Ferry Biedermann

Outside the Bush and Sharon administrations and pro-Likud commentators in the U.S. media like William Safire, it is almost impossible to find anyone who can detect in last week’s major Middle East address by President Bush an effort to actually come to grips with the conflict. Instead, both moderate Israelis and Palestinians regard it as yet another attempt by the Bush team to avoid having to deal with the situation. In fact, by setting out the preconditions for a peace process the way he did, Bush has assured that they will never be met. What was needed was not yet another plan, but immediate steps that would have led to a breaking of the deadlock. Bush called for a change in the Palestinian leadership, but the reality is that in the Middle East right now neither side has leaders that are regarded as ideal peacemakers. Yet they are the ones who have to be dealt with.

The successful regime change in Afghanistan, it would seem, has gone to the administration’s head. But Palestinians make it clear that no Karzai can be imposed on them.

The only measurable effect of President Bush’s speech has so far been to strike dread in the hearts of moderates on both sides of the conflict and to make them despair even more of the chance of effective outside intervention. The Israeli left commented that the speech “could have been written by Sharon.” Palestinians just saw it as the confirmation of what they had suspected all along: The United States was, is and always will be on Israel’s side in the conflict. What’s worse, the perception is widespread that the president totally missed the point when he said: “Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born. I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders not compromised by terror.”

Arafat has always been regarded as the only Palestinian leader with the clout to make peace in the name of his people, and there is no reason to assume that this has changed, explains Ali Jarbawi, professor of political science at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah. “Anybody who comes after him will be even less likely to be able to make the concessions that Israel and the U.S. are demanding,” says Jarbawi, who is also under curfew in Israeli-occupied Ramallah. He is suspicious of the sudden U.S. emphasis on democracy. “For years the Israelis, the U.S. and even the Europeans only paid lip service to the idea of Palestinian democracy because they thought it would be easier to deal with Arafat and the P.A. as they were.” He points out that in Jordan and Egypt too, the governments made peace with Israel despite serious domestic opposition.

The main criticism of Arafat by the Palestinians, apart from internal issues such as corruption and governance, is that he is too forthcoming toward the Israelis and Americans, according to Jarbawi. Any successor, he explains, would need to prove himself tougher than Arafat: “They will compete with each other to be seen as more unwavering in their demand for what the people see as the minimum Palestinian demands of full Israeli withdrawal and a state.” Jarbawi doubts anybody who comes after Arafat will be able to make peace for a long time.

The speech by President Bush has made it even less likely, though, that Arafat will leave the stage any time soon. In Hebron, Abbas Zaki pours scorn over both the Israeli and the U.S. attempts to undermine the P.A. and its leader. He is very critical of Arafat but explains that the population will back him up now that the U.S. and Israel are demanding his departure. “Arafat was almost finished after the last Israeli offensive,” says Zaki, “but now that Bush has put him in the spotlight people are naturally rallying to him.”

Many Palestinians were critical of their leader’s handling of the Israeli siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in April and May. The standoff ended with the expulsion of 13 wanted militants to Europe, an unpopular outcome among Palestinians who saw the move as a surrender. When a mediator was needed last week to approach the militants who were presumably holed up in the Muqata in Hebron, the local authorities purposely avoided involving the P.A. and Arafat because of this, tells Zaki. “But we don’t have a choice but to back him now that outsiders are demanding his departure.”

His views are echoed by Mohammed Dahlan, former head of the Palestinian Preventive Security in Gaza. In the British daily the Guardian, Dahlan wrote:

“As long as the Israelis are against Arafat, I’m with him — whatever reservations I have about some of the decisions that have been made.” Dahlan has long been regarded as a possible successor to Arafat but has never declared any intention of contesting the elections for chairman of the P.A. He is considered one of the candidates who may be acceptable to the Americans and the Israelis, something that automatically taints any aspiring leader, says Ali Jarbawi.

Dahlan obviously concurs, writing, “Bush is now effectively demanding a coup d’itat against Arafat, because the American administration says that even if he is reelected in new elections, it will not deal with him. The result of Bush’s speech is that the latest polls show nine out of 10 Palestinians say they would vote for Arafat.” Dahlan accuses the U.S. of actually having given up on the peace process, and many Palestinians agree with him.

Even when Arafat was at his lowest point, after the Israeli operation Defensive Shield in May, he was still so popular that he would probably have won an election, says Jarbawi. Now, as Dahlan’s letter shows, nobody of any consequence is even likely to stand against him if elections take place. Jarbawi has serious doubts on that score too. “As long as the Israelis occupy the cities, how can elections take place?” He thinks it possible that the soldiers will stay for four to six months and instead of allowing elections, the Israelis will try to reform the P.A. according to their security-oriented demands. Jarbawi even thinks that may have more chance of succeeding than Bush’s vision, which is “not even a plan.”

Hebron, like most West Bank towns, was reoccupied by the army over a week ago and put under curfew. Since the Muqata was blown up over the weekend, the curfew has been relaxed slightly. Groups of children dart out into the streets the moment an Israeli patrol has passed. Waving their arms, they warn the few cars that venture onto the roads of nearby tanks or jeeps.

Hebron’s mayor, Mustafa Natsheh, warns of severe problems in his city if the occupation continues much longer. “It is very difficult even to coordinate humanitarian issues with the army.” He is particularly concerned that the garbage has not been collected for more than a week, which in the hot summer weather can cause serious health problems. “The longer the occupation goes on the more problems we will face.” The municipality has organized the distribution of some milk and bread. “The dairies provide it for free, otherwise they would have to throw it away anyway. They cannot distribute it, people cannot come to the shops and if they do, they don’t have money because nobody can go to work.”

Natsheh thinks that the occupation of his city is part of a plan by Sharon to dismantle the P.A., with a green light from the U.S. “That man can only destroy. The Muqata, the Oslo accords, everything.”

The idea that Bush’s recent speech gave Sharon a free hand is widely accepted among both Palestinians and Israelis. In bitterlemons.org, a Palestinian-Israeli exchange of ideas on peace, the new Palestinian minister of labor and former political commentator Ghassan Khatib wrote, “The conditions Bush placed upon the fulfillment of a peaceful resolution can only result in encouraging Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to continue his current strategy of reoccupying the Palestinian territories and using force to suppress the Palestinian population with curfews, encirclement, demolition of houses and extra-judicial assassinations.”

In the same issue, the Israeli political analyst Yossi Alpher took this idea even further: “Indeed, if Bush’s message is that a Palestinian state can only be reconciled with Israeli security by deposing Arafat, then it is more likely that it will be interpreted by Prime Minister Sharon — whose six visits to Washington in 15 months paid off with this speech — as a green light for Israel to remove the Palestinian leader by force, with potentially violent and escalatory consequences,” wrote Alpher.

Fatah leader Abbas Zaki claims that the reoccupation of Hebron was totally superfluous from a military point of view. He says that the city was quiet because for decades the Israelis have retained control of its center, where a couple of hundred Jewish settlers live in an army-protected enclave in the heart of the Arab town. Others, however, acknowledge that the city is a major center for Hamas. The Hamas commander Munahed Taher, who was killed earlier this week by the Israelis in Nablus, was in fact from Hebron.

Mayor Natsheh says that Hebron is about as militant as any other city on the West Bank. “Anybody can become a militant under these circumstances. Violence only breeds more violence, and this occupation may make people more militant.”

Natsheh emphasizes, though, that the recent total reoccupation of Hebron is only marginally worse than the siege the residents had been facing for months. “For three months they cut off the city — nobody could go to work in Israel or somewhere else in the West Bank. Now people cannot even go to work inside the city. The siege was, as far as we are concerned, also an occupation.”

The whole exercise is useless, he says. Natsheh believes that once the Israelis leave, even the destruction of the Muqata will not make much of a difference in the role of the P.A. “What do you expect? The city still has to be run, the police will just start patrolling the streets again and nothing much will have changed.”

Unfortunately, the Bush administration, undeterred by the bloody chaos in Iraq, still seems intent on spreading its ill-fitting idea of democracy in the region, with Syria its possible next target. A well-informed analyst in Damascus told me that the United States is preparing an “Iraq scenario” for the country, including possibly imposing a no-fly zone in the Kurdish-dominated north. The United States’ rumored plans are likely to backfire, slowing down reform or halting it altogether. Worse, they could plunge Syria and Lebanon into violent chaos.

The Syrian Baath Party, whose right to rule is inscribed in the constitution, gathered this week in Damascus to discuss reforms. But instead of the “great leap forward” that had been promised by the country’s president, Bashar Assad, the congress merely shuffled along, as could be expected from a party that has been in power for more than 40 years. The Baath will for the foreseeable future remain a tool for the continued rule of the Assad family and its allies, even if a few more superficial freedoms are allowed. The big internal question, say some in Damascus, is whether the lack of progress will cause the current low-level grumbling in the country to explode into open rebellion. Others point out that there is no alternative to the regime. There is no effective and organized opposition, except perhaps the banned and persecuted Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood (whose members were slaughtered by the thousands by Assad’s father, Hafez, in 1982), and nobody wants Syria to descend to the level of chaos now seen in Iraq.

As the congress wound down, statements by the Bush administration and the United Nations made it clear that the United States and the international community will continue to put pressure on Syria. But Syrian government minister Buthaina Shaaban dismissed suggestions that the Baath Party’s deliberations had been influenced by external considerations. “All that has been discussed and decided has been discussed because of our national needs,” she said.

