Iraq) casting their ballots for religious parties critical of the US.
Meanwhile, Muslim countries close to the US (Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan) are little more than dictatorships. It is a sorry record.
That is why this week's meeting in Annapolis offers Rice a chance to create a real legacy for herself (and her mentor, Bush).
Rice has displayed a degree of courage in recognising that the forces that she helped to invade Iraq have created much chaos. She has tried to curb the White House's isolationist and muscular tone. She is a late convert to the joys of reaching out. She has, against the odds, assembled a genuine summit of all the parties involved.
In the awful bitter swamp of Middle Eastern politics that is an achievement in itself. But she needs more than that.
She needs results. If the history of the Middle East is a guide, she is unlikely to get them.
- OBSERVER
