U.S. Glum on Mideast Peace Pact : Diplomacy: White House calls the results of Baker’s trip ‘disappointing.’ Optimism that followed the Gulf War seems to have evaporated.

WASHINGTON —  The White House said Monday that its intensified push for a breakthrough in the Middle East peace process has produced “slim” results, suggesting that the optimism that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the Persian Gulf War has nearly evaporated.

In the most negative public assessment since Secretary of State James A. Baker III began his attempt at shuttle diplomacy more than a month ago, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said the results have been “obviously . . . somewhat disappointing.”

The official comment contrasts with recent efforts by the Administration to put the best face on the talks, which have offered little evidence of compromise on any front.

Baker, who returned to the United States from the Middle East over the weekend after his mother died in Houston, will meet with President Bush this week. Prospects for a fourth postwar visit to Israel and its Arab neighbors remain up in the air.

A decision on a follow-up trip could indicate whether the Administration plans to continue its high-profile effort or to scale back for the time being.

On Friday, Bush said Baker had “made progress,” and the President told reporters: “I think the bottom line is there’s some reason for optimism.”

One White House official said that Fitzwater and Bush were simply reflecting two sides of the same coin and that the spokesman did not mean to signal a shift in the Administration’s approach. But Fitzwater’s remarks made clear the prevailing view that the teamwork produced by the Gulf War will not be sufficient to produce sudden movement toward an overall peace agreement in the region.

In the initial weeks after the war, during which U.S. and Arab forces coordinated their military operations and Israel abided by U.S. requests not to attack Iraq, U.S. officials expressed a rare degree of optimism that the alliance could turn next to easing some of the longstanding animosities between Israel, the Arabs and the Palestinians.

Fitzwater said Monday that the Administration “had hoped that the war effort and the goodwill and opportunity that derive from it would lead to progress in the peace process.” But he added, “The results so far have been slim.

“Certainly we continue to hope for peace, to hope that some progress can be made,” he said. “But it’s a slow process--it always has been and it always will be in the Middle East.”

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, meanwhile, said the Administration is trying to get the Middle East peace process “restarted and re-established.”

Cheney described Baker’s task as an “extraordinarily difficult assignment, perhaps more difficult than mine has been over the last few months.” He added that Baker “now has to go try to move some of the players with some historical animosities of enormous complexity . . . along the road toward resolving some of those differences on a permanent basis.”

In a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research organization focusing on the Middle East, the defense secretary said that while he is hopeful that the current initiative will yield a lasting peace, “I also think that we should not be so naive as to assume that it’s going to be easy or that we can necessarily solve all the problems that exist in the Middle East.”

He said that the process was aided by a number of significant developments arising from the Gulf War--the fact that Arab and Western forces fought side by side to eject Iraq from Kuwait; the destruction of Baghdad’s offensive military power; Israel’s increased security arising from the neutralization of Iraq, and the enhanced credibility of the United States.

The tough road on which the Administration has set out in the Middle East became all the more apparent Sunday, when the U.S. proposal for an open-ended peace conference was rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir disavowed a concession made to Baker by Foreign Minister David Levy two days earlier that appeared to leave open the possibility of an extended regional peace conference.

Israel has maintained that it would take part only in a single, ceremonial international meeting and would then insist on direct talks with the Arab countries. Levy, however, had told Baker that Israel would go along with a conference convened every six months to monitor progress in Arab-Israeli talks.

At the White House on Monday, Fitzwater took pains to avoid widening the gap with Israel.

Asked about a suggestion made Sunday by Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) that the United States should consider using its foreign aid policies as a stick to press Middle East nations into concessions, Fitzwater said: “We don’t think it’s appropriate . . . to be threatening anyone.”

Times staff writer John M. Broder contributed to this story.