The good news about President Bush’s latest trip to the Middle East is that a new war has not broken out in the region. Despite a fresh round of violence over the past few days, Lebanon has managed to pull back from the brink of another civil war. The bad news is that practically nothing else is going right in the region.

Lebanon remains a combustible mixture of clan and religious tensions that could explode at any moment. It has been without a president since last November because its many factions cannot reach a political agreement. And Israel anxiously watches its northern border, while the Syrian and Iranian backed Hezbollah militia – the strongest faction in Lebanon - rearms and positions its missile launchers for the possibility of another war with the Jewish State.

President Bush and the First Lady arriving in Israel

Things are not going well in Israel either. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is under police investigation, accused of receiving bribes from an American businessmen; most Israelis wish he would resign. President Bush insists that the peace process does not depend on one man, but Israeli negotiations with the Palestinians would be delayed if Mr. Olmert were forced to resign and new elections were called.

In any event, Mr. Bush’s goal of reaching an Israeli-Palestinian agreement by the end of this year is a pipe dream because he has done too little to promote the process.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reportedly told Mr. Bush last month in Washington that when his negotiators heard the Israeli position, they thought Olmert and his foreign minister were playing a joke on them. That’s because the Israeli demands were so far from the guidelines set by President Clinton in the previous negotiations. According to the Palestinians, the Israelis want to keep not only their big settlements on the occupied West Bank, but also the entire Jordan Valley and all of Jerusalem, except for the Temple Mount (which Palestinian religious authorities already control), and several Palestinian neighborhoods on the eastern outskirts of Jerusalem.

While the Bush administration pays lip service to the official American position that Israel must stop building and enlarging Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian territory, it does nothing else to actually discourage the continuing encroachment of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land.

Akiva Eldar, an Israeli columnist whom I have quoted before (“Middle East Tremors” April 11, 2008) is worth quoting again. He wrote an editorial in the newspaper Haaretz this week suggesting that Mr. Bush “should stay home.” Eldar wrote: “Unless he has a rabbit in his hat, this will be the third time in the past half year that the U.S. president shows the Palestinians and the entire Arab world that they are wasting their time by trying to end the occupation by peaceful means.”

The fear, which Eldar raises and Israeli officials share, is that the Palestinian “moderates” under Mahmoud Abbas will give up trying to negotiate with Israel, abandon the goal of the two- state solution (Israeli and Palestinian states existing peacefully side by side), and return to the armed struggle and a demand for a single, bi-national state, which would mean the end of Israel as we know it.

Tony Blair, who is now an international envoy to the Middle East, tried to help Mr. Bush this week by putting some pressure on Isreal. The former British Prime Minister convinced the Omert government to dismantle or rearrange a small number of Israeli army roadblocks to make life a little easier for Palestinian residents of the West Bank. It was a small concession, but Israeli military officials were unhappy about it. The roadblocks, which Mr. Blair and many foreign observers consider to be a form of collective punishment, are designed to make it harder for Palestinian terrorists to slip into Israel.

If Mr. Bush really wants to open up the road to peace in the Middle East, it will take more than moving a few roadblocks. And it will take more than an international envoy with a limited role and no real power to talk the Israelis into making the risky and substantial concessions needed to reach a peace agreement. What it WILL take is an American president who can use the power of his office -- and muster his own courage and imagination -- to lead.

Others may see Israel in terms of black of white, but to me it is a country in shades of grey, of nuances and riddles, more complex now then it was when I first knew it as a young reporter in 1966.

In those days, it was a young country led by Jews from Europe and built on the hopes and sacrifices of young kibbutzniks who ploughed the land and fought its wars. The Arabs saw it as their land of course, and Israel, faced with their unrelenting hostility, was uncertain of its future. The number of Israeli Jews leaving the country for greener pastures outnumbered the foreign Jews arriving to become citizens of the new Jewish homeland. So in many ways Israel was seen as the underdog.

The following year, the Six Day War changed the equation. The vastly outnumbered Israeli armed forces fought off the combined armies of its Arab neighbours, seized the Arab half of Jerusalem, and occupied the Palestinian territories on the West Bank and Gaza strip, which had been controlled by Jordan and Egypt. I covered the war from Cairo, and I was as surprised as the Egyptians at the speed and efficiency of the Israeli Air Force and armored forces that rolled over the badly led and poorly motivated Arab troops. Suddenly, Israel was no longer the underdog. It was a proven military power backed by the United States and bolstered by the acquisition of a clandestine nuclear arsenal. Foreign Jews flooded into the country. Israelis mingled with Palestinians in the newly occupied territories, and began building Jewish settlements there. It was a time of uneasy coexistence, when Israelis and their conquered subjects got to know each other better. As late as the spring of 1973, I could take my family to the occupied West Bank to shop for fruit and vegetables in the Palestinian town of Qualqilya, enjoy tea in the rose gardens of Ramallah, or drink pamello juice in historic Jericho without worrying about our safety.

