BEFORE embarking upon his four-nation European tour, President Musharraf made yet another offer to Israel to help find a solution to the tangled issues of the Middle East. These offers appear to be rather sudden and unpremeditated and, in the absence of credible evidence of a systematic formulation of Pakistan’s conceivable role in the crisis, are widely interpreted as part of some complex manoeuvre to retain the support of the United States for his own absolute power.

Since the tour was to terminate in Turkey, Islamabad had its share of rumours of coming clandestine contacts with Israel. Unfair as they might have been, the offer and Israel’s scotching of it did pose the question why Pakistan’s diplomacy gets frequently mired in such unproductive ventures.

It is a time of change in the region. The architects of the “axis of evil” are having second thoughts about decisions taken in moments of supreme arrogance. Derision shown by the Bush camp for the visit to Damascus of an important congressional delegation only a few weeks ago has given way to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice meeting the Syrian foreign minister on the sidelines of the meeting on Iraq in Sharm El Sheikh.

The Iranian foreign minister visited the UAE just before joining that meeting as a significant player. The recent American campaign to build up an Arab-Islamic coalition against Iran is taking second place to the need for having Iran on board for the “stabilisation” of Iraq. Israel itself is rocked by a series of grave scandals involving the head of state and the prime minister.

The backlash of failure in Lebanon last July/August may lead to a regime change in Tel Aviv this summer. What singular contribution the Pakistani leadership can make by soliciting an invitation to that turbulent capital is incomprehensible. Israel is by far the worst violator of international law but it is, internally, a functioning democracy. Lebanon is being investigated and responsibility boldly determined.

The Israeli government appointed a committee under 81-year old judge, Eliyahu Winograd, on September 17, 2006, “to look into the preparation and conduct of the political and security levels concerning all the dimensions of the Northern Campaign which started on July 12 (2006).” It was, by any criteria, a war of choice and its failure created a severe wave of insecurity and despondency in Israel.

Issues of war and peace in the Middle East have a global import and, therefore, the Winograd report attracts attention as an index of Israeli introspection. The report claims that Israel is a learning society.

In the Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq, a similar assumption of rational decision-making was implicitly invoked. Many of Israel’s own analysts will want to go beyond the process of decision-making and a quantitative evaluation of the preparedness of armed forces in this particular campaign and seek an answer to Israel’s heavy dependence on war as the main instrument of state policy.The report finds in unequivocal terms that Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert and Defence Minister Amir Peretz had embarked upon the war “without examination of alternatives and without an understanding of the political significance and strategic ramifications.”

It accepts that “the complexity of the Lebanon scene is basically outside Israel’s control”. In Iraq’s context, George Tenet has revealed that “there was never a serious debate that I know of within the (American) administration about the imminence of the new Iraqi threat.”

In the United States and the United Kingdom, information and intelligence were manipulated to secure executive and congressional approval for the Iraq war. The Winograd report notes that support within the Israeli cabinet was gained through “ambiguity”.

Israeli commentators have written about the thick fog of lies, half truths and spins surrounding the invasion which was “without a moral compass, without a political agenda and without a grip on reality.”

The crux of regional problems today is that through semantic reductionism millions of people have been arbitrarily and unilaterally cast into the role of an enduring enemy. It has made a vast, diverse and complex region prone to resistance movements which are becoming indiscriminate in their tactics and targets. This conflict will not end till the world learns once again that unilateral security doctrines that ignore the aspirations of other people are no basis for international policy and no substitute for international law.

The Winograd report could not have said that Ehud Olmert and his associates were driven by the dark demons of hidden prejudice and hatred.

While ordering massive destruction of Lebanon, Pertez had, however, claimed that Hasan Nasrallah would never forget his name. There was also the racist myth of the invincibility of Israeli armed forces in battles with Arabs. It was the shattering of this illusion that led to the demands for an investigation into Israel’s failures.

