Memo to U.S. Presidential Candidates

If you're running for president in the U.S. this year, take note: your predecessor has come and gone on a Middle East visit, and the region may be the worse for it. Learn these lessons from President Bush's handling of the Middle East, or else you too may find your presidency mired in military and diplomatic quagmires that you will pass to your own eventual successor:

--Recognize that the 60-year-old Arab-Israeli dispute is a core factor in many of the region's conflicts, that it still constitutes a rising danger to international peace and stability as well as to U.S. national interests. Nonetheless, it is also well within the reach of being settled through serious negotiations.

--Make a vigorous, immediate effort to even-handedly negotiate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, the key to a wider Arab-Israeli agreement, in a manner that ends the occupation of the West Bank, establishes a genuine Palestinian state and ensures the security of Israel and all her neighbors. Bill Clinton went a very long way and Israelis and Palestinians actually came close to agreement on most details, but Bush ignored negotiations for six years.

--Strive to end the decades-old cycle of conflict throughout the Middle East, to which the U.S. has too often been a direct or indirect party, by emphasizing America's tremendous potential for effective diplomacy, recognizing the national interests of all the region's states including Iran, and working cooperatively with the international community. War has only multiplied the region's problems, while the U.S. has been too hesitant to lead diplomacy.

--Consistently and effectively advocate and respect human rights in support of forces in the Middle East promoting democratic values, in what may inevitably be a lengthy, possibly turbulent transition from authoritarianism to pluralism. Thanks to religion, tradition and the legacy of the Arab-Israeli conflict, democratic transformation in the Arab world will take time; it will be accomplished with perseverance and consistency in pushing basic human rights, not with military operations or slogans.

It's not often that an American leader visits this region, as central as it is to global security. On his past brief trips, Bush has had a very special mission with a narrow focus—like his visits to Iraq to assess the situation and raise morale of U.S. forces there. But this was Bush's first tour per se as a two-term president, and the result of his eight days of traveling is disappointing, if not tragic. Not surprisingly, many Arabs I spoke to after Bush's departure were already looking toward what Hillary, or Obama or McCain might do for the Middle East. The next U.S. president takes the oath of office a year from Sunday.

Bush's first stop was Israel and Palestine. He became almost breezy in estimating that a peace deal, elusive for nearly a century now, might be achieved during his final year in office. The strong impression he left behind, certainly with bitter Arab officials and cynical public opinion, is that in reality he will exert little decisive presidential leadership toward creating a Palestinian state. Bush explained his role in the Annapolis process as being to encourage the opposing forces to keep their eyes on the goal of a final deal. Yet, he didn't manage to get the two main leaders in the same room together, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Bush's failure to produce the slightest bit of progress that would justify hope and sustain momentum in the peace negotiations was itself an indication that little may come once he left the region. Bush of all people needed to demonstrate something more than photo ops and optimistic words. He is the President who for six years effectively disengaged the U.S. from the Middle East peace process, thereby disregarding the country's international and moral commitment (as a co-sponsor of Middle East negotiations) and probably making it more difficult, with the increase in Jewish settlements and killing, and hardened views on both sides, to achieve an eventual compromise. While Bush was still a few hundred miles away in Saudi Arabia, the country that authored the 2002 Arab peace plan, Israeli forces mounted a military operation that killed 19 Palestinian militants in Gaza. Abbas, who Bush had just described as a man of peace, felt compelled to condemn the Israeli “massacre.” Any way you look at it, Bush hadn't done very much to keep his extremely fragile peace process glued together.

If Bush couldn't deliver substantive progress, he might at least have articulated a statesmanlike vision of a peace settlement. A JFK or a Ronald Reagan might have used the historical moment to bolster the moderates and genuine peace advocates on both sides. Bush rightly called for an end to Israel's “occupation” of the West Bank, and he properly paid homage to the evil of Jewish persecution by visiting Yad Vashem. But he might also have given Israelis an eloquent speech about showing their defeated Palestinian enemy magnanimity by facilitating a truly independent Palestinian state without delay. He might have given Palestinians a similar speech, recognizing the injustice they feel, paying tribute to their suffering and sacrifices and pledging unwavering commitment to Palestinian independence, yet calling on them as well to recognize Israeli and Jewish suffering and to halt physical and verbal violence.

