Now that the Israeli election is over, the Bush administration will soon launch its version of Middle East diplomacy confronted by a complex set of obstacles, the least of which may be Israel's choice of hard-liner Ariel Sharon as its prime minister, said Los Angeles Times Wednesday.
Agencies reported that US President George W. Bush was swift to congratulate Sharon but other world and regional leaders expressed caution, if not outright concern. Bush has to deal with this fact, and time has come according to LATimes.
"The president told Prime Minister-elect Sharon he looked forward to working with him, especially with regard to advancing peace and stability in the region," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said in a statement.
Citing senior U.S. officials and Mideast experts, the paper said that President Bush faces a triangle of escalating challenges--on the Mideast peace process, Iraq and Libya--that are increasingly intertwined. Progress on one will require progress on all three, "A step-by-step, Kissinger-like approach is not the answer," warned Augustus Richard Norton, a Boston University political scientist.
"We need systematically to think about all three issues as related problems. If we don't, we're going to find ourselves isolated from many of our allies--and in a situation where we jeopardize our support in critical quarters of the Mideast and our ability to make peace," the expert told the paper/
The U.S. will come face to face with these problems when Colin L. Powell embarks on his first overseas trip as secretary of State later this month to the Middle East and Europe, an itinerary he announced Tuesday after talks with British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.
Despite widespread predictions that the United States can't avoid being drawn into the Arab-Israeli conflict, Powell indicated that the new administration is in no hurry to get deeply embroiled, as the Clinton administration was up until its last days. Powell said the post-election period is instead "a time to be patient" as the winner forms a new government.
"Jawboning is pretty much all we can do right now," he was quoted as saying.
Powell called on the various players in the region to recognize the "absolute importance [of] controlling the passions" and "to refrain from any acts that would lead to violence."
Although Powell promised that the United States will not be "standoffish," he made clear that he and Bush aren't willing to get involved in the conflict unless all sides are prepared to ensure the calm necessary for diplomacy.
"At the end of the day," he said, Israel and the Palestinians "have to want peace more than we may want them to have peace. At the end of the day, they have to come together and negotiate with each other."
"To the extent they find American facilitation, American presence, American leadership useful toward that end, then I think we should provide it," Powell said.
At his news conference, however, Powell indicated that the new administration wants to help broker a settlement not just through negotiations with Israel and the Palestinians. "We want to make sure that the quest for peace is seen in a broad regional context, so that the quest doesn't stand alone in and of itself," he said.
But the broader regional context is exactly where the new administration may find its efforts checked, said the paper. Quoting Mideast analysts as predicting.
However, the US has taken a practical step forward, according to The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
The paper reported from Washington that the White House has announced two key State Department appointments that deal with Middle East affairs.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was quoted as saying on Tuesday that President Bush would appoint Marc Grossman, a former ambassador to Turkey and career diplomat as undersecretary of state for political affairs, to the No. 3 position at the State Department, and Richard Haass as director of policy planning with the rank of ambassador.
Grossman has been a long-time proponent of a strong Israeli-Turkish alliance and has held various positions in the State Department, including several in the Bureau for Near East and South Asian Affairs. He is admired in the pro-Israel community, according to the Post.
It added that Haas, a former special assistant to president George Bush and senior director for Near East affairs on the National Security Council, has advocated a gradual, step-by-step approach in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
Haas, who is currently vice president and director of foreign-policy studies at the Brookings Institution, is remembered for advocating a tough stance toward Israeli settlement construction while an adviser to Bush.
Sharon stressed throughout his election campaign that he, unlike outgoing premier Ehud Barak, does not plan to dismantle any settlement.
The Israeli paper also said that US Vice President Dick Cheney is expected to wield enormous influence on both foreign and domestic policy, and has assembled a wide advisory staff that includes numerous regional experts.
Still conspicuously vacant among Bush foreign-policy appointments is the important No. 2 slot at the State Department, deputy secretary of state, said the Jerusalem Post, adding that Richard Armitage, a former assistant secretary of defense under president Ronald Reagan is expected to be named to the post.
The peace process, rocky as it has been at times, provided the cornerstone for a tentative but promising three-way partnership.
But the events of the past four months--beginning with Sharon's controversial visit to a disputed holy site in Jerusalem's Old City, an act that some people say triggered a bloody new uprising by Palestinians, and culminating with his election Tuesday--have seriously undermined that fragile working relationship, said Los Angeles Times.
This volatile period has also coincided with an overwhelming demand from most of the Arab world to ease decade-long sanctions against Iraq and to embrace Libya now that the trial of two intelligence agents for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 has ended with the conviction of one of them.
Over the past two weeks, however, the new US administration has pledged that it intends to maintain sanctions on Iraq until it complies with the U.N. resolution mandating the surrender of its weapons of mass destruction.
Despite Europe's rapprochement with Libya, the White House has also demanded that the regime of Col. Muammar Kadhafi pay reparations and accept full responsibility for the Pan Am attack before Washington agrees to the lifting of UN sanctions.
Both positions may exacerbate already strained US relations with even close allies. They are also likely to seriously erode any American effort to get Arabs to accept Sharon, a hawk who has already disavowed the compromises offered by defeated Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Mideast experts say.
"There's a new momentum in the region," Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland specialist on the Middle East, told the paper.
"Public opinion in the Arab world is much more focused now on its own issues, in large part because it sees no real prospects for peace with Sharon in power."
Mideast analysts also predict that the US is unlikely to have the luxury of waiting until the Palestinian uprising against Israel is over.
"If you look back at the history of U.S. mediation, every time there's been violence, the United States has been forced to jump in. The Bush administration is also likely to be forced to get involved before it wants to," Telhami said. "The only question is how soon." – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
