TNR's Lawrence Kaplan has a typically sharp analysis of the Bush administration's multiple personality disorder on Israel/Palestine. "The principal reason the Bush administration can't intervene effectively in the crisis is that it can't make up its mind," writes Kaplan. "Actually, it has two of them... [and] every time the administration wades into the conflict, this schizophrenia becomes more apparent."
This article in the Financial Times [via USS clueless] offers the most cogent argument I've seen to the contrary. I agree that the administration hasn't "lost focus" on Iraq. But I'm still skeptical about the idea that the State Department's habitual deferential overtures to Arafat have suddenly changed their character, and are now to be read, for the first time, as Machiavellian manoeuvres designed to undermine him.
We'll really have to wait to see what they do and say next, especially in view of the latest attack. Here's another passage from Kaplan:
When questioned in an Israeli TV interview last December, the Palestinian leader exploded, "who cares about the Americans?" Not Arafat. As one State Department official puts it, "Every time we take a step in his direction, he takes another step back." In the past few weeks alone, Arafat has refused to issue a public appeal to end terrorist attacks in exchange for a meeting with Cheney and has rejected a U.S.-devised cease-fire proposal--a draft copy of which requires Israel to lift "all internal closures"; pull back to "its positions of September 28, 2000"; and cease "attacks on [Palestinian] security forces or institutions." (Sharon agreed.) In fact, the deeper the United States involves itself in the conflict, the worse Arafat behaves. Hence, he greeted U. S. Special Envoy Anthony Zinni with a wave of suicide bombers on the envoy's first trip to Israel. On Zinni's second trip, Arafat greeted him with a ship from Iran packed with 50 tons of missiles, guns, and mortars. The results of Zinni's third and ongoing trip are before us today. "Arafat has always used terror as a negotiating ploy," says Efraim Inbar of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, "and he is doing so once again because of a logic that is hardly responsive to American influence.