By Gwynne Dyer, Contributor
THE ISRAELI newspaper 'Ha'aretz' is not a fan of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's expansionist policy in the occupied Palestinian territories, so it understandably didn't like US President George W. Bush's Middle East speech of 24 June.
"Those millions of Israelis who are losing hope for an agreement to end the conflict by political means," observed Gideon Samet, "now have confirmation from the leader of the West that for a long time to come, there won't even be the beginning of movement."
What Bush's speech signalled was that there would be no peace talks until the terrorism stops, no pressure on Israel to compromise on territory, and enormous pressure on the Palestinians to dump Yasser Arafat in favour of someone even more pliable. The practical consequences of this taking of sides are that the terrorism will go on, the Palestinians will probably become even more radicalised, and the opportunities for Sharon to simply kill Arafat and use the resultant uprising as an excuse to clear Palestinians out of large parts of the West Bank will grow.
The speech was written in the White House, but it could have been written by Sharon's office. Yet we should not assume (as 'Ha'aretz' crudely does) that Bush's policy is driven simply by concern for the American Jewish vote. What it actually reveals is that the Bush administration's main, and indeed almost sole foreign policy priority is the fight against 'terrorism'.
This is what Bush himself has been saying all along, of course. It's just that other people, particularly outside the United States, found it hard to believe that he was really going to concentrate on the 'war against terrorism' to the virtual exclusion of all America's other interests in the world. Terrorism is a problem, certainly, but it ranks
about tenth or twentieth in the order of the world's problems for most people - as it did for most Americans, too, until the eleventh of September last.
Well, Bush meant what he said. Suicide bombings by Palestinian terrorists in Israel are, in his vision of things, a completely separate problem and a far worse evil than 35 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, creeping colonisation that has now placed 42 per cent of the Palestinian territories under the effective control of Israeli settlers, and a Palestinian death toll, since the beginning of this intifada, that is almost three times higher than the Israeli.
In the post-September 11 world, there is only one priority in American foreign policy. Suicide bombings are 'terrorism', and therefore part of that priority. Middle East peace is not.
Other things being equal, President Bush would doubtless love to be the sponsor of a Middle East peace settlement, but if it involves talking to terrorists, or anybody remotely associated with them, then it is ideologically unacceptable. So far as the Bush administration is concerned, all terrorists are the same: a purely irrational evil belonging not to the political world but to the same domain as cancer.
They are also all ten feet tall - a view which is shared by the US mass media and, so far as anybody can tell, the general American public. The 'terrorist threat', in the popular imagination, is as big and scary as the 'Soviet threat' was twenty years ago, even though the damage that terrorists could do is a thousand times less. The difference, of course, is that the terrorists of al-Qaeda actually did kill a few thousand Americans, whereas the risk of a war where ten thousand Soviet nuclear weapons would fall on the United States and kill a hundred million Americans, however real, always remained only potential.
It can't be helped: the average person's grasp of risk factors is so poor that it's commonplace to meet cigarette smokers who worry about terrorism. American public opinion has been persuaded that the 'terrorist threat' to the United States is on a par with the now mercifully defunct risk of a world war, and the Bush administration has dedicated itself to waging a war on terrorism.
We need not quibble over how much this policy owes to political calculation and how much it is actual obsession. The point is that other American interests are going to be subordinated to this overriding objective.
So Washington WILL back Sharon's policy regardless of the damage to American (and longer-term Israeli) interests in the Middle East; Sharon's ability to claim that he is the victim of terrorism trumps any other consideration. The United States WILL attack Iraq within the year, regardless of the likelihood that such a war will destabilise pro-American regimes throughout the region and involve large numbers of American casualties.
Indeed, almost anybody who can claim a terrorist problem now stands a fair chance of manipulating American policy in their favour: Russia has already done it over Chechnya, and India may yet succeed in doing it over Kashmir (with potentially horrendous results). And this deformation of
American foreign policy will probably continue until some really big military or political disaster brings Washington back to earth.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
