MIDDLE EAST: US officials insist that they see a glimmer of hope in the talks that Gen Zinni is engaged in, writes Patrick Smyth, Washington Correspondent.
Despite the continuing violence and bleak prospects for peace in Palestine, a reluctant US administration is now committed to its own full, probably long-term, engagement in brokering peace.
Reflecting the administration's wary ambivalence, the President's spokesman, Mr Ari Fleischer, told journalists on Wednesday that "we are committed to achieving peace, and we won't be deterred. It just gets harder and more complicated every day".
Squeezed between contradictory imperatives, domestically of not being seen by the powerful Jewish lobby in Congress to be applying pressure on Israel, and abroad of building a coalition against Iraq in the Arab world, Mr Bush would much prefer to leave what seems like an intractable problem to sort itself out.
That was, after all, the policy he enunciated during campaign criticism of the Clinton hands-on approach and on which he was elected.
But that appears no longer to be an option. The administration has recently come to the conclusion, as the Vice-President, Mr Dick Cheney, explained at the weekend, that "left to their own devices Israel and the Palestinians are unable to resolve their differences". Worse still, officials say, leaving them to their own devices threatens to fuel the destabilising spiral of increasing violence.
And so Mr Bush is now reluctantly committed to keeping his special representative, Gen Anthony Zinni, in place and to risking political capital by attempting to broker a return to the table by both sides.
"We're at a juncture where mere management of the Arab-Israeli conflict is not possible," says Middle East analyst, Mr Shibley Telhami, of the University of Maryland. "Either we have a massive political effort to reach a solution or we are going to go on a course of escalation that is going to be very consequential for every one involved."
The failure of the effort would undermine US credibility in the Arab world, he says. During Mr Cheney's recent 10-day trip to the region, Arab governments stressed that the US should exert more pressure on Israel if they want Arab support for action against Iraq.
The portents are not good, despite the insistence by US officials that they see a glimmer of hope in the talks that the general has been involved in. In the last two weeks, the US has tried almost every option to calm the crisis short of directly involving Mr Bush or the Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, in mediating between the parties.
Mr Powell and Mr Cheney very publicly failed even to convince the Israelis to let the Palestinian leader travel to Beirut, and pressure on the Palestinians continues to fall on deaf ears. Mr Powell has again appealed to Mr Arafat to speak to his people in Arabic about the futility of violence.
Sceptics warn that the inevitable Israeli retaliation for the Passover bombing is likely to trigger further Palestinian attacks, making the prospects for Gen Zinni's initiative very precarious.