EDITORIAL
Bush summitry welcome, but it's only a first step
For a man with a genuine aversion to overseas travel, President Bush has run a daunting gantlet of summits in a week-long trip to Europe and the Middle East.
At times, the mission seemed one of papering over differences with allies, especially France and Russia, and of asserting leadership in multilateral settings.
At others, especially when he met with U.S. troops in Qatar and then flew over Baghdad, it was more like a jubilant victory lap.
And occasionally the trip seemed an effort to shift the spotlight of American attention away from some nagging difficulties: disarray in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; a search for weapons of mass destruction that bears some worrisome signs of scandal; a magnanimous tax cut that turned its back on the working poor.
A political gamble
Bush deserves credit for deciding, after two years of avoidance, to risk political capital in the high-stakes, never-win dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. His summit with prime ministers Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon seemed more promising than previous false starts.
Abbas pledged to end the ongoing intifada, but it was clear that he lacked authority to compel compliance by the violent Palestinian splinter groups.
Sharon said Israel would dismantle some outposts in the West Bank, but far short of disturbing the settlements of nearly a quarter-million intense Israelis.
The unwanted shadow cast over the Aqaba summit was that of Yasser Arafat. Bush and the Israelis hope to make him disappear by ignoring him, but he remains far and away the leading Palestinian figure, to whom Abbas still reports.
Sharon, as well as Arab leaders at the earlier Sharm el-Sheik summit, fell short of pronouncing the scripted declarations provided by Bush's team. Sharon didn't say the word "settlements"; the Arab leaders didn't endorse the leadership of Abbas, or even mention him by name.
Rosy spin unneeded
The worthy goal of bringing peace at long last to the Middle East will not be served by placing a uniformly rosy spin to everything from triumph to calamity.
Thus the barest beginnings of rapprochement with "old" Europe were shattered by overreaching in announcing that the G-8 summit in France endorsed possible military action against Iran or North Korea.
While the G-8 declaration calls for "other measures ... in accordance with international law" if necessary to prevent nuclear proliferation, to interpret this as permitting military action, as the White House presumed to do, is "extremely audacious," huffed French President Jacques Chirac.
What Bush missed by leaving France a day early was meetings with leaders from a selection of Third World countries, launching the beginnings of a movement to extend the fruits of globalization to poor nations.
The United States should have been an enthusiastic participant.
