The Arab world is entitled to wonder at the consistency of U.S. concern for regional peace and stability, Mr. Bush having, without notice to the region, ceded the West Bank settlements to which we had been so vociferously opposed. That concession, we learn, reflected yet another diplomatic demarche. General Sharon was bound to Washington for a visit with President Bush. Sharon passed along the word that unless we proceeded with the approvals he wished, he would delay the visit. Or cancel it? Imagine, the burden at one and the same time of a standoff in Fallujah and a boycott from Israel!
Mr. Bush has problems here which diplomatic deftness can't easily cure. Israel is not formally at war with Palestine, but such liberties as it has been taking by assassinating Hamas leaders are not easy for the United States to repudiate as inherently abhorrent. In 1943 we shot down Admiral Yamamoto in his airplane. Not because he was just any Japanese admiral, but because he was Admiral Yamamoto -- the man who had planned Pearl Harbor and advised his staff that he expected to preside over the surrender of the United States in Washington, D.C. General Sharon quite understandably wants to shoot down any leader of an organization that proudly claims Israeli victims in its terrorist offensive. And the United States will continue to bemoan these assassinations. After a while, the whole thing can be put on software.
What Mr. Bush cannot ease himself out of is the sense of betrayal brought on by surrendering in the matter of the settlements. If the president has reasoned that leaving Gaza alone will soon make up for that West Bank surrender, he cannot hope that Gaza will bring on a regenerated Palestinian community in time to affect the larger matters pending. They are: the drift of opinion by young Muslims urged to consider Western alternatives of freedom and self-rule; and by older, professionally antagonistic ideologues, who are saying that the United States cannot be trusted.