But Egypt and Syria remained implacably hostile. When they struck back on Yom Kippur in the 1973 War, I was the CBS News correspondent in Tel Aviv, living with my wife and children. The Egyptians punched across the Suez Canal into the Israeli occupied Sinai, while the Syrians rolled across the occupied Golan Heights until they were finally brought to a halt on the edge of the cliff overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The Israeli forces had been caught off guard, and it was touch and go at first. Israelis stood in the streets and cheered as American supply planes ferried in supplies of ammunition that helped save the day. I felt their relief.! & amp; amp; lt; /SPAN>

Life in post-1973 Israel has been a roller coaster of soaring hopes and deep disappointments. After the 1973 War, I came to the conclusion that there is no simple solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The land they dispute is a small sliver of Holy Land squeezed between the desert and the sea. Both sides believe the land is theirs. Both believe they have history and God on their side.

I felt that the best the Israelis could do was to manage the conflict, and stave off another round of fighting as long as possible.

For a while, after Egyptian President Sadat made his historic trip to Jerusalem to bury the axe with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, I thought I might be wrong. I wondered whether peace - real peace, not the so-called "peace process" that has been bandied about for decades - might be possible. Some Palestinians under the leadership of Yassir Arafat slowly began to accept the possibility of living side by side with Israel in two separate but peaceful states. The Israeli right wing began to realize that its dream of an Israel on both banks of the Jordan was unsustainab! le beca use of simple demographics; the Palestinian population was growing faster than the Israeli population - even though Israelis continued to build and expand Jewish settlements in the occupied territories that are a major obstacle to peace.

The Oslo agreement of 1993, in which the PLO recognized the right of Israel to exist in peace and security, was another high point. But in the years that followed, hopes for peace were shattered by a spiral of violence fuelled by Palestinian suicide bombs and rockets and overwhelming Israeli repression. The Palestinian intifadas and the Israeli Defence Forces anti-terrorist campaigns left little room for peace negotiations.

How does the future look from Israel now, at age 60? It lives behind a barrier it is building to keep suicide bombers from sneaking in the back door from the West Bank. In the south, it regrets having given up control of the Gaza Strip to Palestinians who elected a government hostile to Israel and which continues to fire rockets at nearby Israeli towns. To the north in Lebanon, it faces the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah militia, who pounded northern Israel with rockets in 2006, and who won a psychological victory when the Isr ael army invaded southern Lebanon but failed to wipe them out. Farther away, but within medium range missile distance, the Iranians, whose president denies the holocaust, are pursuing a nuclear development program that might give it the means to produce nuclear warheads in a few years.

Meanwhile, President Bush is talking up the prospects of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement before the end of the year -- but is doing little to make it a realistic hope. The moderate wing of the Palestinians, led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, wants to negotiate, but it complains that the Israelis keep building and expanding settlements in the territory that could become part of a Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has even less support in Israel than Mr. Bush does in America, seems to be paying only lip service to the President's hopes for peace.

Where does all this leave Israel? In my opinion, more of less where it was when I first arrived 42 years ago. Its future does not look promising. It is in a stalemate with a basically hostile Arab and Muslim world, and the best it can do is to manage a situation that offers no easy solutions. The only thing I feel sure about is that neither the Palestinians nor the Jews are going to leave that sliver of land they uncomfortably share. Eventually they will have to learn to live together, but God only knows how long that will take.

Antibes, France
I have been spending a week in France, the country where I lived and worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun in the late 1960s and as a CBS News correspondent in the late 1990s. This has been a trip down memory lane.

Of all my experiences as an American in Paris, the most unforgettable was May 1968. Right now, the French are commemorating the 40th anniversary of what they still call the “Days of May” - the great national upheaval that threatened to change everything in the French republic and in the end changed almost nothing.

