Herbert Zweibon

At first glance President Bush’s speech to the nation on January 10 was a repudiation of the central proposals of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group. Baker-Hamilton advocated negotiations with Iran and Syria, the chief foreign contributors to Iraq’s turmoil. In return for broad regional cooperation in the stabilization of Iraq, the U.S. would deliver up Israel. Israel would be summoned to an international conference where (shades of Munich) it would be forced to submit to a diktat spelled out in the Iraq Study Group Report: give Syria the Golan, create a Palestinian state and address the “right of return” (the Arab demand that millions of so-called refugees be absorbed into Israel’s pre-1967 borders, in other words that the Jewish state cease to exist).

In his speech, far from offering to parlay with them, President Bush warned that he would “interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria” and “seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.” Nor was there any direct mention of Israel, although there was a single disquieting sentence about Secretary Rice using “urgent diplomacy…to help bring peace to the Middle East.”

Unfortunately what has become evident since the speech is that the most immediate “surge” is not in American troops but in squeezing Israel. Condoleezza Rice’s “urgent diplomacy” gives every indication that if the administration is not disposed to use Israel as a carrot to win over Syria and Iran, it is prepared to offer up Israel to our supposed Arab “friends,” above all as a sop to Saudi Arabia. These “friends” have got the message: according to a January 15 AP report Arab officials will propose a broad bargain which they dub “Iraq for Land” – in return for their help in stabilizing Iraq the U.S. will give them Israel’s land.

The entire “bargain” is surreal. These states have no ability to pacify Iraq where Iran is the key player, backing both the Shiite militias and the Sunni jihadists. And the broader premise is absurd -- that “solving” the Arab-Israel conflict so as to satisfy the Arabs (i.e. dissolving Israel) will in any way mitigate the threats posed by the deeply dysfunctional Middle East.

The moment Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections the U.S. should have scrapped the misbegotten Road Map, built on the false premise that Palestinian Arabs wanted peace with Israel, not the end of Israel. The Hamas leaders lack even the forked tongue of an Arafat or Abbas, for publicly and privately, in English as in Arabic, they proclaim unreserved devotion to Israel’s destruction. Instead Condoleezza Rice is seeking shortcuts, as she put it in Ramallah “to accelerate progress on the road map” to a Palestinian state. That means eliminating what few demands the Road Map puts on Arab behavior: these, Rice complained, prevented “momentum” in going forward. The U.S. is now in the truly ludicrous position of championing the territorial and other demands of a government with which its officials are not allowed to speak. As The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 12) notes, “American officials are forbidden from dealing with anyone inside an entity controlled by Hamas, because it’s designated as a terrorist group under U.S. law.”

Our current crazy policy, which flies in the face of the principles this administration claims to stand for – fighting terror and supporting democracy -- will do nothing to advance American values or interests. It will do nothing to improve the dire situation in Iraq or reduce Islamic terror or increase Middle East stability. On the contrary, by fostering the perception of a U.S. so weak and desperate it is willing to sacrifice Israel, it will invigorate and vastly strengthen the darkest forces in the Moslem world. This policy is not even made in the State Department which would be bad enough. It’s of Saudi Arabia, by Saudi Arabia and for Saudi Arabia