Trapped By His Own Instincts

• Share

There are seven ages in a man's life, the poet says, and you can see at least three of them already in George W. Bush's presidency. First came his strange, complicated birth, his narrow escape from a Florida swamp, a President uncertain from the start. Next came the innocent clarity of September and the burst of national unity. The attacks and their aftermath seemed to end all the confusion about who was in charge and showed us what Bush was capable of after all: strength, leadership, even vision.

But he is now in a third age, more challenging than the previous two, where nothing is simple, and many of the tools that served Bush so well after 9/11 not only don't help him anymore but actually may be doing him harm. Four weeks after Bush leaped into the Middle East crisis by dispatching Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region, it is clear that the President has come back to where he started, unable or unwilling to end the bickering among his top advisers and struggling to implement a plan because he cannot craft one in the first place.

Bush is stuck, and that has many people in Washington once again wondering whether he is up to the task of managing a complex foreign policy crisis and worrying about how long he can hold his team together. At about the same time that Bush's closest aide, counselor Karen Hughes, announced she would be packing up and heading back to Texas, longtime confidants of Powell began to whisper that the retired four-star general is tired of being undercut by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the hard-liners who work for them.

Powell isn't likely to leave soon--he hates the idea of quitting even more than the thought of losing--but there is no doubt that his patience has been severely tested in recent days. The prospect of Bush moving ahead without the moderating influence of a Hughes, much less a Powell, has some Republicans worried. "Bush has got to get a handle on this," says a G.O.P. veteran. "To quote Bush himself, 'Enough is enough.'"

Already the diplomatic initiative in the region has passed from Washington to, of all places, the normally unwakable Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. Crown Prince Abdullah gave Cheney "an earload full" at a private dinner in Houston on Wednesday--urging the Veep to abandon the Administration's pro-Israel tilt. And when Abdullah met with the President in Crawford, Texas, on Thursday, there were even signs that the old Bush charm had lost its purchase. Accounts of the 5-hr. meeting vary dramatically. According to two sources, Abdullah surprised Bush with three handouts--a photo album and two videocassettes--each containing powerful images of the destruction of Palestinian homes by Israeli troops. The two men looked through the book and watched the videos, the sources said. Abdullah wanted Bush to see what people in Arab countries were waking up to every day in local newspaper and television reports--and then contemplate the anger those images generated and the pressure that placed on Arab leaders. Watching Abdullah's 15-min. presentation, according to this account, Bush was moved. On Saturday, a White House aide denied this version of the meeting.