Better Late Than Never
After several false starts, George W. Bush commits himself—and the U.S.—to ending the bloodshed in the Middle East

Consider the situation in the White House Situation Room last Thursday morning: Israeli troops and armor had invaded almost every city in the West Bank and surrounded about 200 Palestinian fighters barricaded inside Bethlehem's sacred Church of the Nativity. Anti-American demonstrations in Cairo, Beirut, Amman and other Middle Eastern capitals were making it impossible for Washington's Arab allies to stay on the fence. Egypt cut some ties with Israel and warned the White House that the rest could be in jeopardy. Oil prices spiked to $28 a barrel, and the stock market plunged. Anti-Semites vandalized synagogues in France and Belgium. American embassies cabled Washington that they might be the next targets. The situation, a senior White House official concedes, was "getting out of control."

Talk about grabbing George W. Bush's attention: the President finally saw that he had gone down the wrong road, and he pulled a quick U-turn. When he stepped up to the Rose Garden podium Thursday morning, Bush ended more than a year of stubborn disengagement from the Middle East peace process, sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region to seek a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bush's speech was tough and elegant. "The storms of violence cannot go on," he said. "Enough is enough."

The meetings that produced the speech were even more extraordinary. For several days, the most powerful people in the Administration had served as speechwriters. Bush, Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and cia Director George Tenet had all called or crowded into the Situation Room and worked on the speech line by line—a measure of how troubled and critical this moment really was. The team added a great deal of moral embroidery and made sure that the speech demanded something from everyone. In the Rose Garden, Bush reached out to Yasser Arafat, endorsing Palestinian statehood and giving the leader another chance to stop the terrorists and make peace—but making it clear this chance would be his last. Bush pressed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to pull his troops and tanks from the West Bank cities and insisted that Israel begin treating the Palestinians with "compassion." Bush called on moderate Arab countries to stop wringing their hands and start helping the Palestinians build their new nation—but also warned Iraq, Iran and Syria not to undo the deal by supporting terror.

For the past 11 or so Presidents, it has been a truism that American leaders ignore the Middle East at their peril. Many Democrats and Republicans believe that Bush checked out of the story early in his presidency in part because he came to Washington with a reflexive desire to do the opposite of whatever his predecessor did. It is true that Bill Clinton had his hands deep in the Middle East mess from his first year in office until the final days of his presidency in a way that the Bush team found inappropriate and even dangerous, given that a taste for high-stakes summitry, in its view, led to dashed hopes and renewed violence.

Beyond that, Bush has been unlucky in his potential partners. Last year Israeli voters replaced Ehud Barak, who wanted peace, with Sharon, who doesn't want it very badly. Bush may have figured early on that neither Arafat nor Sharon was likely to step into the role of peacemaker anytime soon, so why bother trying to convert either? And so Bush spent the first two-thirds of 2001 worrying less about foreign policy than domestic matters. When he did look overseas, first it was Russia and China that tested him. Then it was Osama bin Laden.

But the central obstacle to engagement in the region has been Bush's senior foreign-policy advisers, led by Cheney and Rumsfeld. They are staunchly pro-Israel and have shown little regard for the peace process in the past. Concentrated at the Pentagon but salted all around the White House, the hard-liners have regular access to Bush. They take a dim view of the land-for-peace swap on which every peace proposal has been based for more than a decade. Every time the Administration's moderates, led by Powell, pushed Bush for a serious peace initiative in 2001, Cheney and Rumsfeld fought them to a standstill. After a while, Powell stopped pushing. Following two trips to the region last year to try to quell the rising violence between Palestinians and Israelis, he gave up. "Colin got tired," says a veteran diplomat who knows all the players, "of going over there with nothing in his briefcase." —TIME, April 15, 2002

Questions

1. Why did Bush initially want to keep his distance from the Middle East?

2. What did Bush say must happen before the U.S. will recognize a Palestinian state?

Bush vs. Arafat

Does President George W. Bush have a follow-up plan for actually removing Yasser Arafat from power? Apparently not. In his Middle East speech delivered June 24, the President urged the Palestinians to replace their current leaders (read Arafat) with ones "not compromised by terror." Once that occurs, he said, the U.S. will recognize a Palestinian state and pressure Israel to do likewise. But some Administration officials admit there's no blueprint for moving Arafat along. Concedes a White House aide: "Some of these tactical aspects we are still working out."

There certainly is no consensus within the President's top circle of advisers. Hard-liners like Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted Bush to push for Arafat's ouster. But Secretary of State Colin Powell has urged Bush to advocate political and economic reforms without demanding Arafat's removal. Powell, says a senior U.S. Middle East expert, suffered a "frustrating" defeat.

For now, Arafat remains popular among Palestinians. But there are some signs of discontent. Mohammed Dahlan, former head of security in Gaza, has been addressing crowds of as many as 2,000 in recent months. He talks of "mistakes of the intifadeh," according to Israeli intelligence, and is said to have backed a protest by Palestinian workers angry that the recent violence has cost them their jobs. Another potential challenger to Arafat is Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, who is a founding member of Fatah, Arafat's political movement. "Abu Mazen is sick of Arafat," a senior Fatah official tells TIME. "He has lost hope of any progress." —TIME, July 8, 2002