"The idea of a Palestinian state has always been part of a vision, so long as the right of Israel to exist is respected." With those words, President Bush on Tuesday launched U.S.-Middle East diplomacy into new and uncharted waters.
The idea of Palestinian statehood has not, of course, "always" been part of Washington's vision for Arab-Israeli peace. Indeed, President Reagan specifically rejected statehood in 1982. More generally, the thrust of U.S. diplomacy has been to focus on process rather than preferred outcomes, i.e., how peace should be made rather than what that peace should look like.
Some critics dismiss this focus on process as the Washington equivalent of fiddling while the Middle East burns. But the record of the past three decades has shown it to be among the wisest and most successful elements of U.S. foreign policy in the modern era.
Through the peace process, the U.S. resolved the long-standing conundrum of balancing ties with Israel and Arab states, wooed Soviet allies to the U.S. camp, removed the threat of superpower confrontation from the Middle East and permitted the rise of a tacit coalition of moderate powers--Israel, pro-West Arab states and Turkey--that was instrumental in winning the Gulf War.
Along the way, the U.S. helped engineer peace treaties between Israel and two of its neighbors (Egypt and Jordan); promoted diplomatic negotiations between Israel and its two other neighbors (Syria and Lebanon) and, perhaps most of all, created the conditions for Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate directly, without international interference, toward the goal of resolving their century-old conflict. All told, not a bad record.
Today, one year into the second Palestinian uprising and one week into what looks like yet another failed attempt at an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire, the "peace process" does not look very auspicious. Car bombs explode in Jerusalem with frightening regularity; violence is the norm. The two parties are barely speaking with each other, let alone negotiating their differences peacefully.
Even before Sept. 11, there was a powerful attraction to intervene by presenting a U.S. vision of how the conflict should ultimately be resolved. Since then, the perceived need to line up Arab and Muslim coalition partners in the war against terrorism only added another quiver in the arrow of those who argue that the time has come to resolve this pesky local conflict--by an imposed solution, if necessary--so that the world can focus without distraction on larger issues.
