'Road Map' Setbacks Highlight U.S. Pattern

President Bush put it starkly when he met with Jordan's King Abdullah at Camp David two weeks ago.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat "is a loser," Bush told the king, according to three sources familiar with the conversation. "I'm not going to spend my political capital on losers, only winners. I'm still in a war mode, and the war is terrorism. If people don't fight terrorism, I am not going to deal with them."

Yet now, four months after Bush formally launched the U.S.-backed peace plan known as the "road map" with a pair of summits near the Red Sea, the plan is in tatters. A Palestinian prime minister intended to sideline Arafat resigned, leaving Arafat back in control. A cease-fire has been broken by suicide bombings, such as the attack Saturday in Haifa, and Israeli reprisals, such as yesterday's bombing inside Syria. And Bush's promise that a stream of U.S. officials would "ride herd" on the parties to pursue peace has been all but forgotten.

The road map's failure highlights a pattern that has characterized the administration's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, say current and former officials and outside experts. The pattern is one of engagement and disengagement -- a burst of publicity about new initiatives or special envoys, followed by policy drift and an unwillingness to push either side, especially the Israelis, to take big steps toward improvement. Eventually, the effort goes dormant, sometimes for months, until yet another approach is crafted.

"The administration has laid out a transformative agenda for the region, and achieving a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was supposed to be an important part of that vision," said Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council staffer largely responsible for shepherding the road map until he left the White House in March. "In pursuing such a solution, the administration has never been willing to do what it needed to do on the ground. They always flinched when they ran into difficulties."

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, voicing the frustration felt by many in the Middle East, said: "When the president of the United States attaches his name to a certain plan, he has an obligation to himself, to his constituents, to everybody, to follow through. You can't stop at each and every obstacle that you meet."

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell disagrees. In an interview Friday, he acknowledged the road map is in a "pause," but "it's not as if with that pause that we have disengaged." He said that once a new Palestinian cabinet -- which Arafat named yesterday -- takes effect, and if it meets "initial performance standards" set by the United States, "we would be prepared to engage. . . . We have not stepped back or stepped away."

But other Middle East experts, diplomats and government officials see the administration slipping back into a pattern that has prevailed from the beginning of the Bush administration -- a pattern they see stemming from a reluctance to break publicly with the Israelis, an unwillingness to commit time and resources to a seemingly intractable problem and the president's black-and-white view of the world since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Working Around Arafat

President Bill Clinton had struggled to achieve a peace accord in his final days in office, but it collapsed in a wave of Palestinian attacks known as the second intifada, which has continued almost uninterrupted for three years, leading to the deaths of more than 2,800 Palestinians and 800 Israelis, according to the United Nations.

The new administration was reluctant to pick up where Clinton had left off, and addressed the issue in fits and starts.

"Our biggest struggle has been how to engage the Americans, how to convince them to get away from the 'anything but Clinton' philosophy and understand that this was not a localized conflict," said a U.N. official.

In June 2001, CIA Director George J. Tenet produced a plan that would restart Israeli and Palestinian cooperation on security, but it -- along with a report by former Senate majority leader George Mitchell (D-Maine) -- was never implemented. Bush, in a speech to the United Nations after the Sept. 11 attacks, said he believed in the goal of a Palestinian state, but offered no path. Then the administration assigned retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni as a special envoy to seek implementation of the Tenet plan. But after a brief flurry of activity, Zinni stopped going to the region.