Double jeopardy

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So now we face the worst of all possible worlds in the Middle East - an outcome where Saddam Hussein is saved by Ariel Sharon. The arithmetic that has culminated in this appalling result is the arithmetic of failure: failure of nerve, failure of principles, failure of responsibility.

The main share of the blame falls on the Bush administration in Washington. Interviewed on the networks last Sunday, just before embarking on a visit to the Israeli-Palestinian front (with a pointless and leisurely stop in Morocco along the way), Secretary of State Colin Powell said that he "hoped" he might be going to meet with Chairman Arafat or, failing that, with some other Palestinian spokesmen. He "hoped"? This is how the foreign minister of Iceland, say, might speak before embarking upon a courtesy call.

Mr Powell's government is the supplier of those nifty Apache helicopters we see every night on TV, hovering lethally over Ramallah and Nablus and Bethlehem. It is the provider of the bulk of Sharon's military might, and it is the main under-pinning of the Israeli economy. The United States government also has a veto at the United Nations, which it has employed on several occasions to shield Israel from criticism. In other words, and to put it at its mildest, its Secretary of State need crave nobody's permission to see Chairman Arafat, or anyone else.

The Israeli novelist Amos Oz wrote this week that Israel is fighting two wars - the first against Islamic desperadoes and extremists and the second to keep control of a people that rejects its occupation. Fighting the second, colonial war, he pointed out, means that it has no hope of winning the first one. A withdrawal from the Occupied Territories would make Israel more defensible in the physical as well as in the moral sense. The sheer obviousness of this is obscured by the bloodbath at the moment, but it is well-understood in the State Department and has been for some time. Are we to imagine, then, that the United States actually prefers its foreignpolicy face to be that of the brutal and obdurate Sharon?

In 1956 President Eisenhower told Israel to get its troops out of Suez and Gaza by a certain date, or face economic sanctions. The ultimatum worked like a charm. That year was also an election year in the United States, but those who thought that Eisenhower could be swayed by domestic calculations were proved quite mistaken. How nice it would be to think that his Republican descendant was equally unmoved. But it seems at present that Bush has been bamboozled into the view that Israel's occupation is a part of the "war on terrorism" rather than a lethal hindrance to it. And then when he sees the results, and asks Sharon to call off the dogs, he looks puzzled - as an Icelandic President might appear puzzled - at the failure of his advice to have the desired effect.

Clueless about all this, and making up their policy as they go along, Mr Bush and Mr Blair none the less seem to think that they can determine the pace of events in Iraq simply by making an announcement. Yet Saddam Hussein has a hostage in the form of Ariel Sharon. Even if Iraq is attacked with overwhelming force, it will still in all probability be able to fire off a missile or two in the general direction of Tel Aviv. In a little-noticed interview with the Washington Post, Sharon gave that as his reason for opposing any move on Iraq in the immediate future. Thus, he puts his own campaign of deluded reconquest ahead of the need to deal with Iraq. And he has a hostage in his turn, in the form of a subjected and humiliated Palestinian people. Should Iraq make some disgusting gesture with nerve- gas or poison-weapons, and should the Arab world be so inflamed as to applaud it, he would have the ideal pretext either to reoccupy the West Bank or, even worse, to embark upon an "ethnic cleansing? of its inhabitants. So, not only may Sharon save Saddam, but Saddam could be the making of Sharon.

This is the grim dialectic with which our neglectful and vain statesmen have left us. How are we to take what they say seriously? In one breath, they call on Yasser Arafat to put down the Saudi-financed Islamic suicide-bombers. (The origins of this finance, though wellknownare, by some mysterious-convention, never mentioned in public.) Then they watch as all of Arafat's organs of authority are methodically destroyed. Then they repeat the demand that he "act against terror". Then, to crown everything, they speak of a "partnership".

It ought to be pointed out more often than it is that the docks, airstrips and other facilities of the nascent Palestinian state were built with grants from the European Union. Then they were levelled by tanks and planes supplied by the United States. What kind of " partnership" is that?

All or most of this impending calamity could have been foreseen by anyone with an amateur knowledge of the Middle East. It is now 46 years since Eisenhower, and 25 years since an American President first acknowledged that a regional settlement with Israel was the precondition for peace. This year, President Bush even became the first President to use the term "Palestinian state". But every day the deeds belie the words, and there will be awful consequences for living a lie.