Bush and Baker Teach Mideast Visitors the Texas Two-Step

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Injecting a bit of awkwardness into the Shamir-Bush Administration talks was the fact that neither side seemed to be quite leveling with the other. Each side knew what the other was up to and was determined not to let the other have its way, while avoiding a confrontation. " —Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, April 9, 1989.

Put your little foot here. Put your little foot there. Before you know it, those little feet have taken you to goodness knows where. That's the Texas Two-Step, and it's also the Bush-Baker Middle East Policy

When Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak visited Washington in the first week of April it was two steps forward. When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir arrived the next week, it looked like two steps backward. But during the brief intermission preceding the visit of King Hussein of Jordan, it became dear that Palestinians and Israelis were at least two big steps closer to peace.

Like it or not, the Israelis are talking to the PLO through the good offices of the United States. And by stating clearly that the US expects Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, Bush and Secretary of State James Baker have renewed firmly a 21-year-old US commitment to UN Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula. That was important because, after' eight years of Reagan administration lassitude, Shamir had begun to convince the Israeli electorate that he could keep undivided sovereignty over Jerusalem, and the West Bank as well.

Finally, the Bush administration has refrained from asking that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza give up their popular uprising, the intifadah. That's realistic, since the intifadah is the only effective political or military tactic the Palestinians have developed in more than half a century of resistance to British, Jordanian, and Israeli occupation, and the Palestinians will never foreswear use of the only weapon in their arsenal.

To the Arabs, those steps forward may seem little to show for the "magic words" reluctantly offered up by Yasser Arafat five months earlier. However, the seemingly uncertain Bush administration may have maneuvered Shamir onto a "slippery slope" where he can no longer just stand pat while demanding more Palestinian concessions.

He brought to Washington a plan for "local elections" designed to split Palestinians under occupation from their leaders abroad, ensure the return of Israeli troops to areas from which they and their informers had been ejected, and establish the idea that the Palestinians had no right to elect their own national leaders, but only their own garbage collectors.

Predictably, the non-committal Bush administration treated it as an interim idea that needed work but held promise. Shamir counted upon the Palestinians to proclaim, indignantly, that the situation has moved far beyond selection of local leaders to talk of interim autonomy arrangements, and that it is time for national leaders selected by the opponents to sit down for a serious dialogue concerning land for peace. The Palestinians mayyetsay just that,and then Shamir will trust his friends in the media gradually to create the myth that in 1989 the Israelis wanted to talk and the Palestinians didn't.

However, as Israeli leadership has become cruder, Palestinian leadership has become more sophisticated. Yasser Arafat may counter with proposals that the elections must be held under strict international supervision, that the voters must be free to select candidates of their choice regardless of residence or other Israeli-imposed artificial restrictions, that from leaders elected will come representatives of the occupied areas at an international peace conference, and that there be freedom of political activity in the occupied areas during the campaign period. All of these are reasonable conditions. The US would look foolish not supporting them. If all this happens, Yitzhak Shamir will indeed find himself on a slippery slope.

Interpretations of the new administration's calculated Middle East ambiguity seem to reflect each individual observer's worst fears. For example, Washington Middle East specialist Donald Neff wrote in the March 31 edition of London's Middle East International:

"Israel's supporters wield such domestic political power, each new administration believes it can outsmart them by filling the bureaucracy with Zionists and at the same time pursue its own policy ... The reality is that this tactic has repeatedly proved wrong. Invariably the new administration finds that instead of fashioning its own policy, it discovers itself captive of the very officials it thought it was coopting by taking them into the government."

From the opposite end of the spectrum, Douglas Bloomfield wrote in the April 13 Washington Jewish Week: "George Bush may have taken Hosni Mubarak out to the ball game last week, but it was Yitzhak Shamir with whom he was playing hardball."

What these widely varying estimates mean is that even career State Department officers don't know exactly where the administration is heading, or when it expects to arrive there. Not since Richard Nixon has the US had an incoming president so well prepared to assume foreign policy responsibilities. like Nixon, as vice president for eight years, George Bush walked the territory, met the leaders, talked to US diplomats, listened to congressional opinions, and saw the problems from the president's perspective. Friends say he knows what the US must do in the Middle East, and understands the domestic forces that will try to keep him from doing it.

