teral "disengagement" plan, to the outrage of the Arab world. Right up to the start of his meeting with Abdallah, it was not certain exactly what Bush would say. Some Bush advisers hoped that he would provide a sweetener by making his previous assurances with Israeli prime minister less definite, given Sharon's history of broken promises.

Unfortunately, their conversation seemed to result in nothing new. Bush showed the king extraordinary respect, and made it clear that he was listening - but failed to provide the assurances the king sought. Abdallah hoped to leave the White House with a presidential declaration that the Palestinians would be compensated for land and refugee trade-offs. Bush, however, said only, "The United States will not prejudice the outcome of the final status issues...all final status issues must still emerge from negotiations between the two parties."

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is now scheduled to meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei. According to a White House official, she will tell Qorei that "there are real opportunities here and the Palestinians should seize those opportunities."

It is hard to believe, however, that Rice will be any more successful than Bush has been.

When Secretary of State Colin Powell met on May 4 with members of the Quartet - the US, United Nations, Russia and the European Union - there was a lot of repair work to do. Bush had just robbed the store to give Sharon whatever he wanted between now and the US elections in early November. Sharon then went back to his own Likud constituency to show how much he had stolen. But his constituency had different ideas. Or so it seemed - unless Sharon is even more Machiavellian than others in his party realized.

The Likud's hard hard-liners insist that they must never give back anything to the Palestinians. They therefore ignored Sharon's plan, and turned it down decisively. Having been definitively rebuffed, Sharon simply ignored the referendum outcome, saying he would make some modifications in his plan. He failed to indicate, however, whether it would be more or less extremist than the plan endorsed by Bush and rejected by Likud.

Meanwhile, at their May 3 meeting, the Quartet decided - in the absence of any indication of Sharon's next move - simply to go ahead and continue on its path.

To make matters even worse - if that was possible - when Powell met with the press in New York following the Quartet meeting, all the American reporters wanted to ask about were the ghastly revelations breaking daily from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. The world was stunned by what US soldiers had been doing, generally between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., when most of the prison personnel were off duty and the sadists went out to play. Powell, a former general and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, obviously was deeply distracted, and didn't put his usual tightly controlled spin on his words.

As The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler wrote, "Bush's comments, made with Ariel Sharon at his side, had alarmed diplomats overseas because some perceived that the United States and Israel had cut their own deal on Sharon's plan to unilaterally separate from the Palestinians."

Diplomats warn, Kessler continued, that "Israel should not try to maintain control over Gaza's air and sea access."

"The US is committed to the basis upon which the peace process rests," Powell said. "And we are in conversation with our other Arab friends to see what assurances and comments they may need from us to make sure that they know that the president has not abandoned them."

Wrote Steven Weisman of The New York Times: "The lengthy (Quartet) statement had been hammered out over the past week in what diplomats said was a crosscurrent of tensions between the Bush administration and its Quartet partners."

The statement represented an effort by the international community to reinsert itself into the peace process, including laying the groundwork for financial assistance to the Palestinian areas to be vacated by Israel.

Following Bush's April endorsement of the withdrawal scheme, his aides have been trying to get the other Quartet partners to follow suit. According to Weisman, however, "Those partners balked because they charge that Israel is using the withdrawal as a substitute for negotiating with the Palestinians.

"Accordingly, they demanded that the statement put out Tuesday include language suggesting that Israel had to continue negotiating with the Palestinians and that the withdrawal had to amount to a complete end of the 'occupation.'"

Europeans, Russians and the United Nations are furious with Bush for having endorsed some of Israel's territorial claims at his meeting with Sharon. The Bush administration regards endorsement as a way to help ensure that the withdrawals go through. European and other diplomats, however, charge the president was motivated by US domestic politics. Sharon's withdrawal plan itself is in disarray.

The backlash in Arab and European countries is particularly intense, but Bush administration officials argued that Sharon's plan has the seeds of a breakthrough in the stalled peace process. The Likud Party's overwhelming rejection of the plan, however, has left the administration's credibility in the Middle East in tatters. The tilt toward Israel will not soon be forgotten in the Arab world, and will make it harder for the Bush administration to claim that the president's support of Sharon has produced results. In fact, the Likud vote comes when the image of the United States already is greatly damaged by accounts of psychological and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by some US soldiers.

- Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine.

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