Instead, what little Bush had to say about the parameters of a future peace agreement was uninspired legalese delivered with the coldness of a divorce lawyer. The specifics he mentioned concerning the three toughest issues clearly favored Israel's hand in the negotiations and were thus destined to make Palestinians nervous rather than relaxed as negotiations get underway in earnest. On borders, Bush said a deal would require allowing Israel to actually keep some of the territory it occupied, in recognition of “current realities”—namely the large Jewish settlements that Israel has constructed there in what is generally seen as a violation of international law since 1967. Palestinians do understand this reality very well, yet Bush failed to mention what would be the expected quid pro quo, Israel giving the Palestinian state an equal parcel of land in return for keeping the settlements. Bush also used diplomatic talk to rule out the return of Palestinian refugees to homes they left during Israel's 1948 War of Independence. Again, Palestinian negotiators do know any return will be severely restricted by political realities. By definition, no Israeli negotiator is going to sign a deal that allows Palestinians to tip the demographic balance inside the Jewish state. Yet the rights of refugees enshrined in U.N. Resolution 194 is a major Palestinian bargaining chip that Bush effectively took away. On control of Jerusalem, Bush simply called it a “tough issue,” though pointedly not endorsing Palestinian claims to part the city and its Islamic holy sites. Bush and the U.S. government are certainly entitled to pronounce their vision of a final settlement—indeed, it is important that they do. Yet by promoting a vision that squeezes one party in the negotiations to the benefit of the other, Bush may well have sabotaged his own prophecy of peace in the Holy Land.

Nothing much was to be gained in the other purpose of Bush's tour, his effort to encourage Arab states to join the effort to pressure Iran diplomatically, ostensibly as punishment for its refusal to abandon its uranium-enrichment activities but essentially as part of Bush's struggle for regional influence with Iran. Of course, no Arab state is very comfortable with Iran, essentially a regional superpower. But they see little reason to stick their necks out when Washington has done little to open a diplomatic dialogue that could help defuse the crisis with Iran, and when there is fear that Bush may wind up starting another war with another neighbor. “Bush comes and goes, but I have to live with that neighbor,” an Emirati woman complained to me afterwards. “It was like we invited somebody as a guest in our house, then he started throwing stones at our neighbor's house while he was here.” I never expected the slap that Bush received from Mohammed Sabah al-Salem al-Sabah, foreign minister of Kuwait, the country whose liberation in Operation Desert Storm was led by Bush's father in 1991. Standing beside Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in Tehran while Bush was still in the Middle East, Sheikh Mohammed declared: "My country knows who is our friend and who is our enemy, and Iran is our friend." Bush is justified in having concerns, yet his simplistic approach to complex international issues did nothing to advance his own policy much less meaningfully tackle the Iran problem.

Bush also cited promoting democracy as a goal of his visit. Here, too, his clumsiness turned off autocrat and democrat alike. By pushing his democracy agenda, Bush hugely annoyed major allies like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has given substantial support to the Arab-Israeli peace process and battled against Islamic extremism. But by continuing to praise Mubarak's importance as a strategic ally of the U.S., Bush embittered Arab democrats who see him selling them out. Bush's tour put the contradictions of his policy in sharp focus, when he called for “democratic freedom in the Middle East” when he was in Dubai, a city of one of the smallest Arab states, and then said nothing about Mubarak's ongoing crackdown on dissent when he visited Egypt, the mother of the Arab world. Egypt would have been the place for Bush to do a lot of talking on the big issues, security as well as democracy, but his visit seemed like an afterthought, or even a pit stop, as CNN called it.

What Bush still does not seem to get is that persistent instability in the Middle East—related to Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, etc.—is a major factor favoring authoritarian and extremist forces against the Arab democrats he professes to support. The next president should understand that the cycle of instability will continue to plague the region and threaten the world until an unrelenting effort is undertaken to achieve peace and justice through diplomacy, dialogue and cooperation. Since 1982, the U.S. government has led, supported or acquiesced in five wars in the Middle East, an average of one every five years: Iraq war against Iran '80-'88; Israel war in Lebanon in '82; Desert Storm liberation of Kuwait in '91; U.S. invasion of Iraq in '03; Israel war in Lebanon in '06. None of the wars left the Middle East or the world a safer place.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo