Between Bush and Sharon, David Hirst asks which is the tail and which is the dog Few disputed at the time that Israel was a factor that pushed Bush to go to war on Iraq. Just how much weight it had among all the others was the only controversial question. But what is clear, six months on, is that Israel is now a very important factor indeed in the stumbling neo-imperial venture that Iraq has become. This "Israelisation" of US policy crossed a new threshold with the two blows dealt Syria in the past fortnight -- President Bush's endorsement of Israel's air raid on its territory and the Syrian Accountability Act passed by the House of Representatives on Wednesday. A community of US-Israeli purpose pushed to unprecedented lengths is now operational as well as ideological. For the US, the primary battlefield is Iraq, and any state which sponsors or encourages resistance to its occupation. For Israel, it is occupied Palestine, its "terrorists" and their external backers. These equivalent agendas converge on Syria. Of course, with his raid, Sharon had his own specifically Israeli agenda, growing out of frustration at his failure to crush the Intifada. Breaking the rules that have contained Israeli-Syrian armed conflict these past 30 years, he signalled his readiness to visit on Israel's Arab neighbours the same punitive measures he uses on the Palestinians. But whereas such an escalation might have had some deterrent value when these neighbours truly did sponsor or harbour Palestinian resistance, it doesn't now. An essential feature of the Intifada is that, spontaneous and popular, it derives almost all its impetus from within. Nothing illustrated that like Hanadi Jaradat, the young woman from Jenin whose very personal grief and need for vengeance prompted the atrocious, self-sacrificial Haifa bombing which prompted the Syrian raid in its turn. So, other than brief emotional gratification to the Israeli public, it achieved nothing. But that will not deter Sharon. Having embarked on this course, he has little choice but to continue it. More importantly, violence has always been the indispensable means by which, in the guise of fighting terror, he pursues his real, longer-term aims -- those of building a "Greater Israel" and crushing any opposition, Arab as well as Palestinian, to it. But he is also, he believes, serving an American agenda. At least no one in Washington says he is not. There was a time, even under this administration, the most pro-Israeli ever, when the superpower would have strenuously distanced itself from such an act by its protégé; a time when, mindful of the linkage between the two great Middle East zones of crisis, it would have recognised that too close an identification with the aims and actions of Israel in Palestine and its environs would complicate its task in Iraq. No more, apparently. Now these aims and actions either matter little to America, or even -- in Syria's case -- complement its own. True, constraints persist even now. Bush still balks at Israel's projected "removal" of Yasser Arafat. On the other hand, he has effectively "disengaged" once more from peacemaking, endorsed the Israeli view that Arafat alone is responsible for its breakdown, and left Sharon a freer hand than ever to conduct the Israeli share of their common and brutal "war on terror". And nowhere, Western diplomats in Damascus say, is this more obvious than with regard to Syria. The Accountability Act, which calls for sanctions against Syria till it stops supporting terrorism, withdraws its forces from Lebanon, ceases development of weapons of mass destruction and enters "serious, unconditional" peace negotiations with Israel, is something the "neo-cons" have been working towards since the mid-1990s. It was then that they first proposed their joint Israeli-American strategy for "regime change" in Syria as well as Iraq, to be accomplished by such means as attacks on Syria by "Israeli proxy forces" based in Lebanon, Israeli attacks on Syrian targets in Lebanon and "select" targets in Syria itself. The deepening US-Israeli alliance is all too liable to backfire. What the US is permitting Israel to do in Palestine and Syria will further inflame Arab and Muslim hostility to what it is doing in Iraq. The effects of that will be felt at the popular level. As despised Arab regimes look ever more incapable of fulfiling the fundamental duty of any government -- defence against foreign attack and domination -- the militants among their people, like Hanadi Jaradat in Palestine, assume that duty themselves. They become terrorists and suicide bombers wherever motive and opportunity for it most potently coincide. Iraq and Palestine are one and the same. "Those," said Beirut's Daily Star, "who cannot take revenge on Israeli occupation will happily visit it on US troops in Tikrit." As for the regimes, Syria has so far opted for restraint. Aware that its only hope of securing its future in a general Middle East settlement is via the United States, it may become even more conciliatory than it already is. But if Sharon keeps up his attacks, there will surely be a limit to such restraint, set by tactical necessity, domestic public opinion and its own perception of itself as a last bastion of Arab steadfastness. It has intimated that, at some point, it will hit back; perhaps by really adopting the spoiler's role in Iraq which the US unconvincingly attributes to it already or, more likely, by activating Hizbullah against Israel. Of course that would be very risky, given Israel's vast superiority in conventional military terms. But -- it will doubtless calculate -- can the US, floundering in Iraq, really afford another Middle East conflagration of its ally's making? The Israelisation of America, as a key ingredient in the ever more noxious Middle East brew, is not an extravagant term for a relationship in which, typically, Sharon leads and Bush lamely follows. The pattern constantly repeats itself. Bush may have misgivings about what Sharon does; at his military excesses, his relentless settlement drive, his "wall", and now his attack on Syria. He may stammer out mild admonitions. But he always accommodates him in the end. And with Iraq eating away at his prospects of re-election for a second term Bush will be more accommodating than ever; more deferential to all the "friends of Israel" in America from whom Sharon draws most of his power to lead -- or mislead -- him. With the next suicide bomber will Sharon reply against the offices of "terrorist" organisations in Damascus itself, as he has intimated he might? One thing is sure: if somewhere down such a road lies an American disaster in Iraq, and a monumental mass departure, the Israeli partner in this most extraordinary and counter-productive of alliances will pay a higher price than America itself.
