Bush Predicts Peace in Mideast Within 10 Years

Vice President George Bush, saying he has found a “marked change in the mood of this region,” predicted Sunday that peace in the Middle East can be achieved within the next 10 years.

“Every leader agrees we must have peace,” Bush told members of a multinational peacekeeping force stationed in the Sinai Peninsula. “We so often focus on what divides the nations of this region. But this growing consensus is a powerful new fact. I believe it will prove an irresistible force in the years ahead.

“With this consensus in place, I can see a number of ways to build a peace in this region--not this year or next year, perhaps, but certainly within a decade,” he added.

Bush made the prediction in a brief address to members of the Multinational Force and Observers, an 11-nation peacekeeping force set up to monitor Egyptian and Israeli compliance with their peace treaty obligations in the Sinai.

The vice president flew from Luxor, Egypt, to visit the peacekeepers at their desert headquarters in El Gorah, near the Israeli border, before proceeding to Cairo for talks today with President Hosni Mubarak and other officials.

A senior U.S. official traveling with Bush said the vice president’s optimism about peace prospects is based on his general impression of the mood he encountered in Israel and Jordan last week and is not based on any new breakthroughs or proposals raised during his current tour, which has been described as largely ceremonial.

However, senior State Department officials are still working hard behind the scenes in the hope of using the Bush visit as a catalyst to help Egypt and Israel complete a long and tortuous series of negotiations over a border dispute involving the Red Sea resort of Taba.

Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy left Bush’s party over the weekend to shuttle between Egypt and Israel in an effort to conclude an agreement in time for Bush to announce it before he returns to Washington on Tuesday.

Talks Extended

U.S. officials, who have been mediating the Taba talks for 15 months, made it plain at the start of Bush’s 10-day tour that they hoped Egypt and Israel could at least initial an accord while the vice president is here. But that seemed unlikely after Egyptian officials reported Friday that another round of Taba talks in Israel had ended without agreement and would not be resumed until later this week.

However, after two days of intensive talks in Cairo with Foreign Minister Esmat Abdel Meguid and other officials, Murphy flew unexpectedly to Israel on Sunday evening. An Israeli official told the Associated Press in Jerusalem that Murphy met with Prime Minister Shimon Peres and other Israeli leaders and then flew back to Cairo.

A source here close to the negotiations had said earlier that there was “still a chance” that an agreement will be reached. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the source said that the two sides “are very close and working very hard.”

Israel, which kept Taba when it withdrew from the rest of the Sinai in 1982 under the terms of its peace treaty with Egypt, agreed in principle early this year to an Egyptian demand to settle the dispute through binding international arbitration. But a formal agreement has been held up by wrangling over seemingly arcane but technically important details.

While the main text of an arbitration accord has now been settled, differences still exist on the fine points of an annex dealing with such questions as what maps and photographs will be used to determine the location of the border between Egypt and Israel.

Egypt, which withdrew its ambassador from Tel Aviv in 1982 after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, has made a Taba agreement its main condition for thawing the “cold peace” that has prevailed between the two countries since the Lebanon invasion.

Timing Important

As the negotiators near the finish line, timing has become important because both sides want to sign an accord before a government rotation in Israel in October, when Prime Minister Peres is scheduled to swap jobs with Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Shamir, the leader of Israel’s right-wing Likud Bloc, is expected to take a much tougher stance on Taba than Peres, and “the feeling is that if an agreement can’t be reached with Peres, it will never be reached with Shamir,” one source close to the negotiations said.

For the United States, a Taba agreement now would also lend a touch of significance to the Bush visit, which has been privately criticized by a number of officials for its lack of substance and its emphasis on publicity for what is expected to be Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign.

Already, the Bush entourage’s emphasis on “photo opportunities” and camera footage for possible campaign commercials has ruffled more than a few feathers in Jordan, where the vice president’s aides asked the Jordanians to rearrange furniture for interior shots and to provide camels for exterior pictures.

“The vice president seems less interested in our problems than in campaigning,” said one Egyptian official, who noted that Bush was not expected to discuss in detail Egypt’s pressing requests for more U.S. help in easing its crushing debt burden.

“We are being used as the first American primary,” he said.