Israel, the U.S. and the Age of Terror

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By ROGER COHEN
Published: November 7, 2004

THROUGHOUT its first term, the Bush administration held that the road to Jerusalem passed through Baghdad. Even before the 9/11 attacks, but especially after them, it shunned the very term "peace process," which it saw as a synonym for sterile Middle Eastern chatter. The new approach was firm: only a regional democratic transformation, beginning in Iraq and extending to a corrupt and terror-tainted Palestinian Authority, could unlock the door to an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.

But with the symbol of that corruption, Yasir Arafat, comatose in a Paris hospital, Iraq mired in conflict, Europe pressing for a signal of a new George W. Bush, and images of violence in Gaza feeding anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world, the question was asked last week: Has the time not come for the administration to adjust its approach to Israel and put peace in Jerusalem first?

Two new seasons seem to have come at once - the post-Arafat era and the second Bush term. Their promise for the Middle East, and beyond it the war on terror, may prove fleeting if different times do not also bring different policies.

After all, in historical terms, Mr. Bush's largely uncritical embrace of Ariel Sharon's Israel is an anomaly. The emergence of the Jewish state in 1948 was greeted with ambivalence in Washington; Secretary of State George Marshall argued against the immediate recognition that President Harry Truman gave.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/weekinreview/07cohe.html

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1. The time for the administration to "adjust its approach to Israel"

has long since passed, and there is nothing in the forseeable future which would induce it to change the plan