REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Bush Bends
Now he'd better break Saddam.
President Bush bowed to pressure from Europe, the Arab world and most of the U.S. media yesterday by urging Israel to end its siege against Palestinian terrorists. This strikes us as a mistake, maybe even a large one, though it all might be redeemed if this helps Mr. Bush refocus the war on terror back on Iraq.
The immediate concern is that the President's renewed pressure on Israel will be perceived as rewarding terror. While his speech was at least free of the State Department's moral equivalence blather, Mr. Bush demanded that Israel make the larger concessions. He handed Yasser Arafat another tongue lashing but asked Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw his troops from the West Bank. In effect the U.S. once again rode to Mr. Arafat's political rescue.
To be sure, Mr. Sharon has had seven days to clean out Ramallah (though not Gaza), and he would have had to pull his troops back sooner or later. U.S. officials explain to us that they were worried that events were "spinning out of control," threatening other moderate Arabs (especially the King of Jordan) and perhaps even radicalizing the moderate Palestinians who haven't yet been murdered by the terrorists. Mr. Bush's speech did also at least recognize "Israel's right to defend itself from terror," which presumably means further military action if the suicide bombings continue.
Nonetheless, Mr. Bush has now committed his own prestige to solving the unsolvable Arab-Israeli conflict. While denouncing Mr. Arafat for failing to control terror, the President still props him up as the Palestinian Israelis are supposed to negotiate with. Mr. Arafat has never confronted terror, not even when he promised after Oslo, but we are supposed to believe that he will now that world pressure has forced Israel to back down one more time.
For the bombings to stop, Mr. Arafat will have to disband the terror wing of his own Fatah organization that he's spent the past 18 months building up. Syria and Iran will have to stop arming Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist bombing sources. And Egypt and the Saudis will also have to use their leverage on the Palestinians, especially by threatening to cut off their money. Just to repeat this list shows how preposterous it is.
All the more so if Colin Powell now wastes his own and American credibility by begging Mr. Arafat to cooperate. The only terms Mr. Sharon has set for resuming negotiations with Mr. Arafat is an end to the violence--hardly unreasonable. If Mr. Powell now waters even that basic demand down, as European elites and the State bureaucracy will insist, then the U.S. will truly be rewarding terror.
To know where that leads, just read Joel Brinkley's chilling interview with Hamas leaders on page one of yesterday's New York Times. Hamas leader Ismail Abu Shanab has the bit in his mouth, boasting that teenagers strapped to bombs are "their F-16" and that they are so much more effective now that they are using weapons-grade explosives and not just homemade bombs. "There are a lot of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews," says another Hamas ethnic-cleanser.
As for pressure from the broader Arab world, a meeting of 57 Muslim nations rejected a motion from Malaysia's Prime Minister to renounce suicide bombing. What risks getting lost here is the common U.S.-Israeli interest in making sure that suicide bombing doesn't succeed as a political tactic. The U.S. suffered suicide attacks of its own, recall, when those planes flew into the Pentagon and World Trade Center. There will be more against us if they work against Israel.
Which brings us to the one silver lining in yesterday's Presidential statement. Mr. Bush was blunt in calling other Mideast nations part of the terror problem for both Israel and the U.S. He mentioned Syria, Iran and Iraq by name. In the case of Iraq, he said its bounties ($25,000) for suicide bombers make it "guilty of soliciting murder of the worst kind."
This hints that Mr. Bush still knows that the real long-term solution in Palestine isn't in Jerusalem but in Baghdad. If yesterday's speech calms Palestine enough to let Mr. Bush refocus the war on Iraq, then (and only then) his bending will have been worth it.
Right now the suicide bombers think that time is on their side; the status quo will never convince them to stop. Only a seismic political change in the Middle East will show the Palestinians that they must come to terms with Israel's right to exist. A democratic pro-Western Iraq will do more for peace in Palestine than 100 trips by Colin Powell.