As for Lebanon, optimism about a Cedar Revolution has so far proved to be greatly overblown. Following the withdrawal of Syrian troops after a 29-year presence, it is still in the midst of its complicated, and arguably undemocratic, election cycle, one that is unaccountably spread out over four regional rounds. “If Ethiopia can have elections in one go, why not Lebanon?” one EU election monitor wondered. In the first two rounds, in Beirut and the south, the outcome was largely predetermined by deals between powerful political bosses, to the disgust of many voters who were left with very little to vote on. The next two rounds may be more competitive, mainly because personal rivalries have split the opposition. Nobody has a program that people can vote on, and parties barely exist. Many of the young Lebanese who turned out for the massive anti-Syrian demonstrations after the murder of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri said they were disgusted by the first two rounds and that this was not the change they had pushed for.

Two keen observers of the situation, one in Beirut and the other in Damascus, recently offered similar explanations for what’s going on. Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Lebanese political analyst and author, and Joshua Landis, an American expert on Syria who lives in Damascus, where he publishes the respected blog SyriaComment.com, both remarked that the rule of the “Zaïm,” the old-style political boss, is still very much alive in both countries, despite the one-party state in Syria and the chaotic Lebanese appearance of democracy. The bosses dispense money, contracts, jobs, educational opportunities, sometimes even permission to marry. They skim off the wealth of the state, award themselves the most lucrative concessions, and block competition. Their power base is often a large family or tribe, a village or region, a religious allegiance, the army, or all of these combined. They may found parties, such as the Progressive Socialist Party, controlled by the Druze Jumblatt family, or the Christian Phalange Party founded by the Gemayels in Lebanon, that serve as fronts and tools. This “rule of the bosses” also holds true in other parts of the region, including Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian territories.

In Syria, Landis said, the Zaïm system has simply been extended to include the Baath Party. The Baath, in the eyes of many in Syria, nowadays merely serves to legitimize this rule of the “mafias,” as they call it. Endemic and deeply entrenched corruption is one of the hallmarks of the Zaïm system, and Syria has it by the bucketload.

“There is a marriage between power and money in Syria,” said Marwan Kabalan of the Center for Strategic Studies at Damascus University. Kabalan noted that this is one of the main reasons that the country has not been able to reform itself, even if it seriously wanted to. “You have to keep the pillars of the leadership happy,” Kabalan said. “Especially if you rule, as the government does here, without the consent of the people.” According to Landis, Syria is still deeply divided along regional and sectarian lines. Although the government, dominated by the minority Allawite sect, tries hard to downplay this, the divided nature of the country is what allows the Zaïm system to continue. The only groups that pose a real challenge to the authorities are the Kurds in the northeast and the persecuted (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood, which has members across the country. The nonsectarian liberal opposition is given much more freedom to speak out, probably because its ideas barely resonate among the population.

In Lebanon, the anti-Israeli, Shiite Islamist Hezbollah movement has been the one of the few parties widely considered to remain free of the taint of the system. It is not known to be corrupt, as many of the other political groupings are said to be, and until recently it did not engage in the political horse-trading that is the Lebanese system of government. This time around that image has been tainted, said Saad-Ghorayeb, who is an expert on Hebzollah. “The party has finally been forced to play by the rules of the Zaïm system,” Saad-Ghorayeb said. She is referring to the many political deals Hezbollah was forced to make in an attempt to stave off pressure to disarm following the withdrawal of its Syrian protectors.

Hezbollah is the only Lebanese group that retained its arms after the end of the country’s 15-year civil war in 1990 and the Israeli army’s withdrawal from the south in 2000. It has been able to do this by marketing itself as the “resistance” to Israel, which gives it the legitimacy to retain its arms and run a state-within-a-state in the south.

But Saad-Ghorayeb said that the party has now become just one of Lebanon’s many regional and sectarian political players, which base their strength on a captive bloc vote and use it to skim off income from the state and businesses. In Hezbollah’s case, the corruption is not thought to be direct. Rather, it has been tainted by its newfound alliance with the more moderate Shiite Amal movement, which many regard as deeply corrupt.

Syria and Lebanon have been very much in the eye of the international community, particularly since Hariri was killed by a huge car bomb in the center of Beirut on Valentine’s Day. The common assumption both in Lebanon and abroad was that Syria was responsible, a charge that Damascus denies. Even before the assassination, the Syrians had been under increasing pressure to withdraw from the country that it regards as its backyard, if not part of “Greater Syria.” In August last year, they forced the Lebanese Parliament to amend the constitution to allow for the extension of the mandate of the unpopular but pro-Syrian Lebanese president Emile Lahoud. This move was a serious diplomatic blunder by Damascus: It turned the French against Syria, paving the way for the passage of the American- and French-sponsored U.N. Security Council resolution 1559, which demanded the departure of all foreign troops from the country and the disarming of militias, that is, Hezbollah.

The end to this saga is not yet in sight, despite Syrian hopes that the withdrawal would placate the international community. First of all, the United Nations is not yet satisfied that resolution 1559 has been fully implemented. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urgently dispatched his Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, back to the region, and announced that he is going to send a verification team to check reports that Syrian intelligence agents are still active in Lebanon. The U.N. moves followed the assassination of prominent anti-Syrian Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir in Beirut, which reopened the wounds of the Hariri killing. Many automatically pointed the finger at Damascus. Syria has denied involvement, but Lebanese commentators say that even if Syria was not behind it, the Syrian government and its Lebanese allies have created an atmosphere in which such acts could take place. There are also allegations that many pro-Syrian agents are still at work in Lebanon and are being encouraged by Damascus.

The United States has asked for the Kassir killing to be investigated by the same U.N. team that is already in Beirut to look into the Hariri assassination. Reports in U.S. newspapers on Friday quote an unnamed senior administration official as saying that Syrian intelligence officers still in Lebanon have drawn up a “hit list” of anti-Syrian figures. Of course this may be propaganda, part of the Bush administration’s strategy of waging a media war of attrition against Damascus. An example of this propaganda campaign came last month, when another unnamed official said that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Iraqi al-Qaida network, had visited Syria to consult with other militants on the recent insurgent offensive in Iraq. Later the administration said it actually had no information on such a visit.

The Hariri investigation is hanging over the Syrian government’s head like a sword of Damocles, said one Western diplomat in Damascus. The European Union, for example, is unlikely to take action on signing the important trade, social and cultural Association Agreement with Syria until the results of the Hariri investigation are known, several diplomats said. The agreement is important because it would allow the government to show that it is not isolated internationally. The United States has reportedly asked the EU not to go ahead with the deal for now, but a European diplomat in Damascus said that the EU has its own reasons not to sign the deal.

Another direct challenge to the implementation of resolution 1559 is Hezbollah’s defiant stance. The “party of God” was bolstered by a solid election victory in its southern fiefdom last Sunday. Hezbollah itself, as well as Lebanese newspapers and analysts, explained the result as an emphatic rejection by voters in the south of the demand to disarm. “They gave a clear message to the foreigners, particularly to the Americans, that the people of Lebanon are unified over the resistance and the independence,” said Hezbollah’s second in command, Naim Qassem. Even though most political groups in Lebanon publicly deny that they will push for the disarmament of Hezbollah, the movement and its allies fear that this is about to happen following the recent departure of its Syrian allies from the country. “The Americans and the French and others will push the expanded anti-Syrian bloc in the next Parliament to disarm Hezbollah. And that will lead to disaster,” said pro-Syrian member of Parliament Adnan Arakji.

The White House has already made clear that it regards the victory of Hezbollah, which it regards as a terrorist group, with unease. “These elections are ongoing and in terms of Hezbollah, I think our views are well known and they remain unchanged,” said press secretary Scott McClellan. “You have a Security Council resolution that calls for the disarming of groups like Hezbollah, and that remains our view. Hezbollah, as you are well aware, is a terrorist organization.” The State Department, too, said it viewed Hezbollah’s continued strength with concern. “There should be no role for an armed militia” in a democratic government, said one official. (Not surprisingly, the U.S. official said nothing about the recent statement by Iraqi president Talabani defending the Kurdish peshmerga and the Shiite Badr Brigade militias.) So there seems very little chance that the United States will let up on the pressure to implement resolution 1559. Lebanese and Syrian supporters of Hezbollah hope that the Europeans, who have not put Hezbollah on the list of terrorist organizations, will be less focused on disarming the group. But Western diplomats in Damascus say there is very little that divides the U.S. and the EU at the moment on 1559 and that there is little prospect that international pressure on Syria will ease.

In fact, one analyst in Damascus said he had indications that the Bush administration, which has long wanted to topple the Syrian regime, is readying an “Iraq scenario” for the country. The United States is hoping to use the Kurds as it has done in northern Iraq. Tensions in the northeastern region of Syria have reportedly reached the boiling point after Kurds blamed the killing of Mohammed Mashouq al-Khaznawi, one of their important sheiks, on the Syrian authorities. The government emphatically denies the charge and has arrested “criminals” who it says are responsible. But clashes have already taken place in the main town, Qamishli, and people who have visited the area expect worse to come. The Kurds are certainly furious, judging by statements issued by their banned political parties. Earlier this week in Damascus, one Kurdish taxi driver even dared shout, “Come in Bush, please come in,” with his windows closed.

If the situation in the Kurdish region gets out of hand, said the analyst in Damascus, the United States may impose a no-fly zone over the region, just as it did after the 1990 Gulf War in northern and southern Iraq. The U.S. is also trying to unite the fractured opposition by encouraging the Kurds, the Muslim Brotherhood and the liberals to work together. This is supposed to address the perceived lack of an alternative to the Baath government.

If this is true, it raises the obvious question of how the Bush administration could seriously contemplate another Iraq-type adventure when Iraq is in worsening chaos, with U.S. troops and Iraqis dying daily and no end in sight. Bush strategists may dream that regime change in Syria would magically solve all the region’s problems at once. In fact, it might make them worse.

