| | Clear as Mud
How the administration’s Mideast policy has become confused, murky and weak
Dec. 8 - It is a curious thing to behold. An administration that started out with a strong, bold agenda is nearing its final year with a weak and timid foreign policy. Its team of policy heavyweights is sidelined in favor of an elder statesman from another era. It’s as if the president who declared he wanted to transform an entire region has been transformed himself.
Weakness and timidity were not the qualities that George W. Bush had in mind when he stepped into the Oval Office--never mind when he devoted himself to fighting terrorism. But just look at the moribund state of diplomacy in the most emotional of all Middle Eastern disputes: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s not just the Israeli and Palestinian leadership that are deadlocked. The United States has deadlocked itself by clinging to a policy prescription that has little to do with the real world.
George W. Bush became the first U.S. president to call explicitly for the creation of an independent and viable Palestine. He also was the first president to call for an end to Yasir Arafat’s leadership. Yet those gutsy statements were the start and end of his policy to resolve the conflict. What good is the president’s bold vision for the Palestinian people if he can’t bring them any closer to making it a reality?
The missing link--the international Roadmap towards a Palestinian state--was the creation of other players (mostly the European Union and the United Nations), and was accepted only reluctantly by Washington. Now the administration holds on to the Roadmap like some Middle Eastern flotation device, ignoring the fact that it never trusted its directions in the first place. While the Roadmap sinks, the Bush administration is left making token gestures to both sides. To the Israelis, it opposes the construction of a fence by the symbolic, partial reduction of loan guarantees. To the Palestinians, it opposes terrorism by the endless repetition of stern words.
For the world’s unrivalled superpower, this is not a powerful position. Consider the furor over the Geneva accord, the hypothetical "peace deal" negotiated by former Israeli and Palestinian officials, Yossi Beilin and Yasir Abed Rabbo. On the face of it, the Bush administration looked tough by standing up to Israeli protests and meeting with Beilin and Rabbo regardless. In reality, the dispute only underscored how the administration has now succeeded in alienating both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership.
Why did the administration want to meet with the Geneva negotiators? Because U.S. officials hoped the Geneva plan might breathe life into the roadmap. That’s not to say the administration endorsed the Geneva accord. Far from it, in fact. The administration opposes the Geneva plan because it doesn’t require an end to violence before anything else can happen. When Powell met with Beilin and Rabbo, his spokesman said he told them that only the Roadmap represented "the appropriate pathway" and that "there are no shortcuts along the way". Was Powell trying to push the Israelis to do more with the Roadmap? Not exactly. "I guess this has been portrayed as putting pressure on the Israelis, because that is the way Israel feels," says one senior State Department official. "But I don’t think that was the intent. I really don’t."
Talk about a curious policy. The Roadmap is dead on the ground, but Washington refuses to endorse an alternative. It nonetheless annoys its key regional ally by expressing an interest in the alternative. Yet it insists that nothing has changed. When the Bush team was running for office in 2000, they used to disparage that kind of nonsense as a feckless foreign policy. Above all else, the Bushies have prided themselves on moral clarity in dealing with the rest of the world. No matter how moral they now feel, clarity is almost entirely missing from their Middle East policy.
That sense of muddle was only deepened by the appointment of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of State and Bush family fixer, as the president’s envoy on the issue of Iraqi debt. According to the State Department, Baker’s work will be welcomed because it’s far too complex and time-consuming for Powell to resolve. It probably is. That’s why there’s a cabinet, including Treasury Secretary John Snow. In previous administrations, Treasury was considered important enough (and competent enough) to deal with international issues such as foreign debt. Along with the diplomats at State, and with a little help from the White House, Treasury dealt effectively with a series of major financial crises.
Today Iraq’s biggest crisis is not financial, even if its debt is a large and unresolved problem. The lack of investment and jobs in Iraq has little do with its national debt, and everything to do with security and Saddam’s misrule. And for many other countries, the solution to Iraq’s debt mountain has nothing to do with the U.S. official tasked with climbing it. The solution is the creation of a new Iraqi government that can re-negotiate its debts with the Paris Club of creditors. "Never in the history of the Paris Club has it ever signed a rescheduling deal with an entity that wasn’t an independent and sovereign state," says one senior French official.
Unless Baker is about to declare Iraq’s independence, there are only two explanations for his appointment. Either the president feels that Powell, Snow and the rest of his cabinet are incapable of dealing with Iraq’s debts. Or the president is giving Baker a far broader role in resolving Iraq’s future. Both explanations are deeply unsettling for his much-vaunted foreign policy team and for the rest of the world. When Baker travels to European and regional capitals, the world’s leaders will think that Baker--not Powell, Donald Rumsfeld or Condoleezza Rice--has the influence with the president to get things done in Iraq. Yet we, and they, can’t be sure of that. After all, in official terms, Baker is just talking about Iraq’s debts.
That kind of confusion, duplication and disarray was not supposed to be the hallmark of the Bush administration. In fact the road to Baghdad was supposed to be just one stop on a journey leading to the end of terrorism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nobody predicted it would also lead to the end of Bush’s once-clear foreign policy.
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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