George Will isn’t buying the “rope-a-dope” trope — not if this latest column is any indication, that is:

Bush, who despises Yasser Arafat as much as he relishes moral clarity, has lost the latter by speaking what he knows is nonsense about the former. Bush is continuing the bankrupt policy of treating Arafat as a legitimate leader and seeker of peace, while an unnamed ‘senior administration official’ speaks to the New York Times about not ‘compromising the principle of zero tolerance for terrorism.’

Bush says ‘enough is enough,’ meaning . . . what? That there has been ‘enough’ (how much would be excessive?) Arafat terror? ‘Enough’ (more would be excessive?) of Israel’s self-defense? Bush demands that Israel do something — something momentous — and that Arafat say ‘something.’ Bush demands that Israel truncate a military operation crucial to its security — perhaps even to its survival. And Bush says Arafat ‘ought to at least say something.’

But Arafat was listening, and probably snickering, last Thursday when Bush, in the White House Rose Garden, said Arafat ‘has not consistently opposed or confronted terrorism.’ Some preposterous process of interagency negotiation put the word ‘consistently’ into Bush’s reference to a man whose vocation for nearly four decades has been terrorism. Some important faction of the administration — a faction given to nuancing — had to be appeased by the word ‘consistently.’

There seems to be a fairly pronounced divide within the ranks of conservative pundits over the Bush “strategy” (such as it is) here. Some, like George Will and Bill Kristol, et al., believe that the State Department is interfering with Bush’s preferred course of action — that Bush is, essentially, being constrained by the diplomatic agenda of the Powell brigade. Others, however, see this “apparent” strain within the administration hierarchy as part of some well-orchestrated plan to play Janus to Arab world — that Powell’s utterances in applied equivalency are belied by his actions (he took the slow boat to the Mid East, he backed off from the harsh rhetoric he’d been aiming at Sharon); in this scenario, the U.S. appears to be keeping its peace-brokering promise to the Arab world while allowing Israel time to finish up operations in the West Bank.

My position tends to change from day to day. One thing doesn’t change, though: I pray Will and Kristol are wrong.