The Road Map to Bush’s Conversion

Like nine American presidents before him, George W. Bush has finally and fully been lured into the Arab-Israeli imbroglio. But the conversion, from keeping the issue at a distance to being deeply and personally committed to it, was a slow process that took almost two years.

U.S.-brokered mediation over the new “road map” for peace now appears on the cusp of either breakthrough or setback. Whether his administration succeeds or fails, the outcome is likely to be a big piece of Bush’s legacy.

Six pivotal events have gradually transformed the president’s thinking. “It’s been an evolutionary thing,” said a senior administration official.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks forced the issue. In a United Nations speech designed to address the terrorist threat to modern civilization, Bush became the first U.S. president to formally call for an independent Palestinian state. He spoke of it briefly, however, as a principle -- in the 34th of 41 paragraphs. It was included, after lengthy internal debate, largely in the context of terrorism and as a signal that the United States wanted justice for Muslims too, U.S. officials said.

The administration, engrossed with Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden, also didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of the Clinton administration, which had failed in last-ditch peace talks at Camp David. Moreover, its new foreign policy team, weighted with pro-Israel neoconservatives, didn’t believe that Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat was capable of making peace, the sources added.

So the pledge was basically left hanging.

The next turning point was instead an “eloquent message” and a somewhat gruesome video, both delivered by Saudi Arabia’s imposing Crown Prince Abdullah during his visit to the president’s ranch in April 2002, an administration official said.

The crown prince, the de facto ruler of the oil-rich country since King Fahd’s debilitating stroke in 1995, was fresh from an Arab League summit where he had engineered an agreement to formally recognize Israel in exchange for the Jewish state ceding territory it occupied in the 1967 Middle East War. That diplomacy was the carrot.

The stick was a video portraying Palestinian suffering since Israel cracked down on Palestinian territories in response to the uprising. It included “images you couldn’t put on TV,” said a State Department official.

Abdullah “went to some trouble to acknowledge Israeli suffering and to say it has to end. But he wanted to show that the Palestinians were suffering too, that it was a humanitarian disaster for both sides. He convinced the president with a passionate and eloquent message about the need to act,” the official said.

The leaders forged a strong bond, Bush told reporters after the meeting. “We share a vision.”

Timing was key. With the Afghan war victory under Bush’s belt and U.S. focus shifting to Iraq, Saudi Arabia had particular leverage. So did Abdullah’s argument that new U.S. movement on the Arab-Israeli conflict was essential to Washington’s claim that it wanted peace and stability in the world’s most volatile region -- a message echoed by many other allies in the weeks that followed.

On June 24, Bush acted on a promise to Abdullah and the others to back up the pledge made at the United Nations, U.S. officials said.

In a Rose Garden speech, he dangled the prospect of a Palestinian state within three years if the Palestinians changed their leadership, introduced sweeping political reforms, wrote a new constitution, revamped security and ended violence.

“An end to occupation and a peaceful democratic Palestinian state may seem distant, but America and our partners throughout the world stand ready to help you make them possible as soon as possible,” Bush said.

This offer lingered too, however, as Arafat stubbornly clung to power and the White House began using its leverage instead to press for an end to Saddam Hussein’s rule in Baghdad.

Efforts to come up with a specific formula were almost derailed in December as the “quartet” of major powers -- the U.S., United Nations, European Union and Russia -- ironed out the steps, envisioning a final settlement by the end of 2005, U.S. officials said.

Although the other parties wanted to publicize the terms, the administration insisted that the three phases should be keep secret until the Palestinians chose a new leader and acted on other U.S. demands.

“It is a pity. It is key to maintain momentum, keep a political perspective in the process and safeguard the credibility of the quartet,” Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said for the EU. “Much goodwill has been invested in ‘selling’ the road map concept to the parties. They now expect the quartet to deliver.”

At one point the quartet almost collapsed. “The other members were about to boycott the event. The way we got them to attend was to say they could meet the president and if they had concerns they could tell him. They did -- and they told him he needed to be engaged, that they feared his heart was in Iraq and not this,” said the administration official. Bush “intimated that his heart was in Iraq, but promised that he did not intend to ignore this.”

Every time Bush was engaged or confronted on the issue, he got drawn in deeper, U.S. officials say. Although the administration was diverted by the Iraq crisis, the issue actually ended up adding to the pressure for an Arab-Israeli peace.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s January visit to Camp David was the most telling of many such moments, U.S. officials say. Although the visit was pegged to joint efforts on Iraq, Blair made a strenuous case that any campaign against Hussein had to go hand in hand with a more vibrant effort on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The final major moment in Bush’s evolution came this spring, following complaints from top Israeli officials that the peace plan reflected the State Department’s view and not what the president had outlined in his June 24 speech, administration officials said.

Bush told national security advisor Condoleezza Rice to compare the plan and his speech. So Rice contacted Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and asked for a one-page guide summarizing the lengthy specifics of the plan. Bush then compared his speech and the plan and pronounced them identical in goals and format, officials say.

It was a crucial moment for two reasons. The immediate effect was that, unlike the once-deep chasm over Iraq, the administration has been “very much in sync” on the peace plan, said a well-placed U.S. official. Bush, who considers Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon a friend, also signaled that he did not intend to be swayed in his determination to press both sides to take tough steps.

When Palestinian Authority legislators approved Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister on April 30, Bush was ready to go. The same day, the specifics of the plan were revealed. Five weeks later, Bush launched his initiative to get things moving at two summits, first with Arab leaders on Egypt’s Sinai peninsula and the next day with the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers in Aqaba, Jordan’s Red Sea resort.

By then, the president had become deeply enmeshed in the conflict, reflected by a now widely recounted anecdote.

At the first summit, on June 3, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was supposed to make opening remarks and then close the session to the media. But when Bahrain’s emir started to talk before cameras could be removed, Mubarak also offered Bush an opportunity to comment. To the surprise of even longtime U.S. specialists, he ad-libbed the list of talking points without notes or hesitation.

“Bush is now energized,” said the well-placed official. “He has an idea of what he wants to do. He gets it. He really gets it.”