By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post

President Bush, who today begins his first high-profile effort at Middle East peacemaking, is convinced that Israel must accept a Palestinian state to ensure its survival, according to current and former aides who have heard him discuss the subject. But they say he has shown little interest in the details of the complex disputes in the region and remains skeptical of intervening deeply in the negotiating process.

Bush often has a viscerally negative reaction when officials try to delve deeply into issues -- such as the final borders of Israel and a Palestinian state, or the status of Jerusalem -- that are central to the conflict, according to people who have participated in discussions with the president. President Bill Clinton at the end of his term debated those questions at length with Israelis and Palestinians, but Bush dismisses them as "all those old issues," two participants in interagency debates said.
The president has baffled some of his aides with comments they thought minimized the obstacles toward the two-state solution he talks about. For instance, the president has told aides that the Israelis are wasting their money on expanding settlements in the West Bank because ultimately those projects will become housing developments for Palestinians.

Some aides suggest this is a naive view of the settlement issue, noting that experts on both sides of the issue believe unchecked expansion of the settlements would make it impossible to create a viable Palestinian state. Other Bush advisers say the president's comments simply reflected his determination to create a Palestinian state.

The president's personal relations with Middle East leaders also play a significant role in how he approaches the issues. His distaste for Yasser Arafat led to his call for new Palestinian leadership, but he is also uncertain whether Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon truly has a vision to achieve peace. The leader in the region who has won his greatest respect is Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who bluntly confronted the president last year over the Palestinian issue.
This account of the president's views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is based in part on interviews with senior officials throughout the U.S. government, most of whom spoke on condition that their names and the agency of government for which they worked not be identified, and several who disagreed with the president's policy decisions. As these officials described it, Bush remains wary of the issue despite this week's peace initiative and is dismissive of the negotiating course set by his predecessors at the White House.

Some of these sources said his hands-off approach, characteristic of Bush's decision-making style on other issues as well, makes them skeptical that the president will achieve his goal of two states living side by side. But a White House official said Bush's style has allowed him to place much of the burden on achieving results on the Israelis and Palestinians, where the official said it belongs. As a step in that direction, Bush plans to assign a team to monitor compliance by both sides.

"The president isn't in the weeds looking at every issue," said a White House official when informed of the contents of this article. Bush believes old approaches, such as focusing on the borders of a Palestinian state, are less useful than "what happens to the institutions inside those borders," which is why he is focusing on Palestinian political, security and economic reforms first, the official said.

Bush has suggested to aides that the process will take care of itself. These aides said that in the president's view, the reforms of the Palestinian Authority will create an alternative to Arafat, the Palestinian leader who has been ostracized by the United States and Israel. This will then create a groundswell of popular support within Israel for creating a Palestinian state, and either the Israeli government accepts it or is replaced by a government that will, the aides said.

The White House official said Bush's approach -- seeking a Palestinian interlocutor for Israel -- is beginning to bear fruit with the election of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, whom the president is scheduled to meet with along with Sharon on Wednesday in Aqaba, Jordan. Bush is to meet today with Abbas and Arab leaders in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

But some administration officials who have disagreed with aspects of the president's policy are concerned that Bush's belief that the hard questions will be figured out by the parties in the region -- without firm intervention by the United States -- ultimately will leave the peace process adrift.

"He does not have the knowledge or the patience to learn this issue enough to have an end destination in mind," said one administration official who has pushed for more decisive U.S. action.

As one example, this official and others pointed to Bush's role in settling the administration's internal debate in December over the "road map," a peace plan drafted by the United States with the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.
After hearing from Sharon and others, Bush began to have serious doubts about the plan, just as the parties were about to reach agreement on a final product. Sharon, along with key members of the religious right and the neoconservative movement in the United States, maintained that the document did not reflect the themes of Bush's June 24 speech in which he called for new Palestinian leadership and a Palestinian state by 2005.

Sharon dismissed the road map as a product of the Near East bureau of the State Department, which U.S. and Israeli conservatives have long accused of being too accommodating to the Palestinians. There also was heavy pressure from American Jewish groups to change language that had been carefully negotiated with the EU.

