Better Late Than Never

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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."

At the center of the hard-line ethic is a strong belief that all conflicts can fit neatly into the war between Us and Them, freedom and tyranny, good and evil. The hard-liners believe that U.S. foreign policy proceeds from straightforward choices between absolutes: trust the nations that work with you; treat everyone else as a potential adversary. The hard-liners' hero is Ronald Reagan, who labeled the former Soviet Union the "evil empire." Reagan, however, rarely let his rhetoric get in the way of pragmatic foreign policy. And Bush is now showing signs of similar flexibility.

In 1989 the first President Bush carefully weeded many of the Reagan holdovers and foreign-policy hard-liners from his Administration. Last year the second President Bush invited them back and allowed them to flourish. In this Bush Administration, it is moderates like Powell who have struggled for influence and who sometimes win only when the hard-line position fails. The two rival teams put their differences aside after Sept. 11. The Pentagon had a strange new war on its hands, and Powell had a multinational coalition against al-Qaeda to plant and nurture. But as the ground war cooled, the hard-liners got busy again. They turned their attention to Iraq, and the back-room tug-of-war began all over again. In January, while Powell was out of the country on a diplomatic mission, Cheney and Rumsfeld teamed up to persuade Bush to cut all ties with Arafat.

Saddam on the Back Burner
That gambit fizzled when Powell found out about it, but the hawks moved again a month later, pressing Bush for a broad military action against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, America's latest target of "evil" in the region. They believed Bush should seize his chance while his postwar popularity was high. Powell and the moderates disputed the timing and tactics, if not the goal itself. But Bush agreed to send Cheney to the region last month to drum up Arab support, or at least acquiescence, for an eventual military operation against Baghdad.

Some allies didn't wait to be asked. In an effort to head off Cheney, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak flew to Washington in early March to tell the President himself that this was no time to make war in the region. Mubarak had been a staunch supporter of Bush's father's war 11 years ago, but he drew the line now that Israel and the Palestinians were skirmishing daily. Mubarak repeated his warning to a small group of private citizens at Blair House in Washington on March 6. As long as the Middle East is in turmoil, he told his guests, there is "no support" in the region for a war on Iraq.

If all that weren't tricky enough, Sharon made things worse by invading Palestinian towns in the West Bank on the eve of Cheney's departure. The U.S. rushed its peace envoy, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, back to the region to provide cover for Cheney's trip. And instead of talking about Iraq, Cheney had to spend 10 days hopscotching around the Middle East and listening to leaders say the road to Baghdad runs through Jerusalem. One head of state warned that if Bush proceeded with the campaign against Iraq, he would find every Muslim nation allied against him. Almost overnight the air went out of a quick campaign against Saddam; when it will reinflate is anybody's guess. Cheney returned from the trip in late March, says a U.S. official, in an altered state. The man who had dismissed the step-by-step peace process only weeks before was now offering himself up as a go-between with Arafat.