Bold Risks Mark Bush’s Policy on Middle East

Last fall, delegations began shuttling between Washington and Jerusalem to discuss a secret Israeli proposal that would overturn decades of Middle East diplomacy: a U.S. recognition of Israel’s claims to portions of the West Bank seized in the 1967 war and an acknowledgment that Palestinian refugees would never be able to exercise the “right of return” to lost land in Israel.

At least some U.S. officials were anxious. How would the Arab world, already inflamed, react? But by late February, word had come down from the Oval Office: President Bush wanted to break with his predecessors.

“The president said, ‘Find a way to make it happen,’ ” said an official with a pro-Israel group close to the negotiations.

Last week, it did.

For a man who came to the presidency with little foreign policy experience, Bush has time and again embarked on bold policy initiatives, especially in the Middle East.

In his first year in office, he spoke openly about establishing a Palestinian state. He made that goal explicit with his peace plan, known as the “road map,” which was unveiled last year on the eve of the Iraq war.

He did it again by calling for democratization of Arab countries throughout the region and proposing a “Greater Middle East Initiative” to promote reform.

And he argued that toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would be a beacon of hope and democracy for the entire region.

Some hailed this latest action as a gutsy way to jump-start a peace process locked in a bloody stalemate for three years. Others condemned it as the United States overtly taking sides with Israel and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, undermining its traditional role as an impartial arbiter between the Jewish state and the Palestinians.

“The president prides himself on being blunt, and this is what we could call a blunt move,” said James M. Lindsay, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and coauthor of a book on Bush’s foreign policy. “From the day he came into office, the president has always favored bold and risky initiatives where the gains are big if it pays off, and the losses are great if it doesn’t.”

The policy shift was announced as the Bush administration was scrambling to contain an upsurge in violence in Iraq, and many commentators worried that it could increase anti-American sentiment in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world. The Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Abdulaziz Rantisi on Saturday seemed only to presage more unrest.

But Flynt Leverett, who helped draft the administration’s peace plan before leaving the National Security Council last year, said that for the Bush administration, the two policies -- on Israel and Iraq -- were on separate tracks.

Leverett said the administration made a decision that, despite expected expressions of Arab outrage, “was not going to significantly affect how much support they get or don’t get on Iraq or other regional issues.”

Lindsay said the decision went to the core of the way Bush and his closest advisors see the world -- that what is important in international relations is not what foreign governments say or think but what those governments do.

“For many of the president’s advisors, ultimately, they believe in being powerful, demonstrating resolve and acting boldly; at looking not at what someone else says, but what are they willing to do or not do,” Lindsay said.

Leverett said it had always been expected that in a final settlement, Israel would keep at least some part of the West Bank settlements. And all along, he said, it had been considered unlikely that Palestinian refugees and their descendants would be able to return to ancestral homes in what is now Israel.

“But why do you need to say that right now?” Leverett said. “What do you get out of that? In terms of mustering international support for your policy, you lose.”

Bush’s endorsement of Israel’s plan, which includes its unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, suggested to many that Palestinians were being left out of negotiations that, under the peace plan, were supposed to be a two-way street.

Leverett said he believed the administration’s shift in policy was aimed partly at increasing electoral support for Bush. But the main motivation, he said, seemed to have been to bolster Sharon, who faces a referendum in his own Likud Party over the Gaza withdrawal.

It was not the first time the administration had changed policy to accommodate Sharon, said Leverett, who is now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Previously, the administration delayed release of the peace plan to avoid complicating Israeli elections. And Sharon aides played a significant role in drafting the Bush speech in 2002 that announced his two-state policy and called for a new Palestinian leadership.

“I think it was, once again, an effort to help Sharon politically,” Leverett said.

The policy shift was in the works for seven months and took many twists and turns, Israeli and U.S. officials said.

As far back as October, officials of the Sharon government had approached the Bush administration, voiced their frustration with the Palestinian Authority and said they were considering a withdrawal from Gaza.

In November, Sharon invited Elliott Abrams, the top NSC official for the Middle East, to a secret meeting in Rome. The men met for three hours, negotiating what it would take to win U.S. backing. As the negotiations continued, Abrams -- who is seen as a liaison to the American Jewish community -- told Israelis he was confident that the Bush administration would find a way to do what Sharon wanted.

Abrams, deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley and Assistant Secretary of State William J. Burns became the regular team on the issue, flying to Israel three times this year. The Israelis twice sent their own team to the United States, led by Sharon chief of staff Dov Weisglass.

In Washington, the White House and NSC are generally considered pro-Israel. But at the State Department, whose staff includes more Arab specialists than the NSC’s, there was wariness. They wanted any approval of the Sharon proposal to remain very general, to avoid prejudicing future negotiations.

Although there were no direct consultations between the Israelis and Palestinians, U.S. officials made a point of meeting with Arab leaders on their trips to lay out what was under discussion. They hoped in this way they could at least muffle the expected Arab outrage, say people close to the negotiations.

“We knew what Sharon was trying to get from the administration; we just never knew where it all would end up,” said one Arab diplomat.

As the date for Sharon’s trip to Washington approached, the State Department again balked at some of the proposed language, believing it was too generous to Sharon. Last Sunday, key officials, including Weisglass and Hadley, met until late into the night at the Hay-Adams Hotel, just a block from the White House. On Monday, Sharon warned that he might call off his trip altogether, a senior Israeli official said.

“There were talks and exchanges about the final wording, and at a certain moment, as happens in negotiations, after we’ve concluded things about the critical issues, suddenly there was a reversal,” said a senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But after the delay [in Sharon’s departure], a resolution was found.”

Even after the Israeli delegation arrived in Washington, there were last-minute talks over changes by State Department lawyers. Israeli political journalist Nahum Barnea, writing in the Yediot Ahronot daily, said the final dispute revolved around just four words. The version already agreed on by the two sides read: “It seems clear that a just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to Palestinian refugee issues will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than Israel.”

The State Department lawyers, Barnea said, sought unsuccessfully to replace the word “through” with “on the basis of” -- a change Sharon personally rejected only hours before the White House session.

Zalman Shoval, a veteran Israeli envoy who was familiar with the negotiating points during more than three months of haggling, said one bone of contention was what to call the West Bank settlements that Sharon wanted to keep.

“There was a question of how to refer to these areas we called settlement blocs -- in they end they were called ‘large population centers,’ ” he said.

When the agreement was announced, it brought the expected swift criticism from the Arab League, the European Union and Palestinian officials. It won public support from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who said it offered an important opportunity.

What remains to be seen is whether the administration’s bet will pay off -- whether the risks of Arab unrest in the Palestinian territories and Iraq will ultimately be viewed as having been worth a big payoff in Mideast peace.

“The question is,” Lindsay said, “at what point does the president’s break with past practice lead to a break with past practice by Arab countries?”