Not since Henry Kissinger has the US had a secretary of state with such skill in dealing with Congress and the media as James Baker. Kissinger, as national security adviser, spent the first Nixon term undermining Secretary of State William Rogers' Middle East peace plan. Then in the second term, as secretary of state, Kissinger stolidly ignored Nixon's own plans to crack down on Israel while someone in the White House undermined Nixon.

The difference between then and now is that Baker has been a Bush loyalist for years. The Bush agenda, though not yet clear to outsiders, is certainly Baker's as well.

By recognizing the right of Israel to exist and accepting resolution 242, the PLO has publicly agreed to settle for less than 20 percent of Palestine, as long as the settlement provides for a Palestinian state alongside the Israeli state. All but three of 21 sovereign Arab states seem ready to accept any peace terms agreed to by Yasser Arafat.

As a result, American allies in Europe and Japan, as well as friendly Arab governments, are understandably impatient for the US to have a Dutch uncle talk with Israel. Never has that country had such serious economic, military, and moral problems. Even a slight reduction in US aid, perhaps just the amount Israel spends on occupation forces and Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza (which the US says must go back to Arab sovereignty anyway), would shatter Shamir's stone wall. If he goes on building up settlements, the US aid Israel so desperately needs declines or even stops. Without it, Israel's economic decline will be so precipitate that eventually the Likud will fall. If Shamir's successor doesn't give up the dream of indefinite Israeli occupation of all of Palestine, eventually he falls too. Sooner or later, the Israeli political process will produce a leader who believes that a smaller Israel at peace with its Arab neighbors, and in which Jews remain a majority, will be more secure than anything on Shamir's drawing board.

Unfortunately, that's not the kind of advice George Bush and James Baker can expect from their deputies. Instead they will bear, as have their predecessors, that American pressure will only make the Israelis more intractable.

Ever since 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower produced instant Israeli withdrawal from Sinai by threatening Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion with economic retaliation, Israel's friends in Congress, the media, and even the executive branch have tried to rewrite history. Pressure makes Israeli leaders "circle the wagons," they claim. Now, after 32 years and seven presidents who listened to this fallacious advice, Israel's wagons are still circled, and it has elected a prime minister on a platform of no more withdrawals.

Inexplicably, the Bush administration has put into key policy-making positions people who are on record with this misguided advice. All of them share either prior association with Henry Kissinger, or with a pro-Israel think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WIFNEP), or both.

Kissinger's advice and influence peddling, which costs a host of foreign clients fabulous "consultantey" fees, has always been available to Israel for nothing. A sample was the leaked advice a year ago to ban the media from Israeli-occupied territories and "put down the insurrection as quickly as possible—overwhelmingly, brutally, and rapidly." The other source of Bush advisers, WIFNEP, was founded in 1984 by Martin Indyk, a former official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Barbi Weinberg, former president of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles.

Lest there be any doubt as to WIFNEP's orientation, its non-Jewish advisers include former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, former ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick, former ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis, and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane. All support Israeli positions, no matter how weak, in the US media. Among WIFNEP's Jewish advisers are publishers Martin Peretz, who turned the once-respected New Republic into an apologist for Zionist extremism, and Mortimer Zuckerman, who did the same thing with US News and World Report.

WIFNEP issued in 1988 a report advising the incoming administration to abstain from Middle East initiatives. And, more to the point, former WIFNEP adviser Lawrence Eagleburger was appointed to the No. 2 position in the State Department, and Dennis Ross took leave from his "senior fellow" position at WIFNEP to become State Department chief of policy planning, a position which keeps him at Baker's side.

Since then, Richard Haass, who has made a career of advising against US Middle East peace initiatives, has become the National Security Council Middle East adviser, Harvey Sicherman became a Baker speech writer, and former NSC European adviser Aaron David Miller became a deputy to Ross.

Such conspicuous Bush administration appointments of Jewish officials to deal with Middle East affairs, according to the Washington Jewish Week, prompted an Israeli official to remark during the Shamir visit: "The Wasps sent out their Jews to do battle with the Israelis." He was alluding to the fact that when senior State Department and White House officials met with Israeli aides to negotiate the exact wording of statements to be issued at the conclusion of the Shamir visit, all five of the American negotiators were Jewish.

