Bush should wait out Middle East deadlock: Analyst

Bush should wait out Middle East deadlock: Analyst

Barry Schweid,
Associated Press/Washington

Apart from President George W. Bush's reassurances of unwavering
support for Palestinian statehood, there is little his
administration is set to do in the short term to try to break the
Middle East deadlock.

Administration strategists, wrestling with one of the biggest
international problems Bush will face in his next four years in
office, seem convinced that serious progress toward that goal is
going to take some time.

First off, they must wait out Yasser Arafat's possibly
terminal illness and then gauge whether his successors can
maintain calm and provide Israel with a partner for negotiations.

Second, the most promising opening for peacemaking -- Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's projected withdrawal from Gaza and
part of the West Bank -- is not due to begin until next year. The
plan also requires final approval by the Israeli government.

Palestinian groups that have leveled deadly attacks on Israeli
civilians could sabotage that opening, and it will take time to
know whether new Palestinian leaders will handcuff them.

Both Bush and Sharon are loath to start negotiations amid
violence.

Meanwhile, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher made
clear on Friday that the U.S.-backed "road map," and not some new
approach, remains the administration's vehicle for getting to the
peace table.

"The kind of steps that have been identified to get there are
the steps that we will continue to encourage," he said.

These include demands that violent groups be controlled,
Israeli outposts be removed from the West Bank and Israeli
settlement activity be suspended.

As American strategists consider their moves, Bush is coming
under increased pressure from European allies to assume a more
aggressive posture.

After speaking with Bush by telephone on Wednesday, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, the president's closest ally in Iraq,
said working toward Israeli-Palestinian peace was "the single
most pressing political challenge in our world today."

"Therefore, we must be relentless in our war against terrorism
and in resolving the conditions and causes on which the
terrorists prey," Blair said. "We should work with President Bush
on this agenda. It is one which all nations of goodwill would
surely agree."

Richard N. Haass, who headed the State Department's policy
planning office for more than two years of Bush's first term,
said on Friday that "you need a Palestinian partner to make
Israel comfortable with the withdrawal and to make it work."

Haass said Bush should send a letter to the Palestinians with
assurances of support on a number of tough issues, including that
the Israeli-held territory that would become a Palestinian state
would be contiguous, and there should be compensation in money or
territory for not resettling Palestinian refugees in Israel.

The letter would parallel the one Bush gave Sharon earlier in
the year in which the president supported Israel's retention of
Jewish settlements near its border and rejected Palestinian
claims that refugees have a right to return to Israel.

Haass, who also directed Middle East policy at the National
Security Council for the first President Bush, said he would not
recommend this president take a position on Jerusalem's future.

Relative calm has prevailed during Arafat's illness as the
Palestinians set up a sort of cooperative structure keyed to
Mahmoud Abbas, known popularly as Abu Mazen, and Ahmed Qurie,
familiarly known as Abu Ala.

The Bush administration hopes the calm they have been able to
maintain will continue, a senior U.S. official said. And,
speaking on condition of anonymity, he said the administration
also hoped that fledgling Palestinian government institutions
would develop.

On the Israeli side, officials said there are some 50 terror
alerts a day, and the relative calm is due to interception by
Israeli forces of would-be attackers.

James Phillips, Middle East specialist at the Heritage
Foundation, said Arafat has "really poisoned the atmosphere for
prospective peace talks, promising so many things and failing to
deliver so often, he eroded Israeli trust in a Palestinian
negotiating partner."

"Hopefully, after he passes from the scene the Palestinians
can develop a more constructive approach than Arafat's disastrous
strategy," Phillips said in an interview.

The onus for reviving the stalled peace process should be on
the Palestinians and not on the United States, he said.

Edward S. Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and
Israel, said the first step the administration should take is to
send an emissary to Arafat's funeral and while in the area to
sound out Abbas and Qurie to "take the pulse" and also to talk to
Sharon in Israel.

Also, Walker, now president of the Middle East Institute in
Washington, said in an interview, the so-called Quartet that
produced the road map for peacemaking -- the United States,
United Nations, European Union and Russia -- should meet to
reinvigorate the blueprint and show that it is still alive.