Protégé or patron?

Having a rogue for an ally is undermining Washington's ability to strike at its roguish enemies. David Hirst writes
Since the Taliban's defeat, the US has been focusing on that long-standing "rogue state" and newly-anointed member of the "axis of evil," Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as the next target of its "war on terror."
The trouble is that it has encountered a second "rogue state" which is all but ruining its prospects of dealing with the first. Of course the US never calls or perhaps even thinks of it as such, because the state in question is Israel. The US has no closer ally or more indulged of protégés. But such, in effect, it is.
There never was a precise definition of what has been variously termed the "rogue," "backlash," "outlaw" or "crazy" state. In practice, it is likely to be an oppressive dictatorship, but that alone has not been sufficient qualification. It must also pose a constant, exceptional threat to the existing order, allying an aggressive nature with the acquisition of disproportionate military power and the development of weapons of mass destruction. And it must be an adversary of the US, since it is the US which developed the concept and determined those to whom it applies.
Israel does not possess this last qualification -- but its pride of place in American affections enables it to possess the others in greater abundance.
As the Jewish state, it may not oppress its Jewish citizens, but as the colonial settler-state which it also is, it is a direct or indirect oppressor of the indigenous Arabs it rules over or displaced. To cope with that, it has become a vastly disproportionate military power, both conventional and unconventional, a permanent source of regional disorder, the object of ever-growing international opprobrium -- and a threat to the US interests that is certainly far more enduring, and potentially no less calamitous, than any posed by Saddam Hussein or other officially designated "rogue states," Syria, Libya, Iran, in the region.
That threat, implicitly at least, was the reason why US Secretary of State Colin Powell just spent 10 days in the region. His immediate purpose was to secure a cease-fire in the Israel-Palestinian fighting and a restoration of the peace process. But it was more than just the fighting itself which drove the Bush administration to "re-engage" in a conflict from which it had deliberately disengaged, it was the impact this was having on the whole Arab world and US standing there. That is clearly what Powell was getting at when, with infinite tact, he told Israel, "as a friend," that "we have to take note of the long- term strategic consequences" of its action and "its effect on other nations in the region and the international climate."
For these consequences are indeed becoming ominous: an anti-Americanism at fever-pitch from the Atlantic to the Gulf; a renewed, dramatic stirring of the Arab "street" which American policy- makers tended to dismiss as a paper tiger; the distress signals from key American allies, Jordan and Egypt, whose leaders fear that if Sharon, and all he stands for, goes unchecked, their regimes risk collapse, along with the whole structure of peace with Israel, fruit of decades of American diplomacy, which they uphold; the profit that militants and outsiders derive from the helplessness of the mainstream -- Hizbullah, with its cross-border assaults, threatening to ignite a "regional war," Saddam Hussein, with his stoppage of oil exports, raising the price of oil by a dollar in a political and economic climate where further turbulence could send it soaring; and the manifest impatience of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah.
The conflict of interest which the Sharon rampage through the West Bank has brought to this new and alarming pitch has been inherent in the relationship between the US superpower and its Israeli protégé since its creation.
On the one hand Israel, the Jewish state, always successfully presented itself as both an embodiment of American ideals -- "bastion of democracy in the Middle East" -- and as a strategic asset and defender of American interests in the region. The success grew mainly out of the extraordinary influence which, via its friends and auxiliaries in key American institutions, the administration, Congress and the media, Israel exerted on US policy. Before Israel came into being, President Truman famously told assembled Arab ambassadors, "I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism, I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents," American politicians have indefatigably vied for Israel's favour.
On the other hand Israel, the colonial enterprise, was bound to be a strategic liability -- not an asset -- for any outside power perceived by the Arabs to be aiding and abetting it. The US, or at least its specialised agencies like the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon with their professional grasp of realities on the ground, has always known this. As Truman was pinning his colours to the Zionist mast, the CIA was reporting that the Zionist leadership was pursuing its objectives without regard for the consequences, thereby "endangering not only the Jews in Palestine but also the strategic interests of the Western powers." This was America's "rogue state" in embryo.
Still, in those early days, the politicians, for all their pro-Israeli partisanship, could more readily share, and more forcefully act upon, the professionals' view of US interests in the region. The most famous occasion -- and adumbration of the present crisis -- was when President Eisenhower enforced Israel's unconditional withdrawal from the Sinai it had invaded in the 1956 Suez War. But -- says Stephen Green in his book Taking Sides -- "a strong case can be made that Eisenhower was the last American president actually to make US Middle East policy," rather than "Israel and the friends of Israel in America."
To be sure, the endemic conflict of interests produced quarrels and tensions ever since -- but somehow these were almost always resolved, or held in abeyance, and almost always to Israel's advantage. To be sure, Israel often put its own interest above America's -- but America would unfailingly supply it with the means to go on doing so. It showered it with a continuous cornucopia of money, weapons and technology. This was supposed either to encourage it to be more flexible in American-sponsored peace-making, yet only made it more intransigent, or to bolster its role as an ally and defender of American interests, even though Israel itself was the main cause of any threat to them in the first place. All the while, in that other centre of Israeli power, Washington, successive administrations -- with the recent, ironic exception of Bush senior -- became ever more pro-Israeli, a process that reached its apogee with this one, replete as it is with right-wing ideologues who favour not merely Israel, but the Israel of Ariel Sharon.
There could hardly be a more startling illustration, than the outcome of the Powell mission, of the protégé turning the tables on the patron, of the will and ability of America's very own "rogue state," now grown to full stature, to disrupt America's purposes through the exercise of military power on the ground and political power in Washington. Powell came out with a mandate to ensure Israel's "immediate" withdrawal from Palestinian territories. That was what the higher US interest required, and what his boss, President Bush, peremptorily demanded. He went home without one, indeed without any discernible achievement whatever. In effect, the president had betrayed his own secretary of state. With America's pro- Israeli forces in full cry -- with Sharon's envoy, his even more extreme political rival, Binyamin Netanyahu, invited by Congressmen to attack American foreign policy from Capitol Hill itself -- his resolve evidently crumbled entirely. A far cry from Eisenhower.
Few Arabs would disagree with Edward Abington, former US consul- general in Jerusalem and now a consultant to the Palestine Authority, who says that Powell had been playing for "tremendously high stakes" and that the consequences of his failure will be extremely bad for the US in the region.
The least that can be said is that, for the US, the question is no longer whether it can rein in Sharon the better to strike Saddam. The game has moved on. It is more likely a question of whether -- as Raja Khoury put it in Beirut's Al- Nahar -- the US can "protect its interests from the volcano of public anger in the region which could erupt and sweep away everything -- regimes, rulers, clients, interests, investments, oil, values and policies."
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