The importance of some of these appointments is magnified by Baker's individualistic and secretive work style. In the State Department and on his lightning trips to foreign countries, he has been virtually inaccessible to senior officials and ambassadors alike, surrounding himself with a praetorian guard of young assistants consisting of Ross, 40; Counselor Robert B. Zoellick, 35; Undersecretary for Political Affairs Robert Kimmitt, 42; and more recently Margaret Tutwiler, 38, who followed Baker from Treasury to become State's chief of public affairs. With the exception of Ross, however, the Middle East views of this inner circle are generally unknown.

If Bush and Baker, whose own experience might incline them to an activist Middle East policy, are getting advice from the political appointees named to Middle East posts it almost certainly is that of the WIFNEP report: Go slowly. Let the protagonists get closer together before the US steps in.

Even if Bush and Baker heed their pro-Israel advisers, what Israel is to do with the time its allies in the US government obtain for it is not clear. Shamir has spent a lifetime blocking inclinations from within Israel to compromise for peace. He opposed the Camp David accords, even though he now cites them as the model for the kind of agreement he would be willing to discuss.

His philosophy at home has always been to do nothing and wait for his opponents to make a mistake. It got him the prime ministry of Israel. In seeking to apply that policy abroad, however, he is encountering the problem that the moderate Arabs have learned from past mistakes. They do not tolerate the launching of terrorist acts against civilians. Nasser Arafat's branch of the PLO, Al Fatah, has even stopped armed incursions from Lebanon against Israeli soldiers to prevent any possibility of civilians becoming involved.

If a Palestinian connection is found with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 or some future catastrophe, therefore, world opinion is going to assume that those involved are renegades working for Iran, Libya, or Syria, or even such Arafat enemies unknowingly working for Mossad. This increase in public sophistication limits options open to Shamir, a former Mossad operations chief himself, to "make something happen."

If nothing happens, Shamir may break his own precedent and take an action to return the whole Middle East peace procession to square one. While Israeli officials and newspapers leak stories about Iraqi nuclear weapons research or Libyan poison gas factories, seemingly setting the stage for a spectacular Israeli armed strike like those against Beirut, Baghdad, and his in the past, there is a steady and ominous undertone of Israeli-inspired complaints and warnings about Syria.

Outbreak of another Israeli-Syrian war would solve three of Shamir's most immediate problems. It would provide alternative employment to bone breaking for his demoralized military forces. It would distract the Israeli public from overwhelming domestic problems. And, most important, it would provide a whole new rationale for increased American economic and military aid to Israel. Even at the present annual $3 billion level, this US aid is no longer sufficient for a bankrupt state seeking to subjugate an Arab minority almost the size of the Jewish majority.

So will the Bush-Baker policy capitalize on Arab readiness and Israeli vulnerability to force the pace of peace? Or will it wait for "parties to the conflict" to drift closer together, when history proves that in the Middle East a loss of forward momentum toward peace means an accelerated backward slide toward war?

There are signs and portents either way. Even if Bush and Baker know what they should do, they must expect lack of support from a Democratic Congress. They must also anticipate unfavorable US media reaction to pressure on Israel.

Although it is unfashionable to talk about Jewish influence in the media, it is a force to be reckoned with, and every elected official takes it into consideration. The Washington Post's Richard Cohen, a consistent liberal about everything but Palestinian human rights, has already fired the first warning shots, savaging Bush's competency and judgment and questioning his Middle East policy in alternating syndicated columns. Jewish weeklies all over the US are full of subtle hints to their readers that the Bush administration may need disciplining if it departs from the Reagan Middle East policy, or lack of it.

The technique of media defamation of critics of Israel has never varied from the 1970s when Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman William Fulbright, who criticized domestic lobbies for foreign interests, was attacked as a segregationist and racist in The New York Times, and a bleeding heart liberal and internationalist by media in his home state of Arkansas.

With all this in mind, the 1988 Republican platform took a stand against Palestinian statehood. Although he now seems to support Palestinian selfdetermination in the West Bank and Gaza, President Bush has not come to grips with the fact that real Palestinian self-determination will lead to a Palestinian state. Whether the Bush administration modifies this stand or not may be the next indication of whether the administration seeks to heal Middle East wounds, or just apply Band-Aids.

Richard H. Curtiss, author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute, is chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.