Can a weaker Bush strengthen all these weak leaders of the new Middle East?

It's time for the shortened version of my print edition weekend column (my usual partner, Aluf benn, is away for a couple of weeks, so all complains should be directed at me). You can read the entire piece here, or just a couple of paragraphs here (A note to the more suspicious readers: In the paragraphs ahead I corrected some mistakes from the print edition piece - some were translation errors, some were updates to events that happened after the print edition was already gone):

Bush

Similarities can be drawn between the three fronts with which Bush is contending in his visits around the world this week - those same fronts which King Abdullah said this week, in an interview on a U.S. television station, are approaching civil war: Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. The U.S. president is trying to strengthen Al-Maliki, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. But how will the battered and bruised Bush summon the resources to help them?

The three leaders are similar, but there are also substantial differences between them. The Bush administration sees Al-Maliki as being insufficiently resolute to act in accordance with the interests that will calm his country. The White House is concerned that he is sometimes motivated by impulses that do not correspond with the objective. "He impressed me as a leader who wanted to be strong, but was having difficulty figuring out how to do so," Hadley wrote to Bush in the leaked memo.

The American position is different regarding Siniora: The Bush administration doesn't have a shadow of a doubt regarding his motives and intentions, but they understand full well that the weakness of his government doesn't allow him to do more. In other words, Siniora is the right person in the right place.

As for Abbas, the Americans are not worried about the purity of his intentions, but they think he too has difficulty understanding how to carry them out. And unlike with Siniora, they are not convinced that he will ever reach this understanding, even when he is handed the means and the resources. Perhaps, as a Bush administration official put it a few months ago, he has the will, but not the personality.

Hagel

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel from Nebraska is one of those eight Senate wonders who look into a mirror and think that the image of the next president is peering out at them. Hagel jumped to the top twice this week, with the generous assistance of The Washington Post editorial page. The first time, he published a sober and profound op-ed piece about the war, and the second time, he starred in a column by David Ignatius, headlined "Hagel's Moment."

If Bush is trying to assign greater responsibility to Al-Maliki, Hagel takes a shortcut and assigns the responsibility to all Iraqis. It's not America that will win or lose in the war, he said, since it's the Iraqis' future that's on the line. "Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost," the senator wrote. And the time to send military reinforcements, he added, is long past.

Hagel's op-ed aroused great interest. He wrote that the renewal of diplomatic ties between Iraq and Syria has generated much hope, since it proves that only "regional powers will fill regional vacuums." Hagel thinks it will take time and that blood will certainly be spilled - in part due to the United States' inability to generate a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - but that ultimately, the Middle East will reorganize on its own. Apparently, Hagel does not accept former secretary of defense Colin Powell's "you break it, you own it" concept - i.e., that since the United States broke Iraq, it has to rebuild it.

Baker

Regional conferences - in the spirit of the Madrid conference he convened at the beginning of the 1990s and whose success is debatable - are Baker's favored formula for solving problems in the Middle East.

Baker has a routine shtick for meeting guests from Israel. He always mentions his memories of his difficult encounters with former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, ending with what is meant to be a kind of happy surprise: Of all the Israeli leaders, Baker liked meeting with Shamir best, because he know that he was as good as his word.

The more time elapses since the establishment of the committee Baker heads, the greater the suspicion that this smart and experienced politician does not have much in the way of new suggestions - only the same old formulas that sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed, and that aren't necessarily suitable right now. "Political realism is dead," an Israeli observer who shall remain unnamed said two weeks ago. There are quite a few Americans who agree with him: It's impossible to fit the solutions of the 20th century to the problems of the 21st.



More on the Mid-East on Rosner's Domain:

The Baker-Hamilton commission: An inevitable disappointment

How do you reconcile Baker and Hadley on Syria?