It was a wonderful time to be young and living in Paris. It was even better to be a reporter. I was fascinated by the spectacle of university students burning cars and building barricades in the Left Bank, of students throwing paving stones and riot police responding with tear gas and batons as they tried to break up the demonstrations that spread through most of France’s schools and universities and onto the streets. It was pure political theater, and indeed that is what it turned out to be. Only a few hundred people were injured in the melees and as far as I knew only one or two might have died. The French riot police may have looked fierce in action but they were well trained in crowd control. I shuddered to think what would have happened if there had been a similar national upheaval throughout the United States and the National Guard had been called in.

The “events”, as most of the French called them, began as a minor protest in a university outside Paris against rules forbidding men and women from being in the same dormitory bedrooms. The leader of the protest was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was known as “Danny the Red” because of the color of both his hair and his politics. He quickly became the bane of the French government and the hero of French students. Nowadays he is a Green Party politician.

French workers were also swept up in what quickly became a national orgy of protest against the stodgy French establishment and the conservative government of General Charles de Gaulle. A general strike shut down just about everything. I had to wait in line for hours and push my car to a service station in the (often vain) effort to find gasoline. Public transport was paralyzed, and even the undertakers were on strike. The dead had to wait to get buried.

The students thought they were running a cultural revolution. Chairman Mao was their icon, and they engaged in endless debates in the universities. At one of these meetings in the Sorbonne, they were proclaiming that “the only creative act is destruction.” As a dutiful reporter, I asked one of the student leaders, “OK, if that’s the way you want it, what are you proposing to replace our bourgeois society?” He smiled and explained to the obviously dim-witted foreign correspondent, “We have a student committee working on that.” The young revolutionaries seemed more interested in making slogans (and love) than realistic plans.

In fact, the students and the workers were living in different worlds. The workers eventually realized that. Their trade unions were appalled at the chaos and disorder the students created. The biggest union, the communist-led CGT, was afraid of being overtaken by the left and eventually made a deal with the government for better pay. One of the things that particularly alienated the workers was the fact that students were burning other people’s automobiles. An automobile in those days was something that you worked for years to acquire. It was almost sacred, and those unruly students were burning them as if they were worthless.

The French government, which knew something about the French character, finally put an end to the Days of May with a simple move. On the eve of the big spring Whitsunday holiday, police broke up the strike in the refineries and gasoline distribution system. The restless French, who hadn’t been able to go anywhere for weeks except on foot or on bicycles, filled up their precious cars with gas and drove off to the countryside or the seaside for a jolly three-day weekend, and it was all over.

It was as simple as that, and if veteran 68’ers tell you today how the Days of May changed their country, they are delusional, or dreaming. France is still a basically a (small “c”) conservative country. The Communist Party was one of the most conservative elements and really wanted to change nothing except workers’ pay and benefits. General de Gaulle, to his credit, reacted to the national upheaval by proposing a referendum on government reforms and resigned after losing it. He was succeeded by a long line of conservative and socialist governments that changed very little in the way France runs.

As a result, the government has been piling up deficits for years, but the French still enjoy one of the most comfortable lifestyles in the world. The quotation, “Après moi, le deluge” (“After me, the flood”) is popularly attributed to King Louis XV, who left France deeply in debt more than two centuries ago. That still seems to be the prevailing attitude among the French, who are also fond of saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

I know what some people will say when they read this: that the two crises have nothing to do with each other. But I can’t help connecting them as I read the headlines in the financial and international press.

The first is the food crisis – the explosion in the cost of food that has touched off riots around the world. It seems to have taken us all by surprise. The news media failed to see it coming, and even the experts seem unsure of why it is happening and what to do about it.

The international price of rice has shot up like a rocket since the beginning of the year – from a little over $300 to as much as $1,000 a ton. It sparked violence in Haiti that cost the prime minister his job, and caused unrest in Africa and Asia, where rice is the staple food for 3 billion people. The cost of other grains - wheat, corn and soybeans - has also surged. The price of one type of wheat recently jumped 25 percent overnight. There have been bread riots in Egypt and even pasta protests in Italy. North Korea, which has long lived on the edge of hunger, is facing a huge humanitarian crisis. And the World Bank says 33 countries risk social upheaval as a result of the soaring food prices.

Panic buying by countries, such as the Philippines, that need to import rice has led to export restrictions by rice producing countries, including Vietnam, India, China and Cambodia. That may give a little relief to domestic consumers, but will push the price up even further for the rest of the world.

