Review & Outlook: Bush's Mideast Box

Wall Street Journal-August 2, 2001
Editorial

Watching the drama in the Middle East conveyed to the world in 
print, televised images and commentary, we find ourselves 
feeling a certain sympathy for the predicament in which 
President Bush finds himself.

Here is a President who took office just as Israel handed power 
to a man, in Ariel Sharon, with a remarkably similar set of 
tough and pragmatic instincts. It seemed to us then that Mr. Bush 
had arrived at the sensible conclusion that it was time to let 
Mr. Sharon and the Israelis deal with an obviously intractable 
Palestinian opposition according to their own best judgement
about the region's realities.

No sooner was Mr. Bush in office, though, than he found himself 
stumbling into a trap that had been laid by President Clinton in 
the form of the Mitchell Commission. It was launched in the 
floundering of the last days of a failing peace process in an 
effort to preempt the new Administration. Mr. Bush was either 
too new to the job or too poorly advised to send the commission 
packing. Quickly, its formulas had been adopted by a State 
Department again tilting to the Arab camp.

Often when Mr. Bush has tried to do the right thing, his life 
has been complicated by the Texas oil patch. This culminated 
last month when his father, the former President, telephoned 
Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and tried to assure him 
that his son's "heart is in the right place" when it comes to 
the Middle East and that his son was "going to do the right 
thing." According to the report in the New York Times, the elder 
Mr. Bush actually placed the call while his son was in the room. 
The call, warm and familiar in tone, was, according to one 
Administration official, "designed to encourage Abdullah to 
think of the new President as having a grasp of the Middle East 
similar to that of his father."

Now, in a drumbeat of newspaper articles and op-ed features, 
the most left-wing of the advocates of appeasement are trying to 
convince Mr. Bush the Younger that blame for the failure of the 
peace process attached not so much to the Palestinians as to 
the Israelis and the Clinton Administration on the eve of a 
Presidential election. The other day there was a long news report
in the New York Times so limited in its sources to the left-wing 
side of this story that it brought a rare public upbraid from 
the Times' own William Safire. It's enough, as we say, to wring 
from us sympathy for the President.

So let us just say that this is a moment for Mr. Bush to keep 
his head and trust his original instincts. The reason that the 
Europeans and the old-guard Democrats like George Mitchell, not 
to mention hard-left advocates of the peace process, are trying 
so frantically to hector Mr. Bush back to the idea of negotiations 
at this time is that they can see the train has left the station. 
Particularly for the left, the collapse of Oslo is a bitter event, 
allowing all the world to see that for the Palestinian leadership 
the process has been little more than the modern equivalent of a 
show trial.

Everyone seems to have been assuming that there would be a final 
chance to do something before war started in the Middle East. 
Well, it turns out that Mr. Sharon is not going to launch a 
Normandy-invasion style attack on the Palestinian Authority. 
He comprehended from the first that the danger was not that the 
situation would degenerate into war as that word is normally 
understood. Israel was already in a war. It is a continuation, 
he has been emphasizing lately, of the war of Independence from 
1948, when the Arabs rejected the United Nations compromise and 
attacked the fledgling Jewish state.

With the backing of a national unity government -- the classic 
war formula in Israel -- Mr. Sharon has been pressing his 
counterattack with a subtlety and shrewdness that has confounded 
those who like to caricature him for the invasion of Lebanon. 
Suddenly, enemy terrorists are being brought down en-route to 
their mischief, or as they are assembling bombs, or plotting
bombings, rather than in old-style revenge killings. There have 
been few if any large military maneuvers. This is war waged in 
twilight, not unlike the Cold War. Subtle, but no less deadly.

To Mr. Bush we would say that this, like the Cold War, is not 
a struggle in which he is going to want to be remembered by 
history as being a neutralist. Despite the murky formulations 
of the left, there is a right and wrong in this struggle, 
which at bottom is an attack on the West and on the idea of
democracy. Hard as it is to accept, the differences with the 
Palestinian regime -- a Soviet-era holdover without a democratic 
mandate -- may just not be bridgeable.