President to Send Envoy to Mideast for Peace Talks
By TODD S. PURDUM
ASHINGTON, March 7 — Under pressure from Arab allies, President Bush announced today that his special envoy, Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, would return to the Middle East next week in an effort to end the mounting Israeli-Palestinian violence.
"There are no assurances," Mr. Bush said, that General Zinni will be able to broker a cease-fire or the resumption of peace talks. But, he added, "that is not going to prevent our government from trying." He spoke this afternoon in a surprise appearance in the White House Rose Garden.
For weeks Mr. Bush and other senior officials have insisted that General Zinni, a retired marine who was recalled from his mission late last year, would not return until the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, reined in attacks against Israelis and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon eased his siege of Palestinian areas.
But with violence unabated and Vice President Dick Cheney set to leave on Sunday for a long-planned mission to the region to review options for moving against Iraq, administration officials and outside experts agree, Mr. Bush had to do something to keep Mr. Cheney's efforts from being swallowed up in recriminations over the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Officials said President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, in talks this week with Mr. Bush, had strongly urged General Zinni's return, as had Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in talks last week with George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence. Mr. Sharon's spokesman said late tonight that the Israeli leader welcomed the announcement.
Mr. Bush repeated today that he was committed to exploring Prince Abdullah's recent peace overture, which suggested that Saudi Arabia was prepared to offer full recognition to Israel in exchange for Israel's withdrawal from territories it occupied after the 1967 war.
A senior administration official said tonight that the enthusiastic embrace of the plan by moderate Arab states — and their willingness to involve themselves in the peace process — "is very different than `It has to be the United States that must solve it.' "
The official added, "You want to take this opportunity to build on a responsible action by the crown prince."
In the Rose Garden this afternoon, Mr. Bush was flanked by Mr. Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, creating a symbolic tableau of the administration's highest-ranking officials in a show of concern about the violence in Israel and the Palestinian areas, which has killed 100 people in the past five days.
Just hours earlier, the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, had said the envoy would not be returning to the region without "an opening where a return by General Zinni would do some good."
An administration official suggested tonight that the violence itself was a spur. "I guess subconsciously, we knew there was another parameter under which you could send him, and we've discovered that's the parameter," the official said. "Given the level of violence, we rewrote our preconditions."
The increasing violence, and rising criticism that the administration was not doing enough about it, together with Mr. Bush's own broader efforts to ensure Arab cooperation in any offensive against Iraq, combined to form a consensus on sending General Zinni back, aides and outside experts said.
"The focus of Cheney's visit was to talk to all these Arab leaders about the effort to remove Saddam Hussein," said Martin Indyk, the Clinton administration's ambassador to Israel and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
"The escalation in Israeli-Palestinian violence has ensured he will not be able to avoid that issue," Mr. Indyk added, "so I think they've come to understand that if they're going to keep the focus on Iraq, they're going to have to so something about trying to calm that violence down."
A senior administration official said that while General Zinni would not have a dramatic new message, the combination of his trip and Mr. Cheney's would allow them to "talk about the larger strategic picture."
Mr. Bush said the focus of General Zinni's mission would be to build support for a truce plan sketched last year by Mr. Tenet, at the C.I.A. It calls for the Palestinians to crack down on suspected militants and prevent attacks on Israelis, and calls on Israel to lift its broad travel bans on Palestinians and pull back to positions it had before the latest fighting broke out, in September 2000.
"Our strategy is a well thought out strategy," Mr. Bush said. "It's one that reminds both parties there is an obligation to seek peace."
The violence, and the harsh Israeli reprisals, has forced the administration to re-examine its strong support for Mr. Sharon's tough policies. On Wednesday Secretary Powell made some of the administration's sharpest critical comments of the Israeli, urging him to "take a hard look" and pull back from "thinking that you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed."
Secretary Powell and President Bush both used less forceful language today, but Mr. Bush said, "I'm counting on all parties in the region, Prime Minister Sharon included, to do everything they can to make these efforts a success."
Speaking of Mr. Sharon, he added, "I think he recognizes that you can't achieve peace by allowing violence to escalate or causing violence to escalate."
The State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, urged Israel to halt its assaults, which have raised civilian death tolls in Palestinian areas, saying they "clearly work against the overriding objective of reducing violence and returning to negotiations."
Tonight Mr. Sharon welcomed the return of General Zinni. Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for the prime minister, said, "Anything that could bring about a cessation of the violence and a cease-fire that will enable a resumption of the talks is welcome."
To date the Bush administration has resisted arguments by some European allies and many in the Arab world that it could not hope to win a worldwide campaign against terrorism as long as Arab passions remained inflamed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While today's announcement may not reflect acceptance of the notion that the two issues are linked, it did suggest that the administration believed progress in its broader goals in the Persian Gulf could be hindered by continued violence.
"If you talk to some of the neighboring states that are concerned about the Palestinian problem from the standpoint of their own stability," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today at an open meeting at the Pentagon, "there's no question they will tell you that dealing with that problem is of the first order, and it needs to be tapped down so there's less violence if the war on terrorism is going to continue to be successful."