Israel, nursing a sense of betrayal, won't toe the US line on Iraq.
An unseemly dispute is complicating the American effort to solve the current crisis with Iraq - a dispute involving the one country that might be expected to give the US unqualified backing in its effort to ensure President Saddam Hussein can never use weapons of mass destruction: Israel.
Far from offering full and unequivocal support for the US, and pledging to co-operate in any way it can, Israel is insistently forging its own independent stance on Iraq, to the fury of Clinton administration officials.
The dispute has bubbled to the surface in the last few days, as the Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, in heated private conversations with the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, and then the US Defence Secretary, Mr William Cohen, in a CNN interview, urged the Israelis to commit themselves to staying out of any conflict, even in the unlikely event of Mr Saddam opting to launch missiles at Israel, as he did in 1991.
Asked if the US would support Israeli retaliation for an Iraqi missile attack, Mr Cohen said "the United States would prefer, very strongly urge, the Israelis not to". He added that the US was fully capable of protecting Israel.
But the Israeli leadership is ignoring the Americans, and is adamant about its "right of selfdefence". Mr Netanyahu and his colleagues have indicated this week that President Saddam would be mistaken to think that Israel will maintain the policy of restraint it adopted seven years ago. "We reserve the right to freedom of action," the Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, said on Wednesday.
At the root of this dispute is a deep sense of frustration and betrayal among Israeli leaders about the way the Americans treated them last time around. Conscious that President Saddam was firing Scuds at them in a deliberate attempt to provoke an Israeli response, and thus to shatter the USArab coalition against him, the Israelis held back as 39 missiles landed here, and accepted the assurances that the US military was doing its utmost to destroy President Saddam's Scud launchers in western Iraq.
In retrospect, the Israelis believe that the Americans "lied to us," Mr Nahman Shai, who was the Israeli army's spokesman seven years ago, said yesterday. As far as is now known, Mr Shai added bitterly, Gen Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded the coalition forces against Iraq, did not order a single extra air mission to try to "take out" the Scud launchers firing on Israel.
Mr Shai said the sense of betrayal was keenly felt today by Mr Yitzhak Shamir, who was prime minister at the time. It was Mr Shamir who overruled those of his colleagues, including his own defence minister, Mr Moshe Arens, and Mr Netanyahu, a deputy minister at the time, who were opposing the policy of restraint.
At the end of the 1991 conflict, Mr Shamir and other Israeli leaders furiously criticised the US for "failing to finish the job" - allowing Mr Saddam to remain in power. According to some reports here, Israel then began developing its own plans for eliminating the Iraqi dictator.
The current Israeli leadership is understood to be furious with the Clinton administration and with the UN's chief weapons inspector, Mr Richard Butler, moreover, for tactless public comments that have heightened tension here, including Mr Butler's comment that Iraq had enough biological material to "blow away Tel Aviv".