The Mideast: Does Bush’s peace push have a chance?

President Bush’s Mideast policy has come “full circle,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. When he entered the White House seven years ago, Bush disdained nation-building, and “disparaged and quickly abandoned” President Bill Clinton’s efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace. Now, with his own presidency winding down, Bush suddenly seems determined to leave a positive Mideast legacy. During Bush’s sweep through the region over the last week, said Steven Lee Myers in The New York Times, he offered his clearest terms yet for a comprehensive peace deal. He called for redrawn borders and a contiguous Palestinian state, one without Israeli settlements. For the first time, he backed “compensating Palestinians and their descendants for homes they left in what is now Israel.” Urging Israel to give up the West Bank, he used the loaded word “occupation.” Both sides would have to make painful sacrifices, he said, adding that he wanted all the issues settled in one year. “I’m on a timetable,” Bush explained. “I’ve got 12 months left in office.”

Peace? In a year? Bush must be delusional, said Steven Weber and Bruce Jentleson in the Los Angeles Times. Though he may wish to return to the conditions that prevailed until his inauguration, the fact is that “the world is a very different place today.” The occupied territories have gone through a second intifada. “Seven years of West Bank settlements have further radicalized Palestinian youth.” The Palestinians are themselves deeply divided, locked in a low-level civil war between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can barely hold his fractious government together. Bush didn’t help matters by invading Iraq, said Gwynne Dyer in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The bungled occupation has damaged U.S. prestige among Arab nations, and “greatly empowered” Islamic radicals. But blaming Bush for the entire mess isn’t quite fair: “The Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’ was already a train wreck before Bush set foot in the White House.” Still, the reality is that either Olmert nor Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has the will or the strength to do what’s necessary. Bush should “seek his legacy elsewhere.”

That’s good advice, said David Sarasohn in the Portland Oregonian, because the impasse between these two sides just can’t be resolved. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush also tried and failed to broker a permanent peace. Almost to the last hour of his presidency, Bill Clinton was working feverishly on a peace plan that came to nothing. “Yet now Bush, too, has succumbed to the messianism that leads presidents to imagine they can resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. In the process, he’s abandoned the “moral clarity” that once defined his foreign policy. Following 9/11, Bush repeatedly said that American support for a Palestinian state depended on its leaders’ unequivocally renouncing violence and terrorism. Last week, though, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that with peace talks underway, people shouldn’t “get hung up” on Palestinian terrorism. It’s official: The “Bush Doctrine” is dead.

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But even if Bush is unlikely to achieve a breakthrough in a year, said The Economist, he shouldn’t be faulted for trying. By forcing Olmert and the Palestinian leaders to negotiate, he can prod them to take important steps, such as Israel giving up most of its settlements in the West Bank and the Palestinians giving up “the right of return” to Israel. “Like Moses, Bush can still point the way toward the Promised Land—even if it falls to another to finish the job.”