The fierce battle inside the Bush administration regarding America’s Middle East policy appears to be heading toward a resolution. Reports from Washington suggest the president has managed to impose a compromise on the warring parties in the form of a division of labor.
Defense Department “hawks” led by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his even more extreme deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, have taken control of America’s worldwide “war on terror.” At the same time, Secretary of State Colin Powell has taken the lead over the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Powell cannot be described as a “dove.” He is a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a veteran Washington insider, skilled in the arts of bureaucratic battles. But he and his key State Department officials are strikingly more balanced and humane than their colleagues in the Defense Department. In the words of an admiring senior official, Powell reflects the fundamental American values of fairness and justice.
President George W. Bush has imposed the compromise by backing both sides. He is ardent in the pursuit of the “war on terror,” but he seems equally determined, if more cautious, in moving forward toward an Israeli-Palestinian settlement on the basis of “two states living side by side in peace and security.” Reflecting Colin Powell’s advice, he is the first American president to refer publicly and repeatedly to the need for a state called Palestine.
Washington sources confirm that the president’s political advisers and speech writers are now drafting (and squabbling over) a Middle East speech which Bush plans to deliver in the near future. This will be a crucial moment because it will chart the way forward for US policy in considerable detail and reflect the balance of power within the administration.
Bush is expected to make the speech ahead of the Middle East conference due to take place this summer, most probably in July. The exact timing has not been agreed and the venue remains uncertain. It was going to be Ankara, but the vacuum created by the illness of Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit probably rules that out. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has offered to host the conference in Italy, and that seems for the moment the most likely venue.
The question of who will be invited to the conference has also not yet been clarified. Some Washington sources hint that the conference may deal exclusively with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which case Syria and Lebanon may not be invited to attend. This would be a concession to Israel’s view that it cannot be expected to deal effectively with two tracks at the same time. The Israeli-Syrian conflict and the remaining problems on the Lebanese track would then be tackled at a second conference a little while later.
In his important interview in New York earlier this week with my colleague Raghida Dirgham of the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper, Powell confirmed that the conference, which he will chair this summer, would not be the last such conference. It would, he said, be “one of a number of conferences that we will hold in the future to move forward.”
Powell also declared, however, that the president had not retreated from the vision he articulated in his April 4 speech in the Rose Garden of the White House in which he talked of the end of Israeli occupation, the end of settlement activity, and the establishment of a state called Palestine.
Bush’s spokesman, Ari Fleischer, made the same point this week. The April 4 speech, he declared, remains the “cornerstone” of Bush’s Middle East policy. He brought it up again in his recent meetings with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel.
Sharon, a life-long opponent of Palestinian self-determination, is clearly unhappy and alarmed by Bush’s repeated reference to a Palestinian state. According to Israeli sources, Sharon told Bush that American support for a Palestinian state would create political instability in Israel, bring down his government, and lead to early elections and to a six month-long political freeze. Sharon may not yet have realized that removing him from the scene may indeed be part of Bush’s long-term plan for a Middle East settlement.
Many observers believe that Bush was unnecessarily kind to Sharon, failing to criticize publicly Israel’s repeated incursions into Palestinian areas, defending Israel’s right to defend itself, and refusing to give a timetable for Palestinian statehood. Some go so far as
to say that Bush capitulated to Sharon. But this seems to be an inaccurate description of the relationship.
It is striking that Bush did not accept Sharon’s plea that the US should stop dealing with Yasser Arafat and that security must be restored before political negotiations could begin.
On the contrary, as Powell explained in his interview with Al-Hayat, the American view remains that Yasser Arafat is the leader of the Palestinian people and that he will continue to be so until the Palestinian people choose otherwise. Powell also confirmed that the Middle East conference this summer will pursue three parallel tracks, dealing with security, the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians, and their political future.
The security track, however, is all-important, as is recognized by the Americans and by key Arab players such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Hence the present emphasis on reforming and rationalizing the Palestinian security and intelligence services with one principal aim ­ to allow them to stop the suicide bombings which have united Israelis of all parties behind Sharon’s policy of brutal military repression.
General Omar Suleiman, head of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service is playing a central role in reshaping the Palestinian security organs. Trusted by both the Palestinians and Israel, it is thought that he is attempting to reduce Arafat’s dozen overlapping and competing services to just four: an internal service (with two branches in the West Bank and Gaza); an external intelligence service; a police force; and a presidential guard.
The American argument is that suicide bombings play into the hands of Sharon and silence the Israeli peace camp. Every suicide bombing gives Sharon an excuse to hit the Palestinians harder. It has enabled him to kill the 1993 Oslo Accords, destroy the Palestinian Authority, and besiege and isolate Yasser Arafat in the shattered remains of his Ramallah headquarters.
This is the crux of the matter. There are those, like Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, the Hamas chief in Gaza, who believe that suicide bombings are the only weapon the Palestinians have to liberate their land. According to this argument, the bombings bring the war home to ordinary Israelis ­ as reflected in the collapse of tourism, the flight of capital, the declining value of the shekel, the drying up of foreign investment, and above everything else the all-pervasive fear, the fear of sudden death.
But there are other Palestinians ­ and they are increasing in number ­ who have come to see that suicide bombings, however extravagantly brave, are also counter-productive. They are, in fact, acts of strategic idiocy, because they prop up Sharon, eliminate the possibility of any Israeli alternative, and prevent the United States from pressing ahead with its peace plans. As one high American official put it: “You can’t engage Israel politically if you can’t stop the suicide bombers. That is the bottom line.”
As Colin Powell promised in his interview with Al-Hayat: “If there were no car bombs, if there were no suicide bombings, if the terror would stop right away … a lot more could be done very, very quickly.”
Washington is a tough place and Israel’s friends are deeply entrenched in Congress and in the administration. Powell has no magic wand with which to create a Palestinian state, but he remains the Arabs’ and the Palestinians’ best hope. He is the only American politician for a long time to have the courage to say that the United States is committed to the safety of Israel within its borders and also to helping the Palestinian people get a homeland: “We are as interested in the welfare of
a Palestinian family as we are of an Israeli family. No child is more precious than any other child.”

Patrick Seale, a veteran Middle East analyst, contributed this commentary to The Daily StaR

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