George W Bush 'articulated' his 'vision' of Middle East peace on Monday, and no objective observer could come away with anything but a shake of the head and a sense of foreboding deep enough to chill the most hardened soul.

He did not even bother to so much as feign evenhandedness, attributing as he did all Palestinian suffering to the policies of their own leaders and those of their allies.

Granted, there was a half-hearted attempt at the very beginning to acknowledge the hardships experienced by legitimate residents of the West Bank and Gaza: Bush followed up a platitudinous sop to Israeli fears of suicide bombings ("It is untenable for Israeli citizens to live in terror") with a line that must have left a lemony taste on his oft-twisted tongue ("It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalour and occupation").

But that was it. In the very next breath, Bush referred to the prevailing impasse and then proceeded to start heaping the blame for the crisis on the Palestinians: "Israeli citizens will continue to be victimised by terrrorists (sic), and so Israel will continue to defend herself, and the situation of the Palestinian people will grow more and more miserable."

Then the leader of the last remaining superpower was off to the races, warping what had been advertised as a "road map to peace" into a recipe for national anguish on both sides. The next 20 minutes or so left no room for doubt that Bush's "vision" of "two states, living side by side", is actually a scenario in which one state (Israel) is allowed to permanently bully a Quisling appendage forever hobbled by the hallmarks of something called "provisional statehood".

I challenge anyone to explain how Palestinian sovereignty can be provisional without a modern version of Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who collaborated with Hitler in World War II and subsequently saw his name forever linked to treason and subservience to invaders.

Independence at a price

Those who break out in hives at any implicit comparison of the Israeli government with that of Nazi Germany can disregard the Quisling analogy and instead attempt to digest another Nordic reference: Finlandisation, the process by which Helsinki was allowed to retain nominal independence at the price of toeing Moscow's line.

Perhaps that is the more accurate interpretation anyway: The lone redeeming feature of Nazism was that it mostly died with der Fuhrer, but Stalinism was made of sterner stuff just the sort that Ariel Sharon needs to follow in his lumbering but labored footsteps.

The foundation to the nightmarish edifice envisioned by the White House is that there will be no Palestinian state until Yasser Arafat is replaced. Bush did not mention the confused Palestinian president (Arafat welcomed the speech as "a serious contribution" to the peace process) by name. But he declared in no uncertain terms that "new leaders not compromised by terror" must be in place in order for negotiations to recommence so that Israel can begin the process of deciding whether or not it is "secure" and willing to consider getting into a mood where it might agree to talk about the means by which a Palestinian puppet state might (or might not) be created someday in the indeterminate future. Inspiring stuff.

There is no shortage of fallacy in Bush's interpretation of the Middle East crisis, but his adoption of Sharon's insistence that Arafat has to go ranks right down there with the most irrational of them. Arafat should be replaced, but not because he has failed to end terrorist attacks; instead, he needs to make way for new blood because he was the dupe who signed onto the entire Oslo process in the first place, agreeing to put off all the most important issues (Jerusalem, borders, refugees, etc.) even as successive Israeli governments re-negotiated or ignored what had already been signed and simultaneously went on the most prolific spree of settlement building since 1967.

Lopsided terms

Palestinian voters might well pick someone else, but there is no guarantee that the new leader will agree to the lopsided terms that Israel and the United States have sought to impose on Arafat. In fact, the opposite is more likely: Arafat's most fervent critics already accuse him of being a Quisling (oops, Finlandista?), and anyone who agrees to give up more than he already has will be begging for the starring role in a lynching.

And even if Bush gets his way by forcing a desperate populace to elect a defeatist traitor (a sort of anti-Moses who leads his people into slavery rather than out of it), how long will it be before people start chafing at the concessions forced on them and their descendants?

The model envisioned by Bush would make it particularly difficult for any Palestinian regime to keep a lid on dissent, providing as it would local officials with considerable independence from the central government but the latter with none from its Israeli and American overlords.

Oh, and by the way, the autocratic regimes that do America's bidding in Jordan and Egypt are just fine with Bush so long as they refrain from holding free elections and completely disregard the will of their populations by continuing to countenance Israel's manhandling of the Palestinian people.

Not bright enough

Bush is certainly not bright enough to have cooked this up by himself, but this kind of statecraft for a newly independent nation is a recipe for a kind of political fragmentation to match the dog's breakfast of non-contiguous territory which the Palestinians would be "allowed" to retain.

The plan must have been drawn up by someone else, and the only interests considered by the schemers involved were neither Palestinian nor Israeli, and certainly not American: They were those of the radical settlers upon whom Sharon and his Likud Party rely for support at the polls.

So while the Palestinians were ordered to elect a new leader willing to acquiesce to the "negotiation" of what America and Israel impose, the only rejoinders Bush had for the Jewish state were tried and toothless ones about not occupying all of the land forever, halting settlement activity, and taking "concrete steps" (demolishing more homes?) to support the emergence of a new state next door. But as is always with the case when it comes to American admonitions to Israel, there will be no consequences for disobedience or even betrayal.

In fact, the only new item in this latest version of Bush's "vision" was the demand for Arafat's ouster. Everything else was a boring repeat of what he has said (but obviously not meant) in the past. There were minor changes to ensure that the Israelis were kept happy, but nothing at all that might convince a single Palestinian to support the peace process rather than the extremists who want to derail it.

But don't take my word for the Israeli pedigree attaching to the US president's speech. This is what Israel's Haaretz newspaper had to say: "Bush wholly accepted the Israeli interpretation of the conflict."

In Yediot Ahronot , Israel's best-selling daily, Nahum Barnea went even further: "The mouth was President Bush's, but the hand that wrote the speech was Ariel Sharon's If the last two years killed the Oslo Accords, President Bush's speech buries it in the annals of history."

Most damning appraisal

Perhaps the most damning appraisal came from Edward Walker, president of the Middle East Institute and a former assistant secretary of state. "It's a very tough approach," Walker told the Reuters news agency. "It looks as if at every step along the way there will be Uncle Sam looking over their (the Palestinians') shoulders and saying at every stage either you pass or you fail."

It's a damn shame that Walker was not more vocal with such views when he was still in office, but then again, he probably would have been fired after being smeared as an "anti-Semite".

Bush is not a gifted man when it comes to speeches. The problem is that Bush's job is a little more demanding than most, especially for someone whose pronunciation of the word "homicide" (as in "homo-cide" bombings) had myself and a few colleagues wondering for a split second whether the leader of the free world was about to demand that all Arab leaders prove their devotion to peace by denouncing "homosexuality".

This is not necessary, of course, since dozens of Egyptian gays were recently put on trial in a state security court established in 1981 to investigate the assassination of then-President Anwar Sadat. And no, this does not mean that Bush is pressuring Cairo (or Jordan, for that matter) to install the same kind of independent judiciary demanded of the Palestinian Authority, one which would be a first in the entire Arab world.

No one expects Bush to act intelligently or imaginatively. It is not too much to ask, however, that the President of the United States at least pretend to be fair especially when the extremist positions he has borrowed from Sharon are ironclad guarantees that more Israelis will die in suicide bombings perpetrated by people who have concluded that the peace process is an excuse to perpetuate the occupation.

The rage is building, fed daily by the proclamations of a bamboozled American president and the draconian police-state tactics of co-opted Arab despots who care not a whit for the Palestinians, only for their own power and wealth. So don't be surprised when suicide bombers start making their way to the West in general and the United States in particular. And don't look to that battered compound in Ramallah for someone to blame — the culprit resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. — YellowTimes.org

Marc Sirois is the managing editor of The Daily Star , an English-language newspaper in Beirut. He lives in Lebanon.