Dept. of Good Intentions: Mixed Results : * Washington’s U.N.-Observer Ploy for West Bank, Gaza Seems to Have Swayed No One

There was a certain economy of motion in the Bush Administration’s almost offhanded announcement Tuesday that it was willing to support--rather than simply discuss--sending a United Nations fact-finding mission to the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Unfortunately, regional reaction to the shift offered further proof of the frustrating limits to American influence in the area.

Last week, Secretary of State James A. Baker III said that the United States was interested in discussing the possibility of sending a U.N. observer to assess the deteriorating situation in the occupied territories, where the Palestinian intifada recently has intensified. Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler, responding to a reporter’s question during a briefing, said that Washington had changed its mind and would support a U.N. mission.

The Administration’s understated change of policy had two targets: One was the Arab League summit in Baghdad, where relative moderates like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the Saudis were seeking to temper demands by the Palestine Liberation Organization and hard-liners like Iraq for condemnation of U.S. cooperation with Israel and Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. The other target was Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who is trying to put together a new government in Jerusalem. By approving the U.N. mission, the Administration signaled Shamir that, in Washington’s view, there is a limit on how far he can go in making concessions to parties that favor harsher measures in, or even annexation of, the occupied territories.

However clear and evenhanded, neither of these signals had much effect. The moderates lost in Baghdad, and the ringing denunciation of the United States that concluded the Arab League summit already is being seen as a victory for the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Meanwhile, a perversely timed assault by Palestinian terrorists on Israeli beaches provided new ammunition for the hard men on Shamir’s right, increasing the possibility that he will form a new government willing to support his resistance to talks with the Palestinians.

The Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien once observed that international crises could be divided into problems that have solutions and situations that have outcomes. In the latter category he put Ulster and the Middle East. This is one of those moments when reasonable people might tend to agree.