Word: zinni
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wave of violence that began with the carnage in Netanya looks to have scotched General Anthony Zinni's mediation mission, even though the Bush administration insists its envoy will remain on the job. Sharon was never going to take seriously Arafat's eleventh-hour cease-fire plea as Israel began initiating its response to the Passover bombing. The Palestinian leader has been unwilling to commit to Zinni's cease-fire plan, and his reluctance to take a firm, principled stand against attacks on Israelis may be partly a reflection of the fact that polls routinely find that upwards...
...Zinni brought nothing new in his toolkit. Instead, his mission was a kind of third-time-lucky attempt to activate the cease-fire plan formulated last June by CIA director George Tenet, and sullenly adopted, but never implemented, by both sides. The Tenet plan, though, was simply a rough choreography - whose sequences and precise requirements have consumed most of the talks hosted by Zinni - of the prelude to implementing the Mitchell Report. And the Mitchell recommendations are squarely based entirely on the premise of helping the two sides find a way back to the final status negotiations that began...
...plenty of reason to expect escalation from Palestinian side, too, with militants of Arafat's Fatah organization likely to launch a new wave of attacks in the hope of intensifying Israel's political and diplomatic crisis and of sending the message that Israel cannot resolve the crisis militarily. Once Zinni leaves, or perhaps even before, both Israelis and Palestinians would likely feel compelled to underscore their own negotiating positions with a show of force. And that could leave U.S. diplomacy stranded as the bullets start to fly again - but with disengagement now carrying an even higher diplomatic cost...
...depth of the problem facing the Bush administration was underscored by the ease with which both sides managed to sidestep American demands. First Arafat simply ignored the conditions set for a meeting with Dick Cheney, and then Sharon simply ignored Washington's wishes on Arafat's travel plans. Zinni's mission, of course, had always been a long shot. There was nothing to suggest conditions for a truce were more conducive than they'd been during his aborted mission last December - indeed, it was the further deterioration of the situation, rather than its improvement, that forced the Bush administration...
...unlikely that Washington expected instant results from Zinni. Sending him to the region was in part an attempt to signal a reengagement with the crisis in the face of Arab criticism that the Bush administration's hands-off approach had allowed the situation to dangerously deteriorate. But between reengagement and results there remains an epic...