AND A FRAT BOY SHALL LEAD THEM :

U.S. Pushing Israel to Accept Arafat for Negotiations (TODD S. PURDUM with JUDITH MILLER, May 5, 2002, NY Times)

The White House is making last-minute efforts to persuade the Israeli government that it must deal with Yasir Arafat even as the Israelis are conducting a sustained campaign to discredit him.

The dueling campaigns come as both sides prepare for a meeting here between President Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Tuesday.

The immediate challenge for Mr. Bush, one senior foreign policy aide said, is to "convince the Israelis it's in their long-term interest to deal with Arafat, no matter how reprehensible he may be." [...]

Mr. Sharon, who arrives in Washington late on Sunday, is expected to argue that Mr. Bush's efforts to broker peace are doomed as long as they depend on the Palestinian leader.

"The Israelis were truly shocked by the amount of information they found" about Palestinian Authority links to terrorism in their recent sweeps and raids in Palestinian areas, one senior administration official said. "Even they didn't think that the kind of collusion with some of these terrorist groups was so extensive," the official said.

Still, this official said of Mr. Sharon's government, "they've got to understand that only by having a responsible Palestinian Authority are we going to solve these questions, and that Yasir Arafat is the leader of the Palestinian Authority."

Mr. Sharon's face-to-face encounter with the president, set for Tuesday afternoon in the Oval Office, promises to be an unusual and risky confrontation for the two blunt-talking, conservative leaders. [...]

The White House says that Mr. Bush is pursuing what he views as the best strategy, regardless of the pressures from within his own party. But his political aides are clearly aware that Mr. Bush's allies have been far more critical of his approach than have the Democrats.

The diplomatic approach Mr. Bush enunciated just a month ago is threatened by Mr. Sharon's refusal to deal with Mr. Arafat. That approach envisions a division of labor, in which Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, are to be responsible for putting pressure on Mr. Arafat, while the president presses Mr. Sharon to embrace concrete steps toward creation of a Palestinian state.

Two days after Mr. Sharon leaves, King Abdullah II of Jordan will arrive to hold talks with Mr. Bush on the next steps in forcing Mr. Arafat to rein in extremists and keep a lid on suicide bombings.

Mr. Bush insists his approach can work, if only the Israelis and the Palestinians follow his lead. "I'm optimistic we're making good progress," he said on Thursday, after meeting with European leaders about the Middle East at the White House. "After all, a week ago, Yasir Arafat was boarded up in his building in Ramallah, a building full of evidently, German peace protesters and all kinds of people. They're now out. He's now free to show leadership, to lead the world."

Mr. Bush has told Mr. Sharon privately that he deeply distrusts Mr. Arafat, and would like to find other Palestinians to negotiate with, American officials say. Secretary Powell has had repeated meetings with some Arafat deputies, but no one in the administration has found a way to avoid Mr. Arafat as long as he remains the designated Palestinian leader.

So, according to administration officials, Mr. Bush plans to tell Mr. Sharon that the strategy of getting Arab states to press the Palestinian leader is working, so that Mr. Sharon should not say or do anything that rocks that plan.

"We think we've seen some breakthroughs, starting at Crawford," a senior administration official deeply involved in the negotiations said in an interview on Friday. He was referring to the meeting between Mr. Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the president's ranch in Texas 10 days ago.

"The Saudis were very active in bringing Arafat's acquiescence to the Ramallah deal," the official said, referring to the Palestinian agreement to let American and British wardens oversee the imprisonment of six Palestinian men whom the Palestinians convicted in the assassination of Israel's tourism minister last October. "And I believe the Egyptians called Arafat, too. So there are signs it can work," if indeed the Saudis and Egyptians can bring much influence to bear on Mr. Arafat.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the apotheosis of George W. Bush is that the clarity of his political vision seems to suggest that he's the most mature American leader and maybe world leader in office right now. In analyzing the Middle East, the most useful thing you can do is to forget everything that's going on right now and imagine what the region will look like in five or ten or twenty years. Several things seem likely :

(1) Israel will still exist. (Though the demographic challenge may have once again returned, this time showing Israel not to be a viable state in the long run.)

(2) Israel will remain in a de facto war with Palestine, although Palestine will be a state. Arafat will have been succeeded by more radical Islamist leaders, like Hamas.

(3) Saddam will certainly be gone, though Iraq may not be governed much better by his successors.

(4) The House of Saud may be gone, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan may be, the Assads in Syria may be, Mubarak in Egypt may be--all replaced by more popular radical Islamist governments.

