Bush to Dispatch Powell to Mideast

Abandoning the last vestige of his standoffish approach to the Middle East, President Bush on Wednesday directed Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to visit the region next week, just days after Israel’s leader is scheduled to visit the White House.

Administration officials said the objective of the intensified U.S. diplomacy is to persuade Israel and the Palestinians to abide by a shaky week-old cease-fire. But clearly the focus is on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a grizzled warrior who has angered his allies and surprised his detractors by meeting Palestinian attacks with restraint.

“Sharon has been restrained in his actions, and the administration wants to reinforce that,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a White House Middle East expert in the Reagan administration. “The only way to do that is to send Powell. If Sharon breaks the cease-fire because he believes the Palestinians have already done so, it will have to be something big.”

Since the cease-fire, negotiated by CIA Director George J. Tenet, took effect June 13, six Palestinians and four Israelis have been killed in sporadic violence. Clearly, those numbers do not indicate an end to nearly nine months of violence. But administration officials say there has been enough progress to justify a new U.S. mediation campaign.

“It’s the appropriate time for Colin Powell to go to the Mideast,” Bush told reporters Wednesday. “We’re making enough progress for me to feel comfortable about asking the secretary of State to go.”

Bush has been reluctant to appear to follow the example of former President Clinton, who spent much of his last year in office in a high-profile campaign to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. At the start of his tenure, Bush insisted that the United States would facilitate talks between the two but would not try to force the issue.

Now, however, Bush seems to have concluded that the U.S. stake in the region is too high for Washington to stay on the sidelines.

Sharon is scheduled to visit the White House on Tuesday. Although the administration refuses to specify the date for the start of Powell’s trip, he is expected to head to the Mideast late next week. William Burns, the administration’s Middle East point man, will precede Powell to the region.

Although the U.S. is urging Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to discourage violence, the situations of the two leaders are substantially different. U.S. and Israeli officials say Arafat must exert a “100% effort” to stop terrorism, even though they concede that there are forces, mostly Islamic fundamentalist groups, that he cannot control. Despite some vigilante action by Israeli civilians, most of the Palestinian casualties have been inflicted by the Israeli army, an organization that Sharon unquestionably controls.

As long as Sharon withholds Israel’s F-16s, tanks and heavy artillery, U.S. diplomats will have some room to maneuver. So far, Sharon has done that, although he has been sharply criticized by his own core constituency for failing to respond to Palestinian attacks, particularly the June 1 suicide bombing outside a disco in Tel Aviv that killed 21 Israelis.

Bush, who spoke by telephone with Sharon and Arafat this week, said both leaders sought to justify violence by their sides.

“I urged them just to not think that way, to believe in the possible,” Bush said.

Sharon’s White House visit will be his second in little more than three months. By contrast, Arafat, a frequent Washington visitor during the Clinton administration, has not been invited to a face-to-face meeting with Bush, something the Palestinian leader clearly covets.

Administration officials say Bush considers a White House invitation to Arafat to be his “trump card” in persuading the Palestinian leader to restrain his followers.

The administration has adopted the recommendations of an international commission, headed by former Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Maine), as the basis for its policy. The panel’s report calls for an end to violence; a six-week cooling-off period; a series of confidence-building measures, including a total freeze on Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; and, ultimately, a resumption of peace negotiations.

“We will go out there in order to encourage [the Israelis and Palestinians] to redouble their efforts to stop the violence and thereby lay the foundation for getting on with the implementation of all the other aspects of the Mitchell committee report,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.