Bush pins hopes on Saudi plan despite setback
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Your support makes all the difference.Regardless of Yasser Arafat's physical presence at the Arab summit in Beirut, the US is already facing the failure of its latest efforts to nurture a basis for a new peace initiative in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Yesterday, the summit that Washington had hoped would focus on a Saudi plan – offering normalisation of relations with the Arab world in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 – seemed to be unravelling as Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, hedged permission for Yasser Arafat to attend the meeting by demanding conditions that looked unacceptable.
Even if Mr Sharon had let Mr Arafat travel to Beirut, he would have done so in a fashion designed to snub the Bush administration – which has publicly urged that Mr Arafat go to the summit and be allowed to return to Ramallah afterwards. Otherwise, Washington fears, the session will turn into an endless denunciation of Israel – and thus, implicitly, the US, Israel's patron power.
And if the summit does not seriously engage the peace proposals, the current mission of the US envoy, retired General Anthony Zinni, would probably be doomed to failure, Washington fears, with the prospect of yet more violence to follow.
Yesterday, the White House was putting as brave a face as possible on proceedings. "The President hopes the meeting in Beirut will focus on ways of finding peace," Mr Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, told reporters. "No matter who goes, he believes the plan of Crown Prince Abdullah can be very helpful."
But the White House could not minimise the setback represented by the decision of the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, not to go to the summit. It means that the man who Washington sees as a middleman for the ceasefire and one day, perhaps, a settlement – and who leads one of only two Arab States to have full ties with Israel – will be absent.
Mr Fleischer, however, refused to comment on Mr Sharon's insistence that the US must guarantee Israel's right to refuse to allow Mr Arafat to return from Beirut to Ramallah – even if they agree to him attending the meeting.
The State Department, however, insisted on Monday that if Mr Arafat was permitted to go, "it must be a round trip".
The impasse over the Palestinian leader also deals a wider blow to US policies in the Middle East. With Israel and the Palestinians at military and diplomatic loggerheads, Washington may find it even harder to mobilise regional support for military action against Iraq.
This month's 11-country trip by Vice-President Dick Cheney was not encouraging for the US administration – one Arab leader after another publicly warned Mr Cheney that any attempt to topple Saddam Hussein would destabilise the region and would create a new set of tensions.
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