Hugo Young: We've missed the point of Bush's Middle East policy

Obsessed with war on terrorism, the president is prepared to go it alone.

It's usually a mistake to assume that a world leader is off his head. Even Boris Yeltsin, though drunk in charge of Russia, had a sense of strategy. Another chump, Ronald Reagan, seemed barely to know in detail what he was doing at any given time, and once, talking to Gorbachev in Reykjavik, came close to handing over America's nuclear store. But Reagan wasn't mad. He clung to a big idea about how to make the world a better place. George Bush is no exception to this rule. His first solemn shot at bringing peace to the Middle East is so one-sided, so absurdly unreal, that it's tempting to dismiss it as the casual folly of a president who can't be serious. But presidents need the benefit of the doubt about their seriousness. We owe them, and ourselves, nothing less.

Certainly Bush proves he's nowhere near being a multilateralist. The long-promised speech was the result of little consultation. The explicit demand that Arafat must go was added to it only hours before delivery. According to the New York Times this grew out of an intelligence report - can it really have been new? - that Arafat had financed yet another suicide bomber. That was enough to rouse Bush's gut instinct to side with his Pentagon people against Colin Powell, and thus impose the undeliverable demand that, before anything else happens, the Palestinians must withdraw their mandate from the only leader to whom they've ever given one.

Some allies have tried to make the best of it. Mubarak of Egypt denied the speech meant anything about ousting Arafat. The Jordanian foreign minister said it marked the beginning of the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The steer from the British Foreign Office was that Bush's approach would never work, but Tony Blair was on hand, as ever, to smooth the waters and explain the inner meaning of what his friend was really trying to say, which was, of course, only helpful and constructive.

If you were an optimist, like Blair, you might also say the speech, however blatant its bias, constituted at last a serious US intervention. Europeans and others have been urging for months that unless Washington re-committed to a process there would be no advance from the suicides and the settlements. Surely Monday's initiative is proof that Bush has got the message? How have Europeans got the nerve to complain? This is, after all, only a beginning. The text that could have been written by Ariel Sharon will be followed, if the Palestinians respond, by equivalent pressure on Israel.

There may be something in this. The European attitude to US intervention almost anywhere has often been paradoxical, not to say contradictory. But another rationale for Bush's sanity is more convincing. This is that he cares more about the war against terror than bringing a just peace to Israel/Palestine. That's why he was prepared to be impossibly one-sided. Palestinian terrorism stimulates his gut instinct more thrillingly than the elusive obscurities of a Middle East peace. It links to the global campaign to which he has dedicated both this presidency and many that might follow. The anti-terror priority is set to be the sine qua non of every aspect of security and foreign policy for the indefinite future.

Read through Bush's recent speeches and this becomes ever clearer. He and his intimates, especially Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, return to it again and again. Nearly 10 months on from 9/11, that's something most Europeans still do not understand. For Americans, in the political class and a long way beyond, the war against terrorism is directed at an enemy that looms as large as the Soviet Union once did, and has made itself felt much closer to home. Everything, including Israel/Palestine, is subordinate to that. Telling Yasser Arafat he must go, and laying his terroristic guilt ineradicably on the line, far exceeds in relevance the pettifogging democratic details about how his departure will happen and who might replace him.

Europeans, by contrast, still live in the old world where change occurs, nominally at any rate, through more familiar modalities. Political process rather than licensed Israeli militarism continues, in this quarter, to be the way forward in the Middle East; and here Mr Blair, for all his bridge-building reassurance, has to be a European not an American. Europeans have not absorbed The Shield of Achilles, the key text by Philip Bobbitt, a security intellectual and former Clinton intelligence chief, which describes at prescient length the new dealing-room of international relations and the brutal terms of trade that America will dictate there as a matter of survival.

In this room, the keynote is not legality but pre-emption. The right to take pre-emptive action, before the stateless enemy strikes first, is a declared Bush doctrine swiftly making its way into axiomatic custom and practice if not law. In the case of Iraq, the prime object of such pre-emptive doctrine-building, the legalities would doubtless be observed. Saddam Hussein will one day be told to comply with the UN resolutions requiring him to let in inspectors to prove he has no arsenals of mass destruction. But failing that, intervention is being prepared. Europeans find this hard to believe. The case against it seems on regional, diplomatic and many practical counts so obvious. But the other day the Democratic leadership in Congress wheeled into line, offering support for whatever the president chooses to do in his avowed and formal policy of removing the Saddam regime.

That illustrates the gulf between us. There's hardly an American front-line politician who has come out against attacking Saddam, and hardly a European who favours it. This grows from differences of history, of culture and even - to American incomprehension - of geography. Those closest to the seat of terror evidently do not understand the threat it poses to them. They are ignorantly sanguine. They do not want to know. Can't they see, says an exasperated Bush, that terror is the global enemy, and Palestinian terror, as the most conspicuous daily version of it, the terror that must be eradicated before anyone talks about Middle East peace?

Europeans, for their part, think Bush exaggerates. And even if he doesn't, they think his answers, whether in Israel or Iraq, are counter-productive. That may be so. But there's one thing he is not. He is not crazy but, by his own lights, quite rational. He and his people have their eye on a purpose. The danger they run is that they think they can achieve it, if necessary, alone. They're the most grudging of multilateralists, the stance that most distinguishes them from Clinton. But they take a harsher, more apocalyptic view than Europeans, including the British, of the possibilities ahead, and no one can say for sure they are mistaken. That view does not allow for equal treatment as between Israel and unreformed Palestine. In reality it does not give prime place to a Middle East peace process at all. Instead it says that the prime enemy is terror - and it doesn't much care whether anyone else agrees.