Spencer Platt / Getty

The president doesn't allow facts to get in the way of his faith about Saddam's evil nature.

eorge W. Bush may not have been totally serious when he declared his support for enforcement of U.N. resolutions at the opening of the General Assembly, one day after the anniversary of 9/11. But only his advisers could have been surprised when the first test of his resolve came from Ariel Sharon’s rampage through Ramallah a week later.

Even the United States called Israeli actions “unhelpful,” which is the strongest criticism Washington permits nowadays. But when the Europeans put forward Security Council Resolution 1435 on September 24, calling on the Israelis to withdraw, Washington had no choice but to go along. A U.S. veto would have had serious consequences for any upcoming U.S.-backed resolutions on Iraq.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry immediately showed how Sharon can make life difficult for his American allies, issuing a statement that the resolution was positive in calling for an end to Palestinian terrorist attacks and for putting terrorists on trial, but saying that Israel had “difficulty in accepting” the U.N. demand for an immediate end to its military action.

Bush had temporarily deflated many of his international critics with his speech before the General Assembly. However, things began to fall apart at a September 14 press conference to announce the result of a meeting of the “quartet”—the United Nations, European Union, United States and Russia—supposedly to organize an international peace conference on the Israel-Palestinian issue. The other parties met stubborn American resistance to any attempt to advance the conference—even though it was Bush’s idea to begin with.

Palestinian Ambassador Nasser El Kidwa charges that America is hypocritical for threatening to invade Baghdad for violating U.N. resolutions, while ignoring “three decades of Israeli defiance.” He counts 28 Security Council resolutions against Israeli behavior in the Occupied Territories—and suggests that 27 others would have passed if the United States had not vetoed them.

Many administrations have denied any “linkage” between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the standoff with Iraq. But even when the president’s father went to war to chase Iraq out of Kuwait, he promised the world in general, and the Arabs in particular, that the U.S. would push hard on the Middle East peace process immediately afterward. “And he met the promise and began the process with the Madrid peace talks,” says Richard Murphy, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the Reagan administration.

Contrasting that with what he calls the current administration’s “obsession with Iraq,” Murphy says the White House is missing the obvious. “They do not buy the argument that they could make it easier for themselves by paying attention to the Israel-Palestine confrontation to buy more space and maneuverability with the Arab world. They just resist it. I can’t explain it.”

t’s not as if the strategic importance of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a secret. Everyone from close allies like Tony Blair to U.N. head Kofi Annan to the Saudis have been telling Bush that he needs to advance the peace process—not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it will help him oust Saddam Hussein without plunging the region into chaos.

While the White House talk about democracy in Iraq sounds good, the administration’s friends in Israel may be much less keen. A democratically elected government in Baghdad is going to be every bit as pro-Palestinian as Hussein’s regime, if not more so. And few Arab leaders are willing to risk popular anger by helping Washington send some planes to bomb Iraq for defying U.N. resolutions at the same time the United States gives other planes to Israel to strafe Palestinian towns in defiance of U.N. resolutions.

Yet the president is not taking the obvious diplomatic steps, such as reassuring the allies he needs to mount a successful military operation. This baffles even many of the president’s supporters. “Being obsessed may be why he’s not interested in the tactics of building support with Iran or with the Saudis,” Murphy suggests. “He’s done a little bit to smooth them over—but they are in a pretty fussed state.”

The administration’s potential allies remain unconvinced that Saddam Hussein had anything at all to do with September 11, and most of them are worried about the long-term consequences of an attack and the Bush administration’s lack of forward planning. “There is no sign of planning,” says Jim Hoge of the Council on Foreign Relations. “If there were, I would think they would be alerting us to it, because it would be reassuring.” Hoge suggests that the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq is “diverting attention and energy particularly at the top, where it is so important, from two much more serious problems [like] the war against al-Qaeda.”

Outsiders assume, when it comes to foreign policy, that there is a seesaw between the administration’s rational element, led by Colin Powell, and the hawks. However, says Judith Kipper of the Brookings Institution, “There’s no doubt about who’s in charge. Bush is closer to the Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz point of view.” The hawks, all uncritical supporters of Israel’s Likud Party, tend “to see the Arab-Israeli conflict, in fact most foreign policy, through the prism of the war on terrorism.”

This view meshes neatly with the president’s worldview. Richard Murphy characterizes the president as “a believer. This is a man who’s on a mission. He is very evangelical about terrorism: He’s got to root out evil.”

And the president doesn’t let facts get in the way of his faith. “I wonder if in his mind there really is a very strong linkage between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” Murphy muses. “Evil is there, and evil must be uprooted, and the fixation on terrorism has now encompassed Saddam Hussein—who ‘tried to kill my father,’ as a footnote. He seems to think the facts are there about the linkage—if only we could discover them. In his mind they are joined up. He does not speak as a man with any doubts.”

Is the president’s policy based on a series of deeply felt but disconnected prejudices in which Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Yasser Arafat and Iran metamorphose into one single evil entity, against which Ariel Sharon and the United States have joined together to do the Lord’s work? “This is a very, very ideological administration,” Kipper says, “more than conservative, and the president does have a sense of priorities that sees everything in black and white.”