A sex scandal in Washington could lead to a war in the Middle East

Robert Fisk on fatal consequences

President Clinton's sexual behaviour, it now seems, may tilt the balance from peace to war in the MiddleEast. Every front- page headline in the Arab world has grasped this point. True, President Clinton mighttry to distract Americans by launching yet another strike against Baghdad for its non-compliance with UNweapons inspectors; even if he found military reason to do so, however, no one in the Middle East wouldbelieve that the timing was coincidental.

President Clinton's sexual behaviour, it now seems, may tilt the balance from peace to war in the MiddleEast. Every front- page headline in the Arab world has grasped this point. True, President Clinton mighttry to distract Americans by launching yet another strike against Baghdad for its non-compliance with UNweapons inspectors; even if he found military reason to do so, however, no one in the Middle East wouldbelieve that the timing was coincidental.

Yet far more serious is the fact that the US president - who never did more than complain privately toIsrael about its wish to destroy the Oslo agreement - no longer has the slightest leverage over the Israeliprime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. And a war between Israelis and Palestinians, ever more likely giventhe threats that they are making against each other, will cost many more lives than Mr Clinton's pin-prickmissiles against Iraq.

Within hours of President Clinton's meeting with Mr Netanyahu last week, the signs were all too clear.The White House spokesman, James Rubin, was waffling about Yassir Arafat's need to be "realistic"about what he could get - as opposed to what he was entitled to - under the Oslo Middle East peaceaccord; and Jerusalem's mayor Ehud Olmert announced that Mr Netanyahu had just given his unequivocalcommitment to further Jewish settlement building on occupied Arab land in east Jerusalem, in totalviolation of the Oslo accords. No wonder Mr Arafat left Washington muttering about the "peanuts" thePalestinians were being offered.

Arab leaders understood all too well what had happened: President Clinton's political impotence meantthat he could not afford to anger Congress or the Senate - whose pro-Israeli lobbyists decide US policy onthe Middle East - and the Israelis, courtesy of Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky et alcould therefore do what they want. And so they did. While the Palestinian Authority negotiator HassanAsfour reproached Mr Clinton for failing, as peace guarantor, to condemn Israel's stated intention ofkeeping at least 60 per cent of the occupied West Bank, Israel's cabinet secretary Danny Navehannounced that "no one will dictate to Israel what are its vital national interests".

No indeed. While Mr Netanyahu was assuring his American Jewish lobbyists that Jewish settlementswould continue to be built, his army chief of staff, Major General Amnon Shahak, was claiming thatwithout security guarantees from Lebanon, Israel's occupation troops might stay there for "another 1,000years". Quite apart from the implications of such an extraordinary statement - at a rate of 39 soldiers killeda year, General Shahak was dooming another 39,000 Israelis to die in Lebanon - it was an open invitationto the pro-Iranian Hizbollah to respond. And they did.

The guerrilla organisation's leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, told a "Jerusalem Day" rally in Beirut thatHizbollah would fight against Israel for "thousands of years", asking why the Israelis thought their statewould exist in the year 2998. Hizbollah would fight until Jerusalem was "free of Jews". Never before hadNasrallah spoken like this. But the drums of war always echo louder on the other side of front lines andwe can expect more fearful rhetoric from Israelis and Arabs alike.Just two days ago, Israel radio wasreporting that the US and Israelis would begin talks - not on peace but on the possibility of war withSyria.

In the meantime, the Israeli army has produced its own code name for a future campaign againstPalestinians in the event of a second "intifada" uprising, about which Arafat has been warning. MrNetanyahu is threatening a "tough response". And just as the 1996 Israeli bombardment of southernLebanon was named "Grapes of Wrath", the future anti-Palestinian strike - according to Israeli journalists- is to be called "Operation Burning Steel". The Israeli daily Maariv even claims that the Palestinianspossess Stinger anti-aircraft missiles in the West Bank - a weird assertion when Israel controls all landfrontiers to the area. Israeli commanders and their soldiers are going to be "mentally prepared" foroperations against the Palestinians, the paper ominously warned last week.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, where the Babel newspaper - edited by Saddam Hussein's son Oudai - has beenheaping scorn on Mr Clinton's sex life, Saddam himself must be opening magnums of champagne tocelebrate the US president's potential catastrophe. Saddam knows full well that if the sex scandal destroysMr Clinton, he will have outlasted two American presidential adversaries; and that if Mr Clinton choosesto attack Iraq because of Baghdad's refusal to cooperate with the weapons inspectors, Arab states -regarding such an attack as a cynical distraction from Clinton's domestic plight - will be under strongpressure to abandon US "protection" and speak out on Iraq's behalf.

Not, of course, that Arab leaders are any more personally moral than Mr Clinton. One plucky monarchwhom we in the West all know and love was recently involved with a student even younger than MonicaLewinski. A Gulf ruler regularly marries virgins from his emirate's tribes. A very well-known Arab Gulfking bought an entire seafront hotel to prevent guests viewing his latest conquests in their bikinis in aneighbouring palace. Nor are the Israelis exempt. Moshe Dayan was a notorious womaniser. MrNetanyahu has even performed a Clinton sexual mea culpa on television. But in the Middle East, sex doesnot decide the future of nations.

One irony of the situation has not eluded the Arabs. Talal Salman, the wily editor of Beirut's daily AsSafir newspaper sharply spotted Arafat's own weakness. "The melodrama of the whole thing is thatArafat is making concessions (on security and the PLO charter) to an American president who is himselfon the verge of being ousted," he wrote. "The time for counting on the United States or others is over."The Saudi-owned Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat ran a cartoon in which a two-faced Mr Clinton staredtraumatised at Monica Lewinsky on television while at the same time trying to concentrate on Mr Arafat,as the PLO leader waved the Oslo agreement in front of him. There was, typically, no explanation as towhy so many Arab leaders slavishly put their trust in the US as an honest broker in the first place.

Already (and predictably), Arab leaders have decided that the Israeli lobby organised Mr Clinton's affair.The Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri has publicly claimed this to be true. No one has asked - despiteMr Clinton's feeble attempt last week to persuade Israel to keep its side of the peace bargain - why thelobby would want to destroy a man whose own Middle East policies have been so cravenly pro-Israeli.Mr Clinton's sexual behaviour has meanwhile affected other parts of the Middle East. In Iran, thedomestic enemies of President Mohamed Khatami - a genuinely moral man who has sought to heal theterrible rift between his country and the US - have been regaling their supporters with tales of MrClinton's Rabelaisian behaviour.

This is not the moment, clearly, for more Iranian talk of "the great American people" - not when it seemsthat the lives and deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Middle East people, Arabs and Israelis alike,may depend on the shape of the presidential organ and the use to which it has been put. Which is, to saythe least, obscene.