With few exceptions, lawmakers are keeping their criticism and their cheerleading to themselves, and letting the administration do its job. “Enough people up there understand this is serious, and demagoguing isn’t going to help,” says former Republican representative Tillie Fowler, a member of Secretary Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board. Politicians know they’re in a zone where every word and phrase is parsed. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle told reporters that he didn’t want to say anything that Colin Powell might have to explain.
Members of Congress make their living mouthing off on the issue of the day. But even the most ambitious, vote-hungry politician doesn’t want to be seen as doing or saying anything that could be interpreted as interfering with the Powell mission.
Once Powell returns from the region, all bets are off. “When the secretary of State, the only one we have, is on a very difficult mission, nobody wants to do anything irresponsible,” says a House Democrat. “But after that mission is over, successfully or more likely unsuccessfully, we’ll have a lot to say.” Buoyed by a new poll that shows Democrats up six points over Republicans in the generic congressional vote (meaning voters in general prefer Democrats over Republicans by that margin), Democrats may be emboldened to seek an advantage in Bush’s flailing Mideast policy.
Some Democrats whisper, though not too loudly, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would never have spun so out of control if Clinton were still president. “Bush would not or could not invest any of his extraordinary political capital in trying for peace,” says a Democratic critic. “He’s like a billionaire who lets his family starve because he’s cheap.”
The shifting political lines around the issue of Israel have drawn Bush irrevocably into the conflict. Democrats have long had an emotional commitment to Israel, and American Jews rewarded the party’s allegiance with a disproportionate share of their votes. Republicans supported Israel for strategic reasons, but the emotional connection wasn’t there, and it showed at the ballot box. That has changed dramatically with the growth of the Christian fundamentalist wing of the GOP and its advocacy for Israel, which is every bit as ardent as any of the Jewish lobbying groups.
It is a new development for the Republicans to have such a powerful part of their party demonstrating visible and visceral support for Israel. This voice within the GOP is so influential that Bush has to take into account “the Republican street” every bit as much as “the Arab street.” A Democratic consultant quips that the Fox News Network is so fervently pro-Israel that, “You’d think it was paid for by the United Jewish Appeal.”
Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who regularly appears on Fox and the other cable-news networks, embodies the hawkish message. In meetings on Capitol Hill this week, he warned that American buses and pizza parlors will be next unless Sharon is given free rein to root out the terrorist infrastructure in the occupied territories. Here’s where Bush is trapped by his own words. When he said in his speech to a joint session of Congress after 9-11 that anybody who harbors terrorists is a terrorist, and that he would pursue terrorists anywhere, anyplace, he gave the Israelis the intellectual and moral argument to carry their antiterrorist campaign into Palestinian cities and refugee camps.
American Jews are angry and hurt. They see anti-Semitism bubbling up in Europe and elsewhere, and they are fearful for themselves–and for Israel. Friends of Israel who are sickened by what Sharon is doing are caught in another trap: they feel they can’t voice their criticism without risking being called anti-Semitic. The administration is saying the right things in calling for an immediate ceasefire, a pulling back of Israeli forces and a clear denunciation by the Arab states of suicide bombers.
Bush’s big worry is that the conflict has taken away his ability to take the war on terrorism to its next stage, which is the removal of Saddam Hussein. “Nothing can be done on any front without this thing stabilized,” says an administration official. Powell argued that point internally for many months before anybody paid attention. Now that he’s won the argument, victory must be bittersweet. Powell, better than most, understands the excruciating road ahead, and for the moment he’s got full backing. “Everybody from the toughest hawk to the softest dove thinks the situation in the Middle East is untenable and that it is cascading out of control,” says the official. “There is a singularity of purpose here.”
The hard-liners are quiet for the moment, but they’ll be back to spin their vision of a post-Saddam Middle East. “You could say the hard-liners are utter romantics,” says Geoffrey Kemp, director of regional strategic programs at the Nixon Center. “They have this domino theory where getting rid of Saddam leads to a democratic Middle East, and that the route to peace is through Baghdad rather than Jerusalem.” Kemp served on President Reagan’s national-security staff when Israel invaded Lebanon, a brutal siege that pulled the administration into the Middle East maw. “It’s what always happens,” says Kemp. “Nobody wanted to get involved, and you get forced into it by events on the ground. You can be as visionary as you like, but the reality is it’s Powell who has to clean it up.” For now at least, Congress is standing aside to let him do what he can.
WHOOPS
President Bush probably wishes he could take back a comment he made while campaigning in Iowa last month for Republican Rep. Tom Latham. “It makes no sense to replace someone on the Appropriations Committee with someone who is not,” Bush declared, telling voters it is in their self-interest to keep a congressman who sits on the committee that holds the purse strings. South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson, who has been targeted by the Republicans and is in a tight race, is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Johnson thought Bush made such a good argument that he quickly plastered the quote all over his campaign literature and is using the president’s words to remind voters why they should re-elect him. Bush will get a chance to eat his words when he visits the state soon to campaign for Republican challenger Rep. John Thune.
