NEWS ANALYSIS
Crisis forced Bush's hand on Mideast

By Anne E. Kornblut, Globe Staff, 4/7/2002

WASHINGTON - Ariel Sharon came to the White House last summer armed with a road map of Israel, a visual aid to help explain his vision of a final peace settlement in the region.

But President Bush did not scrutinize the map for possible solutions to the bloody conflict, according to Israeli accounts. ''Bush looked at the map and recalled the places he had been,'' the Israeli prime minister said afterward, referring to the 1998 tour of the West Bank that Sharon, then foreign minister, gave Bush while he was governor of Texas.

The moment, as recounted to Israeli reporters by Sharon soon after the White House visit, offers a glimpse into the different ways that Bush and President Clinton approached the Middle East. It also shows how Bush's policies have evolved.

Clinton, who virtually memorized the layout of Jerusalem in his quest to bring Israelis and Palestinians to an agreement, made an excruciating and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find a peaceful settlement. Bush, who later described his West Bank trip as one of the most moving events of his life, has opted to wait until the two sides seek his counsel rather than impose his own views, a tack his advisers believe shows a more realistic understanding of the region.

But the practical result of that hands-off policy, analysts say, is that Bush has ended up responding to the dizzying pace of daily events insted of taking command of them. And until two weeks ago, White House officials were content to have it that way, having concluded that the risks of engagement were higher than the risks of staying out of the conflict.

From the moment Bush took office, senior advisers began the process of erasing the hands-on Clinton model. They refused to send a negotiator to peace talks in Egypt before Sharon took office last February, a summit seen as a final attempt at peace. They also repeatedly declared that the Clinton administration's parameters - and the former president's interest in the minutiae of the conflict - were no longer in vogue.

Last week's Rose Garden speech - as well as yesterday's comments from his ranch in Crawford, Texas - were by far Bush's most comprehensive remarks on the conflict to date and an example of the Bush approach. The statements came amid intense Israeli assaults into Palestinian areas and growing protests in several Arab capitals.

Scott Lasensky, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said:

''What you've had over the course of about 15 months is two steps forward, one step back. It's largely driven by events, and the fact that Bush has gotten some distance from Clinton, which gives him some breathing room.''

If Bush had an A-B-C approach to the Middle East - anything-but-Clinton - as many foreign policy specialists believe he did at first, the pace of events has forced him to reassess his stance since January 2001. But each step has seemed to be a reluctant one, with Bush preferring to call on the two sides to ''break the cycle of violence'' before, slowly, sending a more senior-level official to the region.

The Bush administration's position ''was that you don't get in the habit of sending senior Cabinet members or the president to the Middle East,'' Lasensky said.

Bush has bristled at suggestions that he has not been involved. White House advisers, however, describe a deliberate attempt to scale back the role of the US president so that his word would carry more weight in the final stages of future peace talks, should they occur.

''The ideas and parameters that were discussed in the last few months were President Clinton's parameters and therefore, when he left office, they were no longer a US proposal or a presidential proposal,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Feburary 2001, three weeks after Bush was inaugurated.

The past was not entirely discarded; the Mitchell plan that Bush frequently urges both sides to embrace is an offshoot of the final Clinton talks before he left office. When former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, who had been tapped to chart the path for peace negotiations, made his findings public last May, Bush telephoned Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Sharon and sent a US ambassador to the region to help move its implementation forward.

As the bloodshed continued, Bush and his advisers monitored the situation closely and discussed it frequently, but remained cautious, preferring to focus on strategic US interests rather than a high-profile pursuit of peace. And on the few occasions when Bush did act - dispatching CIA Director George Tenet in June to help break the cycle of attacks and bring the parties back to the negotiating table, for example - the violence that followed only bolstered skeptics within the administration who favored limited involvement.

Bush's ''attitude was, `These two people will bloody themselves, and when they've had enough, they'll turn to us, and until that's happened we don't need to be a part of it,''' said professor Jeswald Salacuse of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.

The Sept. 11 attacks were a turning point for Bush, who had had only one discernible break with Sharon before last week, when he demanded a withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Palestinian territories. During their June 2001 meeting at the White House, Bush said that despite an attack killing five Israelis the previous week, ''progress is being made'' in the Middle East. Sharon swiftly rebuked Bush. ''If last week we had five dead, it's like the United States, Mr. President, having 250 killed, or maybe even 300 people killed by terror,'' Sharon said.

After Sept. 11, Bush felt the full effects of that message, and in the months that followed did not dispute the Israeli leader when he compared his fight against suicide bombers to the US war on Al Qaeda. But the White House also recognized the need to build support among Arab nations for its antiterror coalition, a tug that seemed to confuse the administration's Middle East policy further.

Late last fall, both Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called for the creation of a Palestinian state, a notion that had existed in previous administrations but not been stated so clearly. At the same time, Powell announced that General Anthony Zinni would be sent to the region as a special US envoy - a seemingly giant step for Bush after so many months of reluctant involvement. But the Zinni missions have yielded little progress toward a cease-fire.

As the bloodshed mounted from Palestinian attacks and Israeli reprisals, Bush came down on Arafat with increasing force. During yesterday's press conference in Texas with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Bush called Arafat's leadership ''a failure.''

Following the Passover massacre that killed 26 Israelis at a Netanya hotel, Bush stayed quiet as Israeli forces launched an offensive into six Palestinian cities in the West Bank and surrounded Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. Almost a week before the Rose Garden speech, Bush decided that ''he needed to say something,'' a senior White House official said.

On Thursday, Bush called for Israel to begin its withdrawal from Palestinian areas. Yesterday, a day after Israeli forces appeared to intensify their offensive, Bush demanded an immediate cease-fire and a withdrawal ''without delay.''

Although many specialists said the Bush statement was a departure from his hands-off approach, the president's advisers insist Bush has no new desire to plunge into the Middle East conflict. He has called on Arab leaders to help apply pressure to Arafat and has lowered expectations of what Powell might accomplish on his mission this week. And he has all but ruled out the notion of a Clinton-style summit.

''We've tried summits in the past, as you may remember,'' Bush said last week. ''There wasn't one all that long ago where a summit was called and nothing happened. And as a result we had a significant intifada in the area. The only time that's appropriate for a US president to call a summit, when it looks like something can get done. And in the meantime, the secretary of state is very much involved in the Middle East.''

Ambassador Edward S. Walker Jr., former undersecretary of state for Near East affairs, said the administration still feels that ''Clinton allowed himself to get so enmeshed in the thing that he degraded the power of the presidency, so that when it came down to it, the president couldn't close'' the deal.

''That's why Bush has had some distance,'' Walker said. ''But you can carry that analogy too far. Sometimes the president does have to engage, and this is the right way.''

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