Not the right way to negotiate

About 650 AD, a Damascus-based Arab caliph, Muawiya Bin Abi Sofyan, told a group of his followers, "I apply not my sword where my lash suffices, not my lash where my tongue is enough and even if there be one hair binding me to my fellow men, I do not let it break, when they pull I loosen, and if they loosen I pull."

This Arab ruler's memorable approach to human relationships, long revered by the Arab peoples, has often been repeated throughout the ages, but it is sorely missing in the Bush administration's treatment of its adversaries in the Middle East.

Take the case of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who sent President Bush an 18-page letter in the hope of starting a dialogue with Washington. And likewise the new Palestinian National Authority, now controlled by Hamas, the Islamist Resistance Movement which came to office in a highly praised democratic election unrivalled in the region, which also has offered halfway measures to accommodate Western conditions for opening talks with Israel.

In fact, this Islamist group is said to be considering additional steps in a bid to ease the economic stranglehold on the occupied Palestinians

In both cases, the Bush administration has turned a cold shoulder to the Middle Eastern parties. The Iranian ruler has been told he has to forswear nuclear enrichment and the Palestinians have to accept Israel's right to exist and abandon violence. If not, all hell would break loose. Tehran may be subjected to a military strike and the Palestinians will face economic disaster.

This short-sighted American approach has unleashed criticism against the Bush administration, at home and abroad. The American critics included prominent former secretaries of state, such as Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, who told President Bush after a meeting last week he had with former secretaries of state and defence that the administration "needs to lay out more clearly what we stand for in the battle of ideas".

In a lengthy Op-Ed in The Washington Post, Kissinger wrote: "... The United States should not negotiate through proxies, however closely allied. If America is prepared to negotiate with North Korea over proliferation in [a] six-party forum, and with Iran in Baghdad over Iraqi security, it must be possible to devise a multilateral venue for nuclear talks with Tehran that would permit the United States to participate especially in light of what is at stake."

Plunging popularity

The Bush administration is not doing any better as far as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is concerned. The consensus in Washington is that all American eyes are now focused on Iraq (and to a lesser extent, Iran).

President Bush's popularity has been the lowest of any American president in 50 years 29 per cent and one cannot feel but sad that Laura Bush cannot believe these figures. "I don't really believe these polls. I travel around the country, I see people, I see their responses to my husband, I see their response to me."

But the American president knows better, and this explains why he invested in an unprecedented radio address to the nation at a prime hour in the hope that this would divert attention from the mess that his administration has created in the Middle East.

Although the case of millions of illegal South Americans flooding the US is a serious problem, the administration would be fooling itself if it believes it can sweep the Middle East problems under the carpet.

For one, the new Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will be making his first official trip to the US in the hope he, too, can be endorsed as the ailing Ariel Sharon was over his unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

But if the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was a success as far Israel was concerned, a partial pullout from the West Bank will not yield the same results. The difference is obvious. The Gaza Strip is an undivided unit while the West Bank will look not much better than Swiss cheese with pockets of Palestinians here and there.

It will be wrong for the Bush administration to believe that the Palestinians are spineless. One former Palestinian minister reminded a select audience at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington that the poorly armed Palestinian resistance has over the long run managed to disrupt Israeli dreams of a Greater Israel and a military solution to the decades-long conflict a reminder that may shake up Olmert's advance men who have been knocking on various doors here.

This is a major challenge to Secretary Condoleezza Rice, who unlike her predecessor who did not seem to have the full backing of the president, to orchestrate some give-and-take in order to come up with a formula that will be rewarding to the two parties and not the unilateral ambitions of only one.

George Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com.