This report, too, would fail if it ends up only in an evaluation by the general staff. Even cosmetic political changes will not be enough to convince the world that Israel is a learning society. Ehud Olmert may survive only in the short run.

On the horizon are the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, a Mossad prodigy, Israel’s most beguiling politician Shimon Peres — unless the Labour Party can produce a surprise, and even Likud’s diehard colonist, Binyamin Netanyahu. The 200,000 Israelis who demonstrated against Olmert clinging to office, however, should aim at a government that can address the causes of the conflict.The best course is the one that the Arabs have shown again. Israel has to overcome its morbid fear of peace. For decades on end, the powerful Israeli lobby in the United States has helped Israel perpetuate the canard that the Arab world was first and last a rejectionist monolith committed to the destruction of Israel.

The Saudi plan of 2002 on which the present Arab initiative rests is an important milestone on the journey to a comprehensive settlement and not its beginning. Earlier too, moderate Arab leaders had launched ideas for peace provided Israel renounced expansionism, colonisation and racism.

Then there was the Oslo peace process itself. In the Clinton-led parleys at Camp David in 2000, Yasser Arafat went as far as he could; the rest depended on Israel’s leader Ehud Barak making a decisive break with the unsavoury practice of colonisation.

An honest analysis would show that for a long time, it is Israel that has destroyed peace moves. When Jimmy Carter reached more or less the same conclusion, the Israeli lobby went into near hysteria.

In a remarkable essay published in the New York Review of Books, authors Hussein Agha and Robert Malley observe that “the dream of Greater Israel has expired, but so has Oslo’s vision of peaceful reconciliation with the Palestinians”. They pointed to a “scarcity of charismatic leaders” in Israel and to a new generation of run-of the-mill politicians who are in themselves a “symptom of a system in crises”.

If this be the case, the full text of the report of the Winograd Committee should analyse the deeper malaise of Israel. It is important for Israel; it is no less important for world peace because this “system”, based though it is on mediocrity, corruption, land hunger and apartheid, continues to influence decisions of the United States disproportionately.

Furthermore, peace-making all over the world benefits from men of vision but cannot wait for them. The world order has to be a self-executing mechanism for peace and development; a case in point is the present India-Pakistan dialogue which is inching forward without personalities in the heroic mould.

The Palestinians have now a coalition that can deliver. The alternative will almost certainly be another upheaval, another Intifada which may have unsuspected dimensions of violence. Since the landmark electoral victory of Hamas, the Palestinian polity had remained split. Israel tried hard to widen the split to convince the world that there was no interlocutor, no peace partner, on the Palestinian side.

The Riyadh summit created a working unity which Israel remains reluctant to convert into an opportunity. It is nothing short of tragic that the international community allows the fiction that talks could be held only with President Mahmoud Abbas. By doing so, it is endangering internal coherence in the Arab approach to a possible peace process.

The Winograd report is yet another moment for the international community to remind Israel that its ultimate security would be ensured by an early implementation of the Arab plan for a comprehensive settlement which envisages the end of Israeli occupation of Arab lands, the establishment of a sovereign and viable Palestinian state and the recognition of Israel by the Arab states, which in turn would be followed by recognition which several other states are holding back because of Israel’s persistent disregard of international law.Amongst them is Pakistan which has no theological reasons to deny such recognition but no compulsion to dispense with the minimum criteria needed for it either. The Pakistan foreign office seeks some elusive validation for the current preoccupation with Israel from past covert contacts.

If its mandarins derive some secret pleasure from similar games of hide-and-seek, the people of Pakistan could live with them. But for full normalisation of relations, they should tell their powerful interlocutors in Washington that Israel should have finite borders like any other state, that it should vacate territories occupied now for full 40 years, that it should engage in serious negotiations on the basis of the Arab initiative and that it must accept a settlement that respects Muslim and Christian rights in Jerusalem.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

MASS approval for the White House after 9/11 — a “rally around the flag” reflex which George Bush slyly exploited to invade Iraq — is now long gone.

