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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (2209)	4/13/2002 3:09:35 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32591

White House finds itself in a Mideast morass Officials admit miscalculating both sides' intransigence By DAVID E. SANGER THE NEW YORK TIMES Saturday, April 13, 2002 WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration yesterday found itself confronted by a defiant Israeli prime minister and by the quandary of whether to meet Yasser Arafat just as the Palestinian leader's allies claimed responsibility for another suicide bombing. In short, eight days into his first real involvement in the Mideast conflict, President Bush seemed bogged down in the morass he tried to avoid for 15 months. That is a surprise to White House officials. Just last weekend, at Bush's ranch outside Crawford, Texas, they expressed optimism that Bush's plan -- withdrawal by the Israelis, denunciation of terrorism by the Palestinians and deep involvement by the Arab states -- would be well received. Standing in the high school gymnasium in Crawford last Saturday, Bush said confidently that he was sure Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would "heed my call" to withdraw from the West Bank, and his aides guessed that after a few more days of rooting out terrorist hide-outs, Israel would throw its tanks into reverse before Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived. "That was a miscalculation," one senior administration official conceded last night. The administration had surmised that Arafat would seize the moment to say something -- perhaps not the full renunciation of terrorism in Arabic that Bush has demanded, but words that would pave the way for Powell's arrival. Instead, he has been silent, while Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, a close ally of Arafat's Fatah party, spoke with its bombs. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer yesterday called on Arafat to denounce such terrorist attacks. But when pressed on the question of whether such a statement from Arafat was a precondition for any meeting with Powell, Fleischer said it was not. The meeting, which was scheduled for today, has been postponed, presumably to give Arafat more time to think about a statement. If the meeting goes forward, Bush will be left confronting the question of what he meant when he declared that leaders around the world are either "with us or against us" in the fight against terrorism. The White House now concedes that domestic politics in the Middle East have trumped presidential demands, at least for now. Put simply, Israelis feel that enough is enough and that the military campaign Sharon has started must go on. Palestinians are so humiliated and enraged at their treatment by Sharon that no call from the United States makes much impression. Moreover, Israeli officials say that Sharon has detected in the silence of the hawks in the administration -- Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- a signal that the opposition to his military action in the administration may not be solid. That reading is disputed by this discipline-minded White House, which naturally says the administration is speaking with one voice. However, yesterday, one senior official, when asked why both men felt it was cost-free to ignore the president's call, noted, that "we're caught between a 72-year-old man and a 74-year-old man with only one thing in common: their poll ratings have never been higher," referring to Arafat and Sharon respectively. (A BBC opinion poll, published four days ago, found 86 percent support among Israelis polled for Sharon's military actions against the Palestinian Authority.) But the official added, "We're only eight days into dealing with a 2,000-year-old problem," and insisted that it was too early to suggest that either American influence or the president's own personal credibility is on the line. Still, it seems hard to come to almost any other conclusion.