Fantasy Time: What America thinks of Arabs, what Arabs think of it

President Bush's recent pronouncements on the Middle East and Secretary Powell's visit there no doubt reflected a well-intentioned attempt at peace-making. Lack of moral clarity, however, has brought to the surface fantasies rife in the Arab world. Caught up in the events of each day, the secretary of state has had to shift from one foot to the other and back again.

Israeli armor has closed in on Palestinian militants in Jenin and Nablus? This won't do, Powell had no choice but to say, the Israelis must end their operation "without delay" as President Bush decreed, or sometime soon, or anyhow as soon as possible. However couched, Powell's gnomic utterances publicly set him against Prime Minister Sharon. But next minute a photo-call shows him and Sharon together.

There's been another suicide bomber in Haifa, and yet another in Jerusalem? This won't do either, and Yasser Arafat must condemn terrorism, and in Arabic too, and Powell can't meet him on Saturday but only on Sunday. A superpower so easily tipped up and down on someone else's see-saw is not about to convince anyone that its declared war against terror is a serious proposition. This is not the way to conduct foreign policy.

Powell's visit arose from the cry that "something must be done" even if nobody knows quite what in this crisis. In cities including Beirut, Cairo, Amman, Sana (Yemen), and even Kuwait City and Bahrain's Manama, demonstrators in the thousands rally to the crudest anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans; they burn the Stars and Stripes and attempt to storm American embassies. The rulers one and all deploy secret police and security forces formidable enough to contain these demonstrations. But they exploit the emotion of the street to appeal in panicky tones to Washington. Here's a major contradiction running through the Arab world: On the one hand the United States is held to be responsible for everything that's wrong in the Middle East, while on the other hand it is beseeched to come to its salvation.

The outline of an Arab-Israeli peace settlement has been obvious since 1967, when Israel fought to survive a concerted attack by all its neighbors, and in the process occupied Gaza and the West Bank -- or put another way, liberated these territories from their previous occupiers, Egypt and Jordan respectively. After 35 wearisome years, even blinkered Saudi Arabia has perceived the land-for-peace trade-off, whereby the Palestinian inhabitants form a state out of these territories and the Israelis receive a security guarantee in return. After 1967, David Ben- Gurion, always the statesman but then retired to rest on his laurels, said that the territories were a "poisoned cup." With benefit of hindsight, it was a failure of imagination not to act on his warning.

The Sixties were a moment when empire became bad by definition, and any national-liberation movement was correspondingly good. So right- thinking and even pacifist people came to support anyone with a claim to be a nationalist, no matter what the morality of the cause or the violence involved in its fulfillment. As leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization over three decades and more, Yasser Arafat has long been the beneficiary of that Sixties mindset.

Repeatedly opting for violence and repudiating diplomacy, Arafat has triggered civil wars in Lebanon and Jordan, and despatched murder squads to liners and airports and even to the Olympic Games, spreading terror everywhere within reach. During the 1991 Gulf War he backed Saddam Hussein, and he has lately been detected red-handed smuggling arms from Iran, his latest sponsor. A place for Arafat in the "axis of evil" has been well earned.

Time and again, Arafat has been exposed as politically bankrupt, expelled from Arab countries, exiled, reduced to a powerless figurehead. Invariably he has then appealed to the outside world to rescue him, and so far there has always been one power or another that imagines its interest to be to give him another chance, thus suspending the norm usual in human conduct that a man is responsible for his actions. The United Nations, the French, the British, the European Union, even the United States, have variously hastened to rescue him from predicaments of his own making. Getting others to do for him what he cannot do for himself, Arafat reveals escapologist genius. There has been nothing comparable on the world stage. Appeasement of such a man contains a weird blending of imperial guilt, the sentimental Third World liberationism of the Sixties, animus against Jews, and plain political incompetence. The recent aborted visit to Arafat in Ramallah by two European emissaries -- EU foreign-policy chief Javier Solana and Spanish foreign minister Josep Pique -- was an almost farcical illustration of the wish to relieve Arafat of responsibility for what he has done. Powell ran the unnecessary risk of putting himself in the same position.

In Arab society as presently constituted, whoever aspires to power cannot flinch from careerist crime. In the repetitive resort to violence, Arafat is no different from the Assads and the Saddams around him, except in scale; he is a pocket-tyrant. In the last decade, diplomacy had every prospect of bringing peace with Israel and laying the foundations of the state of Palestine. Arafat rejected this. It is his doing that the Palestinian cause is lost by default. Instead he has presided over a mafia of gunmen, for whom terrorism has been a profitable way of life, complete with fortunes stolen from the public purse.