WASHINGTON: The inauguration of George W. Bush last year raised hopes in the Middle East that he would repeat one of his father’s greatest achievements: using forceful and creative US diplomacy to drag Israelis and Palestinians away from a steadily worsening conflict and into a peace process. Instead, it now looks as if the Israeli-Palestinian fighting will be remembered as the Yugoslavia of this Bush administration - a dangerous situation that, through timidity and wilful inaction, the US allowed to become a catastrophe.

The Balkans are the main foreign policy blot on the first Bush administration’s record: By refusing to take the relatively modest steps that could have checked Serbian aggression in 1991, Bush opened the way for years of devastating bloodshed. Now, as Israelis and Palestinians slaughter each other with a ferocity unimaginable only 15 months ago, this Bush administration looks to be haunted by a similar failure in the Middle East. Though Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon brought on their war, so did the administration’s irrational insistence on retreating to the sidelines in a region where the US has been an indispensable broker for decades.

It was not until last week that Vice President Dick Cheney finally pronounced a truth that should have been the administration’s starting point: that “left to their own devices, the Israelis and Palestinians have been unable to resolve” their conflict. Cheney’s belated acceptance that “there isn’t anybody but us” to make peace is not a revelation. It is, in fact, something that the Bush administration heard not only from its predecessors but from its own policy experts and from friendly governments around the world all through last year. Yet, over and over, the implacable answer was the same: “We can’t want peace more than the parties themselves,” Secretary of State Colin Powell pronounced on his first visit to Al Quds, a year ago this month.

Powell, a catalyst of US failure in Yugoslavia, has once again cut a figure of timidity and impotence in the face of a critical challenge. Incredibly, the US secretary of state has returned to Israel only once in the past year, even as the death toll has mounted from the hundreds into the thousands. And in retrospect, that visit last June emerges as a key turning point on the way to the current disaster. At the end of the month, Powell finally scheduled a quick trip, while making it clear to the reporters on his plane that he had done so only to quiet the complaints from Arab and European governments.

Once there, Powell staked out a sensible position, calling for the implementation of the then-novel Mitchell cease-fire plan and international observers to monitor it. But he caved as soon as he met resistance from Ariel Sharon. By the time he left, Powell had abandoned the plan for monitors and signed on to the prime minister’s maximalist demand that there be seven weeks of absolute calm - not counting Israeli assassinations of Palestinian militants - before the most basic of confidence-building measures could be implemented.

There, two months before Sept 11, the administration committed itself to an unworkable strategy. It failed to take the two harder steps that might have made that tactic work. First, it refused to offer any vision of a serious political process, like the Madrid peace conference organized by th the first Bush administration,that might have given the Palestinian peace camp leverage over Arafat. Even more important, President Bush refused to pressure Sharon, ignoring and sometimes even blessing his increasingly destructive tactics.

Sharon proceeded to make a mockery of the pressure-Arafat plan. Each period of Palestinian restraint was greeted with Israeli assassinations, home demolitions or incursions into Palestinian territory; each terrorist attack launched by Arafat’s hardline rivals was answered by devastating Israeli assaults on Arafat’s own security forces. State Department spokesmen sometimes protested, but the White House did and said nothing.

In mid-December, the administration once again abandoned any pretence of intervention, withdrawing envoy Anthony Zinni. Even Sharon’s all-out offensive this weekend has failed to prompt a serious response.

No amount of US effort likely would have produced a peace settlement between Arafat and Sharon, since neither man really wants one. But the example of the first Bush administration shows what could have been done. Confronted with the same Arafat and Yitzhak Shamir, George H. W. Bush and his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, responded with a vision - the Madrid conference - and used the full power of US influence to get both sides there. There was not a breakthrough right away, but talks began, violence tailed off, and two years later, Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed a partial peace accord.

Why has the younger Bush rejected his father’s policy? Some in and outside the administration cite an overreaction to the Clinton administration, which escalated US involvement in the Middle East still further but failed to produce a settlement.

Others suspect that Bush sees his father’s heavy pressure on Israel as a mistake that helped cost him re-election, and consequently is resolved never to be caught leaning on Sharon. Either way, this president’s decision to disengage is beginning to look like an error of historic proportions. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.