Drop Peace Effort, Right Urges Bush

As President Bush struggles to define a consistent course in the Middle East, a chorus of leading conservative voices has begun loudly discouraging the administration from inserting itself into peace negotiations--and instead is urging the president to give Israel a freer hand to respond militarily to Palestinian suicide bombings.

In a series of articles over the last two weeks, conservative thinkers such as William Kristol and William J. Bennett--and leading right-leaning media such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the National Review--have used phrases such as “amateur hour,” “moral confusion” and “Clintonite wishful thinking” to describe the administration’s recent initiatives to breathe life into the flagging Mideast peace process.

This criticism inverts the charge from many Democrats--echoed in the editorial pages of many newspapers--that Bush hasn’t done enough to encourage talks between the two sides. Instead, the conservatives are arguing that promoting talks amounts to rewarding Palestinian terrorism and risks undercutting the “Bush doctrine” of punishing states that nurture terrorists.

“There’s a fundamental tension between the war on terrorism and the peace process, if the peace process means negotiating with terrorists or tolerating terrorism,” argues Kristol, publisher of the Weekly Standard, a leading conservative magazine.

The criticism on the right has quieted somewhat since Bush condemned Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat last weekend and said he could “understand” the new Israeli offensive in the West Bank. As they do on many issues, White House aides brushed off the criticism as carping from the margins.

“I see a little bit of hubbub . . . but I don’t read it as a big deal,” said a senior White House official.

But the harsh conservative words for the administration’s diplomatic efforts--particularly Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent trip through the Mideast--suggest that as the bloody conflict continues, Bush will face sustained pressure within his party to accept Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s aggressive use of force.

“I don’t think there is anybody who puts much stock in talks right now,” said Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a top conservative supporter of Israel. “Many people are saying, ‘How can we tell Israel to pull back [militarily] when, if terrorists were hitting us that way, we would be going back at them hammer and tong?’ ”

Such comments underscore the shift in the GOP’s center of gravity on the Middle East just since the inauguration of Bush, whose administration sought a more impartial stance.

“It is very hard for Bush to be seen as pressuring Israel in the classic way his father did,” says Steven L. Spiegel, associate director of the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA.

Indeed, the entire American debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has tilted right, especially since the collapse of the Camp David peace negotiations under President Clinton in 2000. In Israel, the rising level of Palestinian violence has strengthened the hands of those who see military action as the key to confronting the problem.

Across the American political spectrum, the differences on how to deal with the crisis today are relatively narrow--especially when compared with the call from the European Union on Tuesday for Israel to immediately withdraw its troops. But important nuances still divide the parties.

Most leading Democrats have echoed Bush in viewing the Israeli West Bank offensive as legitimate self-defense. But Democrats generally believe that Bush erred by reducing American involvement in the region last year and should be trying harder now to encourage negotiations.

Even Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), usually one of the most hawkish Democrats, told CNN on Monday that Bush should convene an international conference to begin negotiations between Israel and the Arab nations over the “vision of peace” that the Arab League endorsed in Beirut last week.

It is precisely such an intensified diplomacy that the conservatives are urging Bush to avoid.

Administration’s Efforts Called ‘Amateur Hour’

Cheney’s trip through the region last month--which was designed to rally Arab support for action against Iraq but ended with the vice president holding out the possibility of meeting with Arafat--drew a hail of bricks from the right. In the Weekly Standard, Kristol and co-author Robert Kagan compared the trip to Clinton Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s unsuccessful 1993 mission to rally European support for intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“The past two weeks have been amateur hour in American diplomacy,” they wrote.

Conservatives have also recoiled from Bush’s encouragement of the Arab League peace initiative--a proposal under which the Arab nations would recognize Israel if the Jewish state withdrew to its pre-1967 borders and allowed the creation of a Palestinian state. Many of the conservative thinkers have argued that constructive peace discussions can begin only after a much greater level of Israeli military action.

“I don’t think you can have negotiations now. You have to fight it out,” argues Bennett, a leader among social conservatives and a secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan. “And then once they have fought it out . . . the United States can play a major role.”

Others say peace between Israel and the Palestinians may come only after the U.S. shows the Arab world its own commitment to resisting terror by toppling Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“The path to a calmer Mideast now lies not through Jerusalem but through Baghdad,” said the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

One White House official sympathetic to the conservative critique says Bush can never go as far as the right wants in emphasizing military over diplomatic solutions. While criticizing Arafat and sympathizing with the Israeli action in recent days, Bush has also said that Israel must leave open a “pathway to peace” through negotiations and has refused to label Arafat a terrorist. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell criticized Israel’s suggestion that it might exile Arafat.

Still, Bush’s instinctive support of Israel places him at the center of a generational shift in Republican thinking about the Mideast.

For the first decades of the Jewish state’s existence, the Republican Party was generally less supportive of Israel than Democrats, and more concerned than Democrats about protecting America’s economic and political interests in the Arab world.

“The classic position of the Republican Party, the Dwight Eisenhower approach, was that we have an obligation to Israel . . . but let’s face it, our interests lie fundamentally on the Arab side, in anti-communism and the oil question,” said Spiegel.

Republican attitudes began to shift in the 1980s under Reagan, who identified more closely with Israel than any previous GOP president. Reagan was heavily influenced by the so-called neoconservatives, mostly Jewish (and formerly Democratic) intellectuals who portrayed support for Israel as a moral commitment to a fellow democracy.

Bush’s Father Had a Different Approach

As on many issues, the attitude of Bush’s father toward Israel represented a temporary interruption in the GOP’s Reaganite drift. Harking back to the earlier Eisenhower position, the elder Bush’s administration (particularly Secretary of State James A. Baker III) frequently clashed with the Israeli government and took positions that Israel advocates considered pro-Arab.

Yet around the elder Bush, Republican thinking was continuing to tilt more toward Israel. Along with the neocons, Israel benefited through the 1980s and ‘90s from the rising clout inside the GOP of conservative evangelical Christians. To a broad range of conservative Christians, support for Israel is virtually ordained by the Bible. Last month, for instance, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), a staunch social conservative, declared on the Senate floor that Israel should maintain control of the Palestinian territories “because God said so. . . . Look it up in the book of Genesis.”

Republican ties to Israel have also increased as the Israelis have elected more conservative governments and as the increased lethality of Palestinian terrorism has generally diminished sympathy in America for the Palestinian cause.

These currents have moved the GOP closer to Israel even though American Jews--often considered the most powerful force in shaping U.S. Mideast policy--have remained solidly Democratic in their voting behavior.

Today, the evolution of Republican thinking is encapsulated in the space between George W. Bush and his father.

“Bush 41 just had a different view on this one,” said the White House official sympathetic to the conservative critique. “I just think President Bush is closer to Reagan than his father in his instincts on many things, and Israel is one of them. When you listen to him, his instincts are more to be critical of Arafat than his father’s were.”