I think this is closest to what is really going on. The opening quote of Bush's is dynamite. With the exception of the reporting by Priest and Pincus, I trust them now much more than the Times.
"We will reach a point here, perhaps very, very soon in the next year, when the Palestinians will look at a map and say, 'That's it. We don't have a prayer of having a state.' "
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'Road Map' Setbacks Highlight U.S. Pattern
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 6, 2003; Page A01
President Bush put it starkly when he met with Jordan's King Abdullah at Camp David two weeks ago.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat "is a loser," Bush told the king, according to three sources familiar with the conversation. "I'm not going to spend my political capital on losers, only winners. I'm still in a war mode, and the war is terrorism. If people don't fight terrorism, I am not going to deal with them."
Yet now, four months after Bush formally launched the U.S.-backed peace plan known as the "road map" with a pair of summits near the Red Sea, the plan is in tatters. A Palestinian prime minister intended to sideline Arafat resigned, leaving Arafat back in control. A cease-fire has been broken by suicide bombings, such as the attack Saturday in Haifa, and Israeli reprisals, such as yesterday's bombing inside Syria. And Bush's promise that a stream of U.S. officials would "ride herd" on the parties to pursue peace has been all but forgotten.
The road map's failure highlights a pattern that has characterized the administration's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, say current and former officials and outside experts. The pattern is one of engagement and disengagement -- a burst of publicity about new initiatives or special envoys, followed by policy drift and an unwillingness to push either side, especially the Israelis, to take big steps toward improvement. Eventually, the effort goes dormant, sometimes for months, until yet another approach is crafted.
"The administration has laid out a transformative agenda for the region, and achieving a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was supposed to be an important part of that vision," said Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council staffer largely responsible for shepherding the road map until he left the White House in March. "In pursuing such a solution, the administration has never been willing to do what it needed to do on the ground. They always flinched when they ran into difficulties."
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, voicing the frustration felt by many in the Middle East, said: "When the president of the United States attaches his name to a certain plan, he has an obligation to himself, to his constituents, to everybody, to follow through. You can't stop at each and every obstacle that you meet."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell disagrees. In an interview Friday, he acknowledged the road map is in a "pause," but "it's not as if with that pause that we have disengaged." He said that once a new Palestinian cabinet -- which Arafat named yesterday -- takes effect, and if it meets "initial performance standards" set by the United States, "we would be prepared to engage. . . . We have not stepped back or stepped away."
But other Middle East experts, diplomats and government officials see the administration slipping back into a pattern that has prevailed from the beginning of the Bush administration -- a pattern they see stemming from a reluctance to break publicly with the Israelis, an unwillingness to commit time and resources to a seemingly intractable problem and the president's black-and-white view of the world since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Working Around Arafat
President Bill Clinton had struggled to achieve a peace accord in his final days in office, but it collapsed in a wave of Palestinian attacks known as the second intifada, which has continued almost uninterrupted for three years, leading to the deaths of more than 2,800 Palestinians and 800 Israelis, according to the United Nations.
The new administration was reluctant to pick up where Clinton had left off, and addressed the issue in fits and starts.
"Our biggest struggle has been how to engage the Americans, how to convince them to get away from the 'anything but Clinton' philosophy and understand that this was not a localized conflict," said a U.N. official.
In June 2001, CIA Director George J. Tenet produced a plan that would restart Israeli and Palestinian cooperation on security, but it -- along with a report by former Senate majority leader George Mitchell (D-Maine) -- was never implemented. Bush, in a speech to the United Nations after the Sept. 11 attacks, said he believed in the goal of a Palestinian state, but offered no path. Then the administration assigned retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni as a special envoy to seek implementation of the Tenet plan. But after a brief flurry of activity, Zinni stopped going to the region.
Powell continued to deal with Arafat, but Bush stopped talking to him.
Administration officials say Vice President Cheney concluded after a trip to the region in March 2002 that peace could never be achieved as long as Arafat remained in power. Cheney felt that dealing with Arafat was inconsistent with the administration's war against terrorism, and his view became a central tenet of a speech the president delivered on June 24 of that year, in which he cut off relations with Arafat and envisioned a Palestinian state by 2005 if the Palestinians built a democracy and halted attacks on Israelis.
European, U.N. and Arab diplomats believed then, and still do, that isolating Arafat is a fundamental mistake. In their view, Arafat, with all his flaws, is the only Palestinian leader with enough clout to strike a final deal with Israel. Other analysts say cutting off Arafat might have worked if the administration had also taken the risky step of breaking with the Israeli government and offering its own solution to the conflict.
White House and State Department officials say the decision to isolate Arafat was adopted with little consideration of the tactical consequences. In effect, the policy has left the administration with little ability to influence Arafat, except through European and Arab surrogates who still regularly meet with him.
Leverett, who participated in internal discussions on the June 24, 2002, speech, said an underlying flaw in the administration's approach is that it has not offered a vision of the final deal. The speech needed "a bold statement of what final status would look like in a manner the Palestinians would find credible," allowing them to see a political future beyond Arafat, said Leverett, now at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy.
Bush administration officials had consulted closely with the government of Ariel Sharon on the speech, and sketching a detailed vision of the final deal would have put them sharply at odds with Sharon. The Israeli prime minister had pressed the administration to cut its ties with Arafat, but he has been vague about how or when a Palestinian state would be created.
