Can Bush Make Peace in the Middle East?

The Bush administration may be bumping into the realization that it can't afford Ariel Sharon. Certainly not now, when Arab support is critical to America's ability to defeat the al Qaeda terrorist network, and Osama bin Laden is casting himself as a champion of Palestinian rights. President Bush urgently needs to restore Israeli-Palestinian political dialogue, but so far there are few positive signs. And Sharon is plainly in no mood to do Washington's bidding.

Ignoring Tuesday's calls from Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell for a withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian Authority-controlled areas, Sharon issued a polite "only when we're ready to" reply. Then he launched another raid on a West Bank village near Ramallah, in which 10 Palestinians were reportedly killed.

The U.S. is not amused

[an error occurred while processing this directive]The White House is alarmed. "Israeli incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas have contributed a significant escalation in tension and violence," a State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said Monday. "Israeli Defense Forces should be withdrawn immediately from all Palestinian-controlled areas, and no further such incursions should be made. We deeply regret and deplore Israeli Defense Force actions that have killed numerous Palestinian civilians over the weekend. The deaths of those innocent civilians under the circumstances reported in recent days are unacceptable, and we call upon Israel to ensure that its armed forces exercise greater discipline and restraint."

Those comments were the harshest yet directed at Israel by the Bush administration. But they're hardly surprising given the broader concerns that have forced the White House to take on the role of Mideast peace enforcer it had so strenuously avoided. Not that the U.S. is easing up on Arafat. "Failure on the part of the Palestinian Authority to confront terror in a decisive manner is absolutely unacceptable," said Reeker. But there's nothing new in that. What is new is the insistence that Sharon's tactics are unable to produce the calm Washington now desperately needs in the West Bank and Gaza. Again Reeker: "We call upon both sides to do all they can to halt this continuing dangerous situation marked by violence and provocation, and act in a manner that allows progress on implementing the Mitchell report and restoration of direct dialogue between the parties."

Sharon's position

Sharon was elected on promises to restore Israel's security, a goal he has pursued by steadily upping the military ante: Air strikes using F-16s, a systematic campaign of assassinating individual Palestinian militants, and periodic invasions of Palestinian Authority-controlled territory all raised warning signals and murmurs of disapproval from Washington, but by repeated use Sharon has made them par for the course.

The problem, both for Sharon and Washington, is that those tactics have not worked. A year into the intifada, it is showing no signs of being exhausted or contained by Israeli military action. More alarming for Washington, Sharon's actions have significantly weakened Arafat politically and strengthened his more radical challengers who hope to follow the Hezbollah model of guerrilla warfare, rather than negotiations, to get Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza.

While Sharon and the hawks in his cabinet may have little compunction about destroying Arafat politically, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres plainly shares some of Washington's concerns. Arafat may be an unlovely and unreliable negotiating partner, Peres warns, but he's the only one Israel has. If Arafat is eclipsed politically, his successors will be even less inclined to deal with Israel and more committed to war — a war that Israel is unlikely to lose, but equally unlikely to win. Lightly armed Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers have no hope of forcing Israel to retreat from the West Bank any time soon, but all of Israel's F-16s, Apache helicopters and tanks have proved incapable of ending the Palestinian uprising. All that either side is capable of achieving right now is more of the same.

The grim road ahead

So, as hard as it may be to envision after the bloodletting of the past year, the brutal fact remains that a negotiated political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the only way out of the present bloody impasse. And the war on terrorism has made such a solution a matter of some urgency for the Bush administration.

Sharon's tactics, of course, are by no means the only obstacle to restoring dialogue. The forces Arafat set in motion when the intifada began last year are now coming back to haunt him. As much as he wants a return to the negotiating table, Palestinian public opinion is firmly behind the militants against whom Arafat would have to act in order to restart the peace process. And the Palestinian street has little enthusiasm for new talks with Israel. Arafat has considerably less political authority and room for maneuver than he had a year ago.

As hard as it will be to get the two sides back to a negotiating table, it will be exponentially more difficult to get them to agree on a political solution.

The Bush administration came into office in the wake of President Clinton's failure to secure an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, and opted to step back from the process until such time as the two sides were willing to make peace. At the time, some former U.S. officials warned that Israelis and Palestinians would not find their own way back to the table, and that leaving the fire to burn itself out was a dangerous risk. That's a lesson Washington may now be learning at its expense.