Toppling the Assad regime will not solve the problem of Iraq, because even if Syria is substantially involved in the fighting there, which is doubtful, the basic fuel for the insurgency remains the internal Iraqi situation. The majority of insurgents are Sunnis, mostly former Baathists, with access to the huge stockpiles of weapons that the Americans failed to safeguard after the invasion. It may be true that most of the suicide bombers are foreign, and that a new regime would be able to secure the long Syria-Iraq border across which many foreign jihadis slip into Iraq. But it is highly unlikely that a stable new regime would emerge in Syria — or that if it did, it would be friendly to the United States. The political and social structures in Syria and Iraq are quite similar: What did not work in Iraq will almost certainly not work in Syria, either.

Nor would toppling the Syrian regime make the Palestinians cry uncle. A major reason that Bush administration neocons have long pushed for regime change in Syria, Iraq and Iran is their enmity to Israel. It’s true that the backing of the “rejectionist states” gave the Palestinians some strategic depth — support for the families of suicide bombers, for Hamas, for arms shipments. But the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is within Palestine: What happens at a regional level is secondary. In any case, any new regime in Syria (or any other Arab state, for that matter) would almost certainly have a hostile stance toward Israel until the Palestinian issue is resolved. In the case of Syria, there is the added issue of the Golan Heights: No Syrian government will normalize relations with Israel until it returns the Heights, which Israel captured in the 1967 war.

As for Lebanon, it was chaotic and venal long before the Syrians started meddling. A U.S-backed regime in Syria might upset the delicate power balance in Lebanon and make things even worse. (It could also have a spillover into Iraq: The Shiites in Iraq would not take happily to a U.S. campaign to marginalize the Hezbollah-supporting Shiite majority in Lebanon.)

Above all, a U.S.-backed campaign to remove the Syrian regime would be folly because especially post-Iraq, any stamp of American approval means a death knell for opposition parties in the Middle East. The United States thus faces a paradoxical situation: In order to encourage reform, it cannot appear to back it.

An analyst who is not given to idle talk and has contacts at the highest levels of the U.S. administration agreed that the idea of U.S.-backed regime change was a bad one. “Yes, the Americans are stupid,” the analyst said. “Unfortunately the Syrians are even more stupid.”

Under these circumstances, the tepid call for a “constructive dialogue with the U.S. and the EU” by delegates at the Baath Party’s 10th congress, which ended earlier this week in Damascus, looks laughably out of touch. One reformist-minded Baathist, Ayman Abdel Nour, said after the congress finished that more reforms were soon to follow, because the leadership realized that “we don’t have time to go slow-motion because of the international and regional situation.” But many observers and analysts in the Syrian capital say that the leadership is merely trying to toss the international community a few bones now and then to see if it can be placated. If one doesn’t work, it will try tossing another. Many in Damascus fear the United States will run out of patience before the leadership runs out of bones.

Iraq’s election results have led to much hand-wringing about the non-participation of the formerly dominant Sunni minority. For a stable Iraq, goes the received wisdom, Sunnis have to be included in the political process, particularly in the drawing up of the new constitution. But as always, politics are being dictated and overtaken by realities on the ground. And in Mosul — as well as the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which is being claimed by the Kurds — the reality seems to be that the Sunnis are going to be mercilessly squeezed. It’s payback time.

Both Shiites and Kurds harbor dark memories of decades of oppression by Sunni governments in Baghdad. They now eye an opportunity not only to exact revenge but also, as they see it, to roll back some of the inroads that the Sunni Arabs have made into their territories. This goes particularly for the Kurds. The Americans were aware of the dangers of sectarian tensions in Iraq after the invasion; indeed, they saw Mosul as a microcosm of the rest of the country. The American commanders there made early efforts to involve the local population in the running of their city. But locally recruited police and Iraqi National Guard units proved to be unreliable, melting away and allowing the city to be practically overrun by insurgents after U.S. troops chased them out of Fallujah in November. Since then the Iraqi government and the United States have relied mostly on Kurdish fighters from the north and some Shiite units from the south to secure the city.

“The insurgents actually did us a favor,” said a senior U.S. commander in the region recently. The U.S. forces had been aware for some time of the “problems” with the locally recruited, mostly Sunni Arab, troops, he said. But because of “political sensitivities” they had been unable to do anything about it. They could not bring in loyal Kurdish fighters, because it would upset the Sunni majority in the city and anger Turkey, which is extremely wary of any expansion of Kurdish influence in Iraq. When the insurgents poured into the city and the security forces disappeared, the officer said, it gave Iraqi and U.S. authorities the excuse they needed to go ahead and send in the Kurds and the Shiites.

If the Jana’ain polling station was any indication of how a Shiite-Kurdish alliance was going to play out in the new Iraq, it offered a disturbing preview. Deeply suspicious of each other, the troops were bound together by two impulses: a realization that they would stand or fall together on a violent Election Day in this fractious city, and a hatred of the Sunni Arab “irhabi,” or “terrorists” — a label they applied to the whole of the population that surrounded them and that it was their mission to protect.

Many of the Shiite troops on the roof appeared to be shockingly young. Yet they belonged to the second division of the Interior Ministry’s Special Forces and were referred to by the American soldiers in the area as “the commandos.” They said their detachment had guarded Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s interim, secular Shiite prime minister, until November. Since then they had been “hunting” terrorists in Mosul, they reported with the boastfulness that comes easily to young, heavily armed and well-supported militiamen.

As the plumes of smoke from explosions around the city crept toward the sky on Election Day, the soldiers on the roof bragged about their prowess. “I killed six terrorists just two weeks ago, in a mosque in the center of town,” said Suheil, a young soldier from the Shiite holy city of Najaf. His friend Ahmed chimed in excitedly: “It was something big. We used an RPG to blast the mosque. These terrorists always hide in mosques.” When a firefight broke out later in the day near the polling station, they said that their troops had apprehended 21 “terrorists” in a nearby mosque where they had been “planning attacks.”

In between recounting war stories, the recruits cadged cigarettes, inquired about the West — one soldier struck up conversation with a very graphic remark about the Michael Jackson child molestation trial — and asked to use my satellite phone to call their mothers in Najaf. When it came to the situation in Iraq, they were very clear. Making cutting motions with their fingers across their throats, they said, “Don’t go out into the streets here: The terrorists will kill you.”

The Kurds, almost to a man, are even more ferocious in their attitude toward the local Sunni Arab population. They refer to Sunnis as murderous “dogs,” two-faced liars, animals and other epithets that indicate a deep distrust and even hatred of a group clearly regarded as an enemy. They trot out a litany of complaints, mainly but not exclusively dating from the time of Saddam Hussein, when they say they were attacked, gassed and ethnically cleansed from their lands by Sunni Arabs.

Armies policing civilian populations rarely have a light touch, and the Middle East is not known for its enlightened policing methods to begin with. So it was unsurprising, but still disturbing, that in the space of just a few days, I observed Kurdish fighters in Mosul arresting and severely beating several suspects, at least one of whom was clearly no terrorist. In one case, the beating took place right after an ambush in which two soldiers were killed and tempers were frayed, but on another occasion it was obvious that the man in custody, though he had perhaps pilfered a few things from a disused army base, was certainly not an “irhabi.”

The 104th Battalion of the 23rd Brigade of the Iraqi National Guard, which is to be integrated into the new “Iraqi Forces” made up of both ING and army units, is based at the Al-Kindi military base, a former chemical factory compound in Mosul. The battalion is made up entirely of Kurdish peshmerga fighters who for years battled Iraqi government troops from their mountainous redoubt in the north. After the Gulf War of 1991 and the imposition of the no-fly zones, the Kurds maintained an autonomous semi-state in the north, with U.S. help and international aid. After the Americans and their allies toppled Saddam in 2003, the Kurds rejoined the Iraqi political entity — to a degree. They brook no interference in their internal affairs from the central government, but they do participate in the country’s central political institutions and are considered the Americans’ staunchest allies there.

Of the approximately 140,000 peshmerga, a little less than a third are integrated into the new Iraqi armed forces. But the integration is only in name. The units have a double structure: peshmerga and Iraqi. One colonel at the “Fermandiya,” the sprawling peshmerga headquarters in Dohuk, dismissively said of one officer, “He’s only a general in the Iraqi structure. In the peshmerga, I outrank him.”

The peshmerga commander for the “frontier” that stretches from Mosul to Kirkuk is Gen. Ali Shamsadin, a wiry, gray-haired man who is also called Sheik Aloo by his men. Matter-of-factly, he lists the many roles his troops have played. The bodyguards for the interim government? Peshmerga. The Iraqi units that participated in the American assault on Fallujah? Pershmerga. The units that helped secure Mosul after it was all but overrun by the insurgents? Peshmerga.

“We want to play a role in helping to stabilize the country, but the Americans have sometimes been reluctant to let us carry out this role,” he said in his large office at the newly built headquarters in the Fermandiya compound. As the Kurds are aware, not only is there serious internal Iraqi opposition to their taking on too many powers, but there is also a regional aspect. None of the three neighbors that abut the Kurdish area, Turkey, Syria and Iran, want to see either a strong or a independent Kurdistan, fearing that it would put ideas into the heads of their own Kurdish populations.

The head of intelligence in Kurdistan’s Dohuk governorate, which borders Turkey and Syria, is adamant that much of the trouble in Iraq’s adjoining Nineveh province, which contains Mosul, is being stirred up by the secret services of those countries. Sheik Aloo concurs and voices exasperation at American sensitivities, which he says have limited his ability to deal with the threats. But, he said, “lately it has become better and now we can operate more freely in Nineveh.”

