Bush looks lost in dealing with Mideast 

March 31, 2002 

BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST 









The Bush administration's frustration in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was typified last weekend when Vice President Dick Cheney was ready to sit down with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. 

Cheney had returned to Washington from his 10-day, 11-nation swing through the Mideast. But Cheney aides were secretly positioned in Israel to make the meeting a reality. Advance men back in the United States were on alert, ready to fly back to Israel on a moment's notice. All that was needed was Arafat saying the right word. 

He didn't. Four days later, on Thursday, the Palestinian leader came pretty close to advocating an unconditional cease-fire in language demanded by Washington. It was too late. Last Saturday afternoon, the Cheney aides in the Mideast were sent home, and those back home were taken off alert. 

A few days later, the situation deteriorated, with additional Palestinian suicide bombings and an Israeli military assault on Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. The United States was reduced to being an interested but inactive observer. 

President Bush has continued to look inept in trying to cope with the Mideast. As masterful as Bush has been since Sept. 11 in leading the nation and a global coalition against terrorism, he has seemed lost in coping with the Palestine question. No predecessor in the White House has faltered as badly as Bush. 

It's true that no president would find it easy to handle Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, neither of whom is dedicated to a peaceful solution. But Bush had special problems. 

In the first place, Bush started out determined to keep well away from the Mideast quagmire. That's an attitude common to all new presidents (including Bill Clinton), but Bush was really determined to resist being drawn in. He was convinced that President Clinton had made a serious error with his desperate efforts in 2000 to broker a permanent peace agreement as his term wound down, with his failure generating more violence. 

In the second place, the national security team put in place by Bush was deeply divided between hawks and doves when it came to Israel. The hawks in the White House and Pentagon were opposed in principle to the concessions made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the late-2000 negotiations. The doves in the State Department approved of the concessions but blamed Clinton for rushing a process that resulted in failure. 

Bush had built a house divided. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the nation's leading national security intellectuals, ardently supports Sharon's policy of using force to break the back of anti-Israeli terrorists. Wolfowitz's close friend Richard Perle, as head of the Defense Department's part-time Policy Board, takes even a harder line. Perle is openly contemptuous of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who sought a negotiated settlement with Arafat. 

The result has been a U.S. policy marked by vacillation. As the cycle of Israeli-Palestinian violence mounted during 2001, it became clear to Bush that he could no longer remain aloof from the bloodshed. But what to do? The president wavered between the Wolfowitz-Perle policy of condemning Arafat and the Powell policy of bargaining with him. Bush attempted to condemn Arafat for not controlling terrorism while cautiously criticizing Sharon for fomenting it. 

This ambivalence was obvious during the Cheney mission. His hurried tour of the Middle East initially was arranged not to promote peace in the Holy Land but war in Iraq. The vice president, who strongly urges a military operation to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was dispatched to test sentiment among Arab leaders for this proposed next step in the war against terrorism. All of them told him that the United States ought to bring peace in Israel before seeking their help against Iraq. 

The Cheney mission, therefore, transformed itself in mid-course to seek an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire. Insiders back in Washington were staggered by the irony of the vice president seeking a meeting with Arafat. Cheney is one of Bush's most hawkish advisers, agreeing with Sharon that Arafat is a big part of the problem and has to go. 

While Cheney pronounced himself ready to travel back to the Mideast at a moment's notice for peacemaking, the situation on the ground precluded anything like that. Although the Bush administration has abandoned illusions of being able to keep its distance from this problem, the situation is out of Washington's control. 

As violence escalated into war, everybody agreed that a strong hand by Bush is needed. What he will do and what he can do are unknown, to U.S. policymakers as to everybody else.

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