MIDDLE EAST: Rogue Policies.(misguided foreign policy)(Brief Article)

The last month or so of Bush-administration Mideast policy may, as some supporters allege, just be part of the plan to transform that region. But the Bush drift has been much easier to discern lately than the Bush mastery. Statecraft can be a messy business, requiring backtracking, illogic, duplicity, and improvisation. None of that need necessarily be fatal to a policy, so long as its goal, and the strategy of getting there, survive the zigs and zags. With the leak of a plan to invade Iraq with a force of up to 250,000 troops next year, and Bush's recent repetition of his "axis of evil" rhetoric, there's no reason to believe that the zigzags have yet overtaken the president's medium-term goal of ending the Baathist regime in Iraq.

But some of Bush's recent statements and actions are disturbing because, if taken seriously as a course for future action, they could get the administration on an entirely different strategic tack: namely, devoting American prestige and energy primarily to finding and enforcing a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This approach would reflect a fundamental misreading of the Middle East. Terror is not a tool used by liberal regimes and democratic political movements. Neither Hamas nor Islamic Jihad nor Fatah has any desire to create a reasonably free and pluralist Palestinian state. Nor are the regimes that are fostering Palestinian militancy -- the Saudis, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Syrians -- free or pluralist. Palestinian terror is more a product of the backward political culture in the Arab world than of legitimate grievances against the Israelis. Trying to ease the terrorism by forcing concessions from the Israelis is treating a symptom rather than the root of the problem.

Because of this, toppling Saddam's fascist regime in Baghdad will do more to becalm the Palestinian conflict than all of Colin Powell's earnest shuttling. Given the dictator's weapons production, taking out Saddam is an important end in itself. But the long-term political ramifications could be even more important. A U.S.-installed regime in Baghdad will increase American leverage in the region, provide an example of decent governance for its immediate neighbors, and create a great (and very helpful) angst in Tehran, Riyadh, and Damascus over the possibility that their corrupt, repressive, and terror-tainted regimes might be next (either ...