The big question is what has caused this explosion in grain prices to occur in so many countries at the same time? Climate change may be part of the answer. So, too, is the rise in living standards in India and China, where people now eat more meat. It requires ten times more grain to produce meat than it does to feed people on cereals directly. Government subsidized production of corn to make biofuels is taking a growing portion of that crop out of the food chain. And the rising price of oil has pushed up the cost of fertilizers and fuel for farmers.

Josette Sheeran, head of the UN’s World Food Program – the world’s biggest distributor of food aid – describes what the crisis means for people in the worst-hit countries: “For the middle classes, it means cutting out medical care. For those (who live) on $2 a day, it means cutting out meat and taking the children out of school. For those on $1 a day, it means cutting out meat and vegetables and eating only cereals. And for those on 50 cents a day, it means total disaster.” The explosion in food prices means that the WFP will need an additional $700 million just to distribute the same amount of food as last year.

Seven hundred million dollars? That’s peanuts compared to the billions investment banks and hedge funds around the world have lost in the recent months through greed and reckless risk-taking in the subprime mortgage and credit markets. It’s also small potatoes, compared to the total of $29 billion the world’s top 50 hedge fund managers earned for themselves last year.

But what does the financial crisis have to do with the food crisis?

Many American farmers blame the recent wild gyrations in grain prices on a surge of money – as much as $300 billion - that has been pouring into the food, metals and energy markets from the hedge funds and other financial institutions. In short, as a recent New York Times article reported, the farming community believes Wall Street has played a role in shoving up grain prices. Or, as The Times of London commented more bluntly, “The same people who brought you the subprime crisis and the credit crunch are partly responsible for ($10 a gallon) diesel and food riots in Haiti and Egypt.”

A cheap shot, perhaps, and probably unfair, but when I think of the food crisis I can’t help thinking of the commodity speculators that have reaped billions at the expense of the poor. My mind works that way.

For some time now, the Bush administration’s stated goal in Iraq has been to tamp down the insurgency and curb the religious, ethnic and tribal infighting long enough to allow the Iraqis to work out their differences and reach a political settlement. Meanwhile, the Iraqi army and police would be armed and trained to take over the job of maintaining security from American and British troops.

That was the game plan. It hasn’t worked, and the reason it has failed is increasingly obvious. The United States cannot accomplish for the Iraqis what the Iraqis are not willing to do for themselves. Unless they can reach a political settlement on their own and establish a balance of power among their feuding factions, no amount of pushing and cajoling by the occupying power is going to force them to end what has become a long civil war.

Iraq is an inherently violent and anarchic country, as I saw for myself in December 2002, when Saddam Hussein suddenly emptied the country’s prisons and freed the inmates three months before the United States and its coalition partners invaded his country. Western journalists were taken in a convoy to Abu Ghraib prison, where we learned that Saddam had just announced a blanket pardon for all but a few hardcore enemies of his regime.

No one seemed to know how the scenario would be played out. Would the prisoners be released one by one? Would they be transported to their hometowns? Meanwhile, the crowd of Iraqis grew to thousands as hopeful families and clan members - and others with more sinister motives - besieged the prison compound. It was an astonishing sight for anyone familiar with Iraq in the days of Saddam’s iron rule, when spontaneous gatherings of any sort were forbidden and ruthlessly repressed. No one seemed to know what to do next.

Then, without warning, the dam broke. Abu Ghraib exploded into chaos. Prisoners decided to release themselves and began scrambling over walls. Some knocked holes in the walls. The prison guards abandoned any pretence at maintaining order and threw up their hands in disgust. And then I saw what Iraqis could do to each other if given a free hand.

Families and clan members who presumably had scores to settle were seeking out certain prisoners as they came out of the gate and were shooting them on the spot. The chaos lasted for hours, and the next day, other families began demonstrations in Baghdad to force officials to reveal the fate of prisoners who had not been reunited with their families. I realized then that Iraq is a country that is not easy to govern under any circumstances.

The British tried to dominate it after World War I but eventually lost control after Iraqi nationalists slaughtered the foreign Arab monarchy that the occupying power had imposed on them. The turmoil that followed was eventually curbed by Saddam Hussein, who used extreme cruelty and mass murder to impose rule by a Sunni minority on the Shia majority and the Kurds. By the time the American coalition defeated Saddam’s demoralized army in the 1990-91 Gulf War, the dictator was already starting to lose control of the Shia in the southern part of Iraq and the Kurds in the north.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam Hussein, it liberated the Shia and the Kurds from an oppressive rule, but was seen as an unwelcome foreign occupier by the newly dispossessed Sunni. This may be a gross oversimplification of a complex and highly charged political landscape, but it gives you an idea of what the invading army was wading into.

