The question of Iraq is the question of Palestine

Martin Woollacott, Guardian News Service, London

A few days after his tanks swept into Kuwait in August 1990, Saddam Hussein proclaimed that the occupation was the first step to the liberation of Jerusalem. Thus was "linkage" born, and in the Middle East crisis linkage is once again critical, as the Bush administration finally shows signs that it is ready to deal seriously with the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

In 1990, linkage meant that if an Arab cause could be connected with that of the Palestinians, that connection conferred legitimacy and brought applause.

Conversely, if the U.S. wanted to advance its aims in the Middle East, Washington had to show it was engaged in the search for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Something of the sort had always been true, but the Gulf war established linkage more openly as a guiding principle in the region.

In the end linkage did not help Saddam, and it got Yasser Arafat and the PLO into trouble by drawing them into an alliance with the dictator which they were later to regret. But, through the Oslo process, it did lead, along with other causes such as the impact of the first intifada on Israeli thinking, to a decade of effort to end the struggle in the occupied territories.

Linkage helped sustain Arab governments facing a disillusioned and disappointed citizenry. It allowed them to concentrate on the Oslo process, whether lashing out at its failings or making something of its occasional successes, rather than contemplating courses of action that were dangerous or frankly impossible.

There were reasons for pursuing a peace between Israelis and Palestinians other than sustaining the "moderate" Arab states, keeping control of oil in friendly hands, or preserving a freedom of maneuver over Iraq that diminished sharply over the years.

The conflict was, and is, dangerous in itself, and degrading to both societies. But linkage, not as proposed by Saddam but as reinterpreted by the Americans, the Europeans, the moderate Arab states and Israelis and Palestinians themselves, was a way of balancing and relating diverse interests. It was a driver of events, until the failure of final stage Israeli-Palestinian talks, the change of administrations in America and the Twin Tower attacks progressively disabled it.

Now, however, the old kind of linkage, relating Palestine directly to Iraq, has forcefully reasserted itself. President Bush's words of reproof last week for the Sharon government may seem mild, but they were harsh by the syrupy standards of most American-Israeli exchanges, and accompanied by a U.S.-sponsored security council resolution on the Middle East that for the first time spoke of a Palestinian state. Then Richard Cheney had to rewrite his agenda during his tour of Arab capitals, as he found that he could not skirt the Palestinian problem by referring to Gen. Anthony Zinni's concurrent mission to Israel and the territories.

Uri Avneiri wrote recently that after a period when "instead of looking for a solution to the Palestinian problem, Bush gave the green light to Sharon so that he could run berserk in the Palestinian territories ... the basic logic of the situation started at long last to assert itself."

That logic was that there could be not be a fully effective campaign against terrorism, and certainly no attack on Iraq, until the Palestinian issue was engaged and perhaps not until it was actually settled. Avneiri adds: "It takes only minutes to conclude a train of thought, but a super-power needs six months to change its policy."

The peace plan proposed by the Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah came at an opportune moment. The point about it was not that it offered nothing new, but that it offered something old. Peace and normalization of relations in return for a full withdrawal from the territories had been implicit in the Oslo process as it was understood by the Arabs, although not by Israeli governments, from the beginning.

The prince's plan had clarificatory power because it went back to the principle of land for peace, while stressing that all of the peace was only available for all of the land. The Israeli government, and some in the U.S., at once picked up the normalization offer while noting the omission of ideas on the sharing of the Holy Places and on the right of return, and acting as if the stipulations on withdrawal were negotiable.

But this could not obscure the simple message, intended for the Israeli public as well as for the rest of the world, that no peace is available unless all of the land, or nearly all, is returned. The U.S. has not of course endorsed that proposition. If it ever began to move in that direction, that could have a transforming effect.

What is perhaps emerging is a calibrated bargaining. The moderate Arab states might respond to a limited resumption of negotiations after a ceasefire brought about through American offices by avoiding outright opposition to whatever America's plans for Iraq turn out to be. But the maintenance of that attitude would be dependent on a substantive progress in political negotiations, which is impossible as long as Sharon remains in power and uncertain even if he should fall.

The big bargain would be full support for American action against Iraq, including military action, in return for a truly determined American effort to bring Israel to the peace table on terms not too far distant from the Saudi plan; and from what was discussed at Taba in the last days of Ehud Barak's government.

The moderate Arab states could contribute a readiness to support Arafat in the compromises necessary on the Holy Places and the right of return which they did not show at that time.

The question about the shift in American policy is how serious it will turn out to be. Is it a limited realignment, designed to quieten Arab allies and contain the violence in Israel and the territories while preparations for a possible confrontation with Iraq go ahead?

Or is it the beginning of a more fundamental change in which the Bush administration will push for a full settlement and not just for another unsteady "process" that could soon falter and collapse?

Desirable as that would be, the obvious consequence would also be that the U.S. would expect most Middle Eastern opposition to an attack on Iraq to fade away. It may be that peace in Palestine and war in Iraq are as inextricably linked today as they were in 1990.