Cheney's Mideast reality check

Vice President Dick Cheney returns Wednesday, after an 10-day swing through the Middle East, with a different set of notes in his portfolio from those he expected to bring home.

Move back the Iraq file. Move up the file on US efforts to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

The reordering does not mean the problem of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction fell off the trip's agenda. But it does mean the Bush administration has a clearer picture of how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict colors every other issue in the region.

The sum-up of Mr. Cheney's notes must include this point, specialists in the Middle East and American foreign policy say: The war on terrorism is not the driving order of business for the rest of the world. And if the US wants continued cooperation on tackling international terrorism, it will have to pay more attention to the issues that are uppermost in regions of keen interest to the US.

"At every turn, [Cheney] has been told that Iraq is not the first priority of the various states," says Judy Barselou, a Mideast specialist at the United States Institute of Peace here. "Their priority is the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, so there is a disconnect on the larger war on terrorism."

By yesterday in Israel – from where he headed on to Turkey, his last stop – Cheney was focusing almost exclusively on the Mideast conflict. But he dashed Yasser Arafat's hopes of the vice president paying him a visit, instead telling the Palestinian leader he would meet with him if a cease-fire was arranged under the conditions of earlier US security-building plans.

When he set out on his trip March 10, Cheney had three central goals in mind: shoring up Arab-American relations that have sagged particularly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks; rallying support for US action against the Iraqi regime; and progress in quelling violence and clearing a path to peace in the Middle East.

Cheney can argue that while the order of emphasis may have shifted, he made progress on all three, some analysts argue.

"The Bush administration deserves credit, because they saw the situation on the ground and corrected a foreign policy for the region that initially was too heavily focused on Iraq," says Fawaz Gerges, a professor of international relations at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.. "It's a testament to the flexibility and speed with which they can adapt to realities."

Arab leaders have been impressed by the way Cheney – an old hand at the Middle East – seemed to seek views instead of imposing them, as well as by the measures the US took over a short time to further regional peace efforts, Mr. Gerges says.

Page: 1 | 2