Bush has gone soft on Sharon

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As another wave of suicide terrorists strikes at Israel, the Bush administration no longer seems interested in pressuring premier Sharon to make a deal with the Palestinians. Christopher Hitchens says Washington is now dominated by oil men and security specialists who don't care much what Israel does

The Bush administration seems to have decided, without actually saying so, that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is more or less what General Sharon says it is: namely a question of law and order. In the past few days, all of Washington's admonitions about violence - which usually preserve a semblance of evenhandedness - have been directed at Yasser Arafat. It has been strongly hinted that the United States will break off contact with the Palestinian Authority. And the test of any renewed respectability for the chairman of the PLO, which is the demand that he do nothing less than quell the current uprising, seems to be a bar that is set extremely if not unrealistically high. There is not much dovish dissent from this view, except in a few offices in the State Department. But there are many - notably including Vice-President Dick Cheney - who would like to be even more hawkish, and let Sharon be Sharon with the gloves off.

It's tempting to assign the cause of this change to the new atmosphere of " counterterrorism" after 11 September. But in fact, those events for a while seemed to point policy-makers in the opposite direction. General Sharon lost a huge number of points in Washington by publicly comparing George Bush to Neville Chamberlain. The President in turn made his first-ever public endorsement of a Palestinian state. And a sharp distinction was drawn between the forces of al Qaeda, which are "terrorist" pure and simple, and the long-running grievances of a people who live under what is now the third generation of military occupation. Furthermore, it has long been understood at some official level that the United States cannot hope to win friends in the Arab and Muslim world if it seems indifferent to the Palestinian plight. Saudi Arabia's rulers underlined this point over the weekend, when they issued a strong statement warning against any formal breach of relations with Arafat.

However, the credit of Saudi Arabia in Washington is not what it was.

The Kingdom was a feeble friend, if indeed it was a friend at all, in the struggle against the Taliban. Indeed the usefulness of the relationship, and of the American bases on Saudi soil, is now being debated openly. The mood here is somewhat impatient; allies are judged by loyalty alone and there is little sentimentality about how popular the United States needs to be. Better respected, even feared, than liked - that would summarise it.

However, the real catalytic event would seem to have been the recent capture by Israel of a covert shipload of weaponry bound for Gaza. Peeling away the various false flags from this operation, it appears that if Arafat was unaware of it, then he had no business to be. Put it another way: if he did know about the shipment then he seems to be acting in bad faith. And if he did not, and is so easily made to look a fool by his subordinates, then he is practically a spent force as a negotiating partner. You might call this Sharon's Fork; it is the twin prong on which he has long hoped to impale his old enemy. Sharon's motives are obvious. "Terrorism" or no terrorism, he thinks that the West Bank was given to the Zionist movement by no less a person than God himself. It is not, for him, a question of "security". (Nobody primarily interested in Jewish security would insist on building settlements in Gaza at a moment like this.) The United States, however, can hardly be expected to use the Old Testament or the Koran in attempting to arbitrate a territorial clash between two strident nationalisms.

The question therefore becomes: does America have a plan for a Palestinian homeland without Arafat? Or does it have some other partner in mind? If so, it would be very interesting to know more. I have not, so far, been able to find an administration spokesman who can answer the above questions.

The truth is that the Bush position is shot through with paradoxes. This government is, to an extraordinary extent, made up of oil men.

Traditionally, oil men have been at least sympathetic to the Arab cause, or at least keen on keeping the Arab world sweet. But the administration is also made up, to an increasing extent, of "security" minded people who see the world through a military optic. (It is probably suggestive that Bush's personal envoy to the Israelis and Palestinians is a fullblown General named Anthony Zinni.) To such types, it is self-evident that Arafat has only one job to do, which is being a policeman to his own people. How he is expected to be a dictator without a state is not made plain; how he is supposed to "pacify" Gaza and Ramallah and Bethlehem in one year, when the Israelis couldn't "pacify" these places in 30 years (even with an army) is not made plain either.

Everybody knows that the money and encouragement for Hamas and the Islamic Jihad group comes from Saudi Arabia; never once has any American spokesman called publicly for that to be stopped. This is because (a) it would be thought tactless and (b) because the Israelis want to put Arafat, not The Kingdom, on the spot.

One has the strong sense of an opportunistic and shortterm policy, that is being made up as it goes along.

The United States has been the direct sponsor of every serious Middle East peace negotiation since the 1967 war. It is also the main paymaster and armourer of the state of Israel. There's a latent incompatibility here, but it need not become dominant as long as Washington uses its influence to help secure Israeli compliance with an impressive bushel of United Nations resolutions. Clearly, this cannot happen if the tail is allowed to wag the dog.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.