Powell pays dearly for his boss's failings

It is not just Yasser Arafat who is effectively being held prisoner in the Middle East. Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, is now under a form of arrest too: imprisoned by the weight of hopeless expectations.

For more than 30 years - dating back to the days of Henry Kissinger - American secretaries of state have travelled round the region, trying subtly to find ways of allowing Arab and Israeli leaders to wriggle off whatever hook they are impaled on. The man on the hook now is Mr Powell himself.

The word yesterday was that he intended to travel to Beirut and maybe Damascus before a possible further meeting with Mr Arafat tomorrow.

The legitimate, and important, diplomatic objective was to prevent the signs of trouble on Israel's frontiers with Lebanon and Syria degenerating into full-scale battlefronts.

The less worthy political objective was to buy time in the region to try to avoid the likelihood of a humiliating flight home, having achieved absolutely nothing.

President Bush has kept himself publicly (and maybe privately) disengaged from the issue all week. And White House officials yesterday maintained that distance by using the same standard diplomatic words - such as "useful" and "constructive"- to describe the Powell-Arafat talks as Mr Powell's own entourage. They also made it clear that the secretary of state had "maximum flexibility" and "a broad mandate". In other words, he is on his own.

Mr Powell's problems, in the short term, are partly the result of straightforward poor news management. All last week the media obsessively followed his languid progress towards the area, setting up expectations that had little prospect of being met.

His wanderings - to Morocco, to Spain, to Egypt - dominated the global news agenda. This had something to do with a lull in new reported atrocities that lasted until the Jerusalem bomb on Friday. But the whole trip was being conducted as theatre, and that demands some kind of denouement.

The administration's earlier failings had set up the situation. Suddenly, it was a big deal that a secretary of state was conducting talks that his predecessors, and even their presidents, used to undertake as a matter of routine.

From the moment Mr Bush took office 15 months ago, Democratic opponents identified as a weakness his insistence on being "unClinton" and refusing to get involved in what at that stage might still have been a peace process. They were never able to make much of it, and since September 11 any kind of foreign-policy criticism has been politically impossible.

The consequence of the Bush administration's earlier inaction is that it is now as constrained as the antagonists.

Any kind of tilt towards either side risks jeopardising, in one way or another, its own declared major objective: the defeat of terrorism. The US cannot be seen to condone suicide bombers; it dare not antagonise Arab opinion more than it already has. A renewed attempt at disengagement would do both at once.

There was a hint of desperation from Mr Powell's own deputy, Richard Armitage, in Washington yesterday: "We're open to all sorts of good ideas. We're open to any ideas our Israeli friends might have, or anyone else in the region. We're open to any ideas Chairman Arafat might have."

The next obvious piece of theatre, the dispatch of American troops, seems out of the question: Republican senators have made clear their implacable opposition. And the best plan - "don't start from here" - is no use at all.