It has meant that the United States, de facto, has ended up taking sides in a many-sided civil war. Under the American occupation, Sunni gunmen have forced Shia families out of their homes, and vice versa. The U.S. occupiers have then built walls around ethnically cleansed neighborhoods. American troops have also armed and trained Sunni militiamen in Anbar province. Moreover, the Iraqi Shia have been fighting among themselves. The Shia factions that control the government are now using the American armed and trained Iraqi Army to attack the militia run by the dissident Shia leader Muqtada al Sadr. In addition, there are signs that while the American-backed government in Baghdad wants to eliminate the highly popular Sadr as a political opponent, American officials want to coax him into the political process.

In short, America has become involved in a hornet’s nest of political and ethnic problems in Iraq that even the British imperialists, with their long experience of occupying and ruling distant lands, were finally unable to resolve. So far, there are few signs that their modern equivalents – the U.S. officials in Baghdad - will be able to do any better.

The Israeli press is full of disturbing reports of tension with Syria and Lebanon, and a rapidly unfolding series of events suggest that the Middle East might be on the verge of another outbreak of violence in advance of President Bush’s visit to Israel next month.

Students at Givat Zeev settlement talking part in 'Turning Point 2'

All this week, Israel has been holding the largest civil defense exercise in its history. The exercise, named “Turning Point 2,” includes simulated attacks on urban areas by missiles equipped with chemical warheads. Sirens have sounded throughout the country. Children have been evacuated from schools and the elderly from nursing homes. Government offices were emptied as employees filed into bomb shelters. Israelis have been involved at all levels, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Prior to the national emergency exercise, Barak cancelled a scheduled trip to Germany and visited Israel’s northern border, where he vowed that the Jewish state was ready to strike anyone who tried to attack it. The Israeli cabinet decided to redistribute gas masks to the population. And Syria moved three army divisions up to its border with Lebanon. Both Syrian and Israeli officials have insisted they have no intention of attacking each other, but the Israeli and Syrian armies are reported to be on a high state of alert. What’s behind all this?

Hezbollah fighter

Hezbollah, the Iranian and Syrian backed militia that controls much of southern Lebanon, has been itching to retaliate ever since someone assassinated one of its leaders, Imad Mughniyah, in a car bomb explosion in Syria two months ago. It was widely assumed the Israelis killed him. A Hezbollah attack on Israel – or inversely an Israeli attack on Hezbollah – would inevitably draw Syria into a wider conflict.

In addition, Israeli Minister of National Infrastructures Benjamin Ben-Eliezer (a former Defense Minister) visited the ministry war room during the civil defense exercise and warned that if Iran itself dared to attack Israel, that “will lead to a harsh response by Israel that will cause the destruction of the Iranian nation.” Ben-Eliezer said Iran would be reluctant to attack because it was aware of Israel’s “strength” – a reference to its undeclared but widely known arsenal of nuclear missiles - but added that it “continues to aggravate the situation by supplying arms to Syria and Hezbollah, and we must deal with this.” He also reminded the Israeli public that the exercise this week was not a “fictional scenario” and said the real situation, if Israel is attacked by Hezbollah, “is likely to be a number of times harsher than that which we are already familiar with.”

On top of all this, rumors are circulating in Israel that the army is preparing to reinvade the Gaza strip from which it withdrew in 2005. The continuing rocket attacks being launched on Israeli towns from the Palestinian enclave are putting mounting pressure on the government to react. An Israeli think tank with close ties to the army announced this week that Hamas, the militant Islamist group that rules Gaza, now has 20,000 organized armed forces and has acquired long-range rockets and advanced anti-tank weapons.

Meanwhile, the United States Navy has been maintaining several warships off the coast of Lebanon since March. The exact mission of the ships is not clear, but it has long been a standard practice for the navy to move ships into the eastern Mediterranean when tensions rise in the area – a type of gunboat diplomacy that in this case may be aimed at deterring the Syrians from involving themselves in any move against Israel.

To make matters worse – if that’s possible – there are no signs that the on-and-off Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are going anywhere. Israelis continue to build Jewish settlements in Palestinian West Bank territory, and Palestinians continue terror attacks on Israel.

The one piece of progress – if you can call it that – was a promise by Israel to remove 50 of the more than 500 army roadblocks that have made life miserable for Palestinians in the West Bank. That was the only apparent concession Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was able to win from the Israelis when she visited there last week to prepare for the President’s forthcoming visit for the 60th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the State of Israel.