Within Israel, few believe Bush's decision to cut off Arafat was wrong. The Bush administration "came in with good intentions and with profound moral and strategic clarity," said a former senior Israeli official. "But the realities of the Middle East, a failure of leadership on the part of the Europeans and major mistakes on our part made it impossible" to achieve peace.
The Israeli official said that isolating Arafat would have worked -- and possibly won even European support -- if the Sharon government had offered its own plan for peace negotiations. Sharon's failure to do so "limited the maneuvering room for the administration," he said.
Administration officials disagree with this analysis, saying they are convinced Sharon is willing to make the "painful sacrifices" -- Sharon's phrase -- that are necessary for peace. "The question of what exactly the painful sacrifices are does not need to be clarified this week," a senior U.S. official said. "Our view is, he is willing to make those painful sacrifices for peace, but not able" in the current environment.
The Sometime Monitor
Many in the region -- and even in the State Department -- also viewed Bush's June 24, 2002, speech as an effort by the president to disentangle himself from the Middle East conflict as he prepared for the looming conflict with Iraq. The road map grew out of an effort by European and Arab officials to set in motion a new peace process.
The road map, a detailed "performance-based," three-phase plan to form a Palestinian state by 2005, was largely completed by October 2002. But Israeli complaints -- and a fierce internal dispute within the administration -- made the administration reluctant to release it, U.S. officials and foreign diplomats said. Some key officials were deeply skeptical about the whole effort, saying it placed too much of a burden on Israel, until Bush ordered an end to the debate.
In late 2002, U.S. officials struggled to persuade Israel to release more than $450 million in Palestinian tax revenue, as the Palestinian Authority teetered on the verge of collapse, after Israel insisted on tight controls and on-location auditors to make sure the money was not diverted to terrorism.
But U.S. officials were absent during a singular moment in the struggle to rekindle the peace process. In early February 2003, a delegation of European and U.N. officials went to Arafat's battered Ramallah compound, where he has been under virtual house arrest for months, and delivered an ultimatum: He had to immediately appoint a prime minister who would be empowered to negotiate peace with Israel.
"Abu Amar," said U.N. Mideast coordinator Terje Roed-Larsen, using Arafat's nom de guerre. "This is in your interest. You must do it. Otherwise, you will not see me again," nor anyone from the European Union or Russia.
According to an official who witnessed the exchange, Roed-Larsen then pointed to Arafat's office door: "Instead you will see an Israeli soldier coming through that door."
Arafat did as he was asked, breaking the logjam that had limited U.S. involvement. Since the Bush administration had cut off relations with Arafat, it had been all but impossible for U.S. officials to meet with Palestinian officials.
Just weeks before the road map's release -- when Bush agreed to make it public at the behest of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the administration's key ally in the Iraq war -- Israel delivered a proposal to the administration that would have made more than 100 changes, including removing all references to establishing an "independent" state by 2005, according to the 15-page document. The Israeli government eventually adopted the road map with reservations.
Arafat, after being pressured by the Europeans, appointed as prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, who was on a list of acceptable candidates presented by the diplomats. The Bush administration embraced Abbas as the new future of Palestine, which culminated in a White House meeting with Bush at the end of July. Abbas reached a cease-fire with Palestinian militant groups, but never effectively disarmed them, as the Israelis and Americans demanded. "The security efforts were really dismal," a senior U.S. official said.
U.S. officials say Abbas's Washington visit enraged Arafat, prompting him to undercut Abbas in a series of events that led to his resignation. "If you want the key moment in which the reemergence of Arafat begins, and trouble begins, it is the Abbas visit to Washington," the official added. "It would appear that Arafat's reaction was jealousy."
But some U.S. officials and foreign diplomats say the U.S. effort was lackluster. After Bush's summits, Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice traveled to the region in June and July, and the president appointed a special envoy to monitor progress on the peace plan. But the Americans never really embraced the role of being a credible, public monitor and did not fulfill a key promise made to the Palestinians.
The envoy, John S. Wolf, produced a multicolored matrix that documented how each side failed to meet agreed targets, but it was never made public to avoid embarrassing disclosures. The Central Intelligence Agency was supposed to spend $300 million to train Palestinian security forces, but the Israelis blocked the effort and the CIA -- never happy with the assignment -- quickly retreated, two U.S. officials said.
Wolf returned to Washington last week on what was described as a vacation of several weeks.
Administration officials say they will not press Israel to make important gestures when it is faced with suicide bombings. But even during the cease-fire, Palestinians and many neutral analysts say, the Israeli efforts to bolster Abbas's status -- such as removing roadblocks, dismantling settlement outposts and releasing prisoners -- were often too limited to have much effect, and likely backfired. The number of settlement outposts actually increased, as new ones were erected as others were destroyed for the benefit of television cameras.
"The Palestinians have given up on the road map. They have given up on the administration," said Edward G. Abington Jr., a former State Department official who advises the Palestinian Authority. "Basically, if it is too hard, if the Israelis push back, the administration eventually caves."
One senior U.S. official, who has disagreed at times with the White House approach, said he is concerned that the current period of policy drift will only harden Palestinian attitudes and make the vision of a two-state solution impossible. If the Israelis continue to build settlements in the occupied territories at their current pace, he said, "We will reach a point here, perhaps very, very soon in the next year, when the Palestinians will look at a map and say, 'That's it. We don't have a prayer of having a state.' "
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