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May
13, 2002, 10:30 a.m. By Martin Sieff |
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sraeli
prime ministers can usually reckon on looking good in Washington even
when their longsuffering public back home knows a lot better.
Gruff, taciturn old Yitzhak Rabin remained revered as a strategic genius inside the Beltway even when he was signing away his nation's security to Palestinian leadership that openly taught hatred of genocidal intensity in its schools. Benjamin Netanyahu continued to wow them on Capitol Hill long after hundreds of thousands of Russian and Sephardi Jewish working-class voters had lost all patience with him back in Israel.
But now, embattled Prime Minister Ariel Sharon can no longer even count on his good friend Dubya, the current president of the United States to "understand" him as a fellow pioneer rancher and self-styled "lover of Israel." Not after the fiasco of the past week he can't.
Sharon in his '70s has learned a thing or two about press spin . And he was, in fact, always a canny political operator on the homefront back in Israel, far different from the mindless and brutal "bulldozer" he has been caricatured as for so long. Therefore it was not hard for him to impress the sympathetic William Safire and the less unconditional but still surprisingly naive Jim Hoagland that he was still on top of things on his visit to Washington this week.
But in fact, Sharon's meeting with President George W. Bush last Tuesday was a political disaster for him. And it also highlighted one of the worst strategic problems Israel faces. Its foreign-policy decision-making is now caught between deadlock and incompetence.
A nation's foreign policy is made by its foreign minister, usually acting in close coordination with its prime minister or president, and at his directive. But the deadlock that has developed between Sharon and his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, makes the endless, humiliating and even bizarre tug of war between Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell look as graceful as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in comparison.
Sharon and Peres surprised their entire nation — and much of the world besides — by acting in remarkable harmony during their first months yoked together in Israel's current National Unity Government. But in recent months, especially since the Palestinian suicide-bomb onslaught against Israeli civilians began Dec. 1-2, their relationship has emptied faster than a flushed water closet.
Peres has adamantly opposed almost every Israeli retaliatory strike after suicide-bomb attacks. And the Israeli cabinet has been riven by intense, passionate arguments on these and almost every other issue concerning the escalating conflict with the Palestinians. Peres, as he has done for nearly half a century during his amazingly long political career, has also consistently leaked all these disputes to sympathetic media outlets and Sharon knows it.
The diplomatic vacuum in Israel's Washington embassy, by far the most important overseas posting and far more crucial to Israel than most positions in the bloated National Unity cabinet, remains unfilled. Former Ambassador David Ivry was a highly effective but extremely underrated ambassador. He returned home on April 17, right after this year's somewhat muted Israeli Independence Day celebrations. Now Sharon and Peres cannot agree on his successor.
Sharon's first choice, insiders in his ruling Likud Party say, was Israel's former United Nations Ambassador Dore Gold. The Brooklyn-born Gold is loquacious and fluent in his native English unlike the publicly taciturn and shy Gen. Ivry. He was a top foreign-policy adviser to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But Peres is adamantly opposed to appointing him, believing this would tilt the balance of power decisively against him and leave him as isolated as many Israeli foreign ministers saddled with unsympathetic prime ministers have been before him.
Many other candidates have been suggested for the position including current Mossad secret-service chief Ephraim Halevy, the British-born nephew of acclaimed philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin. He appeared acceptable to both Peres but not acceptable enough to Sharon. So the deadlock continues.
There is a widespread belief in political circles in Israel-around Sharon and Peres alike — that Sharon has concluded he cannot work with Peres much longer and does not need him anyway as national sentiment shifts profoundly to the right. According to this view, Sharon wants to keep Washington open until he can finally get rid of Peres. Then he will finally be free to appoint Gold to the position. However, even this does not appear to be the whole story.
Gold's star has been declining, officials in Israel say. They pointedly note that Sharon did not bring him as part of his foreign-policy team to Washington this week. It might have been better for him if he had.
Sharon met Bush armed with mountains of papers, documents and proposals and seeking to get three things done. First, he wanted to sideline Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and cut him out of all diplomatic efforts to end the current violence. Second, he wanted to sideline Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia's peace plan with more cautious and, he maintained, more realistic peace proposals of his own. And third, he wanted to discredit the Saudis by exposing their enthusiastic support for the suicide-bomber offensive that continues to slaughter hundreds of Israeli civilians.
However to Sharon's shock, Bush did not want to hear any of it. He remained determined to defuse the Israel-Palestinian conflict as rapidly as possible in order to persuade Arab states to support — or at least not fiercely oppose — his planned master stroke, the eventual toppling by military means of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. And therefore he is going along, somewhat reluctantly, with Powell's enthusiastic push to seek a sweeping and rapidly implementable agreement at an international conference this summer.
Why did Sharon and his advisers get it so wrong? After all, every anti-Semite in the world believes with passionate intensity that the leaders of Israel are diabolically brilliant. And even most of Israel's friends assume that its leaders know what they are doing. But sometimes, there is no substitute for Occam's Razor. The simplest, most obvious explanation is the real one. If policies are implemented in a particularly stupid way, it may just be because the people who implement them really are that dumb themselves.
Skilful and experienced diplomats realize that it is impossible to get leaders of other nations to do what you want them to unless you can persuade them it is in their own selfish interests to do so. And you cannot even begin to do that until you can get them to like and trust you first. That is why personal relationships and the ability to charm are so important in the practice of diplomacy.
But Sharon's latest diplomatic offensive served only to irritate and anger Bush and senior U.S. policymakers. U.S. officials were particularly furious that the Israeli media offensive to embarrass the Saudis was timed to coincide when Powell was meeting Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal at the State Department.
For Bush himself, the Israeli drive to discredit the Saudis came at the worst possible time. He needs the Saudis for continued cheap oil and for still-hoped-for success of the Abdullah peace plan. He is also desperate to defuse Saudi hostility to his plans to drive against Iraq. So the last thing he wants or needs is awkward documentation turning up about the less than constructive (in U.S. eyes) activities that the Saudis were taking to support the Palestinians.
This is not the image of Bush that Netanyahu publicly expresses-and appears to even believe — as the best friend Israel ever had in the White House. (What about Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan?). But it is a lot more consistent with what happened this week.
Bush administration reaction to the Israeli anti-Saudi initiative was swift — and revealing. U.S officials, with unaccustomed vehemence, complained to journalists that the Israelis were trying to discredit the Saudis when Washington remained convinced the Saudi peace plan was essential as a blueprint and base from which to move towards any remaining hope of settling the escalating conflict.
So Sharon flew home last week with all three fronts of his latest diplomatic offensive smashed. He will certainly soon come up with new ones. But they will have to work better than the old ones did. Meanwhile, the policy and trust gap between Sharon and Bush is likely to inexorably grow ever wider. That is a price a globally isolated Israel cannot afford to pay. But it will have to find a lot better realpolitik diplomatic and political talent to prevent such fiascoes happening again. So far, the prospects of doing that are not good.
— Martin Sieff is senior news analyst for United Press International. This piece is based on a report for UPI.