In a terrible and perverse way, the Madrid bombing underlines anew that former Malaysian prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad has got it right.

Perhaps he has clothe his analysis in rhetoric that alone makes it unacceptable in the West; but the experience of others shows that those who have a stake in today's received wisdom of Washington will tear off the rhetoric and disagree no matter what - unless you accept their premises.

The essential Mahathir argument that has poured forth in party fora, interviews and Islamic conferences is simple. It is that the present scourge of world terrorism is a product of long, unfair, and destructive Western policies in the Middle East, where Washington has blindly followed the Israeli lead at Palestine's expense.

And from that, opposition to American policy has spread throughout the Islamic world, and hardened into violence within the core in the Middle East.

The corollary to the argument is that responding to attacks like 9-11 or Madrid solely or even principally in military terms is self-defeating and just gives birth to more terrorists (literally) and to more terrorism (figuratively).

Seen as appeasement

That argument is preliminarily seen in Washington as appeasement; but the real argument that has sold Washington is a far more insidious one, and it is not difficult to find the culprits; and again Mahathir has already pointed the finger.

At a meeting in Washington last October, I asked the keynoter, Vice-President Dick Cheney - someone I had once worked with and respected - the hard-nose of American policy, and noted that the perception in the Muslim world, where I lived, was that Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon more or less made America's Middle East policy, and that for many intents and purposes we had become a pariah state.

Cheney replied - revealing something he really didn't intend to while evading my real question - that Osama bin Laden hadn't even mentioned Israel until a couple years ago. I think that to be untrue but even if so, it is irrelevant. Al-Qaeda's recruiting ground has been the focused sentiment of young Muslim men everywhere against American policies.

Cheney was of course conceding my underlying premise, that Israel is at the heart of the issue. No premier in living memory has visited the White House as often as Sharon. And not in living memory has American policy delegated a policy of world-implications to another state, as it has our policy to Sharon.

Veered off-course

Here is where the Mahathir analysis may veer off-course. He looks for an explanation and correctly notes the Jewish control of much American media and finance.

But US President George W Bush comes from a totally different tradition. His father is the only American president from the founding of Israel who stood up to that country's leaders. One might be adventurous and say that within that tradition, and the people within it, lay embedded even a bit of anti-Semitism. Or so is the environment in which Bush grew up.

Moreover, we know from his own words that Bush doesn't even bother to read the press - and therefore, so what if it is Jewish controlled? The problem lies deeper. While Israeli influence in American politics has long been deeply rooted through money and media, letting Israel run amok through Palestine as has happened these past three years is unprecedented. After all, Washington's slightest turn of the military-supply tap and Israeli policy would be turned instantly on its heels.

So what changed? In Bush, we have an untutored president who in 2001 looked for ways to distinguish himself from his father's administration. The 9-11 attacks gave him a golden opportunity to show gutsy feeling that translated into great popularity for a while. But he needed something more. He had not been his father's chosen instrument, after all. Another brother was widely thought to be the preferred one.

Comes Sharon, about the same age as Bush the father. He embraces Bush the son, whispers in his ears that the young Bush is the first president finally to understand world terrorism - meaning the threat to Israel. Watch the body language. Bush bought Israel's policies hook, line and sinker.

Sharon gave him a line by which he could distinguish himself. There has never been anything like it in American history. Nor have there been many American presidents with so little background in foreign affairs - imagine the wealthy son of a world leader who had hardly ever visited a foreign country before becoming the world's most powerful man!

Who's Sharon?

The problem is, who is this Sharon? I first came to know of him in 1982 when I was an American delegate at the United Nations; a fellow sub-cabinet official, a Jewish-American very close to Israeli leaders, bragged of General Ariel Sharon's violent exploits in Lebanon. I subsequently saw scary analyses of these in the American intelligence traffic that made Sharon look like one of the world's significant terrorists.

"He's not an evil man," another Jewish acquaintance of his told me more recently. "He just likes to hit people."

There is reinforcement to the Sharon view - of hitting out as a response to all problems - coming on all sides in Washington. At a conference on Indonesia there just after 9-11, an analyst from a large and famous Washington policy institute reported that one of their studies of Islamic propaganda revealed that there was no mention of Israel - the later Cheney line. I asked whether they had done any reading in Arabic for their studies. In stupefaction, I added the question of whether they had read anything in English.

But this is the policy environment onto which Sharon entered the stage to snooker the American public while leading a blind president down his own chosen policy path. Sharon had promised his own voting public immediate results from his policy of hitting out and hitting hard - apparently without looking and certainly without thinking.

The results three years later on their stage and the world stage are everywhere to see. At some point, Washington will wake out of its stupor.

W SCOTT THOMPSON, an adjunct professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Boston, is a former assistant secretary of state for the Ronald Reagan administration. He lives in Bali and Washington DC.