Travels with Tony

Blessed be the peacemakers, for they shall accumulate frequent flyer miles. British Prime Minister Tony Blair certainly did so last week, zooming around the Middle East for the third time since Sept. 11 on behalf of the antiterror coalition. Like many statesmen before him, he found its stony soil does not quickly yield fruit.

Blair, longtime student of the Koran, has been anxious to win moderate Muslims to the coalitions side, both to help its immediate task in Afghanistan and in pursuit of his grand vision of a broad international effort — once al-Qaeda is routed — on the poverty and injustice that help breed terror. But the skepticism and even contempt Arab leaders and their people are expressing for the coalitions war aims and tactics have him worried.

One result is a new set of 24-hour information strategy centers in Washington, London and Islamabad that Blairs P.R. supremo Alastair Campbell thought up, hoping to make the coalition smarter in rebutting Taliban claims and devising new arguments to persuade a global audience.

Spin is one thing, substance another. The big open sore in the coalitions appeal to moderate Arab states is the unhappy fate of the Palestinians. “They are obsessed with this,” says a senior Blair aide. Just during the three days of the Prime Ministers trip, Israeli forces killed another eight Palestinians, including the assassination of a Hamas leader who was allegedly preparing a bomb, bringing the total number of deaths since the failed Sept. 26 cease-fire to 110 Palestinians and 15 Israelis. Arab leaders “have no belief that were serious about the peace process at all,” the aide continues. So Blair has thrown himself into trying to jolt it into life — better late than never.

Blair sometimes comes across as an earnest young man who cant quite understand why people at war just dont sit down and talk out their differences sensibly. But his decisive backing of force in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and his patient immersion in the messy intricacies of nudging Northern Ireland toward peace, have given him enough “street cred” as a negotiator to command respect. Having George W. Bushs ear doesnt hurt either.

But like the American secretaries of state who spent the 1990s in Middle East diplo-tourism, Blair is finding the ratio of air miles to tangible progress frustratingly high. In public, he got almost nothing last week. Despite spending two years in Britain as a medical student, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used a joint press conference — his first ever with foreign reporters — to blast the coalition for killing “hundreds of innocent civilians a day” and excluding Israeli attacks on Palestinians from its definition of terror. He likened anti-Israeli terror groups based in Syria — such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which assassinated Israels Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi last month — to Charles de Gaulle fighting the Nazis from England. The tough talk was entirely predictable, but it appeared to catch Blair off guard.

The P.M. got more politeness from the Saudi and Jordanian kings but nothing specific. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat both praised him fulsomely, then trashed each other. British officials insisted everyone was more flexible in private than in public.

Thats not much. Blair says the risks of backsliding between Israel and the Palestinians are so vast that the choice is either “to get your hands dirty, or let events be driven by extremists.” He is right. But unlike Northern Ireland, where the Prime Minister has ultimate legal authority, its the Americans who hold the cards with Israel and the Palestinians. Blair will fly the Concorde to consult President Bush this week before seeing Sharon again at 10 Downing St. His task in Washington is really that of a gadfly: to get Bush more engaged in the peace process without pushing too hard or looking like his messenger boy.

A bigger problem is the intellectual exhaustion of the peace process: the Israelis and Palestinians are more divided internally and less trusting than when the Camp David talks collapsed last year, yet a repackaging of its ingredients is all that seems to be on offer. As Blair is having to learn, it takes more than flying practice to turn a gadfly into a dove.