Bush tempers upbeat optimism about Middle East peace
Foreign Desk Report

WASHINGTON—When President Bush began his first energized pursuit of an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord just over five months ago, confidence was his constant companion. “I’m optimistic,” he said over and over about the prospects for ending one of the world’s longest-running disputes within little more than a year.
As the president prepares a Mideast trip this week, his second in four months, he is trading that unfailingly upbeat tone for something a bit more reserved. It’s a nod to Mideast realities.
Old barriers to peace such as distrust, violence and little movement on the most difficult issues concerning borders, Palestinian refugees and how to resolve both sides’ claim to Jerusalem have run up against new ones, mainly in the form of leaders possibly too weak among their own people to cut deals. But both the Israeli and Palestinian leaders are weak, complicating Bush’s task — and his confidence.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is under investigation for allegations that he illicitly collected campaign cash, and has said he will resign if indicted. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is constrained by the political divide between Palestinians in the West Bank where Abbas’ Fatah movement is in control and in Gaza, which is governed by the Hamas militant group. In interviews with the Israeli media Monday at the White House, Bush said his relations with Olmert were “excellent” and called the Israeli leader an “honest guy.”
But in an apparent effort to separate the fate of the peace process from Olmert’s own, Bush said the negotiations with the Palestinians do not depend on Olmert and singled out Israel’s foreign and defense ministers as possible replacements. And, he noted that several Palestinian officials are involved in the peace talks, not just Abbas.
“I certainly think there’s a coming to grips with reality,” said Nathan Brown, a Mideast expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and director of George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies. In November, when Bush convened nearly 50 countries in Annapolis, Md., for a Mideast peace conference that launched the first formal negotiations in years between Israelis and Palestinians, he repeatedly said a deal was doable by the time he leaves office next January.
“I wouldn’t be standing here if I didn’t believe that peace was possible,” he said at a Rose Garden send-off for Olmert and Abbas.
Bush was just as cheerful in January before, during and after a Mideast trip. “There’s a good chance for peace,” he said in Israel, his first visit there as president. “When I say I’m optimistic we can get a deal done, I mean what I’m saying,” Bush said in Egypt.
He kept this stance into March, despite no visible progress in the Israeli-Palestinian talks that include bimonthly meetings between Olmert and Abbas. Bush declared that the 10 months left on his self-imposed peace clock was “plenty of time.” “I’m still as optimistic as I was after Annapolis,” Bush said after meeting at the White House with Jordan’s King Abdullah II.
The approach is classic Bush, for whom a favorite story is how the choice of an Oval Office rug with a sunburst pattern says “optimistic person comes to work” to visitors. Truth be told, it’s not so uncommon for most politicians and diplomats, said Jon Alterman, head of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The president is optimistic because he thinks his job is to be optimistic,” he said. But Bush was less ebullient by the time Abbas visited the White House last month to plead for stepped-up U.S. involvement in the negotiations, particularly to ride herd on Israel to halt settlement activity in Palestinian areas. “I’m confident we can achieve the definition of a state,” he told Abbas, somewhat flatly. Perhaps even more significantly, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told an American Jewish audience a few days later that “we have a chance to reach the basic contours of a settlement by the end of the year.”