Better Late Than Never

By Michael Duffy/Washington

Consider the situation in the White House Situation Room last Thursday morning: Israeli troops and armor had invaded almost every city in the West Bank and surrounded about 200 Palestinian fighters barricaded inside Bethlehem's sacred Church of the Nativity. Anti-American demonstrations in Cairo, Beirut, Amman and other Middle Eastern capitals were making it impossible for Washington's Arab allies to stay on the fence. Egypt cut some ties with Israel and warned the White House that the rest could be in jeopardy. Oil prices spiked to $28 a barrel, and the stock market plunged. Anti-Semites vandalized synagogues in France and Belgium. American embassies cabled Washington that they might be the next targets. And White House officials were poring over satellite pictures from the region: Syria was moving its troops in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in anticipation of Israeli strikes across the border. The situation, a senior White House official concedes, was "getting out of control."

Talk about grabbing George W. Bush's attention: the President finally saw that he had gone down the wrong road, and he pulled a quick U-turn. When he stepped up to the Rose Garden podium Thursday morning, Bush ended more than a year of stubborn disengagement from the Middle East peace process, sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region to seek a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bush's speech was tough and elegant. "The storms of violence cannot go on," he said. "Enough is enough."

The meetings that produced the speech were even more extraordinary. For several days, the most powerful people in the Administration had served as speechwriters. Bush, Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet had all called or crowded into the Situation Room and worked on the speech line by line--a measure of how troubled and critical this moment really was. The team added a great deal of moral embroidery and made sure that the speech demanded something from everyone. In the Rose Garden, Bush reached out to Yasser Arafat, endorsing Palestinian statehood and giving the leader another chance to stop the terrorists and make peace--but making it clear this chance would be his last. Bush pressed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to pull his troops and tanks from the West Bank cities and insisted that Israel begin treating the Palestinians with "compassion." Bush called on moderate Arab countries to stop wringing their hands and start helping the Palestinians build their new nation--but also warned Iraq, Iran and Syria not to undo the deal by supporting terror. During the speechwriting sessions, Administration sources told TIME, the dependably hard-line Rumsfeld had pushed most fiercely to include tough language aimed at any nation that might try to "fish in troubled waters," as one aide put it. And these sources noticed during the several days of drafting that Cheney was particularly active, more willing than before to wager American prestige in a game with so many risks--and keen to sharpen language that warned rogue nations to stay out of the fight.

This is how a crucial policy is reborn in the Bush White House. In a single day, George W. Bush moved from keeping his distance from a region in flames to all but staking his presidency on its peace and security. He also went a long way toward diluting the simple moral code embedded in the recently hatched Bush Doctrine--the doctrine that divides the world neatly into two camps, one good and one evil. Since last September, Bush has said over and over that the nations of the world have a choice: "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists." But by taking a chance for peace that depends on Arafat, the President is acknowledging that the moral absolutism that has worked so well in the war against terror doesn't apply to every feud. The inside story of how Bush decided to wade waist-deep into the Middle East quicksand is the story of a President who is learning that there are few simple choices in foreign policy. So it is with Arafat. "He is a liar and completely untrustworthy," says an Administration official, "but for the moment, he is the man."

POWELL WINS THE ROUND

For the past 11 or so presidents, it has been a truism that American leaders ignore the Middle East at their peril. So why did Bush think he could get away with paying so little attention to the place? As with so many questions about the Middle East, there is an answer to fit every neighborhood. Many Democrats and Republicans believe that Bush checked out of the story early in his presidency in part because he came to Washington with a reflexive desire to do the opposite of whatever his predecessor did. It is true that Bill Clinton had his hands deep in the Middle East mess from his first year in office until the final days of his presidency in a way that the Bush team found inappropriate and even dangerous, given that a taste for high-stakes summitry, in its view, led to dashed hopes and renewed violence. "It wasn't all that long ago where a summit was called and nothing happened," Bush told a television interviewer Friday in a not-so-veiled criticism of Clinton, "and as a result we had significant intifadeh in the area."

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.

SWITCHING SIGNALS ON ARAFAT

Bush was aching to get out of Washington for Easter. He hadn't visited his ranch in three months, the longest time he has been away from Texas since becoming President. So he went to Crawford, but as the deadly suicide bombings continued, he stayed out of sight, saying nothing for the first 48 hours. His silence amounted to a green light to Israel to counterattack--which in turn triggered more suicide bombings. One reason for Bush's silence was that his aides were again fighting about what to say. The President said he didn't want to "showboat," appearing for the cameras but not offering much. Powell argued, sources tell TIME, that it was the moment to intervene and take a more evenhanded approach. But Rumsfeld and the hard-liners balked, arguing that terror was terror, no matter who was behind it. Other advisers wondered what Bush could conceivably do about the Holy Land's widening gyre. British Prime Minister Tony Blair weighed in, contending that making peace requires negotiating with the parties as you find them. And so, little by little, the Administration began to split the difference. On Saturday morning the U.S. voted with a near unanimous majority in the U.N. for a resolution calling on Israel to pull out of the Palestinian cities.

