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Morning News

Alterman: U.S. Has No Strategy to Emerge from Middle East Conflict

Aired October 11, 2000 - 11:36 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: And as you might have seen on CNN, President Clinton talked with reporters in the White House, in the Rose Garden, in the last hour. He told them, he still has no immediate plans to visit the Mideast. He does, though, remain engaged in what they call telephone diplomacy.

Joining us to assess where things are right now and the U.S. role is Mideast analyst Jon Alterman of the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.

Good morning, thanks for joining us.

JON ALTERMAN, U.S. INSTITUTE OF PEACE: My pleasure, Daryn.

KAGAN: When you look at the leaders involved in here, President Clinton, Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat, do you get a sense of who is control and who is in charge here?

ALTERMAN: I am not sure anybody is in control. And one of the reasons that there are a lot of long faces here in Washington is there is a sense that maybe nobody really has a strategy for getting out of the situation we are in. There is a sense that Yasser Arafat may be counting on a low-grade conflict, not really a war, but a lot of stone-throwing, indefinitely into the future. That Ehud Barak may be counting on using just something short of deadly force with continual Palestinian casualties indefinitely into the future, and the U.S. doesn't really have a strategy on how to get off of this point at all and get back to negotiations.

So there are really a lot of long faces here in town.

KAGAN: Well, speaking of those negotiations, looking back, is it too simple for the critics to say, you know, you shouldn't have called Camp David when you do. You were not ready to bring these two sides together and look what has happened because of that.

ALTERMAN: It's really too early, I think, to make a definitive judgment of why Camp David didn't work. But one of the things that has really been coming out a lot in the last few weeks is the sense that the United States did not do a good enough job preparing Arab opinion, and that's mostly Saudi and Egyptian opinion, but also Morocco, and other important Arab countries, to help them back up Yasser Arafat, to make the kinds of concessions that would be necessary at Camp David.

As a consequence, this analysis goes, he was left feeling exposed, that he couldn't meet the Israeli concessions, and the whole thing fell apart. Camp David, of course, was really an Israeli idea that the U.S. bought onto in July. And there was always Palestinian resistance. Perhaps, there was really something behind that Palestinian resistance in the sense that the time was not right.

KAGAN: Jon Alterman, U.S. Institute of Peace, thanks for your time and insight this morning, appreciate it.

ALTERMAN: Thank you, Daryn.

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