Mideast governments increasingly ignore U.S. views

By Jonathan Wright - Analysis

CAIRO (Reuters) - The governments of the Middle East, from Iran to Israel and beyond, are increasingly ignoring the wishes of a U.S. administration which has only eight months left in office, going their own way in regional diplomacy.

U.S. President George W. Bush's latest speech on Middle East policy, made in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh last week, shows how the gap has grown between what Washington would like and what is happening in the region.

It is part of a wider picture of Washington's declining clout, accelerated by its debilitating deployment of more than 100,000 troops to Iraq for the past five years.

France has had contacts with the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, for example, and Israel has had indirect talks with Syria, which Washington is trying to isolate.

Bush said in Sharm el-Sheikh that all nations in the region should stand together against Hamas, a group which he said was attempting to undermine efforts at making peace.

But the Egyptian government, his host and a longstanding friend of the United States, was simultaneously, and with U.S. consent, trying to mediate a truce between Gaza and Israel.

Israeli commentators said the Egyptian mediation amounted to indirect negotiations between the Israeli government and Hamas, a group with which the United States refuses to have dealings.

The Islamist organization, which controls the Gaza Strip, was offering Israel a long-term truce which could make it easier for the rival Palestinian group Fatah to reach an agreement with Israel -- a goal which the United States says it is promoting.

In his Sharm el-Sheikh speech, Bush also attacked the Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim group Hezbollah, calling it "terrorists funded by Iran" and "the enemy of a free Lebanon".

HEZBOLLAH'S CENTRAL ROLE

Three days later in the Gulf state of Qatar, Hezbollah and other Lebanese groups reached an agreement ending the political crisis that had paralyzed Lebanon for months.

Hezbollah had defeated its rivals in Beirut in short order this month when Washington's allies in the Lebanese government tried to challenge some of the privileges it enjoyed as the force which helped drive Israel out of south Lebanon.

The new political arrangement in Lebanon, symbolized by the election of Michel Suleiman as president on Sunday, tilts the balance of power significantly in Hezbollah's favor and underscores its central role in Lebanese politics.

Bush maintained his confrontational attitude towards Iran and Syria, saying: "Every peaceful nation in the region has an interest in stopping these nations from supporting terrorism."

On the same day of the Lebanese agreement, Israel and Syria disclosed they had held indirect talks mediated by Turkey -- the closest they have come to serious negotiations since talks brokered by the United States collapsed in 2000.