Now comes the hard part

One down and one to go, but the hard part lies ahead. The Middle East is near the halfway point between the Jan. 9 election of Mahmoud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority and the Jan. 30 voting for a transitional national assembly and provincial legislatures in Iraq. Despite a boycott by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), the first election resulted in a solid win for Abbas. The second is likely to draw heavy participation in areas where voters want to go to the polls in safety, and at least will brave the insurgency to reach the polling places in central and western Iraq.

While President Bush has praised these elections, the really high stakes for the United States are in what happens in the next six months or so and in how Washington conducts itself during this period. Most Palestinians, Israelis and Iraqis hope that somehow the elections will bring peace, security and good government to Palestine, Israel and Iraq. Others see things differently. Extremists in Israel, Palestine and Iraq are committed to seeing the elections and those supporting them fail to achieve those goals. Worse for U.S. interests, public opinion in the wider Arab and Muslim worlds views the United States and Israel as allied in seeking permanent domination of the Palestinian and Iraqi people. In and of themselves, the elections are unlikely to change this view.

To have any hope of altering this perception, of dampening the rage that produces terrorism, and ultimately of winning the war on terrorism, the Bush administration should grasp two quite different, but equally painful Middle Eastern nettles. First, the United States should resume its role as the “indispensable power” by re-engaging and pursuing, come what may, a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. Second, assuming that the election in Iraq is held and produces a more or less functioning national assembly, Washington should begin seeking to disengage militarily from Iraq.

These policies will be politically distasteful for the administration. In Palestine, it has been “business as usual” since Abbas’ election. Palestinian gunmen recently killed six Israelis at a border crossing in Gaza, and Israel has responded by suspending contact with the Palestinian Authority. For his part, Bush has invited Abbas to the White House, but the word from Washington is that terrorist attacks must be halted and corruption in the Palestinian Authority rooted out before peace discussions can begin.

Re-engagement means abandoning this comfortable conventional wisdom and instead keeping the heat on both parties to resume talks, perhaps within the framework of the “road map” for peace presented them in 2003. Abbas desperately needs this to happen if he is to show Palestinians that he is a leader who can deliver the goods and not simply a puppet of Tel Aviv and Washington. By supporting his plea for talks, Bush will be attacked at home and in Israel for pursuing “peace at any price” policies as his predecessor was charged with doing in 2000.

If peace process re-engagement in Palestine is unpalatable, military disengagement in Iraq would be seen as political suicide. Even if they go off reasonably smoothly, the elections in Iraq will not bring an end to the growing insurgency in Iraq’s Sunni center. The best that can be hoped for is a process of political normalization in the rest of the country that will catch on in the center and begin drying up the sea in which the insurgents now swim.

Arguing that such a process must begin will be a weak counter to charges that the administration is abandoning a cause in which more than 1,300 American soldiers have lost their lives and showing weakness to our adversaries. These are things Bush has said again and again he will never do.

And yet the president has little choice but to try to end a grim status quo in which those in the Muslim world whom we must influence to win the war on terror increasingly see the United States as moving in lock step with Israel in a war on Arabs and Islam. Abbas has a chance to help end that status quo in Palestine, but he cannot do it without unwavering American support. In Iraq, the presence of our troops is the catalyst that has made a growing insurgency the status quo in Iraq. To end it, it must be made clear that the troops will leave.

Bush speaks often of the political capital his win in November has given him. He should use some of it quickly to seek peace in Palestine, a reduction of our military role in Iraq, and a better chance of winning the war on terror.

Charles Dunbar of Brunswick was American ambassador to Qatar and to Yemen and now teaches international relations at Boston University.