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Pres bush sr took on israel Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2002/04/12/usat-cover.htmDespite having led an international coalition to victory in the Gulf War, the elder Bush sounded plaintive and powerless in describing his efforts to deny Israel $10 billion in loan guarantees because of the dispute.
"I'm up against some powerful forces," he said then. "They've got something like 1,000 lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We've got one lonely little guy here doing it."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2002/04/12/usat-cover.htm
04/11/2002 - Updated 11:54 PM ET
Violence threatens to shred presidential agenda
By Susan Page, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Turmoil in the Middle East is encroaching on almost every aspect of George W. Bush's presidency, upending his priorities and imperiling his lofty political standing.
Despite efforts to keep the Mideast conflict at arm's length, Bush has found that the escalating bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians has been impossible to avoid and is now impossible to control — and, some aides fear, will prove impossible to resolve.
Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in Jerusalem Thursday, his peace mission complicated by Israel's continued West Bank offensive and a Palestinian suicide bombing on the eve of his visit.
For an administration that values a united front, the Mideast has provoked an unaccustomed display of differences among advisers and a policy that seems to be evolving day by day in public view. Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have pushed for a tough stance toward Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat while Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice have argued for a more tempered approach.
And domestic policy advisers at the White House are struggling to focus Americans' attention on other priorities and avoid losing political standing at home. They're drawing lessons from an unlikely source: President Clinton's survival strategy during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Already there are jitters over whether higher energy prices from unrest in the oil-rich region could undermine the economic recovery here. The president's top foreign policy priority, the overthrow of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, has been put on hold. And some legislative initiatives are languishing.
"The Middle East has consumed this administration and has its tentacles wrapped around everything we're doing here," says Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and a frequent Bush ally. "This issue in the Middle East has a direct effect on every dynamic of, not just foreign policy and our role and position in the world, but our economy."
"Obviously it is a major issue that has implications for a variety of other matters," Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer says. "Welcome to the White House."
The repercussions of the Middle East conflict are rippling through everything from gas prices at the pump to the president's clout on Capitol Hill:
An increase in oil prices is slowing the recovery, economists say, and could do more damage if costs rise higher. That's a possible consequence of Iraq's announcement this week of a one-month moratorium on oil sales to show support for the Palestinians. A strike by oil workers in Venezuela also is causing alarm. Some administration officials express concern not only about shortages but also about a sense of uncertainty that by itself could roil the stock market.
"We're an energy-dependent nation," Bush noted in an interview published in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. "It points up to part of the fragility of our economy. In other words, when you're dependent, a price spike can affect growth, obviously."
Slower growth would make it harder for workers to find jobs, businesses to expand and the government to pay for programs without increasing the budget deficit.
The administration's timetable to move against Saddam has been delayed, although officials say planning continues. The White House had intended to push the United Nations for tougher sanctions against Iraq this spring, pegged to the expiration of current sanctions at the end of next month.
Demands for more intrusive weapons inspections could provoke a showdown with Saddam, they figured, and provide an opportunity to act with international support, or at least acquiescence.
But the Mideast crisis "has taken options away," Hagel says. "We essentially are in a position where we must address this Middle East situation before we can talk about effective options regarding Iraq."
Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, agrees. "Until we find a way to calm things down ... it will be very difficult to proceed" against Iraq, he says.
Arab leaders warned Powell this week and Cheney during his tour of the region last month that violence in the Mideast must be addressed first.
Anger at the United States for its initial hands-off stance on the Israeli offensive has fueled huge demonstrations against U.S. embassies abroad and fractured the coalition of moderate Arab states that have backed the war on terrorism. The Iraqi leader is exploiting the opening: He won a show of support from other Arab leaders at their summit in Beirut last month.
Shibley Telhami, a Mideast expert at the University of Maryland, says the strong reaction among Arabs to the Palestinian conflict has made it harder for the United States to contemplate direct military action against Baghdad.
The administration's legislative agenda on Capitol Hill has been largely stalled in the Senate. The biggest bill to pass in recent months was one the White House didn't particularly want: the campaign-finance measure backed by Bush's GOP nemesis, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Bush signed it, but without the customary public ceremony.
'It's a distraction'
Administration officials who are lobbying for a bill that Bush does want, one that would give him expanded authority to negotiate trade agreements, say they've been unable to create a groundswell of support or even get much attention because the Mideast is overshadowing everything else.
"It's a distraction from other issues," says Ed Gillespie, a former Republican House aide and Bush campaign official.
