Powell seeking peace among ashes of hate

WASHINGTON — It was about the nearest a cautious and studiously unflappable soldier-diplomat gets to losing his cool. Was it “mission-impossible” to the Middle East, Gen. Colin Powell was asked yesterday, just before setting off for Israel. “I don’t like wallowing with pessimists,” flashed back the reply. “It is necessary for me to go.”

That word “necessary” sums up everything. The trip is necessary because, it is universally held, only the US can impose its will on the Israelis and Palestinians, in the throes of their worst fighting in decades. It is necessary too, if the Bush administration is to salvage moderate Arab support for what is assumed to be its prime goal in the region — evicting Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.

It is necessary, finally, to preserve Bush’s authority, and thus his prestige, at a moment when the three main parties to the conflict, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and those moderate Arab states, are all refusing to do what Washington tells them. But “necessary” also conveys all the pleasure of having a tooth pulled.

Duty has driven Gen. Powell to the region, as it has driven every recent US secretary of state before him; some, like him, having resisted to the last. Like them, he and President Bush knew that in the end he would have to go. But none of his predecessors faced quite as bleak a prospect.

Suicide bombers permitting, Gen. Powell may meet Arafat in his Ramallah compound. But that meager achievement does not alter the depressing reality: That the US has no alternative to dealing with a man who has lost virtually all credibility in Washington as a negotiating partner.

Belatedly too, the Bush team is coming to realize what most of the rest of the world has long understood — that Sharon’s answer to violence is simply more violence.

“After he’s finished, what next?” the proverbial “senior administration official” asked The Washington Post on Thursday. “The fear is that he knows no other way than being tough.”

However, even as that official spoke, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister, was doing the rounds here, peddling not compromise but even harsher remedies than those of Sharon: Deporting Arafat, an open-ended military operation to destroy the West Bank lairs of the attackers, and the construction of a physical wall along Israel’s border to protect it.

The fact remains that whatever Bush’s demands for an immediate withdrawal from the West Bank, his gut instinct lies with Israel. So too does that of Congress, where Netanyahu concentrated much of his efforts this week. So too do that of the conservative and Christian right, a key part of this president’s political base.

It was “imperative”, leading Christian groups said in an open letter to Bush Thursday, for the US “to stand with our friend and ally Israel as they attempt to defeat the same forces of terrorism that we have been battling since Sept. 11.”

But that is precisely Bush’s dilemma. He is learning another truth — however much he might wish it otherwise, the black and white “you’re either with us or against us” approach to Al-Qaeda and international terrorism cannot be applied to the infinite shades of gray of the decades-old crisis in the Middle East.

The president’s frustration is evident in the testy way he talks about it, leading some to wonder about the administration’s deeper commitment, whether it has the will to last the course. That perception does not makes Gen. Powell’s task any easier.

But somehow, the crisis must be defused, to free Bush’s hands for Iraq. Thus the talk of some dramatic new initiative that might kickstart negotiations on the thorniest final issues — the status of Jerusalem, the Israeli settlements, and the return of Palestinian refugees — even as the current fighting still rages.

Few people any longer dwell on the “Tenet plan” or the “Mitchell plan”, arduously crafted by George Tenet, the CIA director, and the former Senate majority leader George Mitchell to secure, respectively, a cease-fire and confidence-building measures that would lead to political negotiations.

Instead, the talk in the think-tanks and institutes that oil the wheels of Washington policymaking is of international conferences to elaborate a settlement, of UN resolution 242 of 1967 (now resurrected in the Saudi peace plan), of an international peacekeeping force to make a deal stick — this latter something the Israelis have always resisted tooth and nail.

It is what the French call, almost untranslatably, a fuite en avant, a “flight forward” — not retreating in the face of difficulty but leaping beyond it to confront an even greater difficulty in the hope the lesser one will disappear along the way.

But Powell is unlikely to make any such breakthrough this week. Perhaps the fighting will subside while he is there but even if it does it is likely to flare up later. This secretary of state may not like “wallowing with the pessimists”. He could find there is no choice.

(The Independent)