The war on terror had been going so well for George W. Bush that he threw a little party last week, inviting 179 of America's closest allies to the White House for a sun-soaked pageant of remembrance and resolve. On the six-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush thanked the "mighty coalition of civilized nations" for joining the war's first phase in Afghanistan and rallied them for the next one. "We're winning," he said.

Self-congratulation has rarely had a shorter half-life. Within hours, Bush's plans to go global with the war on terror were crowded out by new images of violence from the Middle East, where the endless fight between Israelis and Palestinians plunged once more into the abyss of total war. Televisions in the White House and around the world showed 40 tanks and 100 armored personnel carriers rumbling into the West Bank town of Ramallah; Israeli troops blindfolding Palestinian teenagers and machine-gunning Arab homes; an Arab mob executing a suspected Israeli collaborator, then hanging his body by the feet; mothers wailing over their dead children. By the time the chairs had been cleared and the 179 flags removed from the South Lawn, at least 27 were dead from Israeli raids into Palestinian-held territory. The Middle East had crashed Bush's party.

After 18 months of carnage, nearly every sidewalk in the Holy Land seems to be stained red, but it took last week's fighting—the most massive Israeli search-and-destroy operation in 20 years, carried out in retaliation for a numbing wave of suicide attacks against Israeli citizens—to make Bush realize that he could ignore the crisis no longer. Late last week intensified U.S. diplomacy helped produce a potential opening, as the two sides were considering a meeting that might lead to a cease-fire.

Bush has spent his presidency avoiding Bill Clinton's policy of hands-on, round-the-clock engagement in the Middle East, instead allowing the adversaries to settle scores for themselves. But with the death toll now past 1,500—higher than that of the first intifadeh, which lasted from 1987 until 1993—U.S. intervention has become a strategic necessity. The conflict threatens to derail the Administration's plans to open the next phase in the war on terror—in particular, its desire to take on Iraq. If Bush were to allow the escalating combat between the Israelis and the Palestinians to explode into a full-blown war that sucks in neighboring states and inflames the Arab world, America's campaign against terror wouldn't get much further than the caves of Afghanistan.

No U.S. official was more jolted by the new reality than Dick Cheney, dispatched by Bush on an 11-country road show last week through the Arab world to promote the Administration's plans to force a showdown with Iraq. The Vice President is known as a first-class listener, able to convey that others are being taken seriously instead of being gamed. He has never needed those skills more. From London to Amman to Cairo, Cheney was drummed with the same angry refrain: the U.S. must intervene in the conflict now, demand that Ariel Sharon pull all his troops out of Palestinian-held land and forcibly drag the two sides into something resembling a cease-fire. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who receives $2.8 billion in U.S. aid a year, presented Cheney with a litany of alleged Israeli abuses against Palestinian civilians. "This is topping our agenda because it is the core of all the turmoil," says an Egyptian official. And until it's resolved, Cheney's Arab hosts informed him, the U.S. won't get their help against Iraq. Senior Administration officials worked hard to contain their dismay as the Israeli-Palestinian issue trampled the Vice President's agenda. At a joint press conference in Yemen with Cheney and President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni leader lambasted Israel and opposed U.S. action against Iraq. But when a U.S. interpreter briefed reporters on Saleh's remarks, he omitted the harsh details. U.S. officials blamed Sharon for inciting the Arabs just as Cheney was trying to woo them. "Let's just say," a senior official said, "that he did not coordinate his actions with us."

The Administration's desire to keep the Cheney trip on track was partly responsible for last week's diplomatic offensive, which featured the strongest criticisms of Israel by any U.S. Administration in more than a decade. By the weekend Cheney aides were scrambling to arrange a meeting between the Vice President and Palestinian officials. An Administration official told Time that Bush decided to send special envoy Anthony Zinni back to the region partly because "there was a danger that the violence could hijack the Cheney trip. We thought it was useful to show we were dealing with all these issues." After privately chiding Sharon for his campaign against Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, the U.S. last week openly denounced his incursion into Ramallah. "The Israelis crossed a line," says a senior Administration official. Secretary of State Colin Powell threatened to cancel Zinni's mission if Sharon did not pull back from all the territories occupied in recent weeks. The President chastised Sharon during a press conference Wednesday, saying the Israeli offensive was "not helpful" to the still moribund peace process.

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