Carter Too Played a Part

He and Vance shook things up in a helpful way

After years of playing the indispensable intermediary in the Middle East, the U.S. seemed to be just another bystander during Anwar Sadat's sacred mission to Jerusalem. Nonetheless, concludes TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, the Carter Administration deserves credit for being a catalyst in the process leading up to the historic visit. Talbott's assessment:

No one in Washington could claim to have foreseen, much less suggested, Sadat's spectacular gesture. Word of his willingness to go to Jerusalem caught the Administration utterly by surprise. When Sadat stepped on the podium in the Knesset to deliver his speech, Jimmy Carter's chief troubleshooter for the Middle East, Cyrus Vance, was airborne at 30,000 ft. off the coast of South Carolina heading for a long-scheduled visit to Argentina.

Nevertheless, Carter, Vance and their colleagues contributed significantly, if not always deliberately, to the atmosphere that made the Sadat-Begin summit possible. Whatever faux pas he committed along the way, the President succeeded in getting two of the principals in the conflict to lift their eyes from procedural details and ponder the prospect of a final, comprehensive settlement. From the outset of his Administration, Carter had made clear that the old step-by-step approach employed so effectively by Henry Kissinger was in danger of becoming a treadmill, and that haggling over credentials, timetables and terminology had become an excuse for not facing the basic issues.

Carter has been criticized unduly for the way he has revised the vocabulary of the dispute. Israelis and their supporters in the U.S. have been especially incensed by his repeated use of the phrase "legitimate rights of the Palestinian people." Carter chose not to accept the standing taboo on the term, which, as used by many Arabs, is a code word for the creation of an independent Palestinian state bent on the destruction of Israel. He recognized that it was sad testimony to the rarefied and hopeless level of the Middle East debate if he were prohibited from saying that 1) the Palestinian people exist, and 2) they have legitimate rights. In his sometimes unorthodox use of language, Carter helped induce others to take a fresh look at the hidebound diplomatic formulas. In short, he shook things up in a salutary way.

Vance too helped create a political environment conducive to new initiatives by the Middle Eastern leaders. In his trips to the area and in his home-front version of shuttle diplomacy between Washington and the United Nations, he established himself as an honest broker, trusted by both sides. In his methodical, patient, lawyerly fashion, he led his Arab and Israeli counterparts through a hard-headed analysis of the political and territorial issues dividing them. The result was a clearer appreciation that traditional confrontation tactics, combined with a reliance on outside mediators, had run their course, and that the time had come for bold steps by the principals themselves.

Much has been made of Israel's neuralgic reaction to the joint U.S.-Soviet declaration on the Middle East that Vance and Andrei Gromyko hammered out in late September. What has been less noted is that the same statement also upset Sadat, since he has at least as much to fear from Soviet involvement in the Middle East as the Israelis do. The statement was a reminder that if the leaders in the region did not come to grips with their problems, they just might face a settlement imposed, in part, by their least favorite superpower.

Finally, much as he is missed by many foreign statesmen, the very absence of Kissinger from the picture this year was a factor in setting the stage for last week's historic meeting in Jerusalem. For better or for worse, and it was mostly for the better, Kissinger dominated the diplomacy of the region by the sheer force of his personality and the power he wielded so skillfully. No one in the Carter Administration has come close to taking his place That, too, may now be for the better, because it has left a vacuum of statesmanship that the politicians in the area must fill. Sadat--and, to a lesser but still laudable extent, Begin--has gone a long way toward meeting that challenge.

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