The 104th ING was sent down to Mosul in November when the insurgents threatened to take total control of the city. Brigade Gen. Muzaffer Derki is in overall command of four peshmerga ING units, the one in Mosul and three stationed in Kurdistan, but he spends almost all of his time with his men on the Al-Kindi base. A veteran of many battles with Saddam’s troops, he talks about “the Arabs” in the same way his men do. “They need to be treated rough. You need lots of force when dealing with the Arabs. Otherwise they don’t respect you — they think they can rise up against you,” he said, seated in a plush chair that he had his men bring out into the open air at a transportation base on the outskirts of Mosul. Wearing fatigues and bright orange shades as he lunched, he expounded on his views of the Arabs and explained why a seemingly innocent young man should be roughed up and be taken in for questioning.

“He is from a bad neighborhood where there are many terrorists,” the general said. “We must talk to him to see if he knows anybody. If he is innocent, we will let him go.”

The boy had been apprehended when the peshmerga unit had pulled in to inspect a disused army base in the “Hay al-Arabiyeh,” the Arab quarter, in Mosul. They found five men in the grounds who had fled when the fighters approached. After a lot of firing, screaming, and punching and kicking, the five were led before the general, who set free four of them because they were Kurdish. The fifth was Arab, without doubt a terrorist, the Kurds said.

In the back of a pickup truck the accused terrorist sat sobbing into his blindfold. His name was Alaa, he said, and he was 16 years old. He lived with his parents in the insurgent-ridden Rashidiyeh neighborhood, but he said he had only come to the army base that day to buy bricks from the Kurdish family that lives next to it.

The Kurdish troops try to pick up as many Arabs as they can to help their intelligence effort. Because of the mixed Kurdish-Arab population of Mosul, they often get advance information of attacks. The same day, for example, Derki led his men back to the Al-Kindi base and received a warning at a checkpoint: A car bomb was on the road ahead. He decided to push on regardless. When a blue and white Toyota Land cruiser came into view, the nine-vehicle convoy simply crossed to the other side of the road. Seconds after the car carrying the general had passed, it was shaken by a huge explosion, and a large yellow and orange fireball seared the air. Everybody jumped out of the vehicle and threw themselves against a knoll as the heavy machine guns that were mounted on the peshmerga’s pickup trucks opened fire on possible gunmen in the distance.

Derki stood up straight and calmly surveyed the scene. “Classical ambush, detonated by remote control, some shooting from the distance,” he said as the whizzing sound of bullets filled the air. The ambush cost the lives of two of his men who had been traveling in a small bus, returning from leave in Kurdistan. Several of the peshmerga were covered in blood as they charged at the surrounding buildings. The Americans like the Kurds precisely because they are fierce fighters who do not wilt under fire. What they lack in organization, they make up for in motivation. The Kurds arrested two unfortunate Arabs, probably just bystanders, and proceeded to savagely beat them. The whole way back to the Al-Kindi base, they kept hitting the men with rifle butts and stomping on their heads with their army boots.

At Al-Kindi, the 104th is quartered next to the 101st, a battalion that used to be made up entirely of local Sunni Arabs. Even though many of the soldiers are now Kurds, the two groups do not mix. The men of the 104th speak with contempt about their brothers-in-arms in the 101st. “Stay away from them. They are Arabs and you can’t trust them. But don’t worry, we keep an eye on them.”

Inside the 101st headquarters, the colonel who serves as deputy commander of the battalion said that most of the local men in the unit were intimidated and threatened by the insurgents. “Many signed up because they needed the money, but when they and their families were threatened they stayed away.” He waved a list in the air with the names of 265 soldiers, about one-third of the battalion’s strength, who deserted over the past 16 months. When the time came to confront the insurgents last November, the unit was no longer functioning.

The colonel said he was from a large and prominent Sunni family in the center of Mosul and did not want his name published. “They threaten to kidnap your children and burn down your house,” he said. Several ING soldiers have been kidnapped and beheaded in Mosul. The videotaped executions were meant to scare off volunteers.

In the presence of a Kurdish officer, the colonel tried to sound understanding of the Kurdish position but did not quite pull it off. “Under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi soldiers were taught to insult the parents in the presence of their children,” he said. He should know, because he was an officer in the Iraqi army and was trained at the staff college in Baghdad. “Now that they are in charge, they take revenge for what was done to their parents,” the colonel continued. “The weak become the strong.”

Once outside, the Kurdish officer showed no sign of sympathy for the difficult position of his Sunni Arab colleague. “Yes, he runs a risk, but I still don’t trust him. And he still has a choice, but you and I, we will have our heads cut off if his brothers get their hands on us.”

Derki seemed to concur. Like his political bosses in Kurdistan, he made it clear he had no intention of ever letting Sunni Arab officers command him again. “These Arab officers, Kurds don’t have to listen to them. Even the division commander is an Arab. But I only take my orders from the peshmerga.”

Many foreign diplomats and some Syrian analysts say the government of Hafez’s son Bashar can no longer afford those policies. And there are reasons to believe that the Syrian leader himself is trying to move away from his nation’s traditional role as a bastion of Arab militancy. Yet during a recent visit to Damascus, a wide range of observers — including a senior Palestinian leader, Iraqi politicians and local activists — attested that the policies are continuing. Definitive proof is hard to come by here, in one of the most closed and controlling regimes in the world. Lebanon, which Damascus regards as its own private fiefdom, is the only place where Syria makes no attempt to hide its hand. But Syria still seems to be playing the games that under Hafez Assad made it famous for “punching above its weight” in the region.

The problem for Damascus, diplomats say, is that times have changed since 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq — not to mention that the son is just not as adept as the father.

At the same time, however, Damascus is also reaching out to the West and its archenemy Israel. The young Assad is clearly interested in kick-starting negotiations with Israel, and not only through the official channels. Seated in the lobby of a posh Damascus hotel, one highly regarded academic told me, on condition of anonymity, that he was involved in setting up “second track” negotiations with the Israelis, based on the model of the Oslo talks that led to the historic 1993 agreement between the Rabin government and Arafat’s PLO. The man, who is known to be reliable, provided names, dates and places and said the feelers were sanctioned at the very highest level.

Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process who was a key player in the Oslo talks, believes that Assad is sincerely interested not only in making peace with Israel but also in bringing Syria closer to the West. In the latest issue of Bitterlemons International, a Middle East round table, he wrote of “a very warm, creative and constructive” meeting with Assad. “I came away convinced that the president is genuinely interested not only in restarting negotiations, but also in seeking to reposition Syria and integrate the country more deeply into the international community,” Roed-Larsen wrote. “All the indications are that Syria has recognized the signs of the times, and is trying to make some progress, both as regards peace with Israel and in terms of a broader redefinition of its role in the region.”

Debate rages about Assad’s motivations. Syria is clearly feeling heat from Washington and Europe, and the academic involved in the second-track talks admitted that Assad’s peace feelers to Israel might be partly a P.R. ploy. But, he said, Assad is genuinely interested in making peace with Israel.

There can be no doubt that the United States, and now the United Nations, are putting pressure on Syria. Neoconservatives in the Bush administration who once boasted of making a “left turn” to Damascus after defeating Iraq and Iran continue to talk ominously about dealing with Syria. Although few expect the United States to actually invade either Syria or Iran now that its Iraq adventure has soured, the presence of American troops next door has clearly gotten Syria’s attention. A few months ago the U.S. adopted the Syria Accountability Act, which imposed sanctions on Syria for allegedly seeking weapons of mass destruction, a charge Syria denies. And the U.N. Security Council in September agreed on Resolution 1559, which called on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon and to stop supporting that country’s Hezbollah movement. To Syria’s horror, France supported the resolution. But Damascus is far more worried about the United States.

Last week President Bush and one of his officials, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, demanded that Syria stop what they said was its support for the insurgency in Iraq. “We have sent messages to the Syrians in the past and will continue to do so. We have tools at our disposal, a variety of tools, ranging from diplomatic tools to economic pressure. Nothing’s taken off the table,” Bush said at a news conference. He is said to be reviewing options that include freezing the assets of high-ranking Syrian government officials. Armitage told the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar that the administration would not let the subject of Resolution 1559 rest, either. “I hope that our relations with Syria do not worsen further, but it’s entirely in the hands of Damascus,” he said. “Syria’s failure to accept U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559 is a defiance of the international community.”

On Sunday, Armitage offered guarded praise for Syria’s cooperation after meeting with Assad and his foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharaa. “Syria has made some real improvements in recent months on border security. But we all need to do more, particularly on the question of former regime elements participating in activities in Iraq, going back and forth from Syria,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying.

Syria has tried to compensate for some of the American pressure by turning toward Europe. After nine years of glacial negotiations, Damascus this year signed an “association agreement” with the European Union. It was held up at the last moment when the EU insisted that its new rules on human rights and weapons of mass destruction be incorporated. But, says Frank Hesske, the EU’s ambassador to Damascus, the agreement “certainly does not” mean that the Syrians can play off the EU against the United States.

The U.S. sanctions by themselves don’t harm Syria’s economy much. Trade between the two countries is relatively minor. But the sanctions do make it a lot harder to attract international investment, including capital from European companies, which is desperately needed to revive Syria’s antiquated economy, says Hesske. Unable to provide jobs for young people entering the labor market and faced with slowing growth, Syria’s economy may grind to a halt in two years’ time. Partly as a result, social unrest — including renewed stirrings of Islamic fundamentalism — is growing. Fundamentalism was stomped out after Assad launched a brutal assault on the city of Hama in 1982, a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, killing up to 20,000 people. Political repression is still heavy, even though the government is now steadily releasing small numbers of political prisoners. There have been no more signs of a thaw after the authorities came down hard on a nascent pro-democracy movement that sprang up after Bashar Assad took over in 2000.