Just before negotiators were to arrive in Washington on Dec. 20 to discuss the draft, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice gave Bush the seven-page document to read, as well as a summary of its key points, administration aides said. He came back the next morning and, according to U.S. officials, told his aides that the road map was consistent with the vision outlined in his speech. He ordered U.S. officials to get the word out to the Jewish groups.

The Middle East was the subject at Bush's first National Security Council meeting in January 2001. He told his aides he wanted to do something about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but without affecting the administration's other aims in the region and by avoiding the deep involvement of Clinton, according to Edward S. Walker Jr., who was a Clinton holdover present at the meeting.
Given where Bush started out, this week's summits in the Middle East are "a big jump for the president," Walker said. "But he doesn't have to perform much on this trip," except give the appearance of being engaged for Arab and European audiences. They will be closely watching because of the president's pledge in the run-up to the war with Iraq that he would make Middle East peace his top priority after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

Walker recalled that at the first National Security Council meeting, Bush said he wanted to keep an open mind on Sharon and Arafat, though he felt they carried a lot of baggage. But Bush quickly grew to detest Arafat, concluding he was a liar and a poor leader who lacked vision, aides said.

Bush spoke briefly by phone twice with Arafat in the first six months of the administration and refused to meet with him. Last June, after Bush called for a Palestinian state by 2005, he ordered U.S. diplomats never to talk with Arafat again, arguing he had failed to contain Palestinian attacks against Israel.

Bush, in an interview with Eqypt's Nile TV last week, said, "It's not a fair characterization to say we were hands-off -- quite the contrary. I took an assessment of what was possible and realized that it was impossible to achieve peace with Chairman Arafat."

The administration has been careful, on the other hand, to coordinate its policies closely with Sharon, so much so that Sharon bragged about the "deep friendship" and "special closeness" of the U.S.-Israeli relationship during the Israeli elections in January.

But the relationship between Bush and Sharon is complex. Bush has told aides that he has serious doubts that Sharon has a vision to achieve peace, and that if Sharon does have such a vision, he hasn't shared it with the president, according to administration officials.

Sharon's meetings with Bush, moreover, are carefully prepared and choreographed by both sides. Potential issues are carefully vetted and discussed by senior aides before the two men meet, so there can be little chance of a misunderstanding. Rice often speaks with Sharon at length the day before he sees Bush in the Oval Office.

Before the June 24 speech, there were extensive negotiations between a small group of Israelis and Americans over the parameters of the speech and how far Bush could go without falling out of lockstep with the Israelis, one participant said. Not only does Sharon's chief of staff meet frequently with Rice; so does Arie Genger, an Israeli American businessman who is a close friend of Sharon.

Bush called Sharon a "man of peace" last year, infuriating Arabs angry over the Israeli army's actions against Palestinians in the West Bank. Bush publicly has not backed off that statement, but last year he privately rebuked Sharon when the Israeli leader began to repeat the comment to the president, administration officials said.
Bush interrupted Sharon when he began to say he was a "man of peace and security," according to a witness to the exchange who recounted it. "I know you are a man of security," Bush said. "I want you to work harder on the peace part."

Then, adding a bit of colloquial language that first seemed to baffle Sharon, Bush jabbed: "I said you were a man of peace. I want you to know I took immense crap for that."

Aides said the one leader in the region who has earned Bush's respect is Abdullah, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, who forcefully challenged the president over his handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a visit to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex., in April of last year.

In a scene that one senior Bush adviser later likened to "a near-death experience," Abdullah arrived at Crawford with a book showing pictures of Palestinian suffering and a 10-minute videotape of images of children shot and crushed by Israelis that had appeared on Arab television.
The adviser said Abdullah spoke eloquently about what these images meant -- conveying a respect for life rather than a hatred of Israel -- and then laid it on the line for Bush: Was he going to do something about this or not?

Current and former officials said Abdullah put it this way: I will work with you if you are willing to deal with this issue. If you can't, let me know now. No matter what, I'll always say positive things about you in public. But I have to make certain calculations on my own if you aren't going to step up to the plate.

Bush replied that he was working on a vision and would present it soon, the current and former officials said.

"It certainly made an impact on the president," one official said.

Few leaders had ever spoken so directly to Bush. The president, the official said, concluded that Abdullah was a good person who has a vision of where he wants to lead his country. Since then, the president frequently asks aides whether Abdullah believes Bush is living up to the commitments he made at Crawford.