April 24, 2002	Wednesday	Safar 10, 1423

WASHINGTON: No issue since Sept 11 has opened sharper divisions in Washington than President Bush’s handling of the brutal conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Neoconservatives and Christian conservatives (joined by some Democratic hawks) want Bush to pass the ammunition to Ariel Sharon as the Israeli prime minister sends tanks rumbling through the West Bank. But the internationalists in both parties want Bush to restrain Sharon and push harder for a peace conference with the Arab states.

This division roughly parallels the fault-lines inside the administration between the (internationalist) State Department and the centres of conservative thinking in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. Bush often looks ambivalent. His heart is usually with the conservatives. But his head tugs him toward the internationalists.

If the administration is going to regroup after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s frustrating tour through the Middle East, it will need more clarity. Bush is unlikely to set a sustainable course without choosing sides on at least five separate questions dividing the conservatives from the internationalists:

Is Israel’s war with the Palestinians the moral equivalent of America’s war against Al Qaeda?While sympathetic to the parallels between American and Israeli suffering, the internationalists believe the conservatives are stretching the comparison too far. “That is the height of simplicity,” says Senator Charles Hagel. To the internationalists, the key difference is that the Palestinians, however reprehensible their means, have legitimate aspirations toward their own state. Accordingly, the internationalists believe that peace in the region will only come through political negotiation; the conservatives, without explicitly saying so, imply that Israel can impose a victor’s peace through unrestrained military action.

Many around Bush believe his gut instinct is to see the Israeli struggle against terrorism as largely equivalent to his own. Yet Bush also appears to have accepted the internationalists’ conclusion that the conflict, at bottom, revolves around a political dispute over statehood for which there is no purely military solution.

Must peace in Israel precede war in Iraq? The internationalists believe it would be like pouring gasoline on a house fire to attack Iraq while Israel and the Palestinians are clawing at each other. “We cannot press forward on a regime change in Iraq with the fires burning in Israel, or we will risk finding ourselves isolated, Israel isolated,” Hagel says.

All the effort the administration has devoted to reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process suggests it fears the internationalists are right. But intimates believe that Bush accepts enough of the conservative logic that it is not likely he will wait forever for calm in Israel before moving against Iraq.

Can the US negotiate with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat? The conservatives say Arafat is a terrorist, and under the Bush doctrine, the US should cut off all contact with him. “Does President Bush still believe Yasser Arafat is a man with whom we can do business?” William Kristol and Robert Kagan, two leading neoconservatives, wrote recently.

The internationalists say that, while Arafat may be odious, no peace process is plausible today without him. Bush again seems torn between head and heart. The passion in Bush’s denunciations of Arafat probably signals the president’s deepest feelings. But Bush still allowed Powell to meet with the Palestinian leader. Even so, it’s clear that Bush wants to reduce Arafat’s influence by encouraging a greater role for other Arab nations in peace talks.

Is Saudi Arabia part of the solution? The internationalists believe Bush has to nurture the Saudi initiative offering Arab recognition of Israel in return for the Jewish state withdrawing to its pre-1967 borders. “We ought to at least try to boost that,” says Senator Richard G. Lugar, a dean of Republican internationalists.

On this one, the conservatives have not gained much ground. Privately, Bush may have strong words about Saudi toleration of extremism when he hosts Crown Prince Abdullah at his Texas ranch this week. But publicly, he has garlanded the Saudis with praise since Sept 11, and he is genuinely committed to advancing their peace initiative.

Should US troops police a peace agreement? Republican internationalists such as Hagel and Lugar hint that any eventual agreement between Israel and the Palestinians will require an international peacekeeping force that includes US troops. That prospect terrifies conservatives, who think American soldiers would become a magnet for suicide bombers.

It is also likely to be a hard sell with Bush, who is so resistant to deploying US peacekeepers that he does not even want to send any to protect the government the US fought to install in Afghanistan. Unless it can solve these other riddles, the White House is not likely to be worrying any time soon about how to manage the peace in the Middle East.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.