I'm sure Michael Kelly is right about "what Bush expects" in the Middle East.
Bush wants to state for the record, in a once-and-for-all fashion, exactly how the United States sees the situation, in terms discrete and general. The Palestinians have a legitimate grievance that needs to be addressed, as indeed Israel has accepted. But suicide bombers (homicide bombers, says the White House) are murderers, not martyrs. And regimes such as Yasser Arafat's that use mass murder as a tool of statecraft are complicit in murder; and so are regimes that encourage and celebrate such use of murder -- as do almost all of the Arab and Islamic states. Henceforth, the United States will not accept or excuse any of this, and the president "expects" Arafat, the Palestinians and the Arab states to govern themselves accordingly.
What Kelly rightly calls Arafat's "insane gamble" (rejecting a peaceful settlement in hopes of securing greater spoils through violence) was doomed to fail, and has failed. Yet Arafat hasn't come away from the most recent campaign of suicide bombing empty-handed. He has a fresh set of grievances, the accumulation of which has always perversely seemed to be one of his chief goals; he still wields the threat of a further suicide terror campaign in the event that his demands are not met; and it appears that concessions will indeed be granted. A fresh wave of terror seems inevitable. It seems to me that the administration, at some point, will have to do more than merely express disapproval.
Everyone knows that the true focus is Iraq; most agree that it ought to be. The widespread assumption is that no action in Iraq is possible until the West Bank is pacified. As Mark Steyn rather flippantly put it:
From Washington's point of view, the peace mission was necessary because of a scheduling conflict over scheduling conflicts: they'd booked the Middle East for a war with Iraq only to discover the joint being used for some other guys' war. In an ideal world, the US would like to restore peace in the Middle East in order to launch a massive conflagration there.