No exit? Violence in the Middle East.

The present American and Israeli attempts to put an end to terrorism continue to empower it in a manner unforeseen by Washington and Jerusalem. President George W. Bush has called this the "long war." It may prove much shorter, and end more unpleasantly, than he has allowed himself to imagine.

Bush has said withdrawal from Iraq will be decided by some future president. He has nearly two and a half years left in the White House, and he will almost certainly witness the terminal failure of the U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, so insouciantly begun.

Israel's disastrous notion that it can now settle once and for all with both Hamas and Hezbollah has mired the Israel Defense Force in two wars without exit, fighting two nonstate movements with little to lose and a commitment to suicidal sacrifice. How Israel and the United States could have done this to themselves, with consequences so foreseeable (and foreseen, and pompously ignored), will eventually be explicated by the historians' autopsies.

Not that there appear to remain any great secrets. The one important unknown is whether all of this was actually cooperatively planned from the beginning, with the idea of reducing to satellite status or powerlessness the two Arab states with serious pretensions to independence, Iraq and Syria, plus Iran, the other major regional power, in order to produce a "new" (the adjective is one to which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has returned) and tamed Middle East, dominated by the United States in much the way that Iraq and the Shah's Iran were dominated in the early 1950s.

Instead the score for the moment is three states in rubble and social ruin: Palestine, Iraq, and now Lebanon; and two candidates for such treatment: Syria and Iran, leaving Jordan an intimidated bystander (and across the Nile, Egypt, fortunately uninvolved, for the moment). Or did all of this just happen, through negligence and arrogance in the case of Iraq, and through stunning overconfidence in the Hezbollah-Lebanon case?

There is no evident way out of any of the disasters thus produced. The idea of a truce followed by an international force for Lebanon, talked about in Rome (so as to have something to talk about), presumes acceptance by both sides along with voluntary Hezbollah disarmament--the latter inconceivable.

At what point might Israel, in military check, look for an escape in escalation? An attack on Iran would certainly take people's attention off Lebanon, Iraq, and Gaza. Both Bush and Ehud Olmert have demonstrated commitment to the theory that if you can only get to the top enemy and "kill" him, it will turn off all of what Bush describes as "this shit."

The crisis now is a very serious matter for Israel. In the United States, the public is largely unaware of what is going on (or rejoices, in the confidence that Armageddon is upon us, and the Christian elect about to be snatched away to paradise).

Israel was founded as the response to one formidable attempt to murder the Jewish nation, and has remained haunted during the years since that the attempt will be made again. Its own ruthlessness in trying to forestall or preempt that danger has come to exactly the opposite outcome: it has contributed to inspiring a comprehensively armed, widely supported, well-trained, and militarily competent international movement determined to put an end to Israel.

That ambition will certainly not be achieved, but a Hezbollah and Hamas alliance, if it succeeds in fighting Israeli forces to a standstill, can keep Israel under siege, as the northern towns and cities of Israel now have found out, and can permanently undermine Israel's internal security (and confidence), where the United States can give it no help.

Only a wide international diplomatic intervention, of the kind Israeli governments and U.S. conservatives have in the past always scorned, offers some possibility of halting these dismaying and extremely dangerous developments.

This route would require negotiations with the Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian leaderships, and the Lebanese, Iranian, Syrian, Saudi, and probably Egyptian, Pakistani, and Afghan governments. It would obviously have to involve Russia and the European powers as well as the United States and Israel. Its main purpose would be a comprehensive settlement of the Palestinian issue, the incandescent core of the conflict, with Israel's retreat to its 1967 borders, and arrangements concerning Jerusalem and all the refugees of a kind that have endlessly been discussed, and about which there is little serious controversy. These steps would be the foundation for new international guarantees for Israel.

This solution of course seems unthinkable, and would be received as such in Washington and Jerusalem. The alternatives now include some that you don't want to think about, and that would be inconceivably worse for Israelis--and everyone else.

[c] 2006 by Tribune Media Services International