(5) Iran and Pakistan, on the other hand, may well be fairly far along the road to relatively liberal democratic rule.

(6) Israel, India, Turkey, Russia, and the U.S. (maybe even Iran by then) will have forged some kind of political/military alliance based on shared democratic and opposition to the brand of apocalyptic Islam that dominates the Arab Middle East.

Given this longer term perspective, it is easier to see what Mr. Bush is up to. First, he can ignore all the doomsaying about an immediate threat to Israel's existence because neither the Israelis nor we will allow the destruction to come about. Second, since peace is not an option, he can dither around with various plans, make various concessions, issue random ultimatums, etc., because all are merely intended to quiet the situation and buy time so that we can get on with the business of deposing Saddam. Third, he must deal with the repressive authoritarian rulers of the Arab world and prop them up for as long as possible because they are better than the only current alternative. The Sauds may be scum, but how would it help our interests in the region for the bin Ladens of Arabia to control the Arabian oil reserves and wealth? Mr. Bush understands, as Mr. Sharon apparently does not, that Arafat is as good as it gets in Palestine. The idea that peace will come closer once Arafat is gone smacks of utter delusion. Fourth, those Islamic nations that are taking fitful steps in our direction, though they may frequently disappoint us, deserve our patience and our quiet assistance. Iran and Pakistan may annoy us at times, but there is at least some hope that they can evolve into worthwhile partners and allies. Finally, we have no more important international relationships than those with Israel, Russia, Turkey, and India. We may have to turn a blind eye at times to some of their less savory behaviors and we may find ourselves at odds sometimes (like a good marriage that requires some understanding of the partner's faults and experiences some tension now and again), but we can never lose sight of the common interests that bind us together.

From this perspective you also begin to see how shallow are the criticisms of Mr. Bush from both Left and Right. On the Right, the neocons and others want to attack Iraq yesterday, to get rid of Arafat, maybe even to tackle Iran and Saudi Arabia because they aren't helpful enough. This might all be viscerally satisfying but on the bloody morning after we'd find each of these nations run by even less responsible and more violent leaders--are we going to occupy and oppress all of the Middle East? Or do we really think the situation would be improved by having regimes that we can't work with at all installed in all these countries? This attack 'em all is the ill-thought reaction of a teenage boy--no wonder the tempestuous John McCain is their hero.

Meanwhile, the Europeans and the American Left have convinced themselves that there could be peace in the Middle East, if only we all loved the Palestinians a little more. This emotional response, the Mommy response, completely ignores the fact that the offer that Ehud Barak made to the Palestinians was their best case scenario. That's the most land that is ever going to be offered by Israel and the Palestinians said no. If that offer did not suffice then you have to conclude that it is impossible to reconcile Palestinian demands for territory with the maintenance of Israel's territorial integrity. This means that we're never going to achieve more than a heavily militarized truce between the two parties, with continued suicide bombings on the one side and periodic incursions by the other. At best, the two sides might achieve a North Korea/South Korea or China/Taiwan type cessation of hostilities. In this scenario, Palestine (like China and North Korea) will remain the impediment to true peace and will have to continue to be treated like a pariah. To pretend otherwise would be to disregard Israel's adherence to shared democratic values and her desire for peaceful co-existence. Palestine will not be a partner for peace; the most we can hope for is that it acquiesces in an effort to control the violence somewhat.

The Europeans and the American Left also fail to recognize the importance, or object to the importance, of our imperfect new allies : Turkey, Russia, and India. They continue to try to keep Turkey and Russia from being integrated into European institutions and they treat India like a pariah for its development of nuclear weapons and its periodic outbreaks of anti-Muslim violence. The Left will never relent in regard to these nations because each in its own strange way is becoming a part of the hated "West", of the dread system of liberal democratic capitalism that is the product of globalization. The Europeans likely just resent seeing themselves recede into the mists of history as other nations supplant them in importance. Whatever the reasons, the concerns of Europe and the Left should be ignored, as their interests are at odds with the interests of America and of Western Civilization generally.

So long as Mr. Bush continues to keep his eyes on the prize--preserving Israel; cultivating Russia, Turkey, and India; nurturing Pakistan and Iran; quieting Palestine; deposing Saddam; and destroying al Qaeda--all of the sometimes contradictory steps that advance us towards our goals can be properly viewed as mere tactics and frequently nothing more than feints or dodges. It is the strategic vision that matters and to a shocking degree, it appears to be "the man who put the duh? in W" who has it.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 5, 2002 10:04 AM