Is the president who stood before the world and declared, “You are either with the civilized world or you are with the terrorists,” caving in to violence? Actually, if you look carefully at Bush’s dramatic announcement on Thursday, the answer is no.
Gone were the fudgy words of recent days, when Secretary of State Powell declared that Arafat is “the leader of the Palestinian people, and his leadership is now even more central to trying to find a way out,” and White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Arafat was exempt from the we-don’t-deal-with-terrorists rule because he had signed the Oslo Peace Agreement. Instead, in his remarks Bush harshly downgraded Arafat and spoke directly to the Palestinian people–and, by implication, to other potential Palestinian interlocutors. “The situation in which he finds himself today is largely of his own making,” Bush said of Arafat. “He has missed his opportunities and thereby betrayed the hopes of his people.” And when Bush, in his biggest policy shift of the day, called on the Israelis to withdraw, he said “responsible Palestinian leaders and Israel’s Arab neighbors must step forward.” No mention of Arafat.
Administration officials later said that Powell would also seek to meet other Palestinian leaders during his trip. And some longtime observers wondered whether Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who despises Arafat even more than Bush does, might use the interval between the Bush remarks and Powell’s visit to do what he has long said he wants to do: get rid of Arafat. “They have until Powell arrives in Israel to act on it,” says Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some Israelis heard that message.”
Yasir Arafat is nothing if not a supersurvivor, and the administration may be kidding itself if it thinks, at this late date, that it can still go around him or find more moderate Palestinians who would be willing or able to swallow the kind of peace deal that Arafat turned down. But the tough message to Arafat at least helped to assuage the anger on Bush’s right, where many from the president’s conservative base have called on him to maintain his hard-line stance of not talking to or meeting Arafat. The Bush Doctrine is still intact, if barely.
In truth, the doctrine that was truly compromised on Thursday wasn’t the Bush Doctrine the world has come to know since 9-11. It was the earlier, unstated Bush Doctrine that the president brought into office: his policy of disengagement, not just from the Mideast, but from Afghan and Balkan peacekeeping, negotiations with North Korea, arms-control agreements–in general, much of the international system. And the sooner Bush drops this credo, the better.
This early doctrine of withdrawal was especially striking in the Mideast, coming at the height of the intifada. For Bush was in effect renouncing two generations of U.S. foreign policy. It had been up to the United States to keep a lid on the seething violence in the region through every administration, both Democratic and Republican, since the Suez Crisis of the 1950s. Even now, Bush has not bothered to hire a top-flight Mideast strategist in his administration: the head of the Near East desk on the president’s National Security Council, Zalmay Khalilzad, is doubling as his special envoy to Afghanistan and knows little about the Mideast. Even when the administration sent in a retired Marine Corps general, Anthony Zinni, to try for a ceasefire, the president did not make him a presidential envoy, which would have involved inviting Zinni back to the White House to report directly to Bush–a key difference that would have raised Zinni’s profile instantly.
Most presidents, it is true, have tended to wait until later in their terms before getting involved in the ongoing Mideast imbroglio. But the growing savagery of the intifada, as well as the need to win over the Islamic world posed by the post-9-11 war on terror, put special pressure on Bush, which he largely chose to ignore.
Until his policy shift on Thursday, Bush’s nonpolicy in the Mideast was shaping up to be a near-disaster for the war on terror, which he no doubt realized. Sharon, a hawk who once wrote of removing all the Palestinians to neighboring Jordan, has no apparent strategy to re-engage the peace process. And at every opportunity, Sharon has sought to identify Israel’s struggle against the Palestinians with America’s war on terror and to identify Yasir Arafat with Osama bin Laden. “It is impossible to compromise with one who is prepared, like the suicide bombers on the streets of Israel’s cities and in the Twin Towers in the United States, to die only to kill innocent civilians,” Sharon said on March 31 in declaring Israel’s own “war against terrorism.” Rarely has the Bush administration tried to restrain the Israeli prime minister, and when it has, Sharon has lashed out. Soon after September 11, for example, he declared that Israel would not become Czechoslovakia in 1938, an analogy that cast Bush in the role of the despised Neville Chamberlain. Washington rebuked Sharon for the comment and then stood down, continuing to look the other way as the Israeli prime minister pursued his military tactics.
While Israel has escaped major suicide bombings for a few days with unprecedented incursions into Palestinian territory, Sharon still faces a terrible “asymmetric” threat similar to the one that U.S. officials had most feared after September 11. There is simply no way to stop a nonmilitary attack by a lone person who straps himself with explosives and walks into a public place. For Israelis, of course, sharing a flyspeck of land with 2 million angry Palestinians only made interdicting such acts of terror even more of a finger-in-the-dike proposition. And as the Palestinians adopted these kamikaze methods wholesale, they have come to believe that, at last, they were beginning to succeed. Israelis have become demoralized, adrift, as every Sharon incursion has been followed by ever-more murderous suicide bombings.
That’s why, although Bush’s policy shift on Thursday was welcomed worldwide, it may have come at the worst possible moment: when Hamas and other Palestinian radical groups think they are winning. Not only will it now take a minor miracle to stop another major suicide bombing–which would probably send Powell back to Washington with his tail between his legs–it all adds up to a policy that Bush had once said he would never allow: whether it deals with Arafat or not, America seems to be caving in the face of terrorist violence, and by implication proving the effectiveness of that violence. Meanwhile the president’s arm’s-length tactics in the grip of the first Bush doctrine, combined with his support of Sharon’s aggression, has cost him the sympathy of much of the Arab world, which he needs so critically on his side in the war on terror. In recent days, Osama Bin Laden, who had cynically adopted the Palestinian cause from his cave–though in previous years he had shown little interest in it–may have been smiling, if he was still alive, for the first time since the Taliban fell in December.
Even so, there is now at least some cause for hope in a situation that, until Thursday, looked hopeless. “This is a critical moment,” Bush said on Thursday in declaring that “America is committed to ending this conflict.” The first Bush doctrine, at least as it applies to the Mideast, seems to have been abandoned for good. And good riddance to it.
