PRESIDENT BUSH expressed fine sentiments about democracy and peace in the prelude to his current Mideast trip, and he is expected to repeat those themes when he addresses the Israeli Knesset today. Bush is to be commended for being the first US president to call explicitly for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state as the crux of a Mideast peace agreement. But the mere professing of good intentions will never be sufficient to make peace.
"I just don't see how the Middle East evolves without a Palestinian state that's free and democratic," Bush told Israeli journalists in the Oval Office Monday. He added that he has tried to "wade in and add some legitimacy to the two-state solution."
Yet Bush is indulging in revisionist history. His own errors have made attainment of that two-state solution much harder than it otherwise might have been.
For one, Bush and his less realistic advisers believed that Bill Clinton's failure to broker a peace accord at Camp David in the summer of 2000 showed that a president should steer clear of actively mediating between Israelis and Palestinians. For five or six years, Bush clung to the illusion that Clinton's peacemaking exertions had only made things worse - and indeed had led to the eruption of the so-called second intifada in September 2000.
Exacerbating matters was a related illusion: Bush's blind faith that elections could instill democracy in the region even where few of the other preconditions for it existed. Hence the boomeranging policy of Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who demanded that Palestinian legislative elections be held in January 2006 - against the advice of Israeli officials and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas alike. And when the Islamist movement Hamas won a parliamentary majority with less than 44 percent of the popular vote, thanks to the corruption and incoherence of the secular Fatah party, Bush sought to punish Palestinians for electing the wrong leaders.
Bush's chain of mistakes continues today with his refusal to countenance diplomatic contacts with either Hamas or Syria. Bush is holding to this position, even though Israel has itself been conducting indirect discussions with both Hamas and Syria.
The best thing that can be said for Bush's current mission to the Mideast is that it may make the peacemaking task of his successor a little less daunting. That successor cannot afford to repeat Bush's blunders.