The Mideast also has created friction between the White House and Congress. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., complained Wednesday that administration consultations on the Mideast had not been "as consistent or regular as I think they should be." Fleischer dismissed the comments as "bellyaching and whining."
On one issue, however, the Mideast crisis has been a boon for the White House. In debate in the Senate on an energy bill, uncertainty about oil supplies is cited as a prime reason to approve the administration's controversial proposal to open part of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.
"World events are helping to make our case for us," says Jim Wilkinson, a former congressional aide who now works at the White House.
In an effort to keep other priorities on track, White House officials have been careful to have the president speak out on issues close to home almost every day. Bush traveled to Tennessee on Monday and Connecticut on Tuesday to promote volunteerism. On Wednesday, he delivered an East Room speech opposing human cloning and on Thursday touted his proposal to boost religious-based charities.
On Fridays, when key government economic reports often are released, the White House regularly schedules events that show the president surrounded by working Americans — a visual message that he is concerned about and in touch with the real people behind the statistics.
The strategy is one that was tried and tested by the Clinton White House when that president faced a consuming challenge of a different sort. Then, Clinton kept his public words centered on education, health care and other issues of concern to average folks even while nearly everyone else in Washington was obsessed by the Lewinsky affair.
"If there's anything the Clinton years proved, it's that even when the national press is focused on one major issue, affected Americans take the time to hear about their particular issues," Fleischer says. "I bet a lot of young parents with little children paid a lot of attention to the president's comments on Head Start."
He says the president believes that handling a range of issues, even during a crisis, is simply part of the job.
But another Bush associate describes the Mideast's domination of the president's agenda as inevitable and unavoidable, a dance with a gorilla that will end when the gorilla decides. Eventually, he says, Bush will be judged for how he handled the crisis.
The Middle East can be a morass for any president, and the prospects for success are always lower than the possibility of failure. That's one reason Bush was so determined when he took office to avoid becoming enmeshed in the peace process, as Clinton had.
He had seen the risks up close: Bush's father faced a long-running and politically draining dispute with Israel over the building of new settlements in occupied Palestinian territories during his presidency. Surveys of voters leaving the polls in the 1988 election showed Bush winning 35% of the Jewish vote, an unusually strong showing for a Republican. But that fell to 12% when he ran for re-election in 1992.
Despite having led an international coalition to victory in the Gulf War, the elder Bush sounded plaintive and powerless in describing his efforts to deny Israel $10 billion in loan guarantees because of the dispute.
"I'm up against some powerful forces," he said then. "They've got something like 1,000 lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We've got one lonely little guy here doing it."
For the president's strategists, the biggest concern about the Mideast is that a quagmire or failure will erode the remarkable standing Bush has gained, here and abroad, as a decisive and effective leader since his response to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Some Democratic analysts say the Mideast, the first story since then to overshadow the war on terrorism, has pierced a sentiment that it was somehow unpatriotic to criticize the president.
A president's 'magic power'
As violence in the Mideast has dominated the news, Bush's approval rating on foreign policy has begun to drop, although it remains high. A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll conducted April 5-7 showed the rating at 70%, down 13 points since the beginning of the year. His approval rating on handling the Mideast fell 5 points in two weeks, to 67%. The poll of 1,009 adults had a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points.
Matthew Dowd, a senior adviser to the Republican National Committee who is in charge of White House polling, says some decline from Bush's highest poll ratings was inevitable and unrelated to the Mideast or other developments.
The "realistic plateau" for Bush as normal partisan divisions re-emerge probably will be in the high 60s, he predicts. The president's overall job-approval rating in the latest USA TODAY survey was 76%.
On the Mideast, Dowd says, the public takes a long-term view and isn't likely to fault Bush for failing to solve a problem that has bedeviled a series of presidents.
Still, Bush was visibly frustrated and impatient when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Arafat for days seemed to ignore his public demand last week that Israeli forces withdraw from occupied towns and that Palestinian authorities act against suicide bombers.
Administration officials have bristled at Sharon's defiant stance toward the president of the United States, Israel's strongest ally.
And other presidents have paid dearly for failing to resolve foreign policy problems, even difficult ones.
"The whole power of the office of the presidency is the power to move people, move issues," says Leon Panetta, a former California congressman and Clinton White House chief of staff. "If you lose that, if it appears that somehow you're paralyzed in terms of being able to deal with this, it undermines the ability of the president not only to exercise foreign policy power, but it will impact on his ability to exercise any power on domestic issues."
A president's power is part constitutional, part simply the sense of authority that emanates from the position. Panetta cautions, "He will lose a lot of that magic power if the Middle East consumes this presidency."
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