Complications for Cheney’s Mission

Vice President Dick Cheney will embark Sunday on a trip once envisioned as a mission to garner support for widening the war against terror, a task made more complicated by the spiral of Middle East violence.

The dynamics of his trip to Britain and 11 nations in the Middle East demonstrate an underlying truth that experts agree Cheney will encounter:

Although President Bush is dispatching his vice president to gauge support for taking the anti-terror campaign beyond Afghanistan, the moderate Arab states whose support the administration is courting will be unmoved unless they see the Israelis and Palestinians making progress toward peace.

The understated Cheney conceded Friday at the White House that “the trip has taken on, I suppose, a little added significance” as a result of the unabated violence, which reached new levels Friday when scores of Palestinians and six Israelis died.

The vice president said, however, that the trip is still largely driven by the administration’s overriding goal of expanding the war against terror. That, in addition to targeting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, would include attacking Al Qaeda cells beyond Afghanistan not only militarily but also through financial restrictions and cooperation with foreign law enforcement units.

The United States, the vice president said, must “make certain we don’t allow a sanctuary to develop someplace else and become a refuge, if you will, for the Al Qaeda.”

The trip will take Cheney to Arab nations whose leaders are largely friendly to U.S. interests but anxious about showing too much support for Washington’s campaign against Hussein while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is raging.

Kenneth M. Pollack, deputy director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank and a former Persian Gulf expert at the National Security Council, described the message Cheney is likely to hear from his Arab hosts this way:

“Our ability to help you on the war on terrorism and our willingness to abide by any military move against Iraq is going to be guided by the status of the Israeli-Palestinian situation because popular opinion would tolerate neither until Palestinians feel more secure.”

The trip is being undertaken in an environment of extreme security concerns. The vice president’s itinerary is not being disclosed in advance of his arrival in each country.

The U.S. options in defusing the Israeli-Palestinian violence appear few.

A framework exists for bringing the two parties to the negotiating table. It is the plan put forward by CIA Director George J. Tenet to establish Israeli-Palestinian cooperation on security issues so that talks proposed last year by former Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) toward a final peace arrangement can take place.

On Thursday, Bush said he was sending his special Middle East envoy, retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, back to the region to look for an opportunity to bring both sides to the table.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s military keeps hammering the Palestinians, who dispatch suicide bombers and launch other attacks on Israel. And Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat will not or cannot rein in extremists.

So, Cheney would appear to have little to offer the Arab leaders in return for their support against Iraq.

In the run-up to Cheney’s trip, the administration has stiffened its criticism of Israel. On Friday, U.S. officials demanded an immediate end to military operations that target Palestinian civilians.

“We strongly oppose the Israeli policy of targeted killing that has led to the death of many innocent civilians,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

The glimmer of hope cited by Bush as Cheney and Zinni prepare to embark separately for the Middle East was provided by a Saudi peace initiative that calls for Arab recognition of Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal from territory captured in the 1967 Middle East War.

But that sketchy idea fails to address the details that have mired the region in bloodshed for decades, and the Bush administration concluded last year that real peace can’t be achieved between the Israelis and Palestinians as long as their two current leaders are in power.

If that is correct, the most the U.S. could hope for is a cessation of hostilities--and a cold peace. And even that, after the violence of the past week, looks difficult to achieve.