US diplomats take cautious line as they wait for news

WASHINGTON -- American Middle East diplomacy, nearly dormant during the final months of the presidential campaign, sprung into action yesterday as State Department and White House officials grappled with how the United States should respond in the event of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

In a test case of how willing the second term of the Bush administration will be to engage with Palestinian leaders, officials left unanswered several key questions: who -- if anyone -- should be sent to Arafat's funeral, how the United States can best support the rise of a moderate, responsible leadership to replace him, and what can be done to ensure that a violent power struggle does not break out as Israel plans to pull out of a post-Arafat Gaza.

Officials said yesterday that no specific package of assistance or plan of action had been drawn up.

''I'll be honest. All the focus up until yesterday was on the election, quite frankly," said one US official who deals directly with the Middle East. He declined to be identified, even by agency, because of the sensitivity of the issue.

''We'll look at what needs to be done to promote a Palestinian leadership, and to reach out to Arab allies and Europeans. But the first thing will be to give the Palestinian people time to grieve and mark the passing of a man who in their eyes embodied their aspirations," he said.

State Department and National Security Council officials discussed the possibility of sending a representative to the funeral, which would signal a greater willingness to engage with Palestinian officials in the absence of Arafat. One senior US official said the funeral would be of limited diplomatic value.

''It will be a rogues' gallery," said the senior US official, who also declined to be identified. ''There is going to be a protracted power struggle, and for the moment there is nothing wrong in sitting back and seeing what shapes up. Until there is a successor regime, there's not much we can do."

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and William Burns, assistant secretary of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, left for the region last night for a previously planned trip to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, but it was unclear if either would be diverted to Israel or Gaza.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher declined to answer detailed questions about Arafat, 75, who is at a hospital in France with an undisclosed illness and was reported to be in and out of consciousness.

''We are following reports, keeping in touch with people, but I don't have any other information for you or confirmation of any of the variety of stories that are out there," he said.

Yesterday, President Bush was asked to respond to news reports, later denied, that Arafat had died.

''My first reaction is God bless his soul," Bush said. ''And my second reaction is that we will continue to work for a free Palestinian state that's at peace with Israel."

Early on in Bush's first term, many of his key advisers felt that Bill Clinton had wasted too much energy on the failed Middle East peace process and put too much trust in Arafat, who they say did not hold up his end of the bargain to rein in Islamic extremists. Earlier this year, an aide to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that on Powell's first day in office, Clinton called him and ''expressed all the frustrations with Arafat."

Clinton met more than a dozen times with Arafat, but Bush never hosted the Palestinian leader at the White House, and Vice President Dick Cheney refused to meet with him on a trip to the region in March 2002.

After Arafat's failure to control violence, and after an Iranian arms shipment to Palestinian territory was intercepted, Powell met with Arafat in April 2002 in the West Bank and told him, '' 'If you don't do things, control the violent groups, we may never talk again.' He was absolutely brutally frank with him," the Powell aide said.

In June of 2002, Bush called on the Palestinians to sideline Arafat, a man whose name had come to symbolize the desire for statehood but who had been dismissed by Israelis as someone who would never be a credible peace partner.

But critics said the United States and Israel failed to give enough support to Mahmoud Abbas, who was named the first prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2003. Abbas resigned in frustration after just four months in office, citing Arafat's refusal to give up real power.

The White House has been planning a meeting since this summer between Palestinian officials and European donors in ''an effort to give some credibility to the alternative leadership," and ''to demonstrate that the US has not walked away from the problem," said Edward S. Walker Jr., who was US ambassador to Israel from 1997 to 1999 and is now president of the Middle East Institute.

The meeting was supposed to take place in September, Walker said, but Palestinians canceled because of infighting. The new date is slated for next month, and Arafat's absence would bring a new significance to the event.

''It is hard for Israel to say they won't engage and it is hard for the president to say he won't engage because the primary reason they said they would not engage was Arafat," Walker said.

But all signs pointed to an abundance of caution on the part of the United States and Israel, where officials indicated yesterday that the Palestinians should get time to sort out their leadership.

''We all know the reality," the US official said. ''US support in this part of the world can be both a tool to help consolidate a leader's authority or it can be an issue that discredits them."

Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com.