Robert Fisk: Bloody reality bears no relation to the delusions of this President

As a bomb explodes in Beirut and Israel kills 19 in Gaza
raids, Bush takes his Middle East peace mission to Saudi
Arabia (and signs off $20bn weapons deal with repressive
regime)

Twixt silken sheets – in a bedroom whose walls are
also covered in silk – and in the very palace of King Abdullah
of Saudi Arabia, President George Bush awakes this morning
to confront a Middle East which bears no relation to the policies
of his administration nor the warning which he has
been relaying constantly to the kings and emirs
and oligarchs of the Gulf: that Iran rather than Israel
is their enemy.

The President sat chummily beside the all-too-friendly
monarch yesterday, enthroned in what looked suspiciously
like the kind of casual blue cardigan he might wear on his
own Texan ranch; he had even received a jangling gold
"Order of Merit" – it looked a bit like the Lord Chancellor's
chain, though it was not disclosed which particular merit
earned Mr Bush this kingly reward. Could it be the
hypocritical merit of supplying yet more billions worth
of weapons to the Kingdom, to be used against the
Saudi regime's imaginary enemies.

It was illusory, of course, like all the words that
the Arabs have heard from the Americans these past seven
days, ever since the fading President began his tourist jaunt
around the Middle East.

You wouldn't think it though, watching this preposterous man,
prancing around arm-in-arm with the King, in what was
presumably meant to be a dance, wielding a massive
glinting curved Saudi sword, a latter-day Saladin, who
would have appalled the Kurdish leader who once
destroyed the Crusaders in what is now referred to
by Mr Bush as "the disputed West Bank".

Is this how lame-duck American presidents are
supposed to behave? Certainly, the denizens of
the Middle East, watching this outrageous performance
will all be asking this question. Ever since the 1979 Iranian
revolution, a Muslim Cold War has been raging within the
Middle East – but is this how Mr Bush thinks one should
fight for the soul of Islam?

Already by dusk last night, the US President's
world was exploding in Beirut when a massive
car bomb blew up next to a 4x4 vehicle carrying
American embassy employees, killing four Lebanese
and apparently badly wounding a US embassy driver.
And while Mr Bush was relaxing in the Saudi royal
ranch at Al Janadriyah, Israeli forces killed 19 Palestinians
in the Gaza Strip, most of them members of Hamas, one of
them the son of Mahmoud Zahar, a leader of the movement.
He later claimed that Israel would not have staged the attack
if it had not been encouraged to do so by George Bush.

The difference between reality and the dream-world
of the US government could hardly have been more savagely
illustrated. After promising the Palestinians a "sovereign and
contiguous state" before the end of the year, and pledging
"security" to Israel – though not, Arabs noted, security for
"Palestine" – Mr Bush had arrived in the Gulf to terrify the
kings and oligarchs of the oil-soaked kingdoms of the
danger of Iranian aggression. As usual, he came armed
with the usual American offers of vast weapons sales to
protect these largely undemocratic and police state
regimes from potentially the most powerful nation in
the "axis of evil".

It was a potent – even weird – example of the US
President's perambulation of the Arab Middle East,
a return to the "policy by fear" which Washington has
regularly visited upon Gulf leaders. He agreed to furnish the
Saudis with at least £41m of arms, a figure set to rise to
more than £10bn in weaponry to the Gulf potentates
under a deal announced last year – all of which is
supposed to shield them from the supposed territorial
ambitions of Iran's crackpot President, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. As usual, Washington promised the
Israelis that their "qualitative edge" in advanced weapons
would be maintained, just in case the Saudis – who have
never gone to war with anyone except Saddam Hussein
after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait – decided to launch a
suicidal attack on America's only real ally in the Middle East.

This, of course, was not how the whole shooting
match was presented to the Arabs. Mr Bush could
be seen ostentatiously kissing the cheeks of King
Abdullah and holding hands with the autocratic monarch
whose Wahhabi Muslim state had only recently showed
its "mercy" to a Saudi woman who was charged with
adultery after being raped seven times in the desert
outside Riyadh. The Saudis, needless to say, are well
aware that Mr Bush's reign is ending amid chaos in
Pakistan, a disastrous guerrilla war against Western
forces in Afghanistan, fierce fighting in Gaza, near
civil war in Lebanon and the hell-disaster of Iraq.

