Hawks Dominate Debate on U.S. Policy in Region
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Diplomacy: Within the political establishment, Bush draws fire for calling
on Sharon to pull Israeli forces out of the West Bank.
By RONALD BROWNSTEIN
TIMES STAFF WRITER
April 18 2002
WASHINGTON -- Israel's defiance of a call by President Bush to withdraw from
the West Bank has prompted an unexpected political reaction in America: a
backlash against Bush for issuing the demand at all.
In the last week, leading Democrats such as Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman
(D-Conn.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) have joined conservative
Republicans in denouncing Bush's call for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon to end military operations against the Palestinians.
Many analysts believe that the uproar on the home front has contributed to
Bush's muted protest of Sharon's defiance. That pattern continued Wednesday,
when the president included only five words on an Israeli withdrawal in his
speech at the Virginia Military Institute. The domestic criticism could also
signal difficulties for the White House in advancing any peace process
viewed as pressuring Sharon or legitimizing Palestinian Authority President
Yasser Arafat.
"This is a very smart White House politically . . . and I think they
recognize there is not as much maneuvering room as State Department
bureaucrats may think there is," said Gary Bauer, who ran against Bush in
the 2000 GOP primaries and organized a pro-Israel letter from social
conservatives last week.
More traditional voices in the foreign policy establishment, such as Sens.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and Charles Hagel (R-Neb.), have begun to argue
that there is no military solution to the Israel-Palestinian confrontation.
Yet they have been largely drowned out by demands from others in both
parties that Bush offer virtually unreserved support for the Israeli
offensive.
"The pressure is almost exclusively from the hawkish side," said one White
House aide.
Recent polls indicate that public opinion about the proper U.S. role in the
conflict is more ambivalent, with widespread hostility toward Palestinian
terrorist attacks mitigated by skepticism about the Sharon government's
commitment to peace.
Surveys by both CBS and Gallup Organization found that between three and
five times as many Americans who responded sympathized more with Israel than
the Palestinians in the conflict. An overwhelming majority agreed that
Arafat was not doing all he could to end the violence.
Yet doubts about Israel's course were also evident. In the CBS survey,
nearly half of Americans polled said they doubted the Israeli government
wanted peace enough to make real concessions for it.
By comparison, virtually no national political leaders have criticized the
Israeli offensive.
The U.S. politicians most intimately identified with the peace camp in
Israel have been restrained in their comments. Sen. Paul Wellstone
(D-Minn.), for instance, has simply called on Sharon to "respect the dignity
and human rights of ordinary, innocent Palestinian civilians," rather than
issue an unequivocal call for withdrawal.
The dominant voices have been those criticizing Bush for urging Sharon, in
an April 4 speech at the White House, to end the military offensive.
Bush came under immediate fire from foreign policy thinkers known as the
neo-conservatives. That group, composed mostly of Jewish and Roman Catholic
intellectuals such as William Kristol and William J. Bennett, argues that
Israel is responding to terror in the same way the United States did after
Sept. 11. It is hypocritical for Bush to tell Israel to stop, they say.
They also maintain that it undermines the "Bush doctrine"--which states that
the United States will treat any government that harbors terrorists as a
terrorist--for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to meet with Arafat as he
did in the Middle East, or consider him a potential negotiating partner.
The neo-conservatives soon were joined by religious conservatives, who have
become an increasingly important pro-Israeli force within the GOP. A group
of leading religious conservatives, including Bauer and the Rev. Jerry
Falwell, urged Bush in their letter to "end the pressure on . . . Sharon so
that he has the time necessary to complete the mission he has undertaken."
Democratic and Republican senators also entered the fray, sending Bush a
letter late last week that echoed the statement from the Christian
conservatives.
Its signers included liberals such as Clinton, Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)
and Jon Corzine (D-N.J.), as well as Republican moderates Susan Collins of
Maine and Gordon Smith of Oregon.
Last weekend at the Florida state Democratic Party convention in Orlando,
Lieberman and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) received loud applause in
denouncing Bush's pressure on Sharon.
Will Marshall, executive director of the Progressive Policy Institute, a
centrist think tank, said the administration's conservative and Democratic
critics may part ways down the road because the Democrats generally believe
that the United States must eventually negotiate with Arafat--an idea that
is anathema to most on the right.
For now, however, those protesting Bush's pressure on Sharon are frustrating
the traditional foreign policy establishment, a group that includes the
editorial pages of most major newspapers, many former officials from
Democratic and Republican administrations, and senators such as Hagel and
Biden.
Those in this group tend to believe that the conflict can be defused only by
negotiations convened by the United States and preferably involving Arab
nations as well as Israel and the Palestinians.
"The fact is, if we are going to get to a peace, and ultimately a political
settlement, then all sides . . . are going to have to participate" in making
concessions, said Hagel.
Those urging a greater emphasis on negotiation and diplomacy are quietly
reemerging after being overshadowed for the last two weeks.
Biden and Hagel have both defended Bush's efforts at diplomacy and urged him
to convene a peace conference that includes Arab nations.
"I think what the president has to do is continue to stay on a course that
is able to get through the fog . . . knowing full well you are going to take
the hits, and they are going to be deep and painful and many of them are
going to be from your own party," Hagel said. "You've got to stay with it;
you can't back out of it now."
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