Submitted by The Dubya Report on
by Julian Borger
The chaos currently governing the Bush administration's foreign policy reached a new height of absurdity this week when the secretary of state, Colin Powell, announced plans for an international conference on the Middle East.
Hours later, the White House said the term "conference" was "a misnomer". It was just a "meeting", one of a series of informal chats. Not only could the Bush team not agree on policy, it seemed, they could not even agree on the vocabulary.
It sounds farcical, but by all accounts Powell is not laughing. He returned "incandescent" from his abortive trip to the Middle East, according to a European diplomat in close touch with the
secretary of state.
It is not surprising. The Middle East was once the strict domain of the state department and the presidency. Under the Bush administration, however, the vice-president's office and the Pentagon both have an important say. Dick Cheney has had a front seat since his whirlwind tour of the Arab world in March, while both the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, have seats at the table where the Middle East is discussed.
Their only constraint is that they are not permitted to sound off about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without strict presidential approval. But that has not prevented them from making constant attempts to prod White House policy in Israel's favour whenever Powell is out of town.
In January, when the secretary of state was abroad on a diplomatic mission, Cheney and Rumsfeld came close to persuading the president to cut all links to Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority. On his return, Powell had to scramble to turn the tide at the last moment.
For the secretary of state, worse was to come. He only reluctantly agreed to embark on his latest ill-fated mission to the Middle East last month, but it was not the famous intransigence of Arafat and Ariel Sharon which worried him most. After all, it is his job to deal with people like that. He was more worried about having the Middle Eastern rug pulled from under him while he was away. And of course, he was right to worry.
Scarcely had Powell left with the unenviable task of knocking heads together, when the White House declared its partisanship. Ari Fleischer, the presidential spokesman, anointed Sharon as "a man of peace". "The Bulldozer", as the Israeli leader is otherwise known, is many things but even his most ardent supporters would not call him a man of peace. He was elected essentially to wage war.
Then, as Powell struggled to act the honest broker in Ramallah and Jerusalem, Wolfowitz appeared at a pro-Israel rally in Washington, called to oppose US pressure on the Sharon government, and Cheney played host to Binyamin Netanyahu, Sharon's Likud rival who is currently marketing himself to the right of the Bulldozer. He wants Arafat deported.
Nor could Powell assume he was the sole conduit between Washington and Israel. According to diplomats in the region, Sharon and his ministers would come to meetings having already talked to Condoleezza Rice, the US national security advisor and the Pentagon.
Through all of this President Bush has swung to and fro like a weathervane in a Texan tornado. Only hours after the US supported a UN resolution calling for an Israel withdrawal from the West Bank, the president sat rocking in his chair in an open-necked shirt, telling reporters: "I can understand why the Israeli government takes the actions they take. Their country is under attack."
The following week, as the bloodshed worsened, Bush reversed course again, appearing to put his foot down in a major policy address outside the White House. "The storms of violence cannot go on," he said. "Enough is enough."
But the Israeli offensive ground on, ignoring successive US deadlines to pull out "without delay", "now" and "not tomorrow". In the face of that defiance, the White House appeared only to shrug. Challenged on the point, Bush even restated Fleischer's characterisation of Sharon as "a man of peace". Little wonder that the Israeli leader felt under no pressure to leave.
The rolling disaster that is this administration's Middle East policy was set in motion well over a year ago when Bush put his team together. It was clear at the outset that Powell, with his belief in multilateral solutions to global problems, was the odd man out among the likes of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice - who all believe that the US should embrace the leadership history has placed in its lap, and begin acting like a real superpower. Its true friends would follow.
Challenged over these inherent conflicts, Bush laughed them off. The administration would be all the richer for some constructive debate, he said. That is true as long as there is someone willing to make a decision once the debate is over. That, of course, is the task of the president. That is why they give him the big office and the impressive title. But over the Middle East, the president has floundered.
All Bush's instincts - personal and political - draw him to the hawkish side of the force. On his single trip to the Middle East while Texas governor in 1998, he bonded with Sharon, then foreign minister, who took the time to take the presidential scion on a helicopter tour of the occupied territories. The running commentary as they flew over the West Bank and Gaza was heavy on security, light on Palestinian rights.
Arafat meanwhile, stood Bush up, claiming prior engagements - yet another example of the Palestinian leader's poor judgement - and then lied about it to the press, claiming it was the American that had not wanted to meet.
September 11 also made a strong impression on Bush's Middle East outlook. The moral clarity of his black-and-white, for-us-or-against-us vision in the wake of the attack won him the love and respect of his nation. He seems baffled by the fact it has proved so ineffective, bordering on the irrelevant, in the moral greyland of the Israeli-Palestinian feud.
Lastly, there is US politics, and for all his shortcomings, Bush is a natural-born politician. He has sworn not to repeat his father's mistake of alienating the Christian conservatives who represent the core of his support in the American heartland. More than ever, they now identify with the Jewish state as the living embodiment of Biblical prophecy.
The Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Dick Armey has even encouraged Israel to "grab the whole West Bank" and declared "the Palestinians should leave" - an unequivocal green light for ethnic cleansing.
Powell, on the other hand, has only two things going for him, but they both count double. First is the damage his resignation could do to the administration. His approval ratings compare well with the president's and outshine those of his cabinet colleagues, while his mere presence is a comforting guarantor of moderation for an electorate uneasy with extremes.
However, the power of this unspoken threat is undermined by the fact that Powell is known to be a "good soldier" who is unlikely to leave his post at a time of crisis and national danger.
His more powerful weapon lies in the simple fact that his adversaries' policies do not work. The administration's abstention from the problems of the Middle East in its first year in office was a disaster. On his return from his Arab nation tour, even Cheney was forced to admit that only US involvement could break the cycle of violence.
Yet, it is a lesson that has had to be learned more than once over the past few months, as the administration has repeatedly dipped its toe into the peacekeeping mud only to withdraw it once more in distaste. Judging by the evident unease at even the C word (remember it is a meeting, not a conference) suggests that ambiguity and indecision will remain the administration's guiding principles over Middle East policy for some time to come.
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