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The strain was noticeable in the Middle East. In a recent interview
with Newsweek, one senior Israeli official said Mitchell often would
say one thing about the direction the U.S. was taking with the two
sides, only to be contradicted by Dennis Ross, Clinton's special
adviser to the region. The official, who did not want to be quoted by
name, said it seemed as if Mitchell had abdicated his role completely
in recent months. Indeed, Mitchell's frequent visits to Israel and the
West Bank slowed to a trickle; his last visit to the region was in
December.
When he was there, officials on both sides of the conflict had voiced
bewilderment at Mitchell's hands-off approach to the complex
negotiating process. With a small staff in Israel, he would shuttle
between Jerusalem and Ramallah to meet with senior advisers to the
leaders of both sides and then leave after just a few days. In an
interview with Newsweek last month, Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas openly accused Mitchell of not doing his job.
"Every visit by Mitchell, we talked to him and gave him some ideas,"
he said. "At the end we discovered that he didn't convey any of these
ideas to the Israelis. What does it mean?"
A politically attuned man who was once Senate Majority Leader,
Mitchell was aware of the complaints about him. His usual comeback
was to point to his success in Northern Ireland, which earned him the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. For hundreds of days, he liked to say,
he was considered a failure, until the final day, when he actually got
it done.
Mitchell's resignation letter set off a small panic inside the West
Wing earlier in the week. Senior advisers, as well as Obama himself,
could sense the increasing difficulty of the job: Administration
officials had been unable to convince Israel to halve new settlements
in the West Bank, alienating Palestinians, and Israelis were irked in
early May when Abbas allied with Hamas, a group that refuses to

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