The good news about President Bush's latest trip to the Middle East is that a new war has not broken out in the region. Despite a fresh round of violence over the past few days, Lebanon has managed to pull back from the brink of another civil war. The bad news is that practically nothing else is going right in the region.

Lebanon remains a combustible mixture of clan and religious tensions that could explode at any moment. It has been without a president since last November because its many factions cannot reach a political agreement. And Israel anxiously watches its northern border, while the Syrian and Iranian backed Hezbollah militia – the strongest faction in Lebanon - rearms and positions its missile launchers for the possibility of another war with the Jewish State.

President Bush and the First Lady arriving in Israel

Things are not going well in Israel either. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is under police investigation, accused of receiving bribes from an American businessmen; most Israelis wish he would resign. President Bush insists that the peace process does not depend on one man, but Israeli negotiations with the Palestinians would be delayed if Mr. Olmert were forced to resign and new elections were called.

In any event, Mr. Bush's goal of reaching an Israeli-Palestinian agreement by the end of this year is a pipe dream because he has done too little to promote the process.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reportedly told Mr. Bush last month in Washington that when his negotiators heard the Israeli position, they thought Olmert and his foreign minister were playing a joke on them. That's because the Israeli demands were so far from the guidelines set by President Clinton in the previous negotiations. According to the Palestinians, the Israelis want to keep not only their big settlements on the occupied West Bank, but also the entire Jordan Valley and all of Jerusalem, except for the Temple Mount (which Palestinian religious authorities already control), and several Palestinian neighborhoods on the eastern outskirts of Jerusalem.

While the Bush administration pays lip service to the official American position that Israel must stop building and enlarging Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian territory, it does nothing else to actually discourage the continuing encroachment of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land.

Akiva Eldar, an Israeli columnist whom I have quoted before (“Middle East Tremors” April 11, 2008) is worth quoting again. He wrote an editorial in the newspaper Haaretz this week suggesting that Mr. Bush “should stay home.” Eldar wrote: “Unless he has a rabbit in his hat, this will be the third time in the past half year that the U.S. president shows the Palestinians and the entire Arab world that they are wasting their time by trying to end the occupation by peaceful means.”

The fear, which Eldar raises and Israeli officials share, is that the Palestinian “moderates” under Mahmoud Abbas will give up trying to negotiate with Israel, abandon the goal of the two- state solution (Israeli and Palestinian states existing peacefully side by side), and return to the armed struggle and a demand for a single, bi-national state, which would mean the end of Israel as we know it.

Tony Blair, who is now an international envoy to the Middle East, tried to help Mr. Bush this week by putting some pressure on Isreal. The former British Prime Minister convinced the Omert government to dismantle or rearrange a small number of Israeli army roadblocks to make life a little easier for Palestinian residents of the West Bank. It was a small concession, but Israeli military officials were unhappy about it. The roadblocks, which Mr. Blair and many foreign observers consider to be a form of collective punishment, are designed to make it harder for Palestinian terrorists to slip into Israel.

If Mr. Bush really wants to open up the road to peace in the Middle East, it will take more than moving a few roadblocks. And it will take more than an international envoy with a limited role and no real power to talk the Israelis into making the risky and substantial concessions needed to reach a peace agreement. What it WILL take is an American president who can use the power of his office -- and muster his own courage and imagination -- to lead.