By Joe Macaron, KUNA
Washington : President George W. Bush leaves Andrews Air Force Base on Tuesday embarking on an eight-day stay in the Middle East dominated by solidifying the outcome of Annapolis conference and containing the influence of Iran in the region.
“The two themes of this trip are moving forward on Arab-Israeli peace and containing Iran”, said the Director of Middle East Program in the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in a recent press conference about the trip.
“Each has more to do with small steps than grand gestures and each is likely to be handed off in a substantial way to the next administration”, he elaborated. Bush is hoping his stop in Ramallah and Tel Aviv would entice both parties to conclude some sort of agreement two months after the international gathering in Annapolis, but it seems what best he can do is oversee the signing of treaties to boost the economy in the West Bank and perhaps convince the Israeli government to halt the expansion of settlement.
“I am very skeptical of broader progress on Palestinian-Israeli issues because neither the Israeli side nor the Palestinian side has any consensus on what it is trying to achieve or how it plans on achieving it, said Alterman.
Bush will travel to four of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia and Egypt would be his final stop on January 16.
Iran sent a clear message to the United States on the eve of this trip, with Iranian Revolutionary Guard gunboats reportedly provoking last Sunday three US Navy Warships in the Strait of Hormuz.
This incident comes as Bush is hoping to enhance cooperation with GCC countries to counter Iranian influence in the region and comes weeks after the release of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) here in Washington, widely seen as a step back of US foreign policy from the Iranian nuclear file.
“When you look at Iran, you have the backlash and great uncertainty from the NIE”, said the senior fellow at CSIS, Anthony Cordesman, who added that Bush intends to clarify in his trip what this latest intelligence report meant.
“Nobody, as yet, has a clear picture of what the US posture is relative to Iran. I think it is clear we are not going to invade”, he added.
The highlights of this Middle East journey would be Bush’s visit to the Muqataha in Ramallah, the headquarter that embodies the Palestinian Authority, and his first trip to Saudi Arabia after seven years in office.
Bush is also expected to deliver a key speech in Abu Dhabi where he would address the progress made by GCC countries and the importance of regional security, furthermore he will discuss in a roundtable with Kuwaiti women issues of development and democracy.
There are still some speculations about the possibility of Bush making surprise stops in Iraq and Lebanon, but the White House says there are no scheduled visits there.
“Part of the bitter-sweet irony of this trip is that the two places that the administration has closest to its heart, Iraq and Lebanon, are places the president cannot announce he is visiting toward the end of his term”, remarked Alterman. Bush’s trip to the Middle East is not the first one yet he made only few.
Bush went to Egypt, Jordan and Qatar in June 2003 in addition to three surprise visits to Iraq in November 2003, June 2006 and September 2007 with a total number of five trips in a presidency defined by the war on Iraq.
His predecessor, Bill Clinton, made a similar trip during his second year in office in October 1994 that included Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Palestinian territories, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Clinton has the largest itinerary of US presidential trips to the region with a track record of ten, mainly because of his engagement in the Middle East peace process.
Former President George H.W. Bush travelled to the region four times during a tenure shadowed by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait while Jimmy Carter, whose beat was brokering an Egyptian-Israeli peace deal, went only twice to the Middle East.
Bush leaves Washington on the same day of the New Hampshire primary as the countdown for the end of his second term in the White House is approaching.
He is also facing a weak performance of the US economy and has to rush back after the end of his Middle East trip on January 16 to prepare his State of the Union address before Congress on January 28, a speech expected to largely focus on ways to stimulate the economy and generate jobs.
Bush’s trip to the Middle East would probably be more about assurance and less about providing answers or solutions, and it would likely be his last high profile visit to the Middle East.