Bush presses on to Mideast amid change

WASHINGTON - President Bush, who once had grand ambitions to transform the Middle East through democratic reform, sets off on his first extended presidential visit to the region tomorrow with his sights lowered and his ability to influence events fading fast.

From the Israeli prime minister's modest house in Jerusalem to the palace of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Bush can expect a polite welcome during the eight-day trip.

But with the U.S. presidential campaign under way, governments in the region appear to be looking past Bush to his successor. They are not expecting breakthroughs.

The official Arab view of Bush was summed up inadvertently by a diplomat from a major Arab state, who indicated disbelief that the president planned to use the trip to renew his drive for Middle East democracy. "Is that still on?" the Arab official said sarcastically. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.

The contrast between now and the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq could not be greater. Arab officials, whatever they thought of Bush, followed every nuance of U.S. policy and even appeared to accommodate Bush's demands for democracy.

But political liberalization in the Middle East has been in the deep freeze since the extremist Islamist group Hamas' January 2006 victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections.

Bush's new drive for Arab-Israeli peace, launched six weeks ago at an international conference in Annapolis, Md., is already flagging.

Even on Iran, where the United States, Israel and Persian Gulf nations share alarm, there is confusion following a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate in November that reversed an earlier estimate and concluded that Iran abandoned a covert nuclear weapons program more than three years ago.

"The Bush administration has been mugged by reality. After vowing to transform the Middle East, the administration is submitting to it," said Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a center-right policy organization in Washington.

"Five years ago, there was a sense that things couldn't get any worse in the Middle East and we should push for change whatever the consequences," Alterman said. "Now, there is a keen appreciation of how many ways things could actually get much worse and how much better off we are working with people we know and with whom we share at least some interests."

Bush is to arrive in Israel on Wednesday and depart from Egypt the following Wednesday. He will also visit the West Bank, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Bush needs Middle East leaders - most of them autocrats - as much as or more than they need him, to help contain Iran, provide oil and investment, and back Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Bush nonetheless appears unlikely to alter his rhetoric during the trip.

"I think this president thinks his record speaks for itself; his record will vindicate his presidency, and there's no need to remedy that," Alterman said.

Bush's major speech of the trip will come Sunday in the gaudy and fast-growing Persian Gulf city of Abu Dhabi, where he will declare that his "freedom agenda" for the Muslim world has produced results.

But Hamas' poll victory and sectarian gridlock in Iraq and Lebanon after elections there have shrunk the Arab world's appetite for political liberalization.

White House national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley acknowledged that the 2006 Palestinian elections "gave a number of countries pause as to where this [democratization] was heading."

The choice of Abu Dhabi as a venue is meant to channel attention toward changes in the oil-rich Persian Gulf emirates. Dubai, which Bush also will visit, has become a major world financial center and more pluralistic in the process.

But the focus on small Persian Gulf monarchies underscores the shrinking ambitions of Bush's once-expansive Middle East democracy drive.

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice first announced it, in a speech in Cairo in June 2005, she called on Egypt - the most populous, and in some ways, most influential Arab country - to be "at the forefront of this great journey."

But political reform in Egypt is stalled. In the Arab world's other major power, Saudi Arabia, the monarchy has halted tentative political openings.

Al-Qaeda's American

spokesman urged fighters to meet President Bush with bombs when he visits the Middle East, according to a new video posted on the Internet yesterday.

U.S.-born Adam Gadahn

also tore up his American passport in a symbolic protest in the nearly hour-long tape - al-Qaeda's first message of the new year.

"Now we direct

an urgent call to our militant brothers in Muslim Palestine and the Arab peninsula . . . to be ready to receive the Crusader slayer Bush in his visit to Muslim Palestine and the Arab peninsula in the beginning of January and to receive him not with flowers or clapping but with bombs and booby-trapped vehicles," Gadahn, 29, said. He spoke partly in Arabic and partly in English.

Also known as Azzam

al-Amriki, Gadahn was charged with treason in the United States in 2006 and has been wanted since 2004 by the FBI, which is offering a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.