While a hard-core minority dutifully still swallows any silly story the Bush administration spins, the other two-thirds of wised-up Americans seem just as inclined to credit any dubious tale purporting to explain the Republicans’ roughshod reign.

The more far-fetched these tall tales are, the more credible they seem to angry beholders who are only beginning to grasp how massive is the damage that Bush’s buccaneering reactionaries have wreaked on America at home as well as abroad. Everything has worked out so well for the insatiable US rightwing — manic militarism overseas and upward redistribution of wealth at home — that it couldn’t be any better for them if it had all been meticulously planned.

That much is true. One can hardly deny that the Bush White House had everything to gain from a successful major terrorist attack and, therefore, had very little incentive to stop one. Testimony from aggrieved former insiders indicates that before 9/11, terrorism was distressingly low on the White House priority list. Still, one leaps headlong into the twilight zone when one assumes deliberate government collusion. Yet recent polls found as many as 42 per cent of Americans suspect that the US government covered up its own involvement or, at least, negligence in the 9/11 events.

One in five Americans even imagine that it is plausible that the twin towers in Manhattan collapsed as the result of controlled demolitions of pre-set explosives, that a cruise missile hit the Pentagon and that Flight 93 (which crashed after a struggle between passengers and hijackers) was either shot down or landed safely and the bemused passengers are being held incommunicado to this day.

An Internet film, entitled ‘Loose Change’, garnered enormous international attention recently for promoting the febrile notion that 9/11 was the outcome of wicked government complicity. Websites, books and blogs, of course, have nominated many other heinous candidates as culprits: ranging from rogue CIA agents to Texas oilmen to — who knows? — a reincarnated Lee Harvey Oswald.

Some dismayed leftwing critics, including Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn, scoff at these accusations, which usually are not tempered by hard facts, a look at alternative explanations, or a smidgen of common sense. A sophisticated social system rigged to favour the rich does not need to resort to crude conspiracies, or at least not often.

Perhaps the greatest problem with conspiracy theories is that the most preposterous ones are more than matched by proven conspiracies that ruthless elites dreamed up in the past. Was President John F. Kennedy killed by a conspiracy? It’s hard to prove one way or the other. Seven in 10 Americans think he was, and that was long before Oliver Stone made a movie about the assassination.

Did his successor President Lyndon Johnson knowingly use the fictitious Gulf of Tonkin incidents to trigger the Vietnam war in 1964? In fact, he did. We have, for example, the account of former Admiral James Stockwell, a navy pilot flying overhead at the time, who said that he spotted no attack and that this news was radioed to Washington in plenty of time to head off a rash action.

Johnson nonetheless used this non-existent attack on US warships as a pretext to escalate US military involvement to rescue the teetering corrupt South Vietnam regime. That was a conspiracy. (Poor Stockwell was shot down a year later and spent seven years in harsh North Vietnamese captivity during a war he knew was utterly unjustified.)

Nixon’s antics a decade later to subvert the US Constitution also met all the criteria for a robust conspiracy, which is why he was forced to resign. Nixon, if one peruses White House tape transcripts, endlessly fretted about enemy conspirators he felt were surrounding him, partly because all he did himself was connive and conspire against others. In that fraught era, the wry bumper sticker wisdom in America was, if you aren’t paranoid you don’t know what’s going on.

The extent of intelligence agency legerdemain exposed by congressional committees after Watergate in the mid-1970s left even the wildest radicals slack-jawed with astonishment. A coup attempt is, by definition, a conspiracy and the US had a hand in many of them, from Guatemala to Iran to Greece and beyond.

In the mid-1980s the Reagan Iran-Contra affair — which set up a parallel executive structure to evade US law — was termed by the prosecutor, a “conspiracy” in the full melodramatic sense of the word.