Akiva Eldar, a veteran Israeli columnist, this week urged President Bush to intervene more forcefully to implement his stated goal of achieving an Israeli-Palestinian agreement by the end of this year. Eldar observed that President Nixon believed “the key to resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict is a forced settlement that is not referred to as such.” President Clinton’s approach was to propose a detailed peace agreement.

President Bush, he said, “specializes in ceremonies and speeches.”

With the shaky American economy sending financial shockwaves around the world, the costly and bloody pacification of Iraq far from finished, Afghanistan on a knife-edge and the road map to peace in the Middle East going nowhere, President Bush has little to show for his two terms in office. One of his few remaining opportunities to make his mark as a statesman and leave a positive legacy is this weeks’ NATO summit in Roumania.

It is an historic meeting in many ways. The fact that Russian President Putin is attending a NATO summit that is being held in the capital of a former Soviet satellite is testimony to how much the world has changed since the alliance was formed in 1949 to discourage a Soviet attack on Europe. Instead of dissolving after the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union, NATO has been steadily expanding its reach. The Clinton administration began the process of enrolling former communist East European nations as new members. The Bush administration is now trying to push NATO’s boundaries right into the heartland of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine – Russia’s historic breadbasket and still an important part of the Russian economy – and Georgia, the birthplace of Josef Stalin.

There are other contentious issues between Presidents Putin and Bush. The United States and its major European allies support Kosovo’s newly declared independence from Serbia. Russia strongly opposes it. President Putin views Mr. Bush’s decision to plant an anti-ballistic missile system in Eastern Europe as a threat to Russia’s own defenses. Mr. Bush insists it’s aimed at a potential Iranian threat.

Attitudes on both sides have been shaped by a Cold War mentality that still dominates much of the thinking in military and governing circles. As the sole superpower after end of the Cold War, the United States saw little need to take into account Russia’s security concerns. The Kremlin felt that the West showed no respect for Russia’s position. And the East European countries deeply distrusted their former Russian masters.

With the rhetoric hardening in both Moscow and Washington, the NATO summit and the separate meeting between the two presidents in Sochi offer a chance to improve Russian-American relations before the frosty atmosphere turns to Cold War II.

The timing is good. President Bush, who was quick to trust Mr. Putin when he first met him, now seems loath to end their relationship on a bad note. He is finally making an effort to address Mr.Putin’s concerns about the anti-ballistic missile bases, and Mr. Putin is said to be ready to announce measures to aid NATO in its combat against the Taliban in Afghanistan – an expansion of the role of NATO that is stretching its resources.

Mr. Putin and his elected successor Dmitri Medvedev are also aware that Mr. Bush may be easier to deal with than the next administration in Washington. One of America’s smartest diplomats - former Undersecretary of State Richard Holbrook - believes the next American president, whether it’s Obama, Clinton or McCain, is likely to take a tougher stand with Moscow.

West European diplomats believe now is the time to begin a more constructive dialogue with the Russians. Most of the arguments over NATO expansion and missile defenses are relics of the past and increasingly less relevant today. The political map of Europe has been redrawn. That’s now history. The new threats to peace come from other quarters, and that’s an opportunity to cooperate with Russia on countering terrorism, drug trafficking, the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology and other challenges to world stability in the Twenty-first century.

In the clash between the West and Islam that has characterized the beginnings of the 21st century, two of the leading protagonists seem to be moving in opposite directions. But despite appearances, the gulf between the Successor to Saint Peter and the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques may actually be narrowing.

Pope Benedict XVI chose the eve of Easter to publicly baptize an Egyptian-born convert from Islam to Christianity. That was more than a religious act. It touched a raw nerve. Magdi Allam, the new convert, is an editorial writer for the Italian newspaper Courriere de la Sera and lives under police protection because of his outspoken criticism of Islam.

Allam wrote the next day that the “roots of evil are inherent in Islam,” that it is a “violent” and “antagonistic” religion, and that his baptism sent a “revolutionary message” to the Catholic church, which “out of fear is too cautious about converting Muslims.” He went on to state that “thousands of Muslim converts to Christianity are obliged to hide their new faith out of fear of being assassinated by Muslim terrorists,” while “thousands of converts to Islam peacefully live their faiths.” Strong words but also accurate. Under the strictest interpretation of Islam, apostasy is punishable by death.

