President Bush concluded his Rose Garden speech about the Middle East on Monday by calling the moment "a test to show who is serious about peace and who is not." Given how naïve his plan is -- how astonishingly far it is from any foreseeable reality -- he may have failed his own test. It's not that Bush's goals aren't noble or correct, but real diplomacy takes more than wishful thinking.
Bush's fuzzy logic, to borrow a term, is weakest with regard to what he calls the "Palestinian leadership." By refusing even to name Yasir Arafat, the president showed that he's just not ready for an honest attempt at peacemaking.
It's not that Arafat is a stand-up guy, or even a credible negotiator. Revelations in recent months all but conclusively unmasked Arafat as a financial supporter of terrorism. It's quite possible the peace process would fare better in his absence. But there's no guarantee. And that's because there's not yet a viable replacement for him -- that we know of, at least. Presumably Bush wouldn't call for Arafat's removal without an idea of who he wants in Arafat's stead. The Bush team is not made up of amateurs, so it's unlikely it would create a power vacuum without some idea of how best to fill it.
But if Bush administration officials know who should lead the Palestinians, they should alert the public. Bush's candidate -- if indeed there is one -- should be scrutinized openly by the world community and the people he would presumably govern. And if there is no candidate, calling for Arafat's ouster is an even bigger mistake. With the radicalization of the Palestinian people since the onset of the second intifada, Arafat's replacement could be even worse than the decrepit guerilla himself. The next Palestinian head of state may not be so ambivalent in his desire to wipe out Israel.
Nor should Arafat be replaced without democratic elections, which are scheduled for January. Indeed, Bush's plan could blow up in his face if Arafat is re-elected, as it looks like he will be. The great stupidity of Bush's speech, of course, is that he calls upon a people who hate him -- and see him as unabashedly pro-Israel -- to take his paternalistic-sounding advice. In issuing his demand, Bush probably rallied the Palestinians around Arafat better than any diplomatic success might have.
Even if Arafat were to voluntarily cede power but stay on as a figurehead -- a possibility the Israeli government has declared itself amenable to -- he will remain, despite his ineptitude as a statesman and his moral infirmity, an inimitable symbol of Palestinian aspirations. If he is allowed to linger in the background as a politician-at-large, he will continue to hold indirect sway over policy because of his popularity, seniority, and biography.
Beyond the debate about Arafat's viability as a leader, Bush's call for Arafat's removal is the mark of a grossly immature statesman. Good diplomacy means finding solutions to a conflict, even a stalemated one, rather than childishly asking for a new partner. You can't call for a leader's ouster when he doesn't do what you want.
It's fine to call for regime change, as the United States has done in Yugoslavia and Iraq, when the regime is not an essential part of the solution. But the Palestinian Authority won't go away, and Arafat is not a genocidal war criminal on par with Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein. The Palestinian Authority will be a necessary part of the solution in the Middle East, whether Bush likes it or not.
Most unstatesman-like of all is the notion of a provisional state. This ill-considered proposal has no redeeming qualities. Either there is a state -- which is preferable -- or there is not a state, but provisionality is a logistical impossibility. How can Israelis or anybody else negotiate peace, commerce, or treaties with a state that exists only provisionally? How can a provisional state invest in infrastructure that may change as the parameters of the state change? Moreover, provisionality builds in excuses for both lawlessness and failure to clamp down on terrorist activities.
Of course, the existing Palestinian Authority hasn't done anything to rein in those activities, either. Which is why Bush is right to demand reforms in the Palestinian Authority; he's just completely misguided about how to impose them. Bush predicated the creation of a state on broad and abstract goals such as ending corruption and fostering democracy. But he offered no means to measure how or when those reforms will be adequately completed. Nor did he issue a timetable, which might have motivated rapid change. With neither specificity nor a timetable, the plan looks like one big stalling tactic. And that's exactly how the Palestinians are likely to see it.
All of which raises a question: Who, exactly, was the speech for, if not the Palestinians? It certainly wasn't for the rest of the Arab world, given the speech's tacit support of Israel's reoccupation. That leaves only Likudniks and Americans, neither of whom are in a position to solve the bureaucratic and social ills of the occupied territories.
The proposal's most acute shortcoming, sadly, is that, like every previous peace proposal, Bush's plan remains vulnerable to terrorists bent on hijacking it. The Bush plan lacks anything to pre-empt another wave of strikes and leaves the terrorists, as always, holding a trump card.
An ideal attempt to bypass the terrorist quagmire would have committed the U.S. to working with the winner of the January elections -- which might have marginalized extremists who claim Bush and Israel won't respect the right of Palestinians to self-determination. Bush should have called for a real state, not a provisional one, and established a timetable contingent on reforms in the Palestinian Authority. But instead he settled for rhetoric and politics, neither of which offers much hope for peace in the Middle East anytime soon.
