Why Bush Had To Act

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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.