The seemingly logical way to avoid a crisis would be to give in to the international pressure, get out of Lebanon, and stop meddling in Iraq and Palestine. But for several reasons Syria may find it difficult to do that. First of all, the regime survives by the grace of payoffs to clans and factions, according to several analysts who wish to remain anonymous. The money supposedly comes from Syria’s involvement in Lebanon. Then there is the traditional role that Syria has played as a champion of Arab nationalism. It will not be easy for the government to let go of those ambitions and maintain its credibility domestically, among a public that has turned increasingly anti-Western after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And lastly there is a persistent feeling that the good old ways still work.

Part of the riddle is the position of Bashar Assad. The British-educated ophthalmologist inherited the presidency upon his father’s death, but many question the extent to which he is in control. Some observers speak of competing factions within the governing clique, which consists mainly of the extended Assad family, their minority Alawite sect, Christian allies and a sprinkling of outsiders. One of the factions is said to advocate business as usual, despite the 9/11 attacks and the presence of American troops in neighboring Iraq. Business as usual in Syria means that the country will keep up its support for hard-liners and militants wherever it can, in order to remain influential.

The continuing ambiguity about Syria’s role in Iraq may fit this pattern. In Hiri, a desolate village about halfway along the 400-mile-long border, the Syrian security service, the Mukhabarat, seems to be keeping an eye on any suspicious strangers. Journalists who are not on a press tour organized by the country’s Ministry of Information are told to leave and then escorted for more than 45 minutes through the nearby town of Abu Qamal, just to make sure they’re really gone. But the regime’s vigilance against people sneaking across the border to join the Iraqi insurgents, or bring them money or supplies, is said to be less sharp.

Indeed, as Syrian officials keep saying, the border is long and difficult to patrol. Near Hiri, the Syrians have built an earthen ramp to prevent cars from crossing, but everybody agrees that people get through elsewhere. The tribes and families in Syria are the same as on the Iraqi side, and people are used to moving back and forth. A sheik of the large Duleimi clan in Abu Qamal said that he was in Iraq during the war and that he knows that some people have since crossed to join their family members in their fight against the Americans.

The United States appears to be worried less about such individual crossings and much more about the possibility that the Syrian government may either be turning a blind eye to Iraqi insurgents or be actively assisting them. After initially complaining about the porous border, the United States has shifted its attention to the presence in Syria of members of the former Iraqi regime and its Baath party and their alleged role in funding and supporting the insurgency.

The country officially hosts some 45,000 Iraqis, but wildly inflated figures of up to a million refugees also circulate. One Iraqi Baathist who has been in Damascus for some 30 years, a refugee from Saddam Hussein, not an associate, is Mahdi al-Obeidi. “There are many people here from the regime,” said Obeidi, who styles himself a representative of the “original Baath party, from before Saddam.” In his shabby office in Damascus, he claimed to have met with many new arrivals. He does not make a distinction between those who have been “Saddam’s men” and others. Now is Iraq’s hour of need, and everybody should unite to fight the Americans, Obeidi said. “Even if I only have one dime left, I would give it to the resistance,” he declared. Most Iraqis who are in Syria feel that way, he asserted, so it should not come as a surprise that they try to support the “freedom fighters.” It is no secret that the Syrians are in “total sympathy with the resistance,” Obeidi claimed. Sadly, he added, the government has not done much to help.

On the surface, it seems that the claim is correct, at least since the capture of Saddam Hussein about a year ago. Mahmoud Mohammed al Ghasi, also known as Sheik Qa’aqa, was a fiery preacher until the invasion of Iraq. Bearded and dressed as an Afghan veteran in a combination of fatigues and traditional garb, he urged the faithful to oppose American designs in the region. After the invasion he was told to tone it down. Now he looks like a businessman, dressed in a blazer with a cropped beard, and he has given up preaching in the local mosque. “The government does not have a problem with me,” maintained Qa’aqa, seated behind his desk in his office in Aleppo. “I think some officials just became worried because I attracted too many people.”

One disappointed former associate who preferred to remain unnamed said that he and a group of some 300 core supporters left Qa’aqa almost a year ago because the sheik “turned out to be a fraud.” He said that before the war, Qa’aqa had called for a holy war against the Americans if they invaded Iraq. After the fall of Baghdad, Qa’aqa made a U-turn. “A lot of kids came to talk to him about going to Iraq and he swore again and again that there is no jihad in Iraq.” Qa’aqa’s former associate is closely watched by the Mukhabarat, and he has been forbidden to meet with other former followers of the sheik. “They do not want us to organize,” he said. Nevertheless, he claimed that he and others like him had “very good contacts” among the insurgents in Iraq and that it was no problem to cross the border.

There is disagreement in Syria about what the government knows about such supposed ties and what it is doing about it. One advisor to the foreign ministry called it “inconceivable” that the government would allow, let alone condone, support for the Iraqi insurgents. “Those people may go and fight, be trained, learn all kinds of things, and come back to make trouble,” said Riad Daoudi, arguing that the insurgency in Iraq is not in Syria’s interest.

A prominent human rights lawyer, Anwar Al Bounni, agreed — up to a point. He said that the government was arresting fighters who returned from Iraq, but not because it wanted the American vision of a democratic Iraq to succeed. At the beginning of December he was visited in his office in Damascus by one man who had been held for four months after crossing back to Syria. He told Al Bounni that at least 50 former fighters were languishing in the same jail. The lawyer thought that there must be many more elsewhere, and said that the government has indeed clamped down on some of the people who were calling for a jihad in Iraq. In Hama, where fundamentalism is reviving after the elder Assad’s massacre, 16 preachers who had called on their followers to go to Iraq were arrested in September, the lawyer said. This was done, he claimed, not because the authorities wanted to stop the flow of fighters but because they do not want such fighters to be “outside their control.”

Al Bounni said the government has no interest in a stable Iraq. “They worry about Iraq being a really democratic and free country.” This presumably would set a bad example for Syria’s own population. Another analyst who has insight into the working of the government, slightly adjusted that picture. Syria may still play a “passive” role in allowing fighters and financial support to cross into Iraq, he said. But the government would be willing to stop that “in exchange for a role” in the affairs of its neighbor. He called it the Americans’ greatest failure that they have not made such an offer until now.

Syria’s relationship with the Palestinians may face a similar problem. Syria simply does not want to be the last country to make peace with Israel. Its negotiating position over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights would suffer if the Palestinians cut a deal first, which now seems possible, if only faintly. But both the Israeli government and the Bush administration have made clear that they are in no hurry to let Syria in on peace talks and thus evade international pressure over its other actions. In mid-December, Bush said, “Assad needs to wait: first peace between Israel and Palestine, and then we’ll see what to do with Syria.”

So Syria may once again revert to its “spoiler” role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The country hosts some of Palestinian militant groups’ leaders and offices, and senior Palestinian leaders also say Damascus is trying to influence factions in the Palestinian territories. This is shaping up as a concern in the run-up to the elections on Jan. 9 for a new chairman of the Palestinian Authority to replace Yasser Arafat. The new Palestinian leadership is worried about the possibility that renewed fighting could disrupt the elections and scupper their plans to restore a measure of stability and even to restart negotiations with Israel. Over the last couple of weeks, fighting in Gaza between the militants and the army once again escalated after a period of relative calm in the wake of Arafat’s death.

In Damascus, a veteran Palestinian leader, Naif Hawatmeh, earlier this month said that Syria indirectly supports some of the militant factions inside Fatah, the main PLO faction, through the Lebanese Hezbollah movement. “Everybody knows Syria and Iran support Hezbollah. Well, Hezbollah supports some of the groups in the Palestinian territories, not only the Islamic ones but also some inside Fatah such as the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades,” said Hawatmeh, who is the leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and has been based in Damascus for decades.

Persistent Israeli claims to the same effect may have been exaggerated, but even Palestinian sources inside the West Bank, from all the important factions, agree that Hezbollah is involved, and Syria is blamed for instructing some factions to serve its own needs.

The Palestinian Islamic groups are also a concern for Mahmoud Abbas, the new PLO leader and the leading candidate in the Palestinian elections. He visited Damascus in December and met with the political leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal. A Hamas source said that the visit yielded little agreement and that the elections for the leadership of the Palestinian Authority were not even discussed. Meshaal rejected a Hamas cease-fire. After the meeting between Abbas and Meshaal, Hamas increased its attacks on Israeli targets in and around the Gaza strip.

At a press conference in Damascus — after a meeting between President Assad and the Palestinian leadership, led by Abbas — Syria’s foreign minister, Farouk Shara’a, indicated where Syria’s interests lay. He said that coordination between the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon over peace moves was a “demand” of all the Arab states. Abbas also said he wanted coordination but did not make any firm commitments.

Syria is trying hard to prove that it is needed in the regional equation, that it cannot be ignored. In Damascus, critics of the government agree that Assad’s government, even though it is reaching out to the rest of the world, is up to its old tricks. Where they differ is on the question of whether the regime will be prepared to abandon its practices at a price, or whether it never will because its very survival is bound up with them.

While Palestinian society and institutions have been devastated by the violence of the last three and a half years, Israel is actually doing very nicely, thank you. The intifada has failed to break the country, even economically. It’s true that Israel went into a recession during the violence, but that was also a result of the global downturn. Now growth has been restored, albeit at a lower rate than before.

