Patrick Smyth, Washington Correspondent, explores the reasons for US dithering on Middle East.
"Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." - George Bush, September 20th
As simple as that? The black-and-white world of them and us, with its moral certainty and simple purpose, was made for a lacklustre president struggling to find a role. Within days of the September 11th attacks, George Bush had successfully refashioned himself to articulate the nation's pain and lead the country in a war against "evildoers".
But those very talents for expressing confidence and certainty (and which have seen the US President achieve unparalleled poll ratings) are perhaps precisely those which condemned him to dither and equivocate as he began to approach the murky, complex and morally ambiguous world of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Despite unconvincing protestations from the Administration that it has been engaged from the beginning, Mr Bush has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to Thursday's decision to send the Secretary of State to the region. His staking of the Administration's credibility on a major new peace-brokering initiative is a deeply uncomfortable role forced on a President, who publicly scorned such work by his predecessor, by the contradictions between his personal sympathies for Israel and desire to hold together a regional alliance against terrorism.
Both his conviction that President Clinton made matters worse, and the naive belief after September 11th, against the advice of allies, that the Israeli-Palestinian issue could be disconnected from his war on terrorism contributed to that discomfort.
Defining Arafat is at the core of the problem, with hawks insisting that, in line with the doctrine that those who shelter terrorists should be treated as such, he should be overthrown, and doves, that the problem of defining him shows up the contradictions of that very doctrine.
Recalling that it was Lenin who made famous the phrase "he who is not with us is against us", the former National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has been sharply critical of the Bush methodology.
"This is Leninism," he told the Washington Post. "I do not think it's good principle. Unfortunately most of life cannot be delineated in terms of black and white. It's in various shades of gray, and foreign policy has to be sensitive to that."
On Thursday Mr Bush was still insisting that Mr Arafat is an essential partner in the peace process while at the same time denouncing him for harbouring terorists.
"At Oslo and elsewhere, Chairman Arafat renounced terror as an instrument of his cause, and he agreed to control it. He's not done so," Mr Bush insisted.
"The situation in which he finds himself today is largely of his own making. He's missed his opportunities, and thereby betrayed the hopes of the people he's supposed to lead." And, he argued, in keeping with his Afghan policy, "No nation can negotiate with terrorists. For there is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death." Yet he put Colin Powell on a plane to go and talk to the Palestinian leader.
That he has not reconciled himself to that essential lesson of our own peace process, that peacemaking involves contact with the morally repugnant, is reflected in Mr Bush's repeated expressions of his view that Israel has the right to defend itself with, until Thursday, only the slightest cautionary admonitions to restraint. "I fully understand Israel's need to defend herself," he said on Saturday. Not much ambiguity there.
And, in part because of his absolutist views on terrorism , Mr Bush has also developed an instinctive sympathy not only for Israel, some say for religious reasons, but also its leader, Ariel Sharon, that has surprised many and made the US a somewhat implausibe candidate for honest broker in the Middle East. No way do ad hominem denunciations of Israeli leaders' failings make their way into Bush speeches.
Republicans are traditionally seen as less sympathetic to the cause of Israel and Mr Bush's own father was viewed with suspicion during the Gulf War for his insistence on Israeli restraint in the face of Scud missile attacks.
But Mr Bush the younger, on one of the only foreign trips he made before his election, visited Israel in 1998, and was much taken with Mr Sharon, then Defence Minister, who brought him on a helicopter flight to better explain the lie of the land. Mr Bush has said repeatedly since then that if you look at the 1967 borders - to which the Palestinians want to return - there are parts of Israel that are only eight miles wide, and there are driveways in Texas that are longer than that.
Mr Sharon has visited the Bush White House more times than any other international leader (including Bertie Ahern) while Mr Arafat has yet to meet the President.
Mr Bush's reluctance to engage in the problem also has much to do with the skewed politics of the US-Israeli lobby. Although three out of four Jewish voters may have cast their votes for Al Gore many of the leaders of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the key pro-Israeli lobby with 60,000 members and an annual budget of $19 millio, are very substantial Republican fundraisers.
The group, which has its claws deeply embedded in Congress, leans sharply to the hawkish right and in November circulated a letter praising Mr Bush for refusing to meet Mr Arafat and urging him not to restrain Israel from retaliating against Israeli violence. Eighty-nine senators out of 100 signed it.
AIPAC, which denounced the US backing of a Palestinian state as rewarding terrorism, has sucessfully argued that US intervention would inevitably mean pressure on Israel. Its formidable research team makes sure any congressman's ambivalence on the issue is publicly exposed.
There are significant voices speaking out against any deal with Mr Arafat and even for reversing the peace process. The House Majority Whip, Mr Tom DeLay, said this week that Israel should not be expected to negotiate with those that seek to destroy the Jewish state. "During four decades of terrorism, Yasser Arafat has proven his total contempt for human life. He is completely untrustworthy," he said
Mr Richard Perle, chairman of the quasi-official Defence Policy Board, co-wrote a 1996 paper, advising the former prime minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, to make "a clean break from the peace process". His co-author Douglas J Feith argued in 1997, in A Strategy for Israel, that Israel should re-occupy "the areas under Palestinian Authority control" even though "the price in blood would be high."
Above all, perhaps, Mr Bush, with his eye on re-election, may be a reluctant participant in the peace process out of the simple fear of failure, an eventuality made all the more likely by the timidity of his belated intervention.