In Middle East, Diplomacy Is the New Word of Day

It was hardly a landmark event, yet last week’s agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians to open a Gaza border crossing said much about a course correction of America’s role in the Middle East.

Saber-rattling is out. Diplomacy is in.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s decision in Jerusalem to plunge into talks that were going nowhere was only the latest example of a new hands-on diplomacy that has seen senior American envoys intervene in negotiations between parties in the region.

Last month, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, in effect strong-armed Shiite Muslims and Kurds into concessions on the eve of a national referendum on a draft constitution, thus giving the country’s disaffected Sunni Arabs at least the chance to play a greater role in shaping their country’s future.

Also last month, Rice reportedly headed off a move within the Bush administration to launch airstrikes against Iraqi insurgent staging camps inside Syria, carrying the day with the argument that additional U.S. military activity would only generate sympathy for Damascus and heighten anti-American emotions in the region. Diplomatic isolation of the Syrian regime, she argued, was a better strategy.

“For so long, this administration has thought that the only way to make an impact is through military action,” said Edward Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel. “What we’re seeing is an important and welcome change.”

Those who track events in the region believe Rice has played a big part in the shift of administration tactics. Although the policies and methods she advocates are in many cases remarkably similar to those pushed by her predecessor, Rice has one crucial advantage Colin L. Powell lacked: the president’s ear.

This change in the Middle East comes within the broader context of a gradual return to a less confrontational stance in foreign affairs that has differentiated the early months of Bush’s second term from his first term.

The more measured assessments of Rice’s senior diplomats, and not the hard-edged views that carried so much influence during the first term, now often prevail, said a U.S. official who declined to be identified because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“She’s done a marvelous job of bringing the Bush vision for this region back to reality,” Walker said.

Although the new reliance on diplomacy has produced some heartening results, the strategy has its down side. A diplomatic plan to deal with the realities of the Middle East requires time, and the patience to allow developments to play out.

What remains uncertain, analysts say, is how a president saddled with an unpopular war in Iraq can maintain political backing at home for such a campaign. Polls indicate that support for foreign intervention has slipped significantly since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

In a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Council on Foreign Relations, 42% of Americans said the United States should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”

The result compares with just 30% who held such a view in 2002, and is on par with the percentage expressing that view during the mid-1970s, after the Vietnam War, and in the 1990s after the Cold War ended, according to a statement released by the poll’s organizers.

During a brief stop at a U.S. military base north of Mosul, Iraq, this month, Rice did her best to link efforts to build democracy in the Middle East directly to America’s security.

“As we help the Iraqi people secure their freedoms, we indeed secure our own,” she told a group of American troops, diplomats and contract workers. “Because if Iraq does not succeed, and should Iraq become a place of despair, generations of Americans would also be condemned to fear and to insecurity. And so our fates and our futures are very much linked.”

But if the border crossing agreement was an encouraging sign, it was also a reminder that making progress in the Middle East is tough work.

If it required two months and the rolled-up-sleeves involvement of the secretary of State to get Palestinians and Israelis to agree on a simple border crossing, few doubt that it will take longer for the two sides to make the far more difficult choices needed to complete the journey to a Palestinian state.

Change is likely to be equally slow elsewhere in the region. During stops this month in Iraq, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Rice saw hints that the boundaries of political freedom were beginning to expand, but there was also evidence of strong resistance to this change.

At a meeting in Bahrain, more than 30 countries, most of them in the Middle East and North Africa, agreed on a U.S.-backed plan to set up a foundation to promote freedom and democracy. But they were unable to agree on a final declaration pledging to broaden the participation of nongovernmental organizations in public life.

Host country Bahrain was one of just five Arab nations willing to help underwrite the foundation, yet the government last year jailed human rights activist Abdulhadi Khawaja for criticizing the prime minister. He later received a royal pardon but was barred from attending the recent gathering.

In Jidda, Saudi Arabia, Rice launched the first session of a more intense U.S.-Saudi dialogue, but it was a measure of the anti-American feeling in the country that reporters traveling with her were transported in armor-plated vehicles.

Rice’s visit to Iraq was kept secret until the last minute because of security concerns.

Speaking Monday in Jerusalem to a blue-ribbon audience that included Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and other big names, Rice remained undeterred by the hurdles facing her.

“We are not naive about the pace or the difficulty of democratic change,” she said. “But we know that the longing for democratic change is deep and urgently felt.”