Urgent Calls for Peace in Mideast Ring Hollow as Prospects Dwindle

WASHINGTON —  Is the Middle East peace process dead, dying or in a coma?

In a public statement from his Texas ranch and in calls to Mideast and world leaders, President Bush used strong language Saturday to reaffirm America’s commitment to the process. And he pledged that U.S. envoy Anthony C. Zinni will stay in the region to try to mediate.

“I think it is very important for our country to provide an opportunity for discussion, an opportunity for people to come together,” Bush said. “So Gen. Zinni will stay there. He will stay there to continue to push for a process.”

But the words rang hollow to vast numbers at home and abroad. Prospects for ending the bloodshed or getting either side to talk about a cease-fire, much less peace, now seem slim to nonexistent, according to an array of experts and former U.S. officials.

“There is no peace process. There is only a war process,” said Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Israel until last summer.

“It reminds me of [Spanish dictator Gen. Francisco] Franco when he was brain dead but was kept breathing on resuscitation equipment until people figured out the succession,” said Augustus R. Norton, a Mideast expert at Boston University and author of several books on the region.

“The Mideast peace process launched in Oslo in 1993 has been brain dead for a long time,” Norton said. “But the vital signs in the corpse have been maintained to keep the fiction that there’s some possibility of a revival.”

Analysts and U.S. officials say Palestinian militants, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon share varying degrees of blame. But with yet another Palestinian suicide bombing Saturday along with fresh Israeli missile attacks on Arafat’s headquarters--and no new action by the United States--the Bush administration is also increasingly under fire for not doing enough to avert or manage the mounting crisis.

“While all this goes on, Bush fiddles in the White House or Texas, playing Nero as the Mideast burns,” Norton said. “It’s very sad.”

Bush is coming under fire even among his supporters.

“The supreme irony is that the greatest power the world has ever known has proven incapable of managing a regional crisis,” said Geoffrey Kemp, who ran Mideast policy at the National Security Council for the Reagan administration.

“A 2-year-old could have seen this crisis coming. And the idea that it could be brushed under the carpet as the administration focused on either Afghanistan or Iraq reflects either appalling arrogance or ignorance,” Kemp said.

He called the crisis a “wake-up call” comparable to the effect of the Sept. 11 attacks in turning around policy.

Others say that the United States now has few options and that the hard realities explain Bush’s limited actions and remarks.

“I’m not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but I suspect the reason is that he’s recognized that simply to insert himself into this mess without any real possibility of achieving any success is, in and of itself, dangerous, because it would demonstrate that in fact we don’t have any ability right now to control or affect events,” Lawrence S. Eagleburger, secretary of State during the administration of Bush’s father, said on CNN. “And I don’t think we do.”

Even with Zinni’s efforts in the region, others agree that the confrontation may be beyond U.S. intervention for now.

“It will probably have to play out until something so horrific happens that the United States and the international community will have to step in and stop it. Conflicts like this go into a stage of madness, as in Lebanon and Algeria, and this one is now entering that phase. It will have to play itself out,” predicted Judith Kipper, a director of the Mideast program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Eagleburger said the current crisis may be worse than the other “murderous . . . and tough” Mideast wars over the last half a century.

“I don’t think anybody else sees any clear way of getting out of this mess we’re in now. It could go on for a very long time,” he said.

And the potential consequences extend well beyond the Palestinian-Israeli crisis, many analysts warn. Eagleburger said the long-term danger is that the violence will spill over and have a “chilling effect” on the U.S. ability to pursue the broader war on terrorism.

The brewing backlash against the United States was visible Saturday in Kuwait, the oil-rich sheikdom liberated from Iraqi occupation by an international coalition mobilized and led by the United States in 1991. Kuwait and the U.S. remain pivotal diplomatic allies and commercial trading partners.

But 11 years after Kuwait was freed, about 4,000 demonstrators rallied at Flag Square in Kuwait City to denounce Israel and the United States. With the speaker of the Kuwaiti parliament and other top ministers present, the crowd shouted, “No god but Allah! America enemy of Allah!” and “Muslims, Muslims unite. . . ! Death to Israel, death to America!” the Reuters news agency reported.

In a reflection of shifting sentiments over the last 18 months, since the latest Palestinian intifada began, the crowd also roared, “America and Zionism are against the Muslim nation!” Rallying on behalf of the Palestinians and against the United States is particularly ironic because the Palestinians sided with Iraq, not the Kuwaiti monarchy, during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The administration can’t be blamed for the violence, but it can be faulted for missed opportunities during the last year and a half that have allowed the situation to spin out of control, said Indyk, who’s now at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

“The default position--which is not to be engaged as long as the conflict does not generate regional instability--has at various points along the way resulted in missed opportunities. And then at each stage it’s gotten harder and harder to intervene effectively,” he said.

Analysts point to a number of turning points that the United States failed to capitalize on. One was after the June bombing of a Tel Aviv discotheque, which killed 22 people, then the highest death toll in a single such incident since the current intifada began. The Bush administration showed little interest then in getting both sides to agree to a cease-fire plan worked out by CIA Director George J. Tenet. It was left dangling, analysts say.

The second missed opportunity was at year’s end, as the situation quieted down, after Zinni had failed to win an agreement and returned to Washington. Although U.S. officials insisted that the process was not moribund, Zinni’s three-week stay coincided with a huge upsurge in violence that left about 100 Israelis and Palestinians dead from suicide bombings and retaliation.

After that, the United States said it would not send Zinni back to the region until there was a lull in the violence indicating that both sides were ready to talk. The administration stuck to that assertion until Vice President Dick Cheney set out for the Mideast this month to explore Arab sentiment about U.S. interest in a regime change in Iraq.

The result, Kipper said, is that “the peace process is in a coma.”