Hawks Control U.S. Mideast Policy

The confusing signals coming out of the Bush administration on the escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict reflect the latest struggle between the radical hawks -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney -- and the realpolitiks of Secretary of State Colin Powell.

As in so many other major foreign-policy debates inside the administration, the radicals appear to be winning decisively, both because of the relative strengths of the major players and the effectiveness of a relentless media and pressure campaign waged by pro-Likud forces -- both within and outside the administration -- to tie Arafat to Bush's larger "war against terrorism."

For months, groups like the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have published, primarily through the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly, a steady drumbeat of articles attacking Arafat and his Arab allies, denigrating Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's peace proposals, and pressing the administration to avoid the temptation to rein in Sharon.

As Sharon's tanks launched their siege of Palestinian leader's Yasir Arafat's heaquarters in Ramallah last week,the Journal wrote,"The only exit now...is to let the two sides confront each other until they decide they have no choice but to talk again. This means letting Israel defend itself against the kind of terror that Mr. Bush would never tolerate if it took place in New York. If that includes the exile of Mr. Arafat, so be it."

While Bush has not yet endorsed Arafat's exile, virtually all of the administration's other actions appear consistent with the Journal's urgings.

The Bush administration -- apart from its apparently hypocritical vote in the U.N. Security Council early Saturday morning for a resolution calling for Israel to withdraw from Ramallah -- stood firm against increasingly desperate appeals from Arab and European allies to intervene and refused to call on Israel to end its rapidly expanding military offensive in the Palestinian territories.

Bush himself has focused virtually entirely on Palestinian "terrorism" as the cause of the current crisis, adopting wholesale the viewpoint and rhetoric of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Analysts, including many in the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), say Bush has ignored Sharon's own months-long record of provocation and over-reaction.

"Each period of Palestinian restraint was greeted with Israeli assassinations, home demolitions or incursions into Palestinian territory," wrote Jackson Diehl, a Mideast veteran in the Washington Post last week. "Each terrorist attack launched by Arafat's extremist rivals was answered by devastating Israeli assaults on Arafat's own security forces."

Indeed, as the Post observed Tuesday, five days into Israel's biggest military campaign on the West Bank since 1967, "the only daylight between American and Israeli positions appears to be over whether Arafat himself should be considered a terrorist."

While Sharon has denounced him as "an enemy of Israel (and) the entire free world," Bush continues to insist that Arafat remains the only Palestinian who can negotiate peace and stop the suicide bombing.

But Bush's concern for Arafat's welfare and status -- expressed in the U.N. vote, Cheney's highly conditional offer to meet Arafat last month,, and his much-touted appeal to Sharon to let the Palestinian leader attend last week's Arab League Summit in Beirut --- appears increasingly to be merely a public relations ploy for consumption by anxious foreign leaders who see Sharon's attempts to crush the Palestinian "terrorist infrastucture" as not only futile, but potentially explosive for regional stability.

The administration's actions have instead given Sharon an effective green light -- similar to the carte blanche issued twenty years ago by the Reagan administration to the then-defense minister Sharon, allowing him to invade Lebanon, going all the way into the suburbs of Beirut.