Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2002, page 19

Affairs of State

 

Has Peace Been Bushwhacked? President’s Plan Dampens Hope, Elates Sharon

 

By Eugene Bird

What a contrast between the scene at the White House on Sept. 13, 1993 and the scene on June 24, 2002, almost nine years later. Although not a participant in—or even aware of—the Oslo negotiations, nine months into his presidency Bill Clinton orchestrated the historic handshake between the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the prime minister of Israel. Hope, if not euphoria, was high in the days before the agreement’s flaws and Israeli intransigence torpedoed prospects for peace.

By contrast, in the Rose Garden this June 24 President George W. Bush—now, by his own declaration a wartime president—spoke words of venom against the Palestinian leadership. Bush’s words signaled agreement with Israel that, one way or another, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat must go.There certainly was no joy in it, either for the president of the world’s hyperpower or his audience around the globe. Refusing all questions, Bush beat a hasty retreat into his office, followed by his secretaries of state and defense and his national security adviser.

It was a speech warmly applauded in only one country, Israel. Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the incoming president of the European Union, immediately questioned the wisdom of calling for the disappearance of Arafat from the world of turbulent Palestinian politics. French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrini visited Arafat in his besieged Ramallah compound, and the Arab public reacted strongly against Arafat’s removal.

The speech’s positive points were few: Bush did mention the need for aid to the Palestinians, for a two-state solution once borders were established, and for Israel to end settlement activity. His timeline for any of these things to happen, however, is three years away. It would take only a very few bombings, moreover, to end the process and lead to full Israeli re-occupation—something which, strangely, many of the extremists would welcome.

All attempts to get the Department of State or the White House to spell out what steps they were taking to implement the president’s plan failed to elicit any comment except that there was no immediate plan to send the secretary to the region. State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher resorted to the phrase “wait and see,” giving the impression that Bush administration peace efforts are to be wrapped as a surprise gift to the world: Wait and see whether the secretary goes out. Wait and see if anyone but the security negotiator, CIA director George Tenet, succeeds in recreating a new Palestinian security force more acceptable to Washington and Israel. Wait and see if there is a foreign ministers’ conference on the Middle East. And wait and see if elections now slated for January 2003 result in the re-election of Arafat.

The speech also recalled events of 30 years ago, when the Israelis allowed local elections for mayor and councils in the occupied territories. The elections appeared free and fair, but the Israelis removed the freely elected officials as, one by one, they failed to do the bidding of the occupation authorities. Will a new and more democratic choice of leadership meet the same fate?

 

Peace Plan’s Deep Holes

The day after the presidential pronouncement, State Department correspondents put Boucher through the longest briefing he has ever held, asking pithy and penetrating questions, for which he had no real answers. One question referred to the president’s call for free and fair multi-party elections, presumably for both local and national leaders, for the new Palestine provisional, interim and wholly non-sovereign state. Did the president realize that the only other parties besides that of Arafat’s Fatah were Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine? Boucher’s answer, of course, was noncommittal, but the question remains: Will Hamas leaders, after their arrest by the new Palestinian security agencies, be banned from participation in the elections? No one in Washington knows.

Nor does anyone know if Arafat will be around to run in these free elections. Or, if he wins, whether top U.S. officials again will open a dialogue with him. They certainly hope the answer is no, however.

Will the ghost of Arafat, if it comes to that, haunt the Middle East for decades to come? Boucher immediately denied that there was anything in the speech aimed at any particular personality. The fact that President Bush had never mentioned Arafat by name provided the necessary cover for that denial. No one, however, believed it was not very personal and very much aimed at removing Arafat from the scene.

Off the record, a State Department official also claimed that two-thirds of the speech had been drafted within the Department, lending credence to the suspicion that “those Arabists in the State Department,” in the words of Oliver North, had been responsible for the few words (about 137) reminding Israel that it had responsibilities, too.

 

Arab, Palestinian Reaction

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher, representing the only two Arab countries to have signed peace agreements with Israel, weighed in with a positive spin on the speech: that it at least marked an end to non-involvement by George W. Bush and his administration. They neither approved nor criticized the proposed change in leadership for the Palestinians. Mubarak made the point that Bush had not mentioned Arafat. A spokesperson for Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia issued a moderate welcome for the proposed vision.

These lukewarm endorsements of the president’s speech by moderate Arab leaders, however, seemed to place them even further from their own populace, who reportedly were calling the plan exactly what it appears to be—invented in Tel Aviv.

The Palestinian pessimists were quoted as writing off the Bush plan entirely, as a component of Israel’s plan forever to remain in “Judea and Samaria.” Among the optimists—and they were few—the speech was described as an opportunity to have the Americans fully involved, with a timeline of three years before a state of some kind is born. Realists among the Palestinians said that one should pay no attention to what Bush said. According to this latter view, Palestinians should join in political parties or movements, decide to oppose the occupation with all nonviolent means, and decide on how best to reach the goal of ending the occupation. The realists were quoted as saying that the Bush proposal represented both an opportunity and a great danger.

If the administration’s intention was to make the situation murky, giving the Republicans more time until after the November elections, it succeeded. Like the fable of the blind men describing an elephant, the plan could be interpreted in many ways—although it was clearly highly favorable to Israeli interests in staying in the territories, refusing to accept refugees, and establishing borders not on the 1967 armistice line. Bush not only did not mention Arafat, he also made no reference to the Arab League/ Prince Abdullah proposal adopted in Beirut. Instead, the president called for normalization of relations with Israel, but not for full implementation of U.N. Resolution 242, land for peace. His words were an open invitation to Israel to use any and all military force to reduce the Palestinians to something like complete submission. The president’s vision, it must be said, is not a pretty sight. q

Eugene Bird, a retired foreign service officer, is president of the Council for the National Interest and diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Report.

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