At the center of all this is Ariel Sharon, Israel’s controversial prime minister, who has now been in power longer than any other Israeli leader since Yitzhak Rabin was murdered in 1995. Under fire at home over various corruption affairs with an increasingly soap-opera feel to them, Sharon seems nevertheless master of the political and diplomatic landscape. One thread runs consistently through his life: the ability to profit from other people’s mistakes. Ehud Barak obliged him in that respect over three years ago and Yasser Arafat has done it ever since. He has also had the international situation and the Bush administration working for him.

Now the world may well have to come to terms with the fact that the only diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has any chance of being implemented may largely be dictated by Sharon. He has dealt a death blow to the international peace plan, the road map, which had all but expired anyway. By announcing his intention to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank, Sharon has thrown down a challenge to the world that it cannot ignore. Who can in good conscience oppose the dismantling of Jewish settlements, even if it is done unilaterally, simply because it is Sharon who proposes it? By now, even U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has cautiously endorsed the idea.

In Israel and among the Palestinians, the plans have created huge confusion. Nobody knows for sure if he will actually go ahead with the evacuation and if he does, whether that would be good or bad. There is only one sector that consistently criticizes him for even voicing such thoughts: the settlers and their right-wing supporters. Their opposition is shrill and unashamedly invokes the Holocaust. Despite vows not to use violence against their own soldiers, they sound ready to make a last stand. “In 1942 the Jews in Europe also boarded the trains voluntarily because they thought they were going to be evacuated,” is a typical statement made by Eran Sternberg, who is in charge of press relations for the Gaza settlements.

During a recent visit to those settlements, Sternberg tried to keep visiting journalists on a short leash, herding them in groups to meet prearranged “ordinary people” in the Gush Katif villages or in Netzarim, the most isolated of all Gaza settlements. Only one road connects it to Israel proper. Entering the road from the Israeli side is something of a mad Max experience, with soldiers milling about in the desert, settlers in bulletproof vests getting into their cars, and a concrete, barbed wire and sandbagged military position where the actual border is. The bus that services the route has been shot at and blown up. Only the lower windows are bulletproofed, so the driver advises the passengers not to stand up during the 10-minute trip. At the beginning of the intifada, Netzarim junction, where the east-west access road crosses the main north-south route through Gaza, was the scene of violent battles between Palestinians and the Israeli army. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, some 45 Palestinians have died there.

Netzarim is regarded even by many Israelis as symbolizing the particular aberration of Jewish settlements in Gaza. Some 7,000 Israelis live in heavily fortified enclaves in the strip among more than 1.2 million Palestinians. The disparities between the two communities are huge. The settlements occupy the richest agricultural lands and the most important water resources, while Palestinian Gaza is one of the most crowded and poorest places in the world: in effect, a gigantic jail surrounded by a fence. The settlers have an effect on the daily lives of the Palestinians that is disproportionate to their small number. The settlements and their access roads cut Gaza in pieces and make travel difficult, and when the Israelis close the roads for security reasons, impossible. Exchanges of fire and Israeli security measures around the settlements have reduced the surrounding areas to moonscapes. In Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip, the rows of apartment buildings facing the Neveh Dekalim settlement are scarred by gun and tank fire, with gaping black holes on the outside and shrapnel patterns decorating the ceilings of living rooms.

Gaza has a particular madness to it and it lacks the strong Biblical associations of the West Bank, which is why Sharon found such support among Israelis for his plan to get out. The really amazing thing is that he may actually succeed where several Israeli prime ministers before him failed. Menachem Begin, for example, tried to palm off the strip, which on its southern end borders Egypt, to the Egyptians as part of the Camp David peace deal between the two countries. President Saddat refused, not wanting to be drawn into a Palestinian quagmire; his successor, Hosni Mubarak, is of the same mind. He has characterized Israeli attempts to enlist Egypt as a policeman as “a trap,” designed to provoke a conflict between the Egyptians and the Palestinians. But even Egypt cannot afford to ignore the consequences of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Cairo has hinted that it too, just like the U.S. administration, is worried about fundamentalist Muslims taking over the strip. Egypt waged a bloody internal war with its own fundamentalist insurgents in the 1990s. The Egyptians have hinted they will demand that Israel agree that Egypt be allowed to increase the number of troops it is allowed to station in the Sinai Peninsula under their 1975 peace deal.

The withdrawal plan is the subject of feverish contacts between the Israelis, the Americans, the Egyptians and the Palestinians. The Egyptian minister in charge of security affairs, Omar Suleiman, visited Arafat in his Ramallah compound and demanded, according to Palestinian sources, that he restore P.A. control in the Gaza Strip before an Israeli pullout and confront the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements.

It would appear that the Bush administration shares some of the Egyptian worries — and has some of its own. Three ranking Bush administration officials are in Israel this week for the second time in less than a month to sound out Sharon on the details of his plan: Assistant Secretary of State William Burns, Stephen Hadley, deputy director of the National Security Council, and Elliot Abrams, a Middle East specialist at the council. The visit follows remarks by Secretary of State Colin Powell that the administration has “many questions” about Sharon’s plan. These are thought to include the extent of the withdrawal from Gaza, the question of coordination between Israel and the P.A. over the pullout and Sharon’s plans for the West Bank, specifically the possibility that he may demand a trade-off for the evacuation of Gaza in the form of U.S. acquiescence to the annexation of some settlement blocs. Most of these questions, U.S. officials have implied, have arisen because of Sharon’s deliberate vagueness about his intentions. The going has been so slow that a meeting between Bush and Sharon scheduled for this month has been bumped to April.

Washington is said to be particularly concerned about the possibility of the militant Hamas organization taking over the Gaza Strip, where it is very powerful. In fact, just why anyone thinks this would happen is unclear. As it is, the Palestinian Authority retains a tenuous hold on the area, while Israeli control is confined to the settlements. Handing over the settlements to the Palestinians will by all accounts make it easier, not harder, for the P.A. to impose its will on the people. Zakaria Al-Agha, a senior leader in the Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip and a P.A. official, says that once the Israelis leave it will be easier for the P.A. to exert control than it is now. “Now we cannot freely move our forces through the strip because of all the obstacles and if we act we are seen as collaborating with the Israelis,” says Al-Agha. “Once they are gone it will be very clear that we are only acting in order to provide security for our own people, not the settlers.”

Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’ spiritual leader, was quoted this week in Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper as denying that his movement has any plans to take over control of the strip from the P.A. “We have never had the intention of taking over security responsibilities in the strip,” he said. “We seek cooperation and partnership among all the Palestinian national and Islamic movements.” He even held out the possibility of a temporary cessation of Hamas attacks against Israel. “With regard to Gaza, resistance may stop for a certain period of time if all Israelis [settlers and soldiers] leave Gaza, until we see what the fate of the West Bank, our refugees and Jerusalem will be.”

However positive this statement may seem, it actually holds out very little chance for a longer-term cease-fire. It is very unlikely that Israel and the P.A. will resolve these issues; even if they do, it is very unlikely that Hamas will agree to the inevitable compromises this will involve. Other groups, such as the military wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP, have already said they will continue to attack Israelis, “wherever they are,” as one of the group’s leaders in Khan Younis put it. “If they leave we will follow them. We will pursue them and fight them wherever we find them.” The PFLP leader said he would carry on fighting until the liberation of “the whole of Palestine.” That is also the official Hamas position.

Much more than an Israeli withdrawal, the development that could move Hamas into power in Gaza is the infighting among Fatah factions in the strip, which is threatening the ability of the P.A. to exercise control. Over the last couple of weeks, a prominent journalist and senior aide to Yasser Arafat has been killed in Gaza, other journalists have been beaten up and intimidated, officials and police stations have been fired on and gun battles have raged between the factions. The background to this, according to some, is a general breakdown in law and order in the Palestinian territories, both on the West Bank and in Gaza, as a result of Israeli attacks and harsh measures which have undermined the security forces. In Gaza, however, it seems clear that the supporters of Mohammed Dahlan, the former security minister and head of the Preventive Security Service in the strip, are unhappy that he was sidelined by the P.A. leadership after he and Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas were forced to resign last year. The background story is the ongoing struggle between the old-guard PLO leadership that came back from Tunis with Arafat after they returned from exile and the local leaders who emerged under Israeli occupation, such as Dahlan, although he too spent some time with Arafat in Tunis. Dahlan, like Mahmoud Abbas, is seen as more moderate and willing to work with the Americans and Israelis than the old-guard Arafat loyalists.

Neither Dahlan nor his opponents in the P.A. have any interest in the strip falling into the hands of Hamas. But fear that this could happen has set the alarm bells ringing in Washington. The Bush administration seems less concerned about the long-term implications for the peace process if Sharon imposes his unilateral vision than about short-term upheaval in Gaza hurting Bush’s reelection chances. The last thing Bush needs is another Middle Eastern crisis. If trouble were to flare up in Gaza after an Israeli withdrawal or if the strip is in fact taken over by Hamas, this would not reflect well on the president. This explains why the Bush administration asked Sharon to postpone any pullback until after November, as reported in the Israeli daily newspaper Ma’ariv this month.

Administration officials deny this interpretation. They say that it is actually the Israelis who are insisting on moving deliberately, and point to Israel’s previous experience with a unilateral withdrawal, from South Lebanon in May 2000. That withdrawal left an opening for the Hezbollah movement to keep fighting the Israelis over some unresolved issues, gave it considerable prestige as a group that forced Israel to retreat by force of arms and, in the view of some analysts, precipitated the intifada.

