WASHINGTON: President Bush’s emerging strategy for restarting the Mideast peace process is a throwback to a concept first articulated by his father in the 1980 presidential race: “The Big Mo.”

Momentum — or the appearance of movement — is the key to success. From that, officials believe, will flow additional momentum and even more success.

This approach appears to be not based on a grand strategy but a practical desire to be flexible. Though the administration officially has embraced a peace plan known as the “roadmap” — a document drafted last year with the Europeans and the United Nations — administration officials are prepared to largely abandon the plan’s details. US officials also have publicly stated they will address Israeli concerns as the document is implemented.

By addressing Israeli concerns, the administration was able to win Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s reluctant endorsement of the roadmap over the weekend. That paves the way for a possible summit meeting next week between Bush, Sharon and the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas. That, in theory, would open the door for Israeli actions to ease the suffering of Palestinians and a Palestinian crackdown on terror groups. Indeed, a CIA team has already departed for the region to help the Palestinians reform their security services.Momentum. The Big Mo.

But the quest for momentum has also caused officials to delay dealing with some of the hard issues that could derail the process in the coming months. Indeed, Bush’s father decisively lost the 1980 Republican nomination — despite the “Big Mo” from winning the Iowa caucuses — because he failed to lay the groundwork for winning the rest of the primaries.

Indeed, it’s unclear what would happen after the presidential summit — or even if enough momentum could be created to sustain the process through the presidential election season in the United States, when candidates are wary of putting too much pressure on Israel.

Secretary of State Colin Powell over the weekend defended the administration’s approach, likening the process to kicking a can. “The can is in the road now, and we will start moving it down the road, perhaps with little kicks as opposed to a 54-yarder,” he said.

Powell said it was essential, in fact, to defer some difficult issues because otherwise nothing would get started. “It’s easy to say, why didn’t you solve this all up front? Because you couldn’t. You couldn’t get started,” he said. “So there are difficult issues that are ahead, this is not going to be solved in one day or one week or one month.”

The depth of the outstanding issues was illustrated on Tuesday when Israel disclosed the 14 conditions it has given the Bush administration that must be met for it to fully participate in the peace process, which envisages the creation of a provisional Palestinian state by the end of this year and a fully independent and sovereign state by 2005.

Palestinian representatives said the conditions would undermine the plan’s carefully crafted scheme for building confidence between Israelis and Palestinians by having both undertake simultaneous steps towards reducing violence and restoring Palestinian control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“It was their whole wish list,” said a senior Palestinian official after reading the 14 conditions in Israeli newspapers. “It would gut any provisions that would have made it (the roadmap) meaningful to the Palestinians.”

The Bush administration, which has had a text of the 14 demands for several weeks, promised in a statement on Friday to “address them fully and seriously in the implementation of the roadmap.”

Israeli and US officials on Tuesday said that the text overstated the seriousness of Israeli difficulties with the roadmap, and that it was largely drawn up to ease Sharon’s domestic political considerations. Several officials said only three key points — mentioning a Saudi peace initiative in the roadmap, the right of Palestinians to return to their homes in Israel that they left during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and when to address the settlement issues — were said to constitute major Israel objections.

But each of these issues opens up a Pandora’s box of difficult questions. For instance, the US has pressed to include the Saudi peace initiative as a way of keeping Saudi Arabia involved in the process, but the Israelis dislike the initiative because it calls for giving up all land seized during the 1967 war.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank are also a major stumbling block. Israel officials, in their discussions with US officials, have signalled a willingness to dismantle some illegal outposts. The roadmap also calls for a settlement freeze in the initial phase. But differences have not been resolved over what constitutes legal and illegal settlements, whether settlements can grow “naturally” through population growth and whether “further action of settlements” will be taken before final status negotiations, as described in the plan.

Indeed, while Bush has frequently said he envisions a Palestinian state within three years, Sharon appears intent on a long-term interim arrangement that leaves the Palestinians with a provisional state for many years. It is unclear how the administration proposes to bridge this gap in perception.

The Israelis have also made it clear that little movement can be achieved unless the Palestinians take real action against militant groups responsible for suicide bombings. But US officials glumly concede that the Palestinian security forces have fragmented almost into a warlord structure, with little effective control exercised by the new Palestinian security chief.

Even the diplomatic hurdles of setting up the summit have proven difficult. The United States originally wanted one summit, but sources said Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Abdullah balked at attending a summit with Sharon — and Sharon was not keen at being surrounded by Arab leaders. So the Bush administration has had to set up back-to-back summits, one with Arab leaders in Egypt and one with Israel and Palestinian leaders in Jordan.

Still, momentum is the order of the day. An Israeli official close to Sharon said that the prime minister reviewed the world situation, saw an upsurge in global terrorism and the “stalling of things in Iraq,” and concluded that Bush “needed a major success to move forward.”

This source added: “When Bush needed help this time, he got it, and Sharon understands that the US is going to stand by Israel when it comes to security and this very treacherous roadmap.”—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.