Middle East: Finally Face to Face

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The main participants played their hands with varying degrees of skill and clumsiness last week:

-- THE U.S. scored a considerable victory by getting the talks started at all, dramatizing its unchallenged status as the world's sole remaining superpower. Bush did not need to make that point; Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev did it for him. The Soviet Union -- "a country that exists only outside its borders," in the cruel summation of an American official -- is nominally co- chairman of the conference, and its participation enabled some Arabs to claim that they were not just knuckling under to the U.S. But Gorbachev made it clear that Moscow would now fade into the background and pretty much go along with whatever the U.S. wants.

The delicate U.S. task is to keep the talks moving without getting trapped into so direct a role that it would seem to be arm-twisting one side or the other. Bush and Baker tiptoed through that minefield adroitly enough last week. The President reassured a wary Israeli delegation by speaking of "territorial compromise" instead of "land for peace," a formula that Israelis loathe. He also backed the Israeli view that the conference should lead not just to nonbelligerency but to "real peace." Explained Bush: "I mean treaties. Security. Diplomatic relations. Economic relations. Trade. Investment. Cultural exchange. Even tourism." At the same time, he responded to an Arab concern by calling for everyone to "avoid unilateral acts" that might "prejudice" the peace process. Translation: Israel, stop building those settlements in the occupied territories.

The U.S. went home praying that its strategy of putting the volatile elements together in a room would in time produce enough chemical heat to generate compromise -- but not enough to cause an explosion. Baker closed the round by sharply chiding delegates for failing to look to the future, but judging when and how to step in to bridge gaps will be the real test of the Administration's success.

-- ISRAEL bowed to American decisions that elevated the Palestinians to near equal status, giving the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation two of everything: two conference rooms, two briefings, even two speeches at the sessions. Those concessions allowed Israel to soften its image of intransigence.

Then Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir blew it, big. He has always vowed never to give up an inch of territory, and he did not change that stance; he devoted half of his 34-minute speech to a recitation of the oppression of Jews through centuries and indeed millenniums. There was little in his speech to suggest a willingness to compromise, and he followed up on Friday with a bitter blast at Syria's brutality and tyranny. But Shamir was playing less to world opinion than expressing deep convictions that also work for him politically back home. He had appeased Israeli peaceniks by attending the conference while reassuring his hard-line supporters that he remains unbending on issues that count.