Why Bush Had To Act

By Romesh Ratnesar

The war on terror had been going so well for George W. Bush that he threw a little party last week, inviting 179 of America's closest allies to the White House for a sun-soaked pageant of remembrance and resolve. On the six-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush thanked the "mighty coalition of civilized nations" for joining the war's first phase in Afghanistan and rallied them for the next one. "We're winning," he said.

Self-congratulation has rarely had a shorter half-life. Within hours, Bush's plans to go global with the war on terror were crowded out by new images of violence from the Middle East, where the endless fight between Israelis and Palestinians plunged once more into the abyss of total war. Televisions in the White House and around the world showed 40 tanks and 100 armored personnel carriers rumbling into the West Bank town of Ramallah; Israeli troops blindfolding Palestinian teenagers and machine-gunning Arab homes; an Arab mob executing a suspected Israeli collaborator, then hanging his body by the feet; mothers wailing over their dead children. By the time the chairs had been cleared and the 179 flags removed from the South Lawn, at least 27 were dead from Israeli raids into Palestinian-held territory. The Middle East had crashed Bush's party.

After 18 months of carnage, nearly every sidewalk in the Holy Land seems to be stained red, but it took last week's fighting--the most massive Israeli search-and-destroy operation in 20 years, carried out in retaliation for a numbing wave of suicide attacks against Israeli citizens--to make Bush realize that he could ignore the crisis no longer. Late last week intensified U.S. diplomacy helped produce a potential opening, as the two sides were considering a meeting that might lead to a cease-fire.

Bush has spent his presidency avoiding Bill Clinton's policy of hands-on, round-the-clock engagement in the Middle East, instead allowing the adversaries to settle scores for themselves. But with the death toll now past 1,500--higher than that of the first intifadeh, which lasted from 1987 until 1993--U.S. intervention has become a strategic necessity. The conflict threatens to derail the Administration's plans to open the next phase in the war on terror--in particular, its desire to take on Iraq. If Bush were to allow the escalating combat between the Israelis and the Palestinians to explode into a full-blown war that sucks in neighboring states and inflames the Arab world, America's campaign against terror wouldn't get much further than the caves of Afghanistan.

No U.S. official was more jolted by the new reality than Dick Cheney, dispatched by Bush on an 11-country road show last week through the Arab world to promote the Administration's plans to force a showdown with Iraq. The Vice President is known as a first-class listener, able to convey that others are being taken seriously instead of being gamed. He has never needed those skills more. From London to Amman to Cairo, Cheney was drummed with the same angry refrain: the U.S. must intervene in the conflict now, demand that Ariel Sharon pull all his troops out of Palestinian-held land and forcibly drag the two sides into something resembling a cease-fire. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who receives $2.8 billion in U.S. aid a year, presented Cheney with a litany of alleged Israeli abuses against Palestinian civilians. "This is topping our agenda because it is the core of all the turmoil," says an Egyptian official. And until it's resolved, Cheney's Arab hosts informed him, the U.S. won't get their help against Iraq. Senior Administration officials worked hard to contain their dismay as the Israeli-Palestinian issue trampled the Vice President's agenda. At a joint press conference in Yemen with Cheney and President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni leader lambasted Israel and opposed U.S. action against Iraq. But when a U.S. interpreter briefed reporters on Saleh's remarks, he omitted the harsh details. U.S. officials blamed Sharon for inciting the Arabs just as Cheney was trying to woo them. "Let's just say," a senior official said, "that he did not coordinate his actions with us."

The Administration's desire to keep the Cheney trip on track was partly responsible for last week's diplomatic offensive, which featured the strongest criticisms of Israel by any U.S. Administration in more than a decade. By the weekend Cheney aides were scrambling to arrange a meeting between the Vice President and Palestinian officials. An Administration official told TIME that Bush decided to send special envoy Anthony Zinni back to the region partly because "there was a danger that the violence could hijack the Cheney trip. We thought it was useful to show we were dealing with all these issues." After privately chiding Sharon for his campaign against Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, the U.S. last week openly denounced his incursion into Ramallah. "The Israelis crossed a line," says a senior Administration official. Secretary of State Colin Powell threatened to cancel Zinni's mission if Sharon did not pull back from all the territories occupied in recent weeks. The President chastised Sharon during a press conference Wednesday, saying the Israeli offensive was "not helpful" to the still moribund peace process.

