As far as I know, there is only one policy issue on which President Bush ever formally made a personal pledge. In November 2008, at the Middle East summit in Annapolis, he proclaimed:
President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert, I pledge to devote my effort during my time as president to do all I can to help you achieve this ambitious goal. I give you my personal commitment to support your work with the resources and resolve of the American government.
That ambitious goal was achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians by January 2009 (which both Bush and Condi Rice cheerfully declared to be eminently doable).
Looks like Bush lost interest in that goal at some point, and privately canceled his pledge. For one thing, as he’s twiddled his thumbs the last few months, none of that twiddling has involved anything to do with the Middle East. For another, when Hamas and Israel erupted in a new episode of the same old violence last weekend, the president was resolved only to not interrupt his vacation. Not even to make a formal statement calling for restraint, etc.
Between all the clearing of brush and the riding of bikes, he did somehow muster up the energy to speak on the phone to his old pal King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. But that seems to have exhausted his resources and resolve.
Even an emerging crisis in the Middle East, one he pledged to resolve just 13 months ago, has not drawn President George W. Bush from his final vacation before leaving office. Despite his personal pledge at Annapolis last year to broker a deal between Israel and the Palestinians before 2009, this weekend Bush sent his spokesmen to comment in his stead.
Bush’s determined avoidance came even as the “two-day death toll in Gaza rose Sunday to an estimated 300, the largest in more than 40 years” and the “possibility of a full-out ground operation rose as Israel’s cabinet approved plans to call up more than 6,000 reservists.”
Bush still managed to manfully go on twiddling, even through the third day of Israeli airstrikes.
And the official U.S. position continues to be “we want to see the violence stopped, but in a way that leads to a durable and sustainable cessation of violence”. And if there’s no clear way that leads to a durable and sustainable cessation of violence? Why, then, we don’t much care whether the violence continues or stops, do we? Especially since Hamas is a lousy stinking terrorist organization, and Israel is an oh-so-friendly government, even if they have a regrettable tendency to regularly wipe out women and children on the other side.