It remains a profoundly sad fact, nevertheless, that there is no situation so bad that someone won’t find a way to profit from it through luck, circumstance or acting the vulture. Many fortunes have been wrung out of holocausts and natural disasters. The fact of prospering doesn’t make a profiteer responsible, and these accusations usually work to divert attention from truly seamy activities (such as the profiteering itself).

One, therefore, is tempted to go conspiracy theorists one better by speculating that the latest batch of theories were planted by immensely clever right-wingers so as to discourage investigations of authentic skulduggery later on.

If anyone out there should become involved in a malevolent plot that is in danger of exposure the smartest thing to do is portray the opponents as conspiracy theorists. Once a supposedly crazy charge is discredited, any interest in further inquiry evaporates. It works like a charm.

For example, an American news investigation a few years ago into Bush’s National Guard record was foiled because of its (foolish) reliance on a few dubious photocopied documents. No further probe into Bush’s genuinely disgraceful military record occurred. He was safe.

Critics in the US may well ask why the hefty tome of the misnamed Patriot Act (over 300 pages) was already poised on a shelf awaiting a chance — such as the one the 9/11 hijackers thoughtfully provided — for approval so as to stifle civil liberties and help immunise the Bush administration from oversight.

This sort of thing wasn’t a conspiracy at all, it was business as usual. Hired academic guns in plush think-tanks get paid handsome salaries to think out scenarios to which to affix an agenda promoting the wishes of their corporate funders. So this natural disaster or that political mishap accordingly will be interpreted to suit the peddling of whatever point of view they endorse.

Again, hatching plots to exploit a traumatic event is not the same as causing the event. All conspiracy theories thrive on working backward from the question “who benefits?” It would be stupid not to ask at all, so long as you understand that the answer does not necessarily lead you to the culprits. On the other hand, it’s bitterly amusing to watch journalists and academics, whose career prospects are based on the whims of tiny potent cliques, readily denounce others for propagating conspiracy theories.

Despite all these caveats, is there any misdeed one could put past the Bush regime? They lie about anything and, as anyone off their payroll plainly sees, truth only is brought to bear when it happens to coincide with their interests. They even lie when they don’t have to lie, as in the case of the current flap over their motives for firing of eight US attorneys (for not acting enthusiastically enough to serve partisan Republican goals, such as pushing likely Democratic voters off the registers).

Bush’s crew diligently spent the last six years creating the secretive conditions in which conspiracies, and rumours of conspiracies, thrive. Every decision they can manage to take outside the view of the public is indeed taken there.

When you have a group of arrogant, over-privileged out-of-touch people with a ruling caste mentality in charge of, and insinuating themselves into, every branch of government, and controlling mainstream media, who needs conspiracy theories? One no longer can tell the difference between a crazy clandestine scheme and a nutty policy implemented out in the open. The American people can’t help but be confused. Maybe Bush is a clever man, after all.

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, commander of US forces in Iraq, has promised to return to Washington in September to report on the outcome of his surge strategy. I hope he will say that sectarian killings, bombings and US casualties are all down.

But even if he does, I doubt he can offer a clear, plausible date by which the Iraqi army and police will be able to stand on their own without massive US support. So regardless of what he concludes, we seem destined to enter the presidential election season with no credible date for a US exit from Iraq.

In more than four years of war, there have been countless turning points at which we were led to expect decisive political progress in Iraq: the capture of Saddam Hussein (December 2003); the turnover of sovereignty (June 2004); elections for the constituent assembly (January 2005); elections to ratify the constitution (August 2005); and elections for the Iraqi parliament (December 2005).The surge was the last military card we had to play, and now our bluff will soon be called.

In my view, there is only one condition under which we can withdraw from Iraq with our core interests fully protected and with a reasonable claim that our mission was accomplished, and that is when strong Iraqi military and police forces emerge that can operate independently of US forces and prevent a takeover of the country by either Al Qaeda in Iraq, resurgent Baathists or Muqtada Sadr's Shia militia.