The Pope clearly knew what he was doing when he chose Allam to be one of the half dozen persons he traditionally baptizes on Easter eve. It was not the first time he has drawn a sharp line in the sand between Christianity and Islam. In a speech early in his reign that sent shockwaves around the Muslim world, he quoted a Byzantine emperor who described Islam as “evil and inhumane.”

I happened to attend a conference a few days after Easter sponsored by the World Economic Forum in which Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy and scholars met to further the cause of peaceful coexistence between the West and Islam. One of the participants, a leader of the Muslim community in Milan, said he was “embarrassed” by the Pope’s move. One of the Catholic participants felt it was unnecessarily provocative.

On the other hand, there were reports this week of possible accommodation between the West and Muslims in a most unexpected place - Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam and the home of one of its strictest forms, Wahabism. King Abdullah launched an appeal to his “brothers in faith” – Christians and Jews – to attend a conference of the three great monotheistic religions. The king, who sees himself as the leader of the Muslim world as well as the owner of a quarter of the world’s oil reserves, wants to “save humanity” from a “disintegration of the family” and the “rise of atheism.” He expects to present his plan for a conference to the United Nations.

King Abdullah made no mention of Pope Benedict’s public baptism of Magdi Allam, preferring instead to talk about his own “unforgettable” and historic meeting with the Pope last November in Rome. That meeting may already be bearing fruit. The Vatican recently revealed that it has been secretly negotiating the construction of churches in Saudi Arabia.

That would be a real revolution. Not only does Saudi Arabia forbid the building of churches or temples on its soil. It prohibits the practice of any religion other than Islam, and has even deported foreign workers who attended clandestine Catholic masses. Now it appears that Saudi Arabia’s royal family is trying to bend the rules, without breaking the bond with the Wahabi clergy that confers legitimacy on the country’s rulers.

The interface between Islam and the West in the 21st century has not been smooth. Christians, Jews and atheists in the West are learning to live with Muslims in their midst. Muslim immigrants are learning to live in countries where they are not the majority. It has been a tough learning process on both sides.

European governments are trying different forms of accommodation. The French favor cultural assimilation, and forbid any expression of religious faith in their state schools. That has fostered a sense of alienation among second generation Muslims of African origin. The British prefer a multicultural approach that has resulted in Asian Muslim ghettos, and at the extreme, home-grown Islamic terrorists. The Germans have kept their Turkish Muslim community largely segregated, but are now trying to integrate them with only marginal success.

The American experience in accommodating its Muslim minority has been far more successful. That may seem surprising, since the United States is so overwhelmingly and enthusiastically Christian, whereas most of Europe is only nominally Christian, or even post-Christian. But American Muslims are better off, better educated, and more closely integrated into the mainstream culture than those in Europe. In short, they share the American Dream.

That may explain at least in part why – since September 11, 2001 – the United States has not experienced the terrorist attacks that have become more frequent in Europe.

Five years ago when the United States launched the invasion of Iraq, I was in Doha, Qatar, General Tommy Frank’s headquarters. Like most of the American journalists gathered there, I expected a relatively short war. That was what the military commanders were prepared for. I could not have imagined that American soldiers and Marines would still be dying in Iraq today, and that as a result of a continuing occupation, insurgency and civil war the Iraqi death toll would have reached somewhere between 80,000 and 900,000. (Iraq is in such chaos that no one knows the real figures.) So I am reluctant to speculate now on the future of Iraq, or how this seemingly endless war will play out. No one seems to have clear answers yet, not even the candidates in the race for the White House, one of whom will inherit this war.

The most useful exercise now is to look clearly at where the conflict stands today. That may suggest where things are headed in the future. For one thing, public opinion on the war seems to have shifted more in the United States than in Iraq.

A slim majority of Americans now say that going to war against Iraq was the wrong decision. On the other hand, anecdotal evidence right after the invasion suggested that most Iraqis were glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein, and polls now suggest that most of them still think their country will have a brighter future. It is true that an overwhelming majority want the American occupiers to leave, but many say “not right now.”

Among experts in military and foreign policy, both in America and abroad, there is near unanimity that military force alone will not pacify Iraq, and that a political settlement is imperative – both within Iraq and among Iraq, the United States and Iran.

Inside the country, the Iraqis are still not close to settling their political differences. There are few signs that they are ready for the ethnic, tribal and religious accommodations that will be necessary to maintain a stable government. In fact, the United States is now promoting the opposite, rearming and training the Sunnis of Anbar Province, who are the enemies of the current Shia leadership of Iraq, and also of the Shias’ patrons in neighboring Iran.