But if Bush fails to consider the larger consequences of Sharon’s plan, in particular what he intends to do with the West Bank, he will only be postponing a later eruption. Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan may seem attractive at first sight because it offers a dismantling of some settlements, even on the West Bank, and thus decreases the number of points of friction between the two sides. But in reality the problem will only be deferred. The Palestinians will come under huge international pressure to make concessions and rein in militant groups as a result of Sharon’s “disengagement” tactic. Even worse, from the Palestinian standpoint, Sharon’s moves — both pulling out of some settlements and building the fence — may mean that Israel can ignore the Palestinian issue, without the international community intervening. With terror attacks reduced by the fence and some settlement evacuation, the problem will be seen internationally as less pressing. The Palestinians could resort to international actions to get attention, as they did in the ’70s, but in the post-9/11 world that tactic seems futile.

As they run out of options, the Palestinians may indeed turn on their own leaders who have failed to deliver. According to some reports, this is exactly what both Sharon and the U.S. administration are aiming for: the unilateral moves are intended to finish off the current Palestinian leadership, in particular Yasser Arafat, once and for all. The wishful thinking in Washington and Jerusalem then is that a more amenable leadership would emerge, even though all indications point to the opposite.

These theories are regarded by most observers on the ground as so fanciful that they do not even merit contemplation. In fact, what Sharon is offering the Palestinians with his unilateral disengagement falls so short of their aspirations that continued conflict is inevitable, as the Hamas leader Sheik Yassin hinted in his comments. There are no indications whatsoever that Sharon intends to go beyond the limited withdrawals that he envisages for the West Bank, that he is willing to share Jerusalem, that he can come up with a creative solution for the refugee issue or that in general he will seriously negotiate with the Palestinians on the myriad of issues that divide the two peoples. Unilateral moves will not solve disputes over air space, water resources, taxes, border controls, and so on.

It may well be that Sharon never intended to negotiate with the Palestinians. He has always proclaimed his distrust of the other side: He was vehemently opposed to the Oslo peace accords and remains proud that he is the only Israeli prime minister since Yitzhak Shamir in the early ’90s who has not shaken the hand of Arafat. When he came to power during the intifada he made negotiations impossible by insisting on periods of calm before talks could start. Often it was his own army that seemed to provoke another round of bloodletting by launching targeted assassinations just as talks seemed imminent. He has consistently targeted the institutions on the Palestinian side that could provide and back up negotiators. The security services, which did cooperate very efficiently with the Israelis in the late 1990s, were gutted. (It is true, though, that a significant number of their members have been involved in anti-Israeli acts during the intifada.) And recently he released large numbers of Palestinian prisoners to the militant Lebanese Hezbollah movement — while he had refused to do the same in order to support the moderate Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.

Whether premeditated or not, Sharon’s actions since September 2000 have helped to put an end to anything that can be called a peace process. He has been able to achieve this not only through his own cunning but also because of the incredibly irresponsible behavior of the Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat, who is at least equally to blame for the violence. Arafat encouraged the intifada, released Hamas and Islamic Jihad bomb makers from his prisons and enabled them to recommence their suicide attacks, and is personally involved with the Fatah branch practicing the same methods, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Sharon also cleverly exploited the leeway that the 9/11 attacks gave him to counter terror and he was able to maintain a strongly positive relationship with the Bush administration. The result is that the peace process is well and truly dead.

There remains one ray of light. Even though, in all likelihood, Sharon intends to go no further than a very limited withdrawal from the West Bank, such steps have a way of creating a dynamic of their own. Once you start withdrawing it is difficult to stop, because how do you explain the difference between the territory you have already given up and the lands you are still hanging on to? The true future test, which also and perhaps especially is a challenge for the Palestinians, is to agree to share the land and its resources and to agree on all the important arrangements between states that make for good neighbors. An internationally supervised negotiation process, with the United States leading the way, is the only way to achieve that.

In fact, neither side is right. These Cold War-era categories and battles are no longer relevant in addressing the issues posed by Islam, terrorism and the politics of the Middle East, and they obscure the real issues at stake. A further distraction are the passions, positive and negative, inspired by George W. Bush: Those who despise him are unable to accept that anything he does could be defensible, while his acolytes are equally myopic about the dangers and errors of his policies.

By insisting that the war on terror is a moral stand against evil, hawks elevate terrorism to a unique category that it doesn’t deserve. They scare citizens into giving up freedoms — undercutting America’s credibility as the defender of freedom. They blur distinctions between different types of threats and risk demonizing Islam itself — a dangerous development that is already sharply felt by people in the Middle East.

But leftists who rightly reject the vision of Islam as the enemy tend to dismiss its links to terrorism, underdevelopment and repression in the Middle East and outside it. And they are unable to understand how the invasion of Iraq — despite the fact that it was sold under a false guise — could and can move the region forward.

The Iraq invasion has a far more complex relation to the war on terror, and the battle to improve Arab and Muslim societies, than most partisans of either side are willing to admit. The invasion was justifiable, although extremely risky, because Iraq was a festering sore that was destabilizing the region and posed a definite threat to the West, though not an imminent one. The risk, of course, was that invading might result in unplanned consequences — from mass anti-Americanism to Sunni rage, from the rise of Shiite fundamentalism to internecine strife, civil war and partition.

Many of those possible consequences are now threatening to become realities, thanks to the Bush administration’s gross planning failures and bungling of the postwar period. The peculiarity of this historical moment is that the stakes are so high that if everything does in fact goes wrong, the invasion could turn out to have been a mistake. But it’s too soon to tell.

Iraq under Saddam represented a major threat, but it is important to be clear about just what kind of threat. Saddam was a nasty dictator and a regional expansionist who might have launched more military campaigns against his neighbors if he had been allowed to. But it is becoming increasingly clear that he did not have any weapons of mass destruction, nor any ties to al-Qaida. He was a tin-pot dictator who did not pose a military threat to the West (in fact, the U.S. used him when it found it convenient to do so.) The real Iraq time bomb was not just Saddam’s regime but the entire situation there, in particular the sanctions — which were destructive and impoverishing, which generated Arab rage against the U.S. and could never have been ended without Saddam’s departure.

It is commonly overlooked that during the entire decade of the Oslo peace process, the unresolved crisis in Iraq competed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the worst cause of tension between the Arab world and the West. On top of that, whereas the Palestinian leadership clearly made a choice to cooperate with the U.S., Saddam Hussein was a rallying point for defiance. Taken together, Iraq, sanctions, the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia (the issue that set off Osama bin Laden) and more general Western encroachment upon traditional Middle Eastern societies gave rise in the 1990s to a new, internationally active, violent movement that was quite separate from the earlier internationally active Palestinian movements.

The left, afraid of passing judgments on other cultures, has erred by not recognizing that there is something in the Arab world that has made it turn to international terror, when other regions facing similar problems have not done so. Removing Saddam’s regime, and putting pressure on other states in the region to reform, could be a way of forcing the Arab world to face up to its shortcomings. But by blurring the distinction between Iraq and al-Qaida and using crude but politically useful fear tactics to create an Arab-Muslim terrorist bogeyman, the Bush administration has gone too far in the other direction. Partly because of these ideological blinders, partly because it is not as firmly committed to liberty and justice as it claims, either at home or in the crucial Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has failed to take the necessary actions, both in post-invasion Iraq and in the region, to bring lasting positive changes to the region. And it has undercut America’s ability to win the most crucial war of all: the war of ideas.

Instead of simultaneously fighting terrorism and concentrating on eliminating its root causes, Bush has only done the first. To whip up American support for his war on terror, he has played on Americans’ fears, turning terrorism into an absolute moral evil and claiming that it poses as great a threat to the U.S. as the Cold War did. This is a mistake. First of all, terrorism strikes everybody, everywhere, not just the West and Westerners, even if they often seem to be the intended target. Second, terrorism simply doesn’t pose the same threat as the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. Terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in rogue states are urgent security threats, but they cannot be compared to the apocalypse the world faced during the Cold War. Terrorism, however painful and terrifying it is, is ultimately insignificant. It will not bring down any Western government; indeed, it is not even doing that in less stable parts of the world. It is a containable problem, just as it was in the days of the Cold War. We should not now promote it to something grander.

The war on terror does indeed reflect a confrontation between the West and the Arab or Muslim world, but it bears no resemblance to the Cold War. There is no common enemy on the Muslim side, no Arab Warsaw Pact. There is no monolithic front against the West or anybody else, as indeed there is no unified attitude on this in the West. Nor is there a real ideological contest. Islam, despite its sometimes expansionist agenda (which it shares with many other religions), is no ideological rival to the Western way of life. It is true that many in the Arab and Muslim world fear being overwhelmed by Westernization, but many other regions share this concern, and have just as many other points of contention with the West.

Moreover, the international terrorist campaign the world is witnessing today is not particularly new. In the 1970s, an alliance of largely left-wing movements around the world, partly inspired and backed by the Soviets, also formed a huge network of interrelated terrorist cells. The international terrorist Carlos was the bogeyman then. Today’s Afghanistan is yesteryear’s Lebanon.

The idea that the current wave of terrorism is radically different from earlier forms, apocalyptic rather than political, is also misguided. Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida and similar groups have very clear political goals, even if they have a religious background or justification — and many people in the Middle East share those goals. The perpetrators of the attacks and their backers have very similar aims to some of the terrorists who operated in the 1970s. What indeed is the difference between groups such as Germany’s Red Army Faction and al-Qaida? Is there a real difference in the Communist fight against capitalism and the fundamentalist fight against Western cultural and political dominance? And is al-Qaida’s attempt to drive the U.S. out of the Middle East so different from the actions of smaller nationalist movements, such as the Irish Republican Army and the Basque ETA, who are trying to drive respectively Britain and Spain out of regions they claim?

