Presidents Try and Try Again for Mideast Peace
By ELISABETH BUMILLER - NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON - President Bush said the United States would "ride herd" on peace in the Middle East, conjuring up an image of himself as the American cowboy cracking a whip at some unruly cattle, in this case Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon.
That was barely two weeks ago, at the summit meeting in Aqaba, Jordan, where both sides pledged to take initial steps toward peace and hope triumphed briefly over history. But today, with the near collapse of that effort in the violent spasms of last week, does Mr. Bush have some other tricks in his saddlebag? What, exactly, did "ride herd" mean?
Apparently it did not mean that Mr. Bush would personally immerse himself in the daily ups and downs of the Middle East. Although he issued regular exhortations demanding restraint from Mr. Abbas, the struggling new Palestinian prime minister, and from Mr. Sharon, the prime minister of Israel, he did not make a single call to the region, even after Mr. Sharon's forces tried to assassinate a leader of the Islamic militant group Hamas and a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 16 on a bus in Jerusalem.
In fact, the president is still searching for an effective level for his own personal involvement. For now, he has put his representatives in charge of managing the day-to-day crises. As Mr. Bush himself said to reporters after the summit, recounting his conversations with Mr. Abbas and Mr. Sharon: "I used the expression `ride herd.' I don't know if anybody understood the meaning. It's a little informal in diplomatic terms. I said, `We're going to put a guy on the ground to ride herd on the process.' "
That guy is John S. Wolf, the assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, who was to land in Israel on Saturday to lead a team of American monitors to help both sides carry out the peace plan. His immediate task, an administration official said, was to meet with Muhammad Dahlan, Mr. Abbas's new security chief, about strengthening and reorganizing the Palestinian security forces to try to stop terrorism.
Assisting Mr. Wolf, a senior administration official said, are some 10 C.I.A. operatives whose job is, in part, to identify who among the security forces can be trusted and who might have ties to terrorists.
Reorganizing and training Palestinian security forces with C.I.A. help, an effort that dates from the Oslo accords of 1993, is still considered by many Middle East experts to be crucial to any solution. But the process has a troubled history, and some in the Bush administration have been leery of the idea. Middle East experts say some C.I.A.-trained security forces later joined up with terrorists, for example. But now Mr. Bush seems ready to try again.
"It's the details that in the end are going to disrupt this process," said Martin Indyk, a Middle East negotiator under President Bill Clinton. "And that detail is at the heart of the problem." Mr. Indyk, who is now head of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, has suggested making the West Bank and Gaza an international trusteeship, with American-led troops in charge of security, but the idea has not taken root among Mr. Bush and his aides.
Another official charged with riding herd is Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who spoke by telephone to Mr. Abbas and Mr. Sharon on Thursday, urging them to get peace talks back on track. He will travel to the Middle East this week. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, is said to be considering a trip there too.
Mr. Bush, meanwhile, is playing the role of the C.E.O. president, the delegator-in-chief who is loath to be dragged into details that could end in spectacular failure. But Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, who brokered a peace between Egypt and Israel, said Mr. Bush needs to be willing to spend more political capital than he has so far.
"Bullying Abbas is easy and pandering to Sharon has some short-term political benefit, but the net effect is to make the president look like a wimp internationally," Mr. Brzezinski said in an interview last week. "If you're going to take the plunge, you have to swim all the way," he added. Mr. Carter made peace, he said, with a constant and visible personal commitment.
Mr. Bush's advisers respond that the former president most in their thoughts is not Mr. Carter but Mr. Clinton, who threw himself into peace talks and even tried to duplicate Mr. Carter's signature success at Camp David. Mr. Clinton left the presidency, they say, with little to show for his efforts but the 32-month Palestinian intifada, which began during his term, after the peace talks broke down.
"We had a situation under Clinton where he did everything ? he was on the phone all the time to the leaders, and every time a diplomat came to town he would meet with them," a Middle East diplomat said. "He was like the State Department desk officer for the Israeli-Palestinian issue."
Mr. Bush's advisers say that Mr. Bush, who stood so prominently between Mr. Abbas and Mr. Sharon in Jordan less than two weeks ago, has since then been engaged behind the scenes. There have been constant phone calls and meetings with Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice, they say. The president was also to have regular briefings this weekend in Kennebunkport.
"Presidential capital should be husbanded and expended only when necessary," said Aaron David Miller, the president of Seeds of Peace, who served as a Middle East negotiator under six secretaries of state and is a former Middle East specialist under Mr. Bush. "Part of riding herd is that you don't get down in the weeds, but you make sure that the process keeps moving through a variety of instruments that the president has at his disposal."
Nonetheless, Mr. Miller said, Mr. Bush and his advisers were still "genuinely struggling with how to turn the president's new determination into a 24-7 diplomacy to diffuse the current crisis."
In other words, Mr. Bush now finds himself on the same spot occupied by every president for the past quarter-century: struggling to strike the right balance between doing too much and too little when riding herd in the Middle East.
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