"Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?" That was one of the fundamental and perplexing questions posed by professors Mearsheimer and Walt in their insightful paper earlier this year on "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy".

A similar question must now be asked of our own prime minister's actions in view of the harm he seems intent on causing to our own country's interests with his not-so-hidden support for the policies of George Bush and Israel in the current conflict in Lebanon and Gaza.

The sight of Israel responding to the capture of three of its soldiers by Hizbullah and Hamas by embarking on a rampage, unleashing its US-supplied heavy weaponry and destroying much of Lebanon's civilian infrastructure while recklessly causing the deaths of hundreds of Lebanese civilians (and quietly killing over 150 Palestinians in Gaza during the same period) can only have further swelled the ranks of those in the Muslim world who regard the United States and Britain as being fully complicit in the crimes committed by Israel.

Instead of giving the Israelis a nod and a wink, Tony Blair would have been better off urging them to negotiate the peaceful release of their soldiers by freeing some of the over 9000 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners and detainees - many of whom have been held illegally in defiance of the Geneva convention.

In this week's New Statesman, the magazine's editor, John Kampfner, argues that Tony Blair "has managed to ensure that the UK has become both reviled and stripped of influence across vast stretches of the world. In so doing, he has increased the danger of terrorism to Britain itself."

Last week, two former British ambassadors, Sir Rodric Braithwaite and Sir Oliver Miles, publicly excoriated the PM for his position on the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

Sir Rodric mocked Blair for being a "frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussauds", programmed by the CIA to "spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent ... Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago ... Mr Blair's total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself; who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ grinder?"

Sir Oliver, writing here, said that "there is little indication that [Blair] has grasped the horror of what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon; still less that he is aware that Lebanon today is a repeat of what happened when Israel invaded last time. This is in strong contrast with the empathy he shows for Israelis who feel that their existence is under threat from their neighbours, a feeling that is real enough but which in terms of experience of suffering and death simply does not match the horrors that Palestinians and Lebanese have lived through in the last generation."

To be fair, in public Blair has time and again accepted that the just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict is an essential step in laying the groundwork for better relations with the Muslim world, and he underlined this in his speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles last Monday:

"Unless we re-appraise our strategy, unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade, and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win. And this is a battle we must win."

And yesterday, before he flew off to join his family on holiday in the Caribbean, he reiterated that while he hoped that the UN resolution currently being debated would halt the conflict in Lebanon, the settling of the Israel-Palestine question was "completely fundamental to the whole of the issues in the Middle East".

The only problem is that Mr Blair has long pinned his hopes on a US president who has consistently shown no interest whatsoever in using any of his considerable leverage to persuade Israel to fully withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories. Indeed, President Bush has given Israel his blessing to annex large portions of the occupied West Bank, thereby scuppering any hope for a genuine Palestinian state.

Even the current draft UN resolution has been carefully vetted by the United States to ensure that it does not say anything that Israel might possibly disapprove of.

So, Blair's unseemly closeness to the US president has not resulted in any recognisable influence being brought to bear on the key Middle East question he has identified, and rather has only contributed to the further cementing of our reputation in large parts of the world as an unthinking and ineffectual US lackey.

Will Blair's actions over Lebanon have endeared him to Iraq's Shia majority and will it have made the already Herculean task facing the young British soldiers he has sent there and to Afghanistan any easier? I doubt it.

Still, at least the former Israeli prime minister, the very right-wing Binyamin Netanyahu approves of our prime minister's strategy and believes that he is doing a swell job.

The question is, for whom?

Source: Guardian Blog

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