Was Rice mocking the Clinton peace effort?

The Q&A session U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave the editorial board of NBC News is worth reading for several reasons, some of which are her answers to questions concerning the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

It didn't start with a direct question on this issue. Rice was asked about the polls showing that America is "really disliked, not just across the Middle East but in Europe and elsewhere" and replied at length, delving into a list of "some things", unpopular things, that the Bush administration had to do after 9/11. Things previous administrations didn't have to deal with, or, in some cases, failed to deal with. Then she started giving examples, and ended up using this one:

"Take the Middle East. The second intifada had begun because Yasser Arafat had decided to walk away from the Camp David deal. Ariel Sharon, who believed both in a Greater Israel and no Palestinian state, had been elected. And now you have the great bulk of both Palestinians and Israelis believing in a two-state solution. And people act as if it just kind of happened magically. Well, of course not. It happened because it's a policy that President Bush articulated early and has pursued ever since. We reviewed the record of what Saddam Hussein was doing in Iraq. Iran was building a -- reprocessing and enriching out of sight, having lied for 18 years about it. Kim Jong Il and the North Koreans were cheating on their arrangements with us with little interest or intervention from their neighbors because it was our agreement, not theirs.

And I can go on and on and on about the world that we inherited, and I think that if you ask where are some of those issues now, they're not resolved but they're in a better place than they were when, either when people were not aware that there was a problem or where we were largely ignoring the problem.

And yes, some of the people don't like some of the answers that we've had to come to, but I think in the long run though we will be -- it will be seemed to have been the right thing to do.

QUESTION: To lead up to your point, last answer about the Middle East, former President Carter -- someone very close to this administration, I know -- is walking around saying this is the first time in memory the U.S. isn't in the game. We're not convening a structure; a peace process in the Middle East.

SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, and all of those others had such great success, didn't they, in solving the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

QUESTION: Does that mean just try a Camp David 2, 3 or 4?

SECRETARY RICE: No, I'm just saying let's recognize that one has to ask the question why, given all of the attention and all of the effort that has gone into the Israeli-Palestinian issue, it still is there as a problem to solve? And I think that one of the reasons is that we didn't -- have not until recently had certain fundamentals in place that might allow some progress on that issue. I do think it's a time for active engagement to see how far we can get toward the two-state solution. And I've been personally doing that. And I'm determined to keep personally doing it until we are out of office because I do think that there is -- given where Israelis are about wanting to see this conflict resolved, given where, I think, most Palestinians are about wanting to see this conflict resolved, and perhaps most importantly, seeing where the Arab states are now, the responsible Arab states are about wanting to get this resolved -- I think there's a chance that you might be able to really move this forward."