Stripping away the rhetoric and spin, what has actually happened today in Annapolis? I find three points of note:

--Bush announced that the U.S. will act as arbiter of whether the two sides have met the conditions of the road map. This puts Rice & Co. squarely in the middle of the process as, dare I say it, an "honest broker." It gives the U.S. considerable leverage to prod the two sides, and to do the mediator's conjuring act, when necessary. The fact that the Israelis agreed to give the U.S. this leverage is Rice's biggest achievement to date.

--All sides agreed that the negotiations will be continuous through 2008. This is an important fact when we think about what next year will look like for the region. A peace process will be underway, and all the parties -- Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Saudis -- will have to deal with it. The radicals will try to blow it up, but if it's making any headway, that will be difficult. There is a narcotic -- perhaps I should say, narcoleptic -- aspect to "continuous ongoing peace negotiations." They become the focus of attention. They distract from other problems. That's not a bad thing right now.

--The Saudis and the Arab League are present as handmaidens and midwives for whatever this is. That was Secretary Rice's goal when she first began thinking about what has become Annapolis -- to get "buy-in" from the Arabs at the outset of a negotiation process, so that Abbas and the moderate Palestinians would not feel isolated. Annapolis does give the Palestinians some cover -- and it gives Israelis a small hint of what Arab recognition would feel like.

It's always easy with the Middle East to forecast failure. As a colleague said many years ago, when it comes to the Middle East, "pessimism pays." So I understand Fareed's caution. But there's a bit more here than pessimists expected.