Clinton looks to Oslo for peace legacy

Clinton has picked an agreement between Israel and the Arabs as his top foreign policy priority. It also could be his best chance for a shining legacy.

Israel and the Palestinians have given themselves until September to conclude an overall settlement. On Friday they decided to get started Nov. 7.

That schedule coincides with the winding down of Clinton's second term. He has nearly 15 months left in office, time enough for the president to play the role of prodder or dealmaker.

At this point, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat are willing to try on their own. But if they get hung up on the tough issues, Clinton is just a telephone call away.

''We will be central to the peace process not only because the parties want us to be, but because it is a strategic interest of the United States,'' Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, said in a recent speech. Clinton is ready after the rigorous training exercise in last year's successful West Bank diplomacy in rural Maryland.

At the beginning, in 1993, Clinton focused on domestic issues such as the economy and health care, and was slow to get to foreign policy.

When he did concentrate on the outside world, the most pressing matters were conflict in the Balkans, the search for illegal weapons in Iraq and the need to set a course for dealing with Russia and China. He also made some bold strokes to settle the Northern Ireland problem. An agreement he nurtured, while tenuous, essentially is holding.

At this point, though, with the Monica Lewinsky scandal receding and peace prospects in the Middle East more promising than ever, Clinton has his sights on an overall settlement between Israel and the Arabs as a final act.

He was flying to Oslo yesterday with limited expectations on what will be a brief fling at Middle East diplomacy.

The trip is short; Clinton departs Norway tomorrow. He will spend part of the time in a ceremony marking the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister whose path to talks with the Palestinians was paved through quiet Norwegian diplomacy.

Clinton has separate meetings set today with Barak and with Arafat. Tomorrow he sits down with them together. At a White House news conference Thursday, Clinton said he did not want to raise expectations excessively for his talks in Oslo.

His aides said there was no chance, whatever Barak and Arafat tell him, that Clinton would get into the kind of marathon mediating he did on Maryland's eastern shore in October 1998 that helped produce a West Bank agreement between Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The issues on the table are far tougher than the partial Israeli pullback negotiated in Maryland: Palestinian statehood aspirations, the future of Jerusalem, borders, the status of refugees.

''It is a very important occasion. ... I believe this meeting can help us resume momentum,'' Barak said in an interview reported in Sunday's editions of The Washington Post.

Ironically, the Oslo accords in 1993 anticipated a step-by-step approach in peacemaking, not the high-energy drive for a final settlement approved by Barak and Arafat and endorsed by the Clinton administration.

Barak's ambitious approach would go even further and aim for a quick peace treaty with Syria. That track is cold now, and without a Syrian presence in Oslo, Clinton is unlikely to make real headway on that track.

Rabin's view was that the Israeli people could not ''digest'' simultaneous agreements with the Palestinians and with Syria, both of which would call for giving up land and probably uprooting Jewish settlers. Barak, however, is ready to gamble - ''I believe there will be negotiations with Syria in the next few weeks or months,'' he told the newspaper.

In Clinton, Barak has an American president prepared to spend the time before packing up in January 2001 and to position himself for a place in history.

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