US buys into Israeli policy

WORLD VIEW/Paul Gillespie: 'I've been studying American foreign policy in the Middle East for 34 years and I can't recall any US president who has subordinated American interests to Israeli interests like this one."

So says Augustus Richard Norton, professor of anthropology and international relations at Boston University, in an online interview with a Harper's website this week. He has authority on the subject as a long-time career officer and then an academic at the US Military Academy. He has specialised in Lebanon and the Hizbullah movement for many years.

Norton believes Israel has made a profound mistake in responding with grossly excessive force to the Hizbullah capture of two Israeli troops, when it could have "taken the high ground by working through the UN and taking limited military action". His view is interesting for its focus on the consequences of what he describes as the "no-show foreign policy" arising from Bush's collapse of US interests into Israeli interests.

This military maximalism will reverberate for years, with Israel facing much more hatred and fiercer opponents as a result. Inevitably that will affect US interests - not least in Iraq, where Shia movements sympathetic to Hizbullah are profoundly antagonised and the parliament passed a resolution highly critical of the Israeli action last weekend, which did not mention Hizbullah.

Observers who detected a swing towards greater realism in US foreign policy over the last year, determined by the State Department under Condoleezza Rice, will have to revise their views. They revive the neoconservative account of western adversaries in the Middle East, which has always leaned heavily on Israeli policy, and their influence on the Bush administration.

Neoconservatives regard Hizbullah and Hamas as pawns of Syria and Iran. The two movements and their sponsoring states will have to be dealt with militarily if the US project of spreading democracy in the region is to be realised. The argument that this has so far proved to be a fantasy requiring realist adjustment does not go down well with the neoconservatives, who are increasingly critical of Bush's weakness through this crisis, exemplified by his effort to co-ordinate diplomatic action with European powers.

An informed realism would surely have counselled much greater US autonomy from Israeli policy and the maintenance of relations with movements and states capable of bringing Washington's leverage to bear. Instead Washington has to rely on other states to maintain such contacts.

Bush and Rice have opposed an immediate ceasefire, accepting the Israeli case that Hizbullah is the problem and another week is required to defeat or decisively weaken it. As Norton sees it, Hizbullah acted autonomously from Iran and Syria, but made its own monumental blunder in not foreseeing Israel's response. The movement cannot be eliminated, but will be weakened in the short term. In a longer perspective, however, it will probably be strengthened by this disaster.

The debate is seeping into the Israeli mainstream by way of sceptical views on whether the air raids have sufficiently destroyed Hizbullah cadres, rockets or weapons to permit the Lebanese army deploy to the Israeli border without provoking a civil war it could lose. That would bolster Syria's role there - contradicting the case made for Lebanese democratisation, seen last year as the principal fruit of the neoconservative agenda.

The policy which regards Hizbullah as an enemy to be eliminated rather than engaged politically is self-defeating, and not only for Israel. The huge damage to Lebanon will buy short-term stability at the price of greater long-term destabilisation of the region - not least of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the Sunni authoritarian states on which a more realist US policy must rely.

As usual, Blair went along with Bush, notably on the source of the problem, which he described as an arc of extremism stretching through Middle East and southeast Asia.

However, these events show there is another such arc, between US and Israeli policy, potentially just as extreme in its effects. For if the Hizbullah and Israeli miscalculations are added together in such a way as to provoke Hizbullah into using larger rockets against sensitive Israeli targets during the extended operational period, or if Israel concludes Hizbullah can only be stopped by attacking Syria and Iran, then we are tipped into a war with potentially worldwide consequences.

Norton points out that deep in the Israeli security agenda there lies a visceral fear of Iran and a determination to prevent it securing nuclear weapons. Since Iran is the main regional beneficiary of Bush's intervention in Iraq, it is not surprising to see this feature much more prominently in Israeli leaders' rhetoric this week. All the more reason for outside powers to be cautious about locking themselves into such preoccupations. The Wall Street Journal quotes an adviser to Ehud Olmert saying "the support we are getting from Washington is unprecedented". Presumably that includes intelligence and satellite information on targeting.

The crisis has revived the fierce policy debate in the US provoked by the publication earlier this year of a paper by the international relations scholars Stephen Walt and John Meirsheimer, who argued that the Bush administration has endangered US national interests by becoming so closely and unconditionally tied in with Israeli policy. In the current Foreign Policy magazine, they argue that events since then bear out their case that attacks on their position point to the power of the pro-Israeli lobby in the US.

Without that powerful lobby, the US would be much more even-handed between Israel and the Palestinians, much less prone to terrorist attack and less feared throughout the world as a destabilising power.

With it, however, other powers will have to help shape the region's future. So far the record is poor and very mixed.