The Catastrophe of U.S. Inaction . . .

The inauguration of George W. Bush last year raised hopes in the Middle East that he would repeat one of his father's greatest achievements: using forceful and creative U.S. diplomacy to drag Israelis and Palestinians away from a steadily worsening conflict and into a peace process. Instead, it now looks as if the Israeli-Palestinian fighting will be remembered as the Yugoslavia of this Bush administration -- a dangerous situation that, through timidity and willful inaction, the United States allowed to become a catastrophe.

The Balkans are the main foreign policy blot on the first Bush administration's record: By refusing to take the relatively modest steps that could have checked Serbian aggression in 1991, Bush 41 opened the way for years of devastating bloodshed. Now, as Israelis and Palestinians slaughter each other with a ferocity unimaginable only 15 months ago, this Bush administration looks to be haunted by a similar failure in the Middle East. Though Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon brought on their war, so did the administration's irrational insistence on retreating to the sidelines in a region where the United States has been an indispensable broker for decades.