WASHINGTON — As the Bush administration seeks to negotiate a diplomatic end to the fighting in the Middle East, it finds it has a strikingly weak hand.
The war in Iraq, a halting U.S. response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and now the prolonged fighting in Lebanon and Israel have led to intense anti-Americanism in the Arab world. Alliances with longtime Arab friends are strained. And the U.S. lacks relations with two key regional players: Iran and Syria.
"The Lebanon crisis is the end of the myth that we can tell the world what to do and they'll line up to do it," said Nancy Soderberg, a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Clinton administration. "They are going to have to do real diplomacy."
Adding to the challenge is, remarkably, inexperience. Despite 5 1/2 years in office, President Bush's foreign policy team has been involved in surprisingly few high-stakes negotiations in the region.
The draft U.N. resolution painstakingly crafted by the United States and France over the weekend was a first effort at negotiating an end to the fighting in Lebanon and Israel. But it took a long week for agreement to be reached, despite U.S. officials' constant assertion that it was just a matter of details. In that week, many Lebanese civilians died, leading many in the region to think the U.S. cares little about their lives.
The landscape looks grim for serious diplomacy.
Since U.S. forces captured Baghdad without a serious fight in spring 2003, fear of America's military might has melted away as its soldiers and Marines have been unable to control the insurgency or stem Iraq's escalating sectarian violence. The result has reduced America's aura of complete power and, with it, the ability to bend others to its will.
Successful diplomacy requires being able to broker between enemies by having the trust of both parties and enough force, moral and military, to enforce a deal. America's recent foreign forays have relied largely on force, but the military victories have been short-lived and unable to bring about the democracy that was promised.
"In the Middle East, historically people always go with the strong horse, but we don't look like the strong horse anymore," said Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and now director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. "To Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, we look like we're short of breath."
