Time Running Out, Arab Leaders to Tell Reagan

For the second time this year, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan are going to Washington to urge the Reagan Administration to meet with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization as a first step toward peace in the Middle East.

But the mood among senior Egyptian and Jordanian officials is even gloomier now than it was when Mubarak visited Washington in March and Hussein followed suit in May.

In May there was, in the words of Jordan’s Foreign Minister Taher Masri, “an atmosphere the same as before Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem,” a feeling that “a breakthrough is approaching.”

He referred to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s surprise visit to Jerusalem in 1977, which led to a formal peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979.

But the months since May have produced little except disappointment. Instead of a breakthrough, the peace process seems to be on the verge of a breakdown.

The messages that Mubarak, who will see President Reagan on Monday, and Hussein, who will see him a week later, plan to convey are essentially the same, senior officials say. The two Arab leaders will tell Reagan that the best chance for peace in years is about to slip away unless the United States acts quickly to save it.

The principal problem, in Arab eyes, continues to be U.S. reluctance to meet with a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation that Hussein and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat set up in an effort to arrange talks with Israel through the United States.

As Jordan and Egypt see it, such a meeting is essential if Hussein and Arafat are to stick by the peace initiative they agreed to undertake jointly last February.

The United States has agreed to the meeting in principle. But since it does not recognize the PLO, it has had difficulty agreeing with Jordan as to which Palestinians it will talk with. Of the seven Palestinians nominated by Arafat to take part in the talks, only two have been accepted by Washington. Jordan insists on including at least two others.

Despite the apparent stalemate on this issue, officials directly involved in the negotiations say the selection of names is no longer a major problem.

“It will be solved without much trouble” once deeper differences over the peace process itself are resolved, said a senior official who asked not to be identified by name or nationality.

These deeper differences have to do with widely divergent views over where a U.S.-Palestinian dialogue should lead. The United States, distrustful of Arafat’s intentions, wants assurances that the dialogue will lead promptly and directly to negotiations between Israel and Jordan.

But Jordan wants the talks to lead to an international peace conference co-sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union. Only in this way, Jordanian officials say, can hard-line Syria, whose support is crucial to the success of any agreement, finally be drawn into the peace process.

The deepest difference concerns the role of the PLO itself. Israel has refused to negotiate with the PLO under any circumstances, and the United States, in line with longstanding policy, will not talk with Arafat until he publicly recognizes Israel’s right to exist. Jordan says Arafat is willing to do this, but not until he can be assured of U.S. recognition, and thus a place in the peace process.

Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy, the Administration’s top trouble-shooter for the Middle East, toured the region last month in an effort to narrow some of these differences. But he made so little progress that Jordanian and Egyptian officials are predicting that the Hussein-Arafat initiative will have to be abandoned by the end of the year.

Time is running out, they say, because Hussein and Arafat have placed themselves in an extremely vulnerable position by pushing a peace plan that most Arab states will not support; either they oppose it violently or simply doubt that it will work.

Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian officials all paint a bleak picture of what they think will happen if the Hussein initiative collapses.

“Moderates throughout the region will be thrown on the defensive, and hard-liners will gain the upper hand,” an official in the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said. “Jordan’s position will become precarious, and Arafat will be lost--if it’s not already too late to save him. The radicals will take over the PLO.”

A senior Jordanian official concurred and forecast a creeping “Lebanonization” of the Middle East, with U.S. interests becoming increasingly the target of terrorist attacks.

“How long can we go on believing that America is the party to talk to Israel through when there is no change, no movement?” this official asked. “You cannot control peoples’ frustration indefinitely. More and more young people will find an outlet in terrorism. And then we will not be able to contain it. American interests will also be a target, and we will not be able to stop it.”