WASHINGTON, 27 April — Thursday’s summit between President Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah turned out be a meeting of minds rather than a clash of wills — as the US press billed it. The get-together at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas went two hours over the scheduled three-hour conference.
Abdullah’s main mission with Bush, according to Adel Al-Jubair, the crown prince’s foreign policy adviser, was to “make sure that President Bush is aware” of the level of anger in the Middle East and the Arab world over what is seen “as the US unwillingness or inability to control Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.”
The two leaders are said to have found common ground in their deep religious beliefs. “They talked about faith and the importance of faith and the difficult jobs they have,” an administration official said on background. “The Saudi crown prince is a man who comes across as honorable and honest, a man who has a deep desire to do better for his people and for the region, who understands his deep responsibilities as the keeper of Islam’s holiest sites.”
After the initial meeting with senior aides from both sides — including Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the Saudi foreign and finance ministers, the two leaders then met alone, with only an interpreter for about an hour and 15 minutes.
“It’s especially important in this part of the world to have good personal relations,” said the senior administration official. “And as you probably know, it’s important to this president to have good personal relations.”
The question now is: What does this meeting mean for the future in the Mideast?
“It looks to me as thought they both were able to reassure each other that there is little problem, and that is a dangerous development,” Kathleen Christison, former political analyst on the Middle East at the CIA, told Arab News. “I think that Abdullah’s pledge not to use oil as a political weapon, diminishes, actually eliminates, any leverage he and the Arabs have over the US to induce a change of policy. And Bush, although he said he wants Israel to withdraw, has made it clear over the past few weeks that he has no intention of forcing Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
“It looks to me as though Bush has decided that his continued support for Israel is more important for his domestic political position than any effort to accommodate Arab demands on behalf of the Palestinians,” said Christison.
What happens next depends “entirely on Crown Prince Abdullah and the Egyptians. If they are not prepared to exert real pressure on the US, then I don’t think they are going to get any change of policy out of the Bush administration,” said Christison.
“I think the very idea that Bush could call Ariel Sharon a ‘man of peace’ in the wake of the atrocities committed by the Israelis at the Jenin refugee camp is an indication that he has no intention of leaning on, or forcing Sharon to move towards peace, to get out of the occupied territories, or even to end his siege of the Palestinian cities.”
Christison said that up until a few months ago, the administration was worried about losing support from their Arab allies, and that they would be subjected to a significant Arab pressure regarding Middle East policy.
“But the pressure hasn’t come. And as a result, I think the hawks around Bush have convinced themselves and Bush that there is no real danger to these Arab leaders from their people, and therefore we can get away with basically anything we want, which means we can allow Israel to do anything it wants.”
