The Bush administration has compounded so many errors in Iraq that there are only bad and less bad decisions to be made, writes Lara Marlowe.
The foreign ministers of Iraq's neighbours and the G8 and China, the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, representatives of the Arab League, the Islamic Conference and the EU will converge on the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el- Sheikh today and tomorrow to discuss the war in Iraq.
The outcome will be a bland declaration encouraging the interim Iraqi government to pursue the political process outlined in UN Security Council resolution 1546: elections in January 2005 to create a 275-strong assembly that will chose an executive cabinet, draw up a permanent constitution and pave the way for direct elections by the end of next year.
It will all seem far removed from the grisly reality on the ground in Iraq, but Sharm el-Sheikh was never intended to solve anything; it was scheduled hastily in late September to boost George Bush's election campaign.
There are no signs that Bush is about to become a convinced multilateralist. With the president refusing to admit past errors in the Middle East and appointing hard- line loyalists to key cabinet positions, it is difficult to see how Iraq can be stabilised or the Israeli- Palestinian conflict resolved while he is in office.
The outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell called these issues "my two burdens". Now they are being shifted to Condoleezza Rice. Rarely has incompetence been so highly rewarded.
Not only did Rice ignore evidence that al-Qaeda was about to strike the US before September 11th, she encouraged the president to invade Iraq and discounted all evidence that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. In the spring of 2003, Bush put her in charge of the "road map" for Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Six months later, he gave Rice responsibility for peace and reconstruction in Iraq. She failed abysmally on both assignments.
The appointment of Alberto Gonzales, Bush's Counsel at the White House, to the post of Attorney General, is another indicator of how little importance Bush attaches to the US's image in the Middle East. It was Gonzales who called the Geneva Conventions quaint and argued that international laws forbidding torture did not apply to "enemy combatants" captured in the US "war on terror".
After Yasser Arafat's death, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, pleaded with Bush to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has killed more than 3,500 Palestinians and 950 Israelis since September 2000.
But Blair received no reward for his loyalty in Iraq. Mr Bush said no to a special envoy for Israel and the Occupied Territories; no to an international conference; no to commiting to the establishment of a Palestinian state by 2009.
At a press conference, he wouldn't even answer a question about whether Israel should freeze settlement-building.
Bush and Rice support the plan of Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. That plan was described last month by Dov Weisglass, Sharon's chief of staff, as "formaldehyde . . . so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians".
Sharon and Bush insist that all Palestinian attacks must stop and that the Occupied Territories must be democratic before negotiations. International law and the basic rights of Palestinians do not enter the equation, nor is there any guarantee that the new Palestinian Authority which emerges from elections on January 9th will be "democratic" enough to suit them.
After all, Yasser Arafat was democratically elected.
The basic terms of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were hammered out at Taba in January 2001 and in last year's non- binding Geneva accords: Jerusalem as a capital for both countries; the right of return to the Palestinian state, but not to Israel; compensa- tion with other arable lands for any settlements retained by Israel.
Iraq is far more intractable. The war seemed to reach new heights of savagery over the past nine days, with the murder of the saintly Care director Margaret Hassan by insurgents and the video-taped summary execution of an unarmed, wounded insurgent by a US marine in a mosque in Falluja.
The mutilated body of a fair- haired woman found in a Falluja street may be Ms Hassan's. The bullet wound in the head corresponds to the videotape of her murder that was sent to Al Jazeera.
US occupation forces had to end the reign of terror in Falluja, yet they did it with their usual disregard for the welfare of civilians and the laws of war. The International Red Cross has complained bitterly at the US military's refusal to allow food, water or rescue workers to reach civilians during the 10-day assault.
Equally alarming, the Falluja offensive has increased fighting in Mosul, Ramadi, Baquba, Baghdad and Latifya and has led to widespread calls for a boycott of January's elections.
Every semblance of progress in Iraq - the killing of Uday and Qusay; the arrest of Saddam Hussein; the "transfer of sovereignty" and the naming of Prime Minister Allawi - has been followed by still worse violence.
The only face-saving way out for the US is what the New York Times calls "Iraqification"; gradually entrusting conduct of the war to the Iraqi government and security forces. Setting aside the fact that newly trained Iraqi soldiers often desert or assist the insurgents, there is an unhappy precedent.
From 1969 until 1972, Washington adopted the "Vietnamisation" policy whereby the US-backed South Vietnamese government was supposed to take over. It ended with people hanging from helicopter blades as thousands were evacuated from the rooftops of Saigon in April 1975.
The Bush administration has compounded so many errors in Iraq that there are only bad and less bad decisions to be made. The US cannot run away, as it did from Beirut and Mogadishu; to do so would be to hand the country to the kidnappers and beheaders.
With Iraq already steeped in the blood of 100,000 civilians and 1,150 US servicemen killed since March 2003, "Iraqification" is the only shred of hope. For the sake of Iraq, the region and the world, it will be endorsed by the Sharm el-Sheikh conference.