They begin as goodwill initiatives that make their excruciatingly slow progress from the drawing board to the negotiating table and then to the real world — where they founder. Then, years later comes the rerun, albeit under a new name. And so it goes.

For months, we wondered whether this time around, the latest American-brokered, internationally backed peace effort known as the road map would make it to the finish line. As Colin Powell, the American secretary of state, ended his official visit to Palestine last weekend, we stopped wondering. Israel, very simply, refused to accept this latest peace plan. Powell claimed, improbably, that despite that posture by the Israeli side, there was “sufficient agreement on elements” in it to move forward, but failed to convince anyone how that would be accomplished. Further compounding the picture during Powell’s tour was the Israeli military’s imposition of the tightest crackdown on travel into and out of Gaza since the current uprising began in September 2000, and its killing of three Palestinians there, including a farm worker tilling a field near an army observation post — making a mockery of the whole notion of a “peace process.”

What it boils down to is this: It is all up to President Bush and whether he is willing to stand up and be counted. In other words, does he have the resolve to free himself from the stranglehold of the Christian right — whose fanatic support of Israel derives from kooky beliefs about “the second coming” in the Holy Land — and the armlock that Ariel Sharon has around his neck?

The former include Tom DeLay, House Majority leader, and sundry Bible-toting, right-wing congressmen, who recently delivered a letter to the White House declaring that the administration is “undercutting” Israel by embracing the road map and that they would oppose any deal that “imposes significant requirements” on Israel. And as for the latter, Bush would need to allow his secretary of state to confront the inescapable sense of triviality and dissimulation in Sharon’s stance.

“This President Bush,” wrote Thomas Friedman, New York Times commentator, in his column last Sunday, “if he keeps going in the direction he’s been going, will be remembered as the president who got so wrapped around the finger of Ariel Sharon that he indulged Israel into thinking it really could have it all — settlements, prosperity, peace and democracy — and in doing so helped contribute to the slow erosion of the Jewish state.”

In Cairo on Monday, Powell tried to dance around the idea that Israel refused to accept the road map, and ended up giving the concept of “cognitive dissonance” an added pitch of meaning. He said it “made no difference” whether Israel “declared that it accepted the document.” Egypt’s Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher countered by asking if “accept” was a dirty word for Israel to utter.

If the road map is a failure, as it clearly appears to be, even so early on in the game, it is because President Bush, who had pledged “my personal commitment” to its implementation, did not have the courage of that commitment. The failure will mean that Sharon and his cronies will have won, Israel will retain the Palestinian territories and become officially recognized around the world as the only colonial entity extant in our time — its name becoming an equivalent for dead weight — the Arab nations will become totally alienated from the US, which now will be considered complicit in Likud’s expansionist designs, and the Saudi peace plan, accepted at the Arab League conference in Beirut on Feb. 27, 2002, offering official recognition by League members of Israel within its 1967 borders, will be relegated to the history books.

Oh, yes, it all hinged, as of early last week, on the word “accept” and how Secretary Powell tried to spin its lexicological connotations. “The Israeli side did not use the word ‘accept,’” he told reporters in Cairo after meeting with President Hosni Mubarak on Monday, “It makes no difference whether you have a word ‘accept’ or not have a word ‘accept’.” Instead, he added, “rather than focus on that issue, I am focusing on the steps that we can take.”