Iran is one of the keys to pacifying Iraq. It fears the Sunnis who ruled Iraq until the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980 and the eight-year war that followed cost Iran hundreds of thousands of lives.

Rearming the Sunnis is the most effective lever the United States now holds to coerce the Iranians into reaching an accommodation on Iran. Iran has already helped tamp down the insurgency by urging the firebrand Iraqi Shia leader Moktada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army militiamen to cool it.

The irony in all this is that by re-empowering the Iraqi Sunnis, the United States is helping the faction it went to war against in 2003.

That raises the question of what would Iraq and the Middle East have looked like several decades from now if the United States had not invaded Iraq. Would the Iraqi dictatorship have eventually imploded? After all, Saddam Hussein had run the country’s economy into the sand and was maintaining his hold on power by brutal methods. Whether the Iraqis on their own would have eventually rid themselves of an unpopular dictatorship is one of the big “ifs” of this debate. But if you think the tide of history is flowing in the direction of democracy - even in the Middle East - then the answer would probably be yes. And by not invading Iraq, the United States might have saved trillions of dollars and all those American and Iraqi lives.

The question one should really ask now is not whether the invasion was a mistake. It’s whether an abrupt American withdrawal from Iraq will eventually cost fewer or more lives. That, too, is not clear at this point, but the next president of the United States will have to make a decision based on his or her view of the domestic political imperatives and the implications for America’s future position in the world.

It’s not his or her ability to react promptly when faced with a 3 a.m. phone call that should count in this election. It’s the next president’s ability to think clearly about the uses of power in the world’s most important office, and how Iraq fits into America’s global strategy.

President Bush once called President/General Pervez Musharraf “a man of courage and vision” and repeatedly called him “a friend.” Now Mr. Bush apparently hopes the Pakistani leader will just go away quietly, without too much fuss.

Mr. Bush no longer needs his erstwhile friend now that the Pakistanis no longer want Musharraf to remain in office. The Bush administration is more concerned about the future of Pakistan than about Musharraf’s future. Pakistan has become a ticking time bomb in the years since the former head of the Pakistan military seized power in a 1999 coup.

Foreign intelligence agencies believe Pakistan is now the world headquarters of Al Qaeda, and that Osama Bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the country, with or without the complicity of the Pakistani military intelligence services. Pakistan has also become the rear staging area for Taliban fighters who have been stepping up attacks in neighboring Afghanistan. Finally, Pakistani Taliban militants have been staging increasingly deadly suicide attacks in Pakistan itself – the latest in the city of Lahore, where they targeted a secret government intelligence facility that housed an American-trained anti-terrorist investigation unit. At least 27 people were killed and as many as 150 injured. All this is happening in a country that has not only acquired nuclear weapons but has been shown to be a serial proliferator of nuclear weapons secrets to several of America’s enemies. And it is happening at a time when the country is going through a political crisis that has weakened Musharraf’s hold on power and his ability to rein in the terrorists.

Lahore attack: most of the victims were killed in this building housing a federal agency

It is not surprising that the White House thinks it can no longer continue to back Musharraf. It wants him to go as soon as convenient, and if possible to go gracefully.

That may not be easy. The political parties that support him were resoundingly defeated in last month’s parliamentary elections, but Musharraf wants to hang on to power. He tried to exploit differences between the parties that won the election - the Pakistan People’s Party of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the Pakistan Muslim League-N of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. That didn’t work. Now in what looks like a sign of desperation, he is offering to give up his most powerful political weapon – the right to dissolve parliament – if his opponents stop insisting on reinstating the former chief justice of the Supreme Court. Musharraf fired him last year when it looked as if the judge was about to declare the general’s re-election as president unconstitutional. If the judge is reinstated, few doubt that he would immediately take up the case against Musharraf.

How Musharraf’s mano a mano with his opponents will end is not yet clear. But what is clear is that he is now playing his end game. The London Daily Telegraph recently quoted an unnamed aide to Musharraf as saying he wants to leave the presidency on a positive note. Another aide confided that “while Musharraf made many mistakes, he genuinely strove to improve the country and does not want to damage it.”

It looks as if Musharraf faces the choice of stepping down voluntarily or being forced out in another crisis. The army is said to prefer a smooth transition, and is not likely to come to his rescue. It will back (and possibly broker) the new political coalition that takes over from the former general. The White House will breathe a sigh of relief. And it will continue to do business with the people who have held the real power in Pakistan since its independence from Britain – the military.