Last Wednesday night, as I watched President Bush giving his full backing to the permanent maintenance of Israeli settlements on the West Bank, I finally changed my mind. The man is mad. Only someone who has lost his senses would have torn up the road map so carefully produced just a year ago, and made himself an unconditional ally of prime minister Sharon's policies. Insanity; utter insanity, opines Kevin Myers.
A Palestinian acceptance of armed Israeli settlements on the West Bank could possibly be one (though improbable) outcome of negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis. And the Israelis could reasonably demand a Palestinian acceptance of those settlements, if only as a tough opening stance in secret talks. But for President Bush to megaphone-endorse the Israeli settler policy as a feature of a permanent agreement, and then to expect the Palestinians to enter discussions on how to achieve it, suggests the man has had a frontal lobotomy, without anaesthetic.
No doubt some codicilled small print might just possibly allow for the ultimate dismantling of the settlements; but small print is for courts of law, not the bar of popular opinion. Israeli and Palestinian alike believe the US Government has backed the permanent settlement option. Many Israelis - foolishly - are jubilant. Moderate Palestinians despair, for no Palestinian leader could undertake to steer his people to such an objective and survive, politically or even literally.
For it would be difficult even for a nation of Pollyannas to accept the permanent presence of an armed and hostile host such as the Israeli settlers in their midst; but for a people who have produced Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Martyrs' Brigade, and God knows what else, it is quite inconceivable. It cannot happen, and no force in the world can make the Palestinians freely submit to such an outcome. Only a madman would think otherwise.
There's more. I supported the war in Iraq a year ago, in part because I believed President Bush's assurances that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, Saddam was such an evil savage that the world would be - and is - a far better place now he has been overthrown, and his unspeakable sons killed. Even without the WMD, he was a permanent threat to peace, and the war was morally and politically justified. But it should have been executed with proper resources, for it is axiomatic in such operations that overpowering force is used to ensure peace, pending the reorganisation of the country's own security forces.
Instead President Bush opted for economy of effort, naïvely hoping that the popularity of regime change would ensure a smooth transition of power. Instead, the allies have been presented with a murderously ruthless and entirely predictable terrorist insurgency campaign. To compensate for the lack of rifles on the ground, the US has had to resort to technology: hence the helicopters and artillery firing chain-guns into densely populated suburbs. Lesson one, page one in the terrorist handbook: Provoke your stronger enemy into over-reacting, thereby turning hitherto unsympathetic neighbours into your allies. Done.
Moreover, there is an immutable integrity to events in the region. The world has been here before. After a previous regime change in Iraq at the end of the first World War, in the summer of 1921, the British army lost 2,000 casualties to an insurgency campaign. Twenty years later, in 1941, another regime change, and another insurrection, led by an old adversary, Fawzi Qawukji, whom the British had met before in a previous Arab Rising. Where? Iraq? No. Palestine, three years earlier. In this part of the world, borders are on maps, not in hearts. The US cannot hope to bring peace to Iraq while simultaneously seeming to shaft the Palestinians.
Bush's insane endorsement of Sharon's policy of making the larger West Bank Jewish settlements permanent means that the US has now effectively become - in Arab eyes - both the bankroller and the instrument of Israeli policy-makers. The US has written a moral, political and financial blank cheque for Israel. It has thereby forfeited any possible role as a fair and disinterested arbiter between the two sides.
Even if Gaza is successfully evacuated of settlers, which I very much doubt will happen, countless Palestinian suicide bombers will still yearn to perform their own mini-Holocausts. They see no future for their people.
A recent report by international military observers concluded: "The Israeli army is pursuing a deliberate policy of mass repression and collective punishment, similar in many respects to the tactics the French pursued in Algeria. It routinely flies in the face of international humanitarian and legal norms, and is contrary to all civilised post-war counter-insurgency doctrine."
Israel's neighbours, meanwhile, are backward, despotic, incompetent. The combined GDP of the resource-rich Arab League, in area the size of the US, is less than that of Spain. With almost no growth in the region, another 50 million Arabs will be looking for jobs by 2010. Anti-Semitic mantras are the standard opiate of the Arab poor and élite alike, and are the almost universal substitute for political discourse: blame the Jews and the US for everything, as al-Qaeda recruiting sergeants dole out Osama's shillings.
So the Zionists' arable dream has become an Arabic nightmare, a vigil of a thousand and one sleepless nights spent gazing from the ramparts at a growing array of enemy campfires stretching over the twin horizons of land and time, like a vast starlit sky. An Israeli missile strikes a campfire, a dot of light vanishes, and a half-dozen new stars flare into existence on the ink-black sands.