Let's not kid ourselves. The situation today is in some ways much worse than the one faced by President Nixon in Vietnam 35 years ago. At that time, South Vietnam had an army with a paper strength of one million men that, despite its problems, was able to hold on for three years after the US withdrew its ground forces. The South Vietnamese army provided Henry Kissinger with his "decent interval" between the US withdrawal and South Vietnam's collapse. (Indeed, Kissinger argues with some plausibility that the South Vietnamese military could have hung on indefinitely if Congress hadn't cut off funds for US air support.)

Nothing like that exists or will exist in Iraq for the politically meaningful future. As of November, the Pentagon claimed it had trained 322,000 Iraqi military and police, but it admitted that the actual number on hand was much lower because of desertions and attrition. Iraqi forces continue to suffer huge shortfalls in armour, weaponry, logistics and communications, and it is unclear how they would fare without American hand-holding.

Serious training of Iraqi forces started late and never received adequate funding or top-level attention, despite the fact that Petraeus was at the helm of the training effort in recent years. The South Vietnamese army may have been nothing to write home about in 1972, but we are extremely unlikely to have an Iraqi equivalent by the end of 2007.

What all this means is that even if the surge, by September, is reducing violence in Iraq to some degree, it will not guarantee a "safe" exit strategy for US forces.

But here's the problem: Do we have any other choice than to withdraw? We could stick it out, and I suspect that we could avoid losing in Iraq for another five, 10 or 15 years, as long as we're willing to maintain high troop levels, continue to spend large amounts of money and suffer more casualties. But even the most conservative Republican candidates are unlikely to campaign on a platform of staying in Iraq indefinitely when the primary season starts next winter and the war enters its sixth year.

This means that we will have to engage in a very different debate from the one we have been having up to now, a debate not about surging and not about withdrawing with our goals accomplished but about how to draw down our forces in a way that minimizes the costs that will inevitably accompany our loss of control.

This is a difficult situation, but it is necessary. The questions we need to address include: How do we reconfigure our forces to provide advice, training and support, rather than engaging in combat? How we can withdraw safely without a serious Iraqi army to cover our retreat? How will we dismantle enormous bases like Camp Liberty or Camp Victory and protect the diminishing numbers of US troops in the country? Do we trust the Iraqi military and police sufficiently to turn over our equipment to them? How do we protect the lives of those who collaborated with us? The images of South Vietnamese allies hanging to the skid pads of US helicopters departing Saigon should be burned into our memories.

And what if the weak Iraqi government we leave behind falls or other political crises occur when we have fewer US troops to respond? Can we work with proxies, resources or arms supplies to shape outcomes?

As we draw down, the civil war is likely to intensify, and the focus of our efforts will have to shift to containing it within Iraq's borders. Preventing intervention by outside forces will become an even more urgent priority.

On the other hand, it is not necessarily the case that the situation will spiral out of control. Although the situation is graver in some ways than Vietnam, in others it is better. Although we have no equivalent to a South Vietnamese army, the enemy has no equivalent of the North Vietnamese army. It is hard to see any of the small factions struggling for power in different parts of the country emerging as a dominant force throughout Iraq.

The presence of US forces has itself been a spur to terrorist recruitment, but as it becomes clear that we are on our way out, it will be easier for Iraqi nationalists to turn against the foreign jihadists (as they have already begun to do in Al Anbar province).

An intensifying civil war will be a tragedy for Iraq, but it is not the worst outcome from a US standpoint to have a number of bitterly anti-American groups duking it out among themselves. Civil wars eventually come to an end when one side wins (unlikely, in this case) or when the parties exhaust themselves and drop their maximalist aims.

The war is not lost, despite the assertions to that effect by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. But victory is not around the corner either. We need to start figuring out how to leave this zombie-like zone now. — Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service

The writer is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, US.