But at each meeting, Blair’s begging has gone unrewarded and the Brits have left Washington with just a few crumbs of comfort. In fact, every time Blair has pressed for some movement on the Middle East, Bush has either brushed his sense of urgency aside or repeated only the most general commitment to peace in the region. Just before the war began in Iraq, it took substantial pressure from Blair to convince Bush to promise to release the roadmap some time soon.
That was the state of the transatlantic relationship–until now. This time around, on Blair’s turf, the Brits conjured up an extraordinarily simple gimmick. Where Bush likes to meet Blair at the secluded sylvan retreat of Camp David, Blair dragged Bush out to an 18th century castle in terrorist-torn Northern Ireland. His message: If we can keep a peace process alive in this place, we can do the same in the Middle East.
The pitch seems to have worked. Speaking together in Belfast on Tuesday, Blair and Bush echoed each other with a sense of hope about what they could now achieve with the Israelis and Palestinians. “To those who can sometimes say that the process in the Middle East is hopeless, I say we can look at Northern Ireland and take some hope from that,” Blair declared optimistically.
For his part, Bush seemed equally glowing about the prospects for both peace processes. “Peace in the Middle East will require overcoming deep divisions of history and religion, yet we know this is possible,” he said. “It is happening in Northern Ireland.” He almost sounded like Blair’s previous best friend in the White House, Bill Clinton, who proved the decisive factor in the 1998 Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland and was so deeply in the weeds of the Middle East peace talks.
That’s not a comparison this White House would appreciate. But it’s not just the tone of the two leaders, or the issues, which spotlights how far President Bush seems to be moving. It’s also the slippery compromises, the messy half-truths that are part and parcel of the very notion of a peace process in either region. For a president who prides himself on moral clarity and straight talk, the process of a negotiated peace offers neither clarity nor straightness. Instead, it offers years of fudge and disputed definitions in the pursuit of that finest of dreams: peace.
Life in Northern Ireland is undoubtedly better than it was before the Good Friday agreement, but the experience of the peace process has been embittering for both sides and dogged by moral murkiness. In fact, it’s precisely what the Bush administration has been trying to avoid in the Middle East.
Take the most pressing, most central part of any peace talks: security. Both sides in theory are negotiating because they want an end to conflict. So an end to violence, and a start of disarmament, is the most critical part of the deal. Yet for years Northern Ireland’s peace has been punctured by low-level violence–murders in low numbers (as opposed to large-scale bombings), gangland beatings and intimidation between the rival communities. It has also been plagued by the refusal of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to disarm fully and renounce violence one more time.
Compare that with the Bush administration’s approach to the Middle East, where–along with the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon–it has insisted on security first. Not a half measure of security, or a partial end to the violence, but a full commitment by the Palestinians to peace. Far from taking a slippery slope, incremental approach towards peace, the administration has taken a hardline position on the Palestinians. For instance, it has refused to release its roadmap until it is absolutely convinced that the Palestinian Authority is committed to sidelining Yasir Arafat by confirming the appointment of a new prime minister, Abu Mazen.
And what triggered the administration’s ditching of Arafat? In large part, it was the intercepted ship, the Karine-A, laden with arms in the Red Sea on its way to the Palestinian Authority in January of last year. Instead of ending its involvement with violence, the Palestinian leadership was clearly embracing it. It was almost exactly the equivalent of what happened with the IRA in 2001, when three of its members were caught in the Colombian jungle on suspicion of training Marxist guerrillas in urban warfare. Those three are now on trial in Bogota, where officials credit the IRA for a dramatic rise in terrorist attacks in Colombian cities. The IRA men claimed they were in Colombia as eco-tourists.
Both the Bush administration and the Blair government have sent uncompromising messages to the IRA that such terrorist training–which is supposed to raise substantial amounts of cash from the narco-terrorists in Latin America–must stop. Yet that has not excluded the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, from the peace process. Nor has the IRA’s insistence that it could only disarm fully in exchange for a pullout of the British army from Northern Ireland. Imagine that kind of pre-condition being set by the Palestinians.
If Tony Blair has really convinced George W. Bush that the two peace processes are similar, that would suggest a sea change in the administration’s policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It would mean that the Palestinians could move forward in peace talks in exchange for only partial steps towards an end to violence–talks which could continue even while the terrorist attacks go on.
If Blair has not moved Bush, the president might be guilty of yet another shared trait with President Clinton: compartmentalization. Maybe the president has learned how to separate one peace process in one part of his brain from another.
