March 4, 2003	Tuesday	Zul Hijjah 30, 1423

WASHINGTON: With all the rumbles and rumours of war with Iraq and the splintering of the Western alliance over the issue, another event has gone almost unnoticed: The Middle East peace process has quietly expired.

Not officially, of course, but that’s what the events of the past month amount to.

In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative Washington think tank that is home to some of the more prominent hawks on the Iraq issue, US President George W. Bush gave a speech that was mostly about Iraq. But almost unnoticed was a sentence in which he gave lip service to supporting the Israeli- Palestinian peace negotiations but which, in fact, gave them something resembling the kiss of death.

Bush, speaking in the wake of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s victory in January parliamentary elections, gave total support to Sharon’s position on negotiating with the Palestinians. No issues will be discussed until there is a change in leadership on the Palestinian side and an “end to the terror”, Bush said.

But who would announce the “end to the terror”?

Prime Minister Sharon, of course, has his own agenda, which does not include serious negotiations with the Palestinians in the foreseeable future. And he will not be in a hurry to announce the official end to terrorism.

In the meantime, given the formation of his new government, which includes the country’s most enthusiastic supporters of expanding Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, those settlements will continue to take over Palestinian land.

Bush could have flatly asked Sharon to stop the settlements, or, as his father did, penalize the Israeli government by withholding from US aid the amount that the Israeli government spent on new or expanding settlements. That was more than a nominal amount — up to 500 million dollars a year.

But the younger Bush, in tying the future of the negotiations to “a change in leadership”, means to marginalize Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat and eventually make him disappear.

Paradoxically, however, the Bush policy could well have the opposite effect — making Arafat more important, since his decision on when — or if — to step down will help control the future of Israeli- Palestinian relations.

Meanwhile, the so-called “quartet” of Middle East negotiators — the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — has effectively been put out of business.

As it happens, some at the American Enterprise Institute have been in the lead in promoting a US attack on Iraq. Before Bush and his Republican Party took office, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith (now the number three man at the Pentagon) and others took a policy paper to then- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was called “Making a Clean Break” and suggested that removing Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, would be an efficient way to reorder the Middle East to Israel’s advantage.

The paper said the benefits to Israel of such an attack would outweigh the risks, such as coming under attack from Iraqi missiles, as occurred during the 1991 Gulf War. The benefits, according to the study, would include greater acceptance of Israel by its Middle East neighbours, once those neighbours discovered the advantages of living in a democratic neighbourhood.

It’s a breathtaking concept, including the replacement of almost every government in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other traditional American allies in the region.

It is not certain that the Bush administration in Washington has accepted the plan and its consequences. But, there are moderate Jewish writers in the United States already saying that such a plan - if it failed at any point, including a quick and relatively painless war in Iraq — would lead to a worldwide resurgence of resentment against the United States and Israel and a further shakeup in the world order.—dpa