But that afternoon, when he finally made a statement, Bush seemed unaware of what his Administration had been up to. And he was working without a net: none of his top aides had followed him to Texas. "Everyone was on vacation," says a chagrined White House official, "and they pretty much stayed on vacation." Staffing the President was a junior press aide normally assigned to Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, and it showed. "I can understand why the Israeli government takes the actions they take," Bush said. "Their country is under attack." Given the U.N. vote that very morning, the message was incoherent. And the imagery and atmospherics were all wrong: wearing an open-collar shirt and rocking back and forth in his chair, Bush looked like his pre-Sept. 11 self, a little bit scared and a little bit scary. A top official said later, "It was a mistake."

By the time Bush returned to Washington on Sunday, the White House knew it had a problem. Senators from both parties were calling for Bush to get more involved. Presidential counselor Karen Hughes' morning communications meeting began with an aide who complained, "We're getting killed in the media!" Hughes and Rice joined forces and went to Bush to propose that he make a clarifying statement about the region sometime during the week. This time, to the moderates' surprise, the idea had the support of Cheney, who told Bush it was time to change gears and move toward more active intervention. "He was very realistic this week," says an official in the moderate camp. "Cheney was clearly influenced by his trip." Bush agreed on Monday night but told his aides about his decision Tuesday morning.

When Bush threw himself into the Middle East peace blender, his aides knew his neat and simple foreign-policy doctrine was going to be pureed. That meant Bush's right wing would feel betrayed. Early in the week the neoconservative opinion makers William Bennett and William Kristol told Bush to stick to his guns and show Arafat no quarter. Bennett and Kristol seemed to have an ally in Rumsfeld, who took an almost strident antiterrorist line in public all week, even as White House officials spread the word quietly that everyone actually agreed in private. Rumsfeld's remarks may have been just for show, designed to mollify those Bush was about to throw over the side. If so, it worked: Kristol's criticism of Bush in the Weekly Standard magazine on Friday was surprisingly mild.

THE DANGERS AHEAD

Bush's opening statement wasn't exactly a beacon of clarity, since he had to carefully and judiciously slap just about everyone in the Middle East. But it may have been the beginning of a realistic policy. The main problem now is that no one knows what happens next. Arafat quickly accepted the President's proposal "without condition," as his spokesman said, but few believe he can control all the suicide bombers. Sharon pledged to withdraw from the Palestinian cities, but he seemed in a bigger hurry to mop up every potential terrorist and perhaps dismantle what was left of the civilian Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The death toll for the week rose to more than 100, with Israeli soldiers tightening their grip around Manger Square, where Palestinian gunmen and a huddle of civilians and priests were besieged in the Church of the Nativity complex. Israeli warplanes and artillery struck targets in southern Lebanon on Saturday after Israeli posts in Israel proper and the Golan Heights were shelled by Hizballah, raising familiar fears that a widening conflict could squelch yet another peace mission before it has a chance to take root. And Bush toughened his message to Sharon and called on Israel to pull back from the West Bank cities "without delay." On Saturday, in a telephone conversation with Bush, Sharon said he would expedite the campaign.

Bush officials expect both Israeli and Palestinian positions to harden before they crack. That may explain why so many experts now believe the U.S. should come up with an ultimatum--a solution imposed from on high with new rules, sweeteners for every camp and unbearable penalties if they balk. It's an approach favored in one form or another by such old hands as Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser in the Carter Administration, and Robert Malley, a former Clinton peace negotiator. Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres thinks the U.S. should at least impose terms for a cease-fire, because "the alternative is another bazaar that will waste time and opportunities." Says Brzezinski: "The U.S. has to face the fact that the parties to the conflict are incapable of reaching a comprehensive peace on their own." But Dennis Ross, a former Bush and Clinton Middle East expert, says an ultimatum won't work. "You're not going to get them to compromise on Jerusalem now, you're not going to get them to compromise on refugees now, and you're not even going to get them to compromise on borders now," he says. "What you will produce is both sides focusing on the issues that give them the hardest line." Watching events unfold from the West Wing last week, one U.S. official sighed and said, "Better late than never." When it comes to the Middle East, that qualifies as optimism.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney and John F. Dickerson/Washington; Stewart Stogel/United Nations; J.F.O. McAllister/London; and Scott McLeod/Cairo

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney and John F. Dickerson/Washington; Stewart Stogel/United Nations; J.F.O. McAllister/London; and Scott McLeod/Cairo