To Israeli hard-liners, Sharon's moves last week were necessary responses to a Palestinian terrorist threat that has grown in scope and audacity--and were no more ruthless than Washington's war against al-Qaeda. Israeli leaders wonder how Washington expects them to do business with Arafat, who only two years ago rejected a Clinton-brokered deal that would have given Palestinians 90% of the occupied territories, and instead launched the latest intifadeh. Both Arabs and Israelis suspected Bush of expediency: the President didn't pay much attention to their war until it impinged on his war.

But with so much daily bloodshed, the conflict's victims are less interested in questioning American motives than in seeing the killing stop. Zinni, a retired four-star Marine general who once commanded U.S. troops in the Middle East, arrived in Jerusalem Thursday to get both sides to act on the so-called Tenet plan, named for CIA chief George Tenet, who negotiated it last June. The plan sets out steps meant to lead the two sides to a cease-fire. Diplomatic sources told TIME that Zinni is proposing to put CIA monitors in Palestinian Authority jails and offices on a full-time basis and provide both sides with technical surveillance devices to ensure compliance with the cease-fire requirements in the Tenet plan. A cease-fire would give war-weary Israelis and Palestinians some breathing space, but a lasting political settlement isn't in sight.

The U.S. hasn't yet thrown its weight behind the most ballyhooed recent peace initiative--Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's offer of normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab states in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from all land seized in the 1967 war. Some version of the proposal will almost certainly be endorsed at next week's Arab summit in Beirut, but squabbling between Syria and the Saudis over the language of the plan could dilute it. While Abdullah says he is offering "full normalization"--meaning official trade, political and cultural relations between nations--Syrian officials want to change the language to "complete peace," a far less generous phrase that would remain unpalatable to Israel. Though Bush expressed tentative agreement with the Abdullah plan when it was unveiled last month, his Administration hasn't offered formal support for it. Said a senior White House aide: "I've never been sure if the Crown Prince intended this to go as far as it has."

Even so, Arab diplomats say the plan has already had an impact, simply by encouraging the U.S. to rejoin the search for peace. But not all the fighters are ready to lay down their guns. In Gaza a remote-controlled bomb packed with C-4 explosive blew up an Israeli Merkava tank, killing three soldiers. Also last week Israel's Shin Bet security service foiled three separate bombing plots set to coincide with Zinni's arrival. In one incident near the Jewish settlement of Rimonin, Israeli forces blew up a car carrying an alleged suicide bomber on his way to Jerusalem.

The Israeli army's push into the West Bank and Gaza was massive but brief; by Saturday Sharon had withdrawn his forces from most of the West Bank. But few terrorist leaders appear to have been caught or killed. In Ramallah and Tulkarem, Israeli soldiers arrested 100 Palestinians who were on their wanted list but not the main militants, who apparently fled as soon as they heard the tanks outside their refugee camps. An Israeli raid on the sprawling camp in Jabalya turned up at least 10 workshops manufacturing Kassam II rockets, which Hamas has used against Israeli soldiers and civilians. Gunmen in Palestinian-held Bethlehem have taken to hiding by day in Manger Square, across from the Church of the Nativity, which sits on the place where Jesus was born, before venturing out to attack Israeli troops by night. The gunmen know it is the one place Israel wouldn't dare send its tanks, for fear of angering the world's Christians. The enemy's determination has dispirited Israeli troops. "We can conquer the whole West Bank with no problem," says an Israeli officer. "The question is, what do we do then?"

