WASHINGTON: If you commit acts of terror or subsidize such acts, or if you harbor terrorists, you are our enemy, and we will treat you as an enemy. That’s the Bush doctrine. Israel was plainly acting in conformity with the doctrine when it began its military campaign to “uproot” terrorists from the West Bank. Yet one cannot have followed the news of this campaign without a growing conviction that something went terribly wrong.

The makers of the Bush doctrine invented a simple test, but one that does not lend itself to ready application. How do you gauge the loyalties of people who live in the neighborhood of terrorists?

The doctrine says that only evil people could fail to resist the agents of evil. It neglects the possibility that some may fail to resist because they’re afraid, or because they are confused by the presence of more than one evil.

Suppose there is a Palestinian today in one of the camps. He lives in the shadow of a well-known faction that is taken to represent him. He has reason to fear the members of this faction. Against them, he sees nothing but an invading army reducing to rubble the entire structure of his society.

How shall he speak and act? If, in the circumstances, he neither says nor does anything about terrorism, is he to be accounted morally identical with the most savage of the terrorists?

The deficiency of the Bush doctrine shows most starkly in its language. It relies, for every calibration of judgment, on just one word: evil. The most fortunate possible American-brokered peace in the Middle East will be squandered if it does not bring a chastening recognition.

The armies of Ariel Sharon on the West Bank put into crushing practice what the United States should never have preached. There are places where you cannot act on the Bush doctrine without drawing up an indictment of a whole people - visible enemies, conjectural enemies, dull or watchful neighbors of enemies, and a great many indecipherable others.

The US believed for a little while, and may have found comfort in believing, that the events of Sept 11 had simplified the moral world. But the moral world never was simple. An awareness of its complexity, we are uneasily starting to learn, is a necessity of leadership now that the United States and its allies are compelled to use violence in a cause of self-defense. The fate of many nations depends on US ability to declare no more enemies than it has and to create no more enemies than it must. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.