April 7, 2002	Sunday	Muharram 23, 1423

NEW YORK, April 6: Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser at the time of the 1979 Camp David accords during the Carter presidency, has said in a newspaper interview that the Bush administration had “winked” at the current Israeli offensive and asserted that it was likely to make it more difficult to resume negotiations.

“I fail to see how plunging the Palestinian side of the equation into anarchy is a contribution to the peace process,” Brzezinski said. “That is what our policy amounts to,” Brzezinski said in the interview with the New York Times.

He suggested that a potential Middle East settlement be first drafted in Washington, then both sides be pressed to accept it and US peacekeepers be entrusted with the enforcement side.

But experts on Middle East are worried that Washington might have compromised its credibility by an unqualified support to the Jewish state and could hurt its efforts to get Arab and other Muslim nations to help eliminate the Al Qaeda network.

Already, Washington’s position is causing tensions with its Arab allies, and is sure to chill President Bush’s hopes of gaining support for strong action against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

“Basically, most of the world disagrees with the Bush administration,” in part because it’s unclear that Israeli military action will stop the suicide bombings, said Judith Kipper, a Mideast expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

So far the administration is holding to long-standing proposals to first cement a ceasefire and then begin talks that could lead to a negotiated settlement, the New York Times said in an analysis.

The issue is: should it continue to do so as violence rages?

THREE CHOICES: The United States has three basic choices, experts say. One is to give the Israelis a green light to evict Mr Arafat and dismantle the Palestinian Authority.

That approach is based on the assumption that Mr Arafat will never be a reliable negotiating partner and that Israel has no choice but to act alone to constrain terrorism.

A second approach _ essentially the administration’s current posture _ is to watch the Israeli military offensive from the sidelines, while cautioning them not to harm or evict Arafat. The hope is that the two sides, exhausted and bloodied, will eventually sit down with the administration’s special envoy, Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, and begin fresh talks on establishing a truce.

The two sides would then proceed to talks on political questions, guided by the recommendations of an international committee, headed by former Senator George J. Mitchell, which would aim at freezing Israeli settlements and taking other steps to ease the confrontation.

They would also open talks on a final accord that would create a Palestinian state to coexist peacefully with Israel.

A third approach _ one increasingly being proposed with different variations in Washington _ is to insist that political iss