The bomb in Beirut, just before five in the evening, must
still have come as a rude shock to the luxuriating
President who has such close ties with the Saudi regime –
despite the fact that the majority of hijackers in the crimes
against humanity of 11 September 2001 came from the
kingdom – that he allowed its junior princes to fly home
from the United States immediately after the attacks.
Two trips to Mr Bush's Texas ranch by King Abdullah
was apparently enough to earn the US President a night
in the Saudi king's palace-farm, surrounded by groomed
lawns and grassy hills.

Heard across many miles of the Lebanese capital,
the bomb devastated buildings in a narrow street in
the east of the city through which the vehicle was
passing, just as the US ambassador – on a different
route into the city – was travelling to a central Beirut
hotel reception before leaving for Washington. A
State Department spokesman, however, insisted
that no US citizens had been hurt. The American SUV
had taken an obscure laneway close to the Karantina
bridge to travel north of Beirut along the bank of the
city's only river when it was struck, leading local
Lebanese military officials to ask themselves if the
bomber had inside knowledge of the route they
were taking.

There was talk that this was a "dummy" convoy staged to
distract potential bombers from the journey which
Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman was taking to a reception
at a downtown hotel. A carpet manufacturer's factory
was smashed by the blast which tore down roofs and
smashed windows more than half a mile from the scene.

For Arab leaders, Mr Bush's message to the Gulf
leaders was wearily familiar. In the 1980s, when
the Reagan administration was supporting Saddam Hussein's
invasion of Iran, Washington spent its time warning Gulf
leaders of the danger of Iranian aggression. Once
Saddam invaded Kuwait, America's emphasis changed:
It was now Iraq which posed the greatest danger to their
kingdoms. But once the emirate was liberated, the
oil-wealthy monarchs were told that – yet again –
it was Iran that was their enemy.

Arabs are no more taken in by this topsy-turvy
"good-versus-evil" narrative than they are by
Washington's promises to help create a Palestinian state
by the end of the year, scarcely a day before Israel publicly
admitted to plans for yet more houses for settlers on Arab
land amid Jewish colonies illegally built on Palestinian territory.

Yet to understand the nature of this extraordinary
relationship with the Gulf monarchs, it is necessary
to recall that ever since the President's father
promised a weapons-free "oasis of peace" in
the Gulf, Washington – along with Britain,
France and Russia – has been pouring
arms into the region.

Over the past decade, the Gulf Arabs have
squandered billions of their oil dollars on
American weapons. The statistics tell their
own story. In 1998 and 1999 alone, Gulf Arab
military spending came to £40bn. Between
1997 and 2005, the sheikhs of the United Arab
Emirates – Mr Bush's hosts before he continued to
Riyadh – signed arms contracts worth £9bn with
Western nations. Between 1991 and 1993 – when
Iraq was the "enemy" – the US Military Training
Mission was administering more than £14bn in Saudi
arms procurements and £12bn in new US weapons
acquisitions. By this time, the Saudis already possessed
72 American F-15 fighter-bombers and 114 British Tornados.

How little has changed in the past 17 years. On 17
May 1991, for example, George Bush Snr said there
were now "real reasons to be optimistic" about a peace
in the Middle East. "We are going to continue to work in the
[peace] process," he said then. "We are not going
to abandon it."

James Baker, who was the American Secretary of State,
warned on 23 May 1991 that the continued building of
Jewish settlements on Palestinian land "hindered" a
future Middle East peace, just as the present Secretary
of State said last week. At the time, the Israelis were
reassured by Dick Cheney that the US would safeguard
their "security".

The West may have a short memory. The Arabs, who
happen to live in the piece of real estate which we call
the Middle East and who are not stupid, have not. They
understand all too well what George W Bush now stands
for. After advocating "democracy" in the region – a policy
which gained electoral victories for Shia in Iraq, for Hamas
in Gaza and a substantial gain in political power for the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – it seems to have dawned
on Washington that something might be slightly wrong
with Bush's priorities. Instead of advocating a "New Middle
East", Mr Bush, lying amid his silken sheets in the Saudi
king's palace, is now pursuing a return to the "Old Middle
East", a place of secret policemen, torture chambers
– to which prisoners can be usefully "renditioned" – and
dictatorial "moderate" presidents and monarchs. And
which of the Gulf despots is going to object to that?