Risk Seen in Mideast as White House Sidelines Issue

On what may well be his last swing through the Middle East before the November elections, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell visited Cairo, Kuwait City, Baghdad and the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh.

Conspicuously absent from his itinerary last week were Jerusalem and the West Bank, an indication that Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking has fallen far down the administration’s list of foreign policy priorities.

Little more than a year after President Bush vowed to pursue a resolution to that conflict “to the bitter end,” Powell’s decision to steer clear of Jerusalem and Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority government, reflects a new political reality. With national elections looming in the U.S. and Israelis and Palestinians embroiled in their own political crises, the administration is unwilling to spend any more political capital on the issue.

“It’s an election year,” said a State Department official who deals with the region, speaking on condition of anonymity. “So I don’t know that we’re going to do a hell of a lot. I don’t see anyone really rocking the boat. If anything, we will keep the status quo.”

But regional observers say that the calculation that peacemaking can wait until after Americans go to the polls is not without risk. As the White House focuses on battling insurgents in Iraq and the Democrats at home, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is pushing ahead with his plan to pull troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip, and chaos is spreading across the Palestinian territories, where armed militants are challenging Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Without U.S. leadership, the administration’s critics argue, Israel’s impending pullout could trigger a new explosion of violence among the Palestinians they leave behind.

“The process is in trouble,” said Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel who is director of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, “because of the chaos on the Palestinian side, because Sharon’s got political difficulties at home

“The absence of U.S. leadership is ... helping to ensure that instead of there being an orderly transfer, we will see chaos and warlordism in the wake of Israel’s withdrawal.”

Indyk and Dennis Ross, who served as a Middle East envoy under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, said the administration had essentially ceded leadership as a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians to Egypt and left it to the Egyptians to push the Palestinian Authority to reform its security forces.

In “The Missing Peace,” a recently published memoir of his years negotiating with Israelis and Palestinians, Ross warned that if Israel was allowed to simply withdraw from Gaza, “it could result in Hamas gaining control over Gaza and chaos in the West Bank,” referring to a militant Islamic organization.

Only the United States, Ross wrote, “has the wherewithal” to manage Israel’s pullback, and it is abdicating that responsibility.

Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, on Tuesday urged the administration to stay “actively involved in moving the peace process and negotiations forward toward a two-state solution and to support the unilateral withdrawal plan” as well as Israel’s construction of a barrier separating the West Bank from pre-1967 Israel.

In a letter to Powell, Saperstein -- whose group includes more than 900 reform congregations across North America -- faulted recent congressional resolutions endorsing Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal plan for failing to “recognize the need for withdrawal to be directly linked to a return to the negotiating table” and neglecting to “address the troubling humanitarian conditions of the Palestinians.”

Powell and other administration officials insist that they are still searching for ways to help ensure that Sharon carries through with the withdrawal and that the Palestinians can fill the power vacuum when Israel withdraws after the first of the year.

When Powell was drawing up his itinerary, another State Department official said, Israel and the Palestinian territories were quickly ruled out.

“There was not much to do,” said the official, who also asked not to be named. “There was nothing that he could bring to the table that would move things forward in a way that was worth his going there.”

During his travels, Powell repeated his assertion that the Palestinian Authority’s failure to reform its security services and rein in militants was to blame for the lack of progress.

If Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Korei is able to impose his authority over the security forces, Powell told reporters traveling with him last week, “then I think we all have something to work with.”

In the end, Israeli-Palestinian issues were sidelined in Powell’s discussions with Arab leaders. The topics included the Saudi proposal for a Muslim force for Iraq and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s urging that the United States give the Sudanese government more time to deal with the Darfur crisis before taking further steps against the government.

In Cairo, Riyadh, Kuwait City and Baghdad, the senior State Department official said, the emphasis was on “those issues that are timely now.”

Bush already is drawing criticism from Democratic presidential challenger Sen. John F. Kerry for failing to do more to bring Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table. Kerry has promised to appoint a high-level envoy for the Middle East if he is elected and to be more personally involved in diplomacy.

But the Massachusetts senator has not staked out a position on the Middle East that is fundamentally different from Bush’s. He is supportive of both the internationally backed “road map” -- a step-by-step process by which Israel and the Palestinians are supposed to negotiate an end to their conflict and establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- and Sharon’s plan to exit Gaza.

Neither Israelis nor Palestinians are asking for robust U.S. intervention at the moment. Arafat sees Bush -- who has refused to deal with him -- as his sworn enemy, and Sharon is in negotiations to form a new government that he hopes will quickly adopt his pullout strategy. And with few exceptions, mainstream American Jewish leaders say they are content with the administration’s efforts and with the pause during the presidential campaign.