Whether Bush fully commits his office's prestige to helping the two sides end the suffering depends on how the President resolves deep divisions within his Administration. Moderates, led by Powell, have long pushed Bush to wade in deeper, arguing that inaction in the face of spiraling violence jeopardizes American credibility in the region. Bush's willingness to criticize Sharon and his decision to send Zinni back to the region emboldened the moderates, who last week scored a victory by securing White House support for a U.N. Security Council resolution endorsing the creation of a Palestinian state, the first time the U.S. has voted for such a resolution. But Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have long opposed deep U.S. engagement in the peace process. As Time reported in February, Cheney and Rumsfeld argued during a meeting of the President's national-security team in early January that the U.S. should sever ties to Arafat. Though Bush rejected that proposal, insiders say Cheney is still the key White House voice on the Middle East. Whether last week's shifts harden into a long-term commitment hangs on how the Vice President responds to the reception he received on his trip. "He's getting an earful," a U.S. official told TIME, "but how that will affect his thinking only he and the President will know."

In recent months a combination of remarkable developments--the military supremacy demonstrated in Afghanistan, Bush's vertiginous approval ratings, continued public support for the war and the relative lack of opposition overseas--has persuaded Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to broaden the scope of military operations and planning. The idea isn't just to shut down al-Qaeda sanctuaries in places like the Philippines, Yemen and Georgia but also to target and remove dangerous regimes developing weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the U.S. or its allies. For proponents of this new, more assertive foreign policy--premised on the use of military power to destroy potential threats to U.S. security before they become all too real--Iraq is the most obvious place to start.

The road to Baghdad, though, leads through the nervous capitals of the Arab world. Saddam Hussein is widely reviled by neighboring regimes, but many worry that supporting a U.S.-led war to remove him while the Palestinian struggle continued to blaze would invite popular revolt in their own streets. The Administration's warnings to Iraq have rattled officials in the region. "There is basically this attitude, 'We can do anything,'" says an Arab diplomat. "I hope that will change." Last week Cheney tried to modify that perception through his self-effacing emollience. "Everybody thinks we're coming and saying, 'Let's whack Saddam,' but that's not how you do business here," a senior official accompanying Cheney said. "It's 'Here's why this is a threat. Here's why you're vulnerable.'"

U.S. officials say that leaders briefed by Cheney acknowledged that Saddam and his weapons are significant threats. But none seem ready to go to war to get rid of them. At a press conference after meeting with Cheney, Mubarak sought to slow any U.S. momentum toward war by suggesting that an Arab League effort to restart talks between the U.N. and Baghdad might get weapons inspectors back into Iraq--which could indefinitely forestall a U.S. attack. What has caught Administration officials flat-footed has been the Arab insistence on "linkage": making support for a U.S. campaign against Iraq contingent on a redoubled U.S. effort to secure a comprehensive Middle East peace deal. "We've been sending dispatches for a year telling them that the only thing the people care about here is the Palestinian question, but they've ignored it," says a U.S. official in Cairo. "There's not a single Egyptian who would be willing to say O.K. on Iraq unless they see a change in the way the U.S. deals with the Palestinians." Says a U.S. official in Amman: "All I know is if we invade Iraq, I'll be on the first evacuation plane out of here, because this place is going to explode."

The message may be getting through, if only because the Israeli-Palestinian problem has so plainly intruded on the Administration's still evolving plans for Iraq. Though the most boisterous hawks think the U.S. could take out Saddam without the participation of Arab states, military strategists told TIME that even modest war strategies hinge on U.S. access to Arab bases and airspace. "All our options require some type of help from countries in the region," says a U.S. Central Command planner. The strategic logic is simple, says a civilian official in the Pentagon: "The worse things get between Israel and the Palestinians, the fewer options we have with Iraq."

The Iraq issue may ultimately have been what pulled the U.S. back into the Middle East fray, but there are other reasons for the U.S. to get involved. Since 1967, Washington has been the only effective mediator in the region. America's security, now more than ever, demands that the U.S. take steps toward bringing an end to the parlous conflict. Throughout the Muslim world, sympathy for the Palestinians and antagonism toward Israel continues to fuel extremist hatred of the U.S. Re-engagement in the peace process will not extinguish the sources of Muslim rage, but it might be a start. And it would allow Bush to show that the U.S. is prepared to tackle problems that don't bend to military solutions.

--Reported by Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington; James Carney with Cheney; Matt Rees and Ahron Klein/Jerusalem; Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem; and Scott Macleod/Cairo

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington; James Carney with Cheney; Matt Rees and Ahron Klein/Jerusalem; Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem; and Scott Macleod/Cairo