Gwynne Dyer: Deformed US foreign policy obsessed with terrorism

The Israeil newspaper Ha'aretz is not a fan of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's expansionist policy in the occupied Palestinian territories, so it understandably didn't like President George W. Bush's Middle East speech of June 24.

"Those millions of Israelis who are losing hope for an agreement to end the conflict by political means," observed Gideon Samet, "now have confirmation from the leader of the West that for a long time to come there won't even be the beginning of movement."

What Mr Bush's speech signalled was that there would be no peace talks until the terrorism stops, no pressure on Israel to compromise on territory and enormous pressure on the Palestinians to dump Yasser Arafat in favour of someone even more pliable.

The practical consequences of this taking of sides are that the terrorism will go on, the Palestinians will probably become even more radicalised and the opportunities for Sharon to simply kill Arafat and use the resultant uprising as an excuse to clear Palestinians out of large parts of the West Bank will grow.

The speech was written in the White House, but it could have been written by Sharon's office. Yet we should not assume (as Ha'aretz crudely does) that Mr Bush's policy is driven simply by concern for the American Jewish vote.

What it reveals is that the Bush Administration's main, indeed almost sole, foreign policy priority is the fight against "terrorism".

Which is what Mr Bush has been saying all along, of course.

It's just that other people, particularly outside the United States, found it hard to believe that he was really going to concentrate on the "war against terrorism" to the virtual exclusion of all other US interests in the world.

Terrorism is a problem, certainly, but it ranks about 10th or 20th in the order of the world's problems for most people - as it did for most Americans, until the events of last September 11.

Well, Mr Bush meant what he said. Suicide bombings by Palestinian terrorists in Israel are, in his vision of things, a completely separate problem and a far worse evil than 35 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, creeping colonisation that has now placed 42 per cent of the Palestinian territories under the effective control of Israeli settlers, and a Palestinian death toll since the beginning of this intifada that is almost three times higher than the Israeli toll.

In the post-September 11 world, there is only one priority in American foreign policy.

Suicide bombings are "terrorism" and therefore part of that priority. Middle East peace is not.

Other things being equal, President Bush would doubtless love to be the sponsor of a Middle East peace settlement, but if it involves talking to terrorists, or anybody remotely associated with them, then it is ideologically unacceptable.

So far as the Bush Administration is concerned, all terrorists are the same: a purely irrational evil belonging not to the political world but to the same domain as cancer.

They are also all 3m (10ft) tall, a view shared by the American media and, so far as anybody can tell, the American public.

The "terrorist threat" in the popular imagination is as big and scary as the "Soviet threat" was 20 years ago, although the damage that terrorists could do is a thousand times less.

The difference, of course, is that the terrorists of al Qaeda did kill a few thousand Americans, whereas the risk of a war in which 10,000 Soviet nuclear weapons would fall on the US and kill 100 million Americans, however real, always remained only potential.

It can't be helped. The average person's grasp of risk factors is so poor that it's commonplace to meet cigarette smokers who worry about terrorism.

American public opinion has been persuaded that the "terrorist threat" to the US is on a par with the now mercifully defunct risk of a world war, and the Bush Administration has dedicated itself to waging a war on terrorism.

We need not quibble over how much this policy owes to political calculation and how much it is obsession. The point is that other American interests are going to be subordinated to this overriding objective.

So Washington will back Mr Sharon's policy regardless of the damage to American (and longer-term Israeli) interests in the Middle East; Mr Sharon's ability to claim he is the victim of terrorism trumps any other consideration.

The US will attack Iraq within the year, regardless of the likelihood that such a war will destabilise pro-American regimes throughout the region and involve large numbers of American casualties.

Indeed, almost anybody who can claim a terrorist problem now stands a fair chance of manipulating American policy in their favour. Russia has done it over Chechnya, and India may yet succeed in doing it over Kashmir (with potentially horrendous results).

And this deformation of American foreign policy will probably continue until some really big military or political disaster brings Washington back to earth.

* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.