Had it not been for the 9/11 attacks, it is doubtful al-Qaida and other fundamentalist groups would have been assigned a new category of terrorism all to themselves. And despite the horrific scale of those attacks, it was neither wise or constructive to do so. Elevating Islamist terror to a special category has had disastrous consequences both within America and abroad. Domestically, it has led to loss of liberty; internationally, it deepened the suspicions of Muslims and Arabs that the U.S. had no intention of dealing fairly with them.

Nor has it had a positive effect on our battle against terrorism. Years of experience have taught the West that the best way to fight terrorism is by using a law-and-order approach. Terrorists are criminals, to be hunted down and apprehended. (Afghanistan was a special case, a state whose ruling Taliban regime was virtually indistinguishable from an international terrorist organization. Invading Iraq was justifiable but not because of terrorism.) The very phrase “war on terror” is therefore dangerous, because it exaggerates and mischaracterizes the threat.

A clear-eyed look at the conflict shows that the Bush team is not winning this war — but it hasn’t lost it yet, either. The American efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq are floundering, despite the capture of Saddam, but the Iraq invasion has not led to the huge increase in attacks around the globe that some had feared. Indeed, if you exclude the “hot zones” — Israel and the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Afghanistan — the number of terror attacks has been about the same in 2003 as the year before. (Actually, because of the Bali bombing, the death toll in 2002 was even higher than that in 2003.) Nor has the invasion convulsed the region, as many feared: The Arab regimes are still as firmly or shakily in charge as before. On the other hand, the positive developments that the war’s architects claimed would follow the invasion have not taken place: Democracy and freedom have not spread throughout the Middle East, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unsolved.

The most ominous fallout of Bush’s war on terror has been the dramatic rise of anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments around the world. There is a widespread feeling that both countries are overreacting to terrorist attacks that don’t threaten their existence — abusing genuine security concerns to further an expansionist political agenda. If resentment is a reliable indicator of the possibility of future terrorist attacks, then the prospects are grim. And America’s errors in dealing with postwar Afghanistan and Iraq and its failure to use its power to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are compounding this resentment.

Not terrorism itself, but the way states react to it, will ultimately determine who wins the war on terror. Not one Western democracy has ever been fatally destabilized by terrorism. Even in the (flawed) democracy most plagued by terrorist attacks, Israel, the state, society and even the economy have continued to function moderately well. On the contrary, it is the Palestinians whose governing institutions, society and economy have been devastated in this battle.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict offers an interesting object lesson on the purpose and impact of terror campaigns. Insofar as it has a political objective, the goal of Palestinian terrorism since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 has been to disrupt the peace process, not to advance it. (Although some Palestinian terror attacks, as the Israeli journalist Amira Hass has noted, are simply acts of revenge or despair.) The violence has been partly successful in achieving this goal because the extremists knew that they had a partner on the Israeli right, which was also working to torpedo the peace moves. If the Sharon administration, rather than clinging to the occupied territories and the settlements, had actually pursued murdered Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s famous injunction to “negotiate as if there was no terror and deal with terror as if there were no negotiations,” Palestinian terrorism would be challenged and eventually eclipsed by a political solution.

In other, less-stable or non-democratic countries, both the goals and the impact of terrorism can be different. In the Middle East the clearest example of this is Egypt. In the 1980s the fundamentalist group Gamaa Al-Islamiya waged a violent campaign against the government. Along with other fundamentalists, its members assassinated the country’s president, Anwar Sadat, for making peace with Israel. The peace treaty has survived, as has the Egyptian government in a largely unchanged form. The Islamists were suppressed partly through a ruthless and violent campaign against them.

But the other element in the government’s campaign to neutralize the fundamentalists was to adopt their agenda. The peace with Israel has remained cold largely because of this. But domestic policy changes were even more significant.

Freedoms across the board came under fire. The government cracked down not only on fundamentalists but on all forms of dissent, including political movements, human rights organizations and intellectuals. Anxious to woo the Egyptian public — composed mainly of moderate yet deeply conservative Muslims — Mubarak’s regime took steps against a wide variety of groups and phenomena, including homosexuals, the Coptic Christian minority, belly dancers, sexual innuendo on television and “lewd” or religiously charged publications. The result has been that jailed leaders of the Gamaa felt simultaneously threatened and comfortable enough to declare last year that they had made a mistake in launching the campaign of violence. The government had vanquished terrorism, but at what price? It can as easily be argued that the terrorists had achieved at least part of their objective.

Despite the dispiriting results of these two very different terrorist campaigns, they have not completely succeeded. Egypt’s government is still firmly in charge and the country has not turned into the puritanical Islamic state that the fundamentalists seek. In Israel, the attacks and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s failure to pursue a political solution have succeeded in derailing the peace process, but the militants’ longer-term goal of regaining the whole of Palestine remains a pipe dream.

In this regard, how Turkey responds to November’s terrorist attacks in Istanbul is a key indicator of whether or not the war on terror is being won. The first twin attacks on the synagogues in the center of town hardly caused as much as a traffic jam in this huge and bustling metropolis. Life went on, and the occasion provided a marvelous opportunity for the moderate Muslim party in power to demonstrate its tolerance and concern for minorities. On a geo-strategic level, the same firm yet concerned tone was in evidence in a pledge to maintain friendly ties with Israel. If Turkey stands fast and refuses to make concessions to the radicals, that would demonstrate the nation’s increasing stability and confidence — and would be a far greater success in the war against terror than capturing Saddam or any displays of high-tech military wizardry.

Unfortunately, the self-appointed leader in the war on terror, the United States, has already lost a crucial battle in that war. By cutting back on civil liberties, the Bush administration has shown weakness to America’s enemies and weakened its own standing as an exemplar of freedom.

Bush’s compromising of civil liberties has been spearheaded by his attorney general, John Ashcroft. Allow the writer one personal anecdote at this point. While covering the congressional midterm elections in 1998 in Dick Gephardt’s St. Louis district, I came across then-Sen. Ashcroft at a Republican fundraiser. Upon hearing that I was from Europe he proceeded to question me about a variety of issues such as healthcare and social benefits. After every answer, he almost immediately interjected something along the lines of, “But isn’t it much better here?” It does not seem very surprising that he grew into the promulgator of the USA PATRIOT Act. My experience of U.S. senators is limited, but it seems to me that the United States needs leaders who are not quite so unfamiliar with the rest of the world and not quite so smug.

By taking such extraordinary measures in the face of Islamic fundamentalist terror, the authorities in the West give it a status that was not even achieved by Communist networks during the Cold War. By changing its internal posture the U.S. sends a signal of weakness, one that people in the Middle East, attuned to such measures by the actions of their own repressive governments, are especially sensitive to.

But even worse, the U.S. is giving up on the war of ideas that this confrontation is really about (and that the administration invokes for propaganda purposes). When President Bush talks about bringing democracy to the Middle East, he addresses the core issue of the West’s relations with the Arab world. But how can he talk about bringing civil liberties to the Middle East while limiting them at home, and failing to deal evenhandedly with the Israeli-Palestinian issue — which more than any other issue shapes Arab attitudes toward the U.S.? This points to a central paradox that plagues this administration’s high-minded war on terror: It is fighting that war on premises that it itself does not fully believe in or act on.

The invasion of Iraq is a case in point, to the horror of people who have witnessed it firsthand. What should have been a celebration of democracy became a ham-fisted occupation. It’s true that the population brought much of its woe upon itself with unrestrained acts of pillage and looting. But nothing can excuse the terribly botched postwar planning (which allowed that looting to take place) and the near-total lack of any injection of enthusiasm about democracy. The first thing that America should have done, after restoring basic services (much more rapidly than it did) or even during that process, was to organize festive local gatherings throughout the country to elect temporary representatives of the people, even if that process was bound to be flawed. It is understandable that the U.S., having won the war, wanted to safeguard its interests, but it should have set a timetable from the very beginning for handing over civil responsibility to an elected Iraqi government. The high-handed way in which the occupation was handled did not spell democracy to the people of Iraq, nor to potential European allies — whom Bush had already alienated in the run-up to the invasion.

The problem is that in the Bush administration, the U.S. does not have the great defender of liberal values that the West needs at this crucial point in history. An ideologically extreme group that is mean-spirited about a whole range of liberal, civil-liberties and personal-choice issues, from abortion to the environment, from tax-breaks for the rich and crony capitalism to gnawing away at benefits for the poor, does not a good defender of the West make.

It is true that many on the left, especially the European left, have for too long failed to stand up for the ideas that have formed Western society since the Enlightenment. Even today many European leftists are somewhat shamefaced about openly defending the values that make possible the kind of open society that has become a beacon for so many others around the world. Even when confronted with militant Islam, which makes no bones about its values and is willing to promote them through violence, some in the West hesitate to clearly declare their allegiance to liberal values, as if to do so would be to engage in cultural colonialism or to echo the racist, imperialist rhetoric of “the white man’s burden.”

Toppling Saddam was a worthy deed, and much good could still come from the U.S. presence there. But this administration is particularly ill-suited to convince the rest of the world and the Iraqis themselves of its good intentions. The Bush team is fighting this war of ideas almost exclusively with military tools and displays of power politics, both abroad and at home.

Force has its place. A violent threat, such as terrorism, sometimes has to be combated by a well-chosen military action, as in Afghanistan. Vested interests in the Arab and Muslim world and elsewhere may resist the opening up of their societies, and it may be legitimate to counter them when their stagnation and repression threatens others. But in the end, it is essential for the West and the U.S. to convince most of the people who find themselves fearing Westernization and globalization that they can take the best of the West and still retain their own cultures and identities. And it is essential that the West practice what it preaches — in Baghdad, in New York, in Nablus. That is the arena in which the real war, the war of ideas, is taking place — and it is a war that America, under George Bush, is losing.