By <a href="mailto:gsamet@barak.net.il" class="tUbl2">Gideon Samet</a>
After the meeting of the odd couple, it will be a long time coming before any diplomatic moves can be resurrected. The couple is not odd because of Sharon. It is strange because it only took two days for an American president, with broad public support, to be frightened by his own utterances. He said one thing to Egyptian President Mubarak on Saturday and different things on Monday to Sharon. By doing so, he buried any chance for movement because the spirit of that meeting won't change before America goes into its congressional election season. Sharon and Arafat, each trapped by the other, are not the exclusive obstacles to an attempt to renew the negotiations. Mediator George Bush - powerful but a failure - is no less of a problem.
The New York Times yesterday expressed hope in its editorial that customs of hospitality and not failure of leadership made Bush emphasize such different messages in two days. Like most of the Western media, the newspaper supports a new move for prying the conflict out of the clutches of mutual refusal and bloodshed. It now hopes Bush will repair the damage in a policy speech the president is meant to deliver in two to three weeks. But that's a false hope. Shimon Peres is guessing, probably rightfully so, that the speech won't depart from reiterations of Bush's "vision" of a Palestinian state. It will mostly be cliches of goodwill.
This is a regrettable development in which Bush has become a Sharon clone in still another way. Once again it turns out that he also has another agenda - his political survival. A senior American official, highly knowledgeable about the administration's manners, told this writer it is doubtful that during his first term the president will allow himself to ignore the humiliation he suffered during the elections. Under the influence of a conservative Pentagon and under the threat of the Jewish community's so-called leaders - who echo the Israeli right wing - the president prefers not to rock the boat with too daring a diplomatic bid.
Nonetheless, his extreme caution during the talks with Sharon is indeed strange. He did not mention say a word about the settlements, for example. Every administration in the last two decades has adopted almost reflexively the position that the settlements are an "obstacle to peace." Every president since the pro-Israel Ronald Reagan could recite that in his sleep. There's something unformed about Bush's ability to speak in a consistent, clear and reasoned manner about complex issues like the Middle East. His record was not much better during last month's tour of Europe, with his aides being forced to use jet lag as an excuse for his rhetorical failures.
On Monday, too, the White House spokesman was quick to correct a simple statement that got away from Bush. Instead of speaking of a parallel process of reforms and the start of negotiations, the president adopted Sharon's formula, which conditions any negotiations on "another Palestinian Authority."
No less odd is the fact that Bush erased all efforts of his own envoys who spoke with Arafat and assumed their mission was meant to get the dialogue going between him and Sharon. He totally ignored the State Department and its head Colin Powell. And at the same time, he gave a resounding slap in the face to initiatives by the European Union, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The leader wishing for support turned a cold shoulder to the leading newspapers that have been pleading with him to behave differently.
This all adds up to embarrassing conduct. It would be only an American matter if it didn't damage the key players in a dangerous conflict. But the Monday meeting left a clear impression that it's almost a lost cause to change the president's position, whether he formulated it in his gut or his mind. Vigorous forces did not manage to prod the leader of the West. One must therefore turn to our local scene that is also finding it difficult to change the determined destructiveness of the local leader. If Bush in Sharon's clothing did anything useful this week it was in confirming the the need for the Labor Party to quit its coalition with the political right that detests any compromise with the Palestinians. The Labor alibi was that America would move Sharon? That excuse for staying in has also been erased
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