US tests the limits of its leverage in Mideast

"When the two sides are engaged in a really vicious, intimate, short-term mode of thinking, they're not going to be thinking very much about reputational issues," says says Tamara Wittes, program director of the Middle East Institute here.

At the same time, fundamental questions critical to moving forward remain unanswered. For instance, do Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon really want a peace deal? Before he left, Powell himself set low expectations for his trip.

Stephen Cohen, at the Israeli Policy Forum in New York, says that because of the administration's late entry into the Arab-Israeli quagmire, it is just beginning to discover what kind of leverage it has. Certainly, it is greatest with the Israelis, America's longtime ally and No. 1 recipient of foreign aid.

According to Mr. Cohen and others, the most effective use of US influence at the moment is exactly what President Bush is doing – jawboning. With his stern statements of the past few days, Mr. Bush is working to influence public and elite opinion, and reinvigorating the debate within Israel and among the Arabs about what comes next.

"There is a new political will in the ballgame," says Cohen. The wills of Mr. Sharon and Arafat "have now been joined by the political will of George W., and that's not a small political will."

It's large enough to push the Israelis back from two towns. But analysts agree that these are mainly time-buying moves by Sharon. Bush is still up against the same kind of forces at work during Israel's attack on Lebanon a decade ago.

"I'm very much reminded of the events in 1982, when a very friendly American president to Israel, Ronald Reagan, was quite surprised to learn that calling on the Israeli government when it was in the middle of conducting a military campaign, which had been long planned and was very strongly provoked, didn't get you very far," says Sam Lewis, who was the US ambassador to Israel at the time.

But analysts do not expect Bush to go beyond rhetorical pressure and actually curtail military or economic aid to Israel. That happened in 1991, when the elder President Bush delayed $10 billion in loan guarantees out of concern that Arabs would boycott a multilateral peace summit. The money was to be used to build housing for Russian émigrés in the Palestinian territories. The move provoked a fierce backlash from the pro-Israeli lobby and conservatives in the US.

Still, one new dynamic is driving US resolve: the potential for the Arab-Israeli conflict to undermine Bush's war on terrorism. One administration official urges patience as the White House feels its way through this situation.

"I'm not sure this is the moment from which to take the snapshot," the official says. "Everybody assumes that there are going to be reactions and responses in the next week or two."

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