George W's Bloody Folly

That was a fantastic speech. Quite literally,

fantastic. George Bush's address on the Middle East,

delivered outside the White House on Monday evening,

consisted, from beginning to end, of fantasy.

It bore so little relation to reality that diplomats

around the world spent yesterday shaking their heads

in disbelief, before sinking into gloom and despair.

Our own Foreign Office tried gamely to spot the odd

nugget of sense in the Bush text - but, they admitted,

it was an uphill struggle. Israelis committed to a

political resolution of the conflict were heartbroken.

Even Shimon Peres, foreign minister in Ariel Sharon's

coalition, reportedly called the speech "a fatal

mistake", warning: "A bloodbath can be expected."

The core of the president's message was that the

Palestinians must embark on a sweeping process of

internal reform before they can even think about

getting back to the negotiating table. They must

transform themselves into a democratic market economy,

free of corruption and with a separate judiciary and

legislature if they are to be considered eligible for

statehood - which, when it comes, will be merely

provisional.

Shall we count the ways in which this is completely

absurd? George Bush is demanding that Palestine become

Sweden before it can become Palestine: it must be

stable, prosperous and boast constitutional

arrangements which still elude Britain - our judiciary

and legislature are not separate - let alone the Arab

world before it can become even a state-in-waiting.

This would be laughable if Palestine were in tranquil

Scandinavia. Even there it would count as putting the

cart before the horse, asking a nation to create the

institutions of a highly developed country before it

becomes a state. But this, remember, is being demanded

of the Palestinians - statebuilders with every

possible obstacle in their way.

Like the fact that they are under military occupation.

As the New York Times noted yesterday: "How the

Palestinians can be expected to carry out elections or

reform themselves while in a total lockdown by the

Israeli military remains something of a mystery."

Palestinian ministers complain they cannot visit a

village 10 minutes away; they can pass laws but not

implement them. They are Potemkin ministers, existing

on paper only. Yet now they are to build the

Switzerland of the Levant, where the streets are clean

and government functions like clockwork. This is

George in Wonderland stuff.

Monday's speech even had a touch of black comedy. The

president said the new Palestine should be taught good

governance, nominating the Arab states for the role.

Imagine it: democracy lessons from Saudi Arabia, a

masterclass in liberty from Kuwait.

But that is not the president's greatest fantasy.

Yasser Arafat must go, he says, though without naming

him. It may be refreshing to hear a US president come

clean in his conviction that he has the right to pick

other nations' leaders, but this demand exposes fully

the vacuousness of Bush's thinking.

For who does he imagine might replace Arafat? Does he

not realise that Palestinians are angry with their

leader not because he has been insufficiently

pro-American but because they see him as too moderate,

too willing to do Israel's bidding. The Palestinian

street is not clamouring for a man who will crack down

harder on Islamist militants or sing a western song

about free trade and local elections.

So if elections go ahead, here's what will happen.

Either Palestinians will deliberately defy Washington

and re-elect Arafat or they will choose someone more

hardline. Any leader who has the Israeli or US stamp

of approval will immediately be discredited as a

puppet and promptly rejected.

Also, for all his flaws, Arafat has an asset none of

his rivals can match. He is still, thanks to his long

history, Mr Palestine: his signature on a compromise

deal is the only one that could persuade his people to

accept it. By rushing his exit now, Bush is depriving

any future peace agreement of the only Palestinian who

could deliver it.

S o the president's speech shows a man unconnected to

Middle Eastern reality. But it is worse than unhinged;

it is dangerous. First, Bush has given a green light

to Sharon to continue his policy of military force

coupled with a refusal to freeze settlement building

on the West Bank. Monday's wording implied that Sharon

is only obliged to pull back from Palestinian cities

or freeze settlements once the Palestinians have

worked their way through the US wishlist. So long as

violence goes on, or Arafat remains in place, the

Israeli PM can do what he likes.

Given that the president refused to specify what the

final settlement might look like - delaying that and

other questions to later talks - he has supplied

Sharon with an incentive to get busy now, building

settlements, putting up fences and carving new

borders. If Bush had declared that the eventual

Palestinian state would be on the other side of

Israel's 1967 borders, there would be no point in

Israel trying to redraw the map. But now Sharon has

every motive to create his notorious "facts on the

ground".

There is danger on the Palestinian side too. The only

people celebrating yesterday were the Islamist

extremists of Hamas and Jihad, chiding moderate

Palestinians for ever believing that politics, rather

than violence, might bring results. Bush has not

dangled any serious carrot before the Palestinians: no

promises on Jerusalem or refugees or final borders.

Even Colin Powell's planned international conference

seems to have vanished. All Palestinians will get if

they comply with Washington's demands is a provisional

state on 42% of the West Bank. Maybe. Few will

consider that a prize worth the sacrifice of their own

leader and a national transformation.

So this new plan of Bush's is a flight of errant,

irresponsible fancy that can only fail, bringing more

bloodshed and ruin to the peoples of the Middle East

who are desperate for something better.

But it will reverberate far beyond. It will damage the

international standing of the US president and America

along with it. Muslim and Arab nations will be

antagonised by this plan of inaction, while

chancelleries from London to Moscow will realise they

are dealing with a leader who pays no lip-service to

them - or to basic reality.

This is a foreign policy failure for George Bush. If

he were a Democrat, both the Washington press corps

and Congress would already be racking it up alongside

the unextinguished threat from al-Qaida and the

continued freedom from captivity of Osama bin Laden.

Those failures, and now the guarantee of further

slaughter in the Middle East, should be prompting hard

questions about Bush and his war on terror. America

needs to snap out of its post-9/11 torpor of consensus

and realise there is a leadership problem in the US -

and his name is George Bush.

j.freedland@guardian.co.uk