Artículo de STEVEN R. WEISMAN en “The Washington Post” del 21.05.2003
WASHINGTON, May 20 — President Bush, intervening to salvage his administration's battered Middle East peace plan, today called the new Palestinian prime minister for the first time, and administration officials said he was considering traveling to the region in the next few weeks for the first time as president.
Administration officials said that in his conversation with the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, Mr. Bush urged him to take "concrete steps" to disarm Hamas and other groups that have carried out attacks against Israelis. He later telephoned Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, they said, asking him to ease the harsh conditions for Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.
The president's unusually direct involvement in the Middle East situation reflected what administration officials said was a growing fear that without more assertive involvement from Washington, the chances to settle the Israeli-Palestinian disputes could disappear into a vortex of more violence.
Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said Mr. Bush believed that Mr. Abbas "genuinely wants to do everything in his power to achieve peace and to fight terror."
An administration official, however, described the internal mood as one of "anxiety and desperation" after the latest cycle of five suicide attacks against Israelis since Saturday, Israeli crackdowns, and the failure last week of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to bridge any of the differences between the sides.
In a separate development, administration officials said that to rekindle the prospects for peace, Mr. Sharon was being pressed to consider doing something dramatic that would not directly affect Israeli security, like dismantling a small number of Jewish settlements established in the last two years.
A couple of weeks ago, these officials said, two top White House aides — Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, and Elliott Abrams, director of Middle East affairs on the national security staff — took a helicopter trip across Israel with Mr. Sharon.
Administration officials said at the time that the trip was an attempt by Mr. Sharon to show them the precariousness of Israel's security situation, as he had done with other visitors, including Mr. Bush before he was president.
In fact, the officials said, the helicopter trip was partly intended for them to get a bird's eye view of Jewish settlements to see which ones would eventually be frozen or even dismantled as part of the peace negotiations. The peace plan calls implicitly for settlements to be dismantled as part of a final settlement, its drafters say.
A trip by Mr. Bush to the Middle East was uncertain, administration officials said, and his aides were said to disagree over whether he should become more personally involved at all in the Israeli-Palestinian morass.
The president is due to leave at the end of this month for a summit meeting of the world's leading industrial democracies in Évian, in the French Alps. American officials say that he could make a swing to Kuwait or Qatar to show support for American troops in Iraq, and meet with Mr. Sharon and Mr. Abbas there or elsewhere.
A visit to Israel itself was considered possible but unlikely.
American officials concede that it would be extraordinary for Mr. Bush to get directly involved in the impasse between Israel and its would-be Palestinian partners over the longstanding issue of who makes the first gesture to defuse the violence and tensions.
From the beginning of his term, the president had vowed not to involve himself in the minutiae of the Middle East, disdaining the way his aides said President Clinton had turned Camp David into a hotel for envoys while trying to hammer out an agreement, placing his own prestige on the line in a futile effort.
Some officials said there continued to be talk in the administration today about selecting a special envoy to press Mr. Sharon and Mr. Abbas to make concessions to each other. But officials said a sense of futility pervaded even that discussion.
"How many special envoys have gone out there and had their reputations ruined?" asked an administration official. "Where are we going to find somebody willing to do it when the chances are so poor?"
Underlying the current crisis atmosphere was a growing realization that the administration's peace plan — the "road map" calling for a phased series of reciprocal steps leading to a Palestinian state — had itself become a focus of Israeli-Palestinian antagonism rather than a path to peace talks.
The road map was a novel approach adopted by Mr. Bush, partly out of a determination to deal with foreign crises differently from Mr. Clinton. It consisted of negotiating the steps in the road map plan over the last year, not with the Palestinians and the Israelis themselves, but with international partners — the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.
The administration's peace plan was worked out over many months by the so-called quartet, supported by three important Arab allies, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Both the Palestinian and Israeli sides raised objections to the draft of the plan, but according to administration officials they were asked not to oppose it outright. The strategy was to get Europeans and Arabs involved in the process so they could help persuade the Palestinians to respond positively.
When Israel objected, the president was said to have assured Mr. Sharon that he would force a change in Palestinian leadership, replacing Yasir Arafat with someone more willing to crack down on violence, and that Israel would not have to take irreversible actions until violence subsided.
With the end of the Iraq war, the administration published the plan. It has also been formally endorsed by the Palestinians and several Arab countries. Mr. Sharon has demurred.
Mr. Powell went to the region last week to try to get Israel and the Palestinians to take actions even in the absence of agreement on the road map. But according go administration officials, Mr. Abbas now says he cannot take any actions until Israel endorses the road map.
Meanwhile, the plan is drawing criticism from conservatives. Christian groups and some Jewish groups say it is unfair to Israel because it requires too much for too little in return.
To the dismay of many in the administration, the plan, which was supposed to facilitate peace, has become an impediment to it, in the process isolating Israel as opposing something favored by Europe, the United Nations, Russia, the American president and the Arab world.
Administration officials now say that they face a choice of abandoning the road map altogether and starting over, or somehow trying to persuade Israel to endorse it, perhaps by agreeing to some changes.
One official said that if there were changes to be made, there was no agreement on what form they would take. A way out of the dilemma, he said, would be to recall that there was always going to be a period of "public commentary" after the plan was published.
"One idea would be to announce that this period of public commentary is open," said the official. "From that, you begin to develop a public consensus to revise it and amend it, and make changes that will further empower the Palestinians and give the Israelis a sense of security."
From the sidelines, Mr. Bush is getting considerable free advice from Congress. Conservatives like the former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, and Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have assailed the plan as unfair to Israel. Today, 44 House members voiced support for the plan in a letter to Mr. Bush. It was signed by a broad bipartisan group led by Representatives Darrell Issa of California, a Republican, and Louis Capps of California and David Price of North Carolina, who are Democrats.