Bush Quickly Losing Ground With Allies

by Jim Lobe

Not only did virtually all of Washington's closest Middle East "allies" -- Arab and Israeli alike -- reject its efforts to ensure a smooth Arab League endorsement of Saudi Arabia's latest peace proposals, its next target in the war against terrorism, Iraq, was welcomed back into the Arab fold with open arms.

As the week in which Bush had hoped to achieve a cease-fire in the ever-escalating struggle between Israel and the Palestinians ended, a new spiral of killing was already underway, with Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers moving into the West Bank and Gaz in retaliation for the latest Palestinian suicide bombings.

Meanwhile, Europe continued to seethe over the latest manifestations of U.S. unilateralism -- a 30 percent hike in tariffs on steel imports -- and China blocked a routine port call by a U.S. warship at Hong Kong to protest the Pentagon's reception of a top Taiwanese defense official.

And, after insisting for months that U.S. troops would not be used for peacekeeping in Afghanistan, the Pentagon rejected desperate pleas from the United Nations and Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai, to expand the size and reach of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). U.S. forces would have to keep peace between the warlords who control most of the country, after all, said Washington.

Nor was that all. Pakistan rejected outright the suggestion that U.S. troops be permitted to operate on its side of the border with Afghanistan to prevent Taliban and al Qaeda forces from gaining sanctuary there.

Finally, uniformed military commanders, who have long grumbled privately about the hegemonic ambitions of the civilian hawks who now dominate the Pentagon, have been going public.

In Congressional hearings over the past two weeks, they suggested their forces are already stretched too thin by the war on Afghanistan and other deployments to take on major new missions. That provoked a visibly irritated and testy defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to warn March 28: "It's a disservice to them to leave that impression, in my view."

"It's not easy ruling the world," noted one caustic Congressional staffer, whose Democratic boss has been among those lawmakers gradually more willing to question the administration's goals in its anti-terrorist campaign.

Rumsfeld's testiness reflected more than frustration with his more cautious commanders concerned about the administration's promiscuity in taking on new military tasks virtually around the world.

More important, things are not going well for administration hawks clustered around Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney who, after claiming victory with the swift and virtually painless ouster of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan late last year, had hoped to take the war next to Iraq.

Indeed, preparing the diplomatic groundwork for such a campaign, to be launched as early as next fall, was the major purpose of Cheney's 11-day trip to see U.S. allies in the Mideast and Gulf region earlier this month.

But, with the exception of Israel itself, Cheney received the same message in virtually every capital he visited, most bluntly expressed by Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa of Bahrain, the country that provides the U.S. Navy with its main base in the Gulf.

"The people who are dying today on the streets are not a result of any Iraqi action," the Crown Prince told Cheney. "The people are dying as a result of an Israeli action. And likewise the people in Israel are dying as a result of actions taken in response."

The administration had hoped that dispatching Bush's special Mideast envoy to the region to try to negotiate a ceasefire during Cheney's trip would have appeased Arab sensitivities sufficiently to focus the trip on how to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Just in case, it threw in unprecedented U.S. sponsorship of a UN Security Council resolution affirming support for a Palestinian state "within secure and recognized borders."

But Washington's Arab clients were unusually steadfast in the face of Cheney's appeals. They underlined that position at their summit in Beirut this week, not only by arranging an unexpected reconciliation between Iraq and Kuwait, but also by approving a resolution that -- in addition to offering peace to Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from territories occupied since 1967 -- warned that any attack on Iraq would be considered an attack against all Arab states.

Their action followed a series of stunning rebuffs to Washington: Arab leaders insisting to Cheney that the Israeli-Palestinian question was more urgent than Iraq, then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rejecting the vice president's personal appeal to permit Palestine Authority Chairman Yassir Arafat to attend the Beirut summit, with the assurance that he could return.

"The U.S. expended a lot of political capital to no avail, illustrating how deadlocked the situation is and the limits of American influence," Samuel Lewis, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, told the Washington Post. His successor, Martin Indyk, warned darkly that "the situation on the ground is going to full-scale war."

But even as events and actors in the Middle East appeared to spin out of Washington's grasp by week's end, the administration found itself grappling with other problems.

The European Union, for example, has drawn up a politically explosive list of U.S. exports that it has targeted for retaliation against the steel tariffs. Highest on the list are major products from states where Bush's Republican party is especially vulnerable in upcoming Congressional elections.

Brussel's action, according to David Broder, one of Washington's most influential political analysts, reflects in part the suddenly widening gap between Europe and Washington over the latter's anti-terrorist goals, particularly its plans on Iraq. Writing from Rome, Broder, who is not prone to hyperbole, described the Europeans as "furious" with the administration and "ready to fight back."

Even at home, things suddenly appear a lot more difficult for the hawks, and not only because the military has begun squawking about over-extension.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration is so divided over which Iraqi exile groups to back in any future effort to topple Saddam Hussein, that the State Department is withholding or delaying the approval of visas for the Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC) to take part in a major INC meeting here, scheduled for later this month.