Not-so-benign neglect
THE MOST noteworthy aspect of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's shuttling last week from Beirut to Israel to Rome and then back to the Middle East might have been its novelty. Nowhere has the Bush administration's reluctance to negotiate with nasty antagonists and prickly allies been more apparent than in the Mideast. And nowhere is America's unflagging diplomatic engagement more indispensable.
It is often said of the Mideast peace process that it resembles a shark: If it does not continue in motion, it will perish. The overlapping crises Rice is now trying to get under control have taken their current menacing form, in large part, because President Bush and advisers addicted to illusions of unilateralism have abdicated America's role as an irreplaceable mediator in the Mideast.
Bush and his advisers have scorned former President Clinton for plunging into the details of Mideast deal-making six years ago at Camp David. With questionable logic, they argue that a president squanders his aura by descending into the minutiae of the disputes between Israelis and Palestinians.
It is true that Clinton failed to close the deal between Yasser Arafat and Israel's prime minister at the time, Ehud Barak. And it is also true that Clinton made costly mistakes, both in his role as honest broker at Camp David and in mishandling an effort earlier in 2000 to mediate a peace accord between Israel and the former Syrian ruler Hafez Assad.
Nevertheless, Bush's refusal to risk political capital in Mideast mediation is having calamitous consequences. Bush refused to talk to Arafat because Arafat lied to the White House about a shipment of arms destined for Palestinian gunmen. Arafat, however, lied to nearly everyone. And though it was always hard to negotiate with Arafat, if a deal had been struck before he died, it might well have prevented the ascendancy of the Islamist movement Hamas -- along with the constant warfare and constant suffering that prevail today in Gaza and the West Bank.
If Bush had insisted that Ariel Sharon at least go through the motions of negotiating an agreement with Abbas on Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas would not have been able to take credit for driving Israel out of Gaza by force of arms.
History cannot be scrolled backward, and there can be no certainty about what might have happened in the Mideast if Bush had not been seduced into passivity by a doctrine of refusing to negotiate with a select set of rogues, despots, and enemies. What is certain is the tally of disasters that have followed from Bush's diplomatic inertia.
A partial list of those disasters refutes the notion that a nation enjoying the unchallenged supremacy of America in the aftermath of the Cold War has no need to strike deals with troublesome adversaries. In the case of Iraq, Bush's failure to work out postwar understandings with the dictatorial regimes in Iran and Syria had foreseeable consequences: Sunni Arab jihadists were allowed to flow into Iraq from the West while Iranian agents and Revolutionary Guard operatives swarmed into Iraq from the East.
In the days after Saddam Hussein's regime was overthrown, intimidated rulers in Tehran and Damascus sent out feelers to Washington for postwar cooperation. The Iranians wanted a grand bargain that could have included mutually satisfactory arrangements not only in Iraq but on Gulf security, Iran's sponsorship of Hezbollah, the Iranian nuclear program, and lingering disputes over US sanctions and frozen Iranian assets.
Administration officials are not wrong to be suspicious of the Iranian theocrats -- and to abhor their abuse of human rights, their mockery of democracy, and their treatment of women, free-thinking intellectuals, and ethnic and religious minorities. Nonetheless, the Bush administration benefited from cooperation with Iran in the war that drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Iranian intelligence provided bombing targets during that war and Iran helped cobble together an interim, multi-ethnic Afghan government at an international conference in Bonn, Germany, after the war.
A comparably high price is being paid for Bush's refusal to cut a nuclear deal directly with the despotic regime in North Korea. Since Bush has been in office, North Korea has been able to process enough plutonium for eight to 10 nuclear weapons.
The folly of subcontracting America's Syria dossier to Arab states became all too obvious this week. There has been no US ambassador in Damascus for a year, and the effect of merely threatening Syrian ruler Bashar Assad without dealing with him has been to drive him into the tight embrace of Iran. Bush's Republican predecessors and their secretaries of state all cut deals with Bashar's ruthless father, Hafez Assad. James Baker, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger: They all acted upon the Don Corleone maxim to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
After more than five years in which Bush has sought to flout the unforgiving rules of statecraft, much of the world resembles a sorcerer's workshop left in the careless keeping of his apprentice. From Baghdad to Beirut and from Gaza to Pyongyang, Bush seems to have inadvertently ushered in a new world disorder.
