CAIRO — The Arab League summit that concluded in Riyadh Thursday reaffirmed the body’s peace offer to Israel, but it hardly suggested the sort of ‘bold outreach’ to the Jewish State for which U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been lobbying. Indeed, the summit appeared to reveal a yawning gap between the outlooks of the U.S. and its key Arab ally, summit host Saudi Arabia. Although on her latest Middle East shuttle she managed to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to agree on holding regular meetings, Rice’s efforts to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace are looking more like crisis management than visionary deal-making. She had hesitated to spell out exactly what she meant by ‘bold outreach,’ but had urged the Arab leaders heading for Riyadh to not merely to endorse a formula for peace - the Arab League’s Beirut initiative, first adopted in 2002, calls for full peace and normalization of relations if Israel withdraws from Arab lands occupied in 1967 - but also to provide a mechanism through which Arabs and Israelis could begin discussing the formula. ‘Regional states,’ she said, ‘should participate actively in diplomacy to advance the achievement of peace.’ […]