Bush mideast policy

This NYT article is a useful corrective to those analyses which see US
policy as driven exclusively by the "Zionist lobby" (since US interests in
the Mideast are obviously only economic in nature...)
--

March 25, 2001 



The Middle East: Disillusionment With a Friend


By WILLIAM A. ORME Jr.


RAMALLAH, West Bank — PALESTINIAN leaders watched with shock last week as
the Bush administration embraced Israel's new hard-line leader and distanced
itself from the peace effort that Washington had sponsored for the previous
eight years.

Palestinian negotiators had come to see President Clinton's "peace team" as
apologists for Israel, and many prominent Palestinians had convinced
themselves that their position would be stronger under President Bush. An
administration top-heavy with Texas oilmen, they thought, would surely heed
pro-Palestinian sentiment in the Persian Gulf.

And, analysts here asserted, an administration with fewer Jewish supporters
would be less protective of Israel. 
That was a caricature view of Republican realpolitik, of course, but it
reveals the distance between what the Palestinians are pressing for and what
Mr. Bush is prepared to deliver. It was neatly exploded last week by the
generally uncritical reception that President Bush accorded Ariel Sharon as
Israel's prime minister.

During that visit, administration officials echoed Israeli demands that
Palestinians put a stop to incitement and violence and listened to Mr.
Sharon excoriate Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, as the calculating
mastermind of the conflict. Bush advisers appeared to concur with Mr.
Sharon's contention that rogue states with missiles — not the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute — are the region's biggest geopolitical
challenge.

There are no immediate plans to invite Mr. Arafat to Washington,
administration officials let it be known.
Abu Mazen, one of Mr. Arafat's senior deputies, seemed stunned. "America is
taking kind of a reckless position," he told Palestinian journalists. "If
they want to mediate, their position should be more balanced."

But the Bush administration is in no hurry to mediate. Americans are there
"to assist, not insist," said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in an
implied rebuke of the Clinton administration.
But if the Bush and Sharon governments don't consider the Palestinian
problem the key to regional stability, many Arab states do, including
American allies like Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia, where authoritarian
regimes have been rattled by pro-Palestinian street protests. Syria said it
has spurned indirect peace entreaties from the Bush and Sharon
administrations because it wants Palestinian demands addressed first.

"You cannot withdraw whenever you choose," said Yasser Abbed Rabbo, the
Palestinian information minister. "If you withdraw, you create chaos, not
only here, but in the whole region."
In a parallel rejection of American policy in the region, the Arab Middle
East is rebelling against American- backed sanctions against Iraq — all
sanctions, even the scaled-down "smart" ones now being proposed in
Washington.

King Abdullah of Jordan, the host of an Arab League summit next Tuesday,
invited the Iraqi and Kuwaiti foreign ministers to his palace offices last
week. Jordanian officials said afterward that they now expect near-unanimous
rejection of constraints on commerce with Iraq, which will be invited to
join a network of new Middle East free trade agreements. Kuwait, which was
invaded by Iraq a decade ago and has been the chief Arab advocate of
sanctions since, has signaled that it won't buck the majority this time.

In one concrete sign of its broader concerns in the region, Kuwait is
contributing $150 million to the Palestinians through a new pan-Arab
"Intifada Fund" administered from Saudi Arabia. In a reversal of their past
arm's-length relationship with Mr. Arafat, the gulf nations are channeling
much of the $700 million they have pledged directly to the cash-strapped
Palestinian Authority, which could not otherwise meet its payroll. 

While the name of the fund may ring harshly on Western ears, diplomats in
the region say gulf leaders actually fear that a Palestinian economic
collapse could trigger an even more violent and anarchic confrontation with
Israel, poisoning relations with Washington and energizing Islamist
dissidents at home.

Dennis Ross, the Clinton administration's chief Middle East negotiator,
whose old job was unceremoniously abolished this month, says the Bush
administration will be pulled into a peacemaking role here whether it wants
to or not. "The reality of the Middle East tends to impose itself upon the
United States," he said last week. 





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