Israeli leader Ariel Sharon is following, virtually to the letter, George W. Bush's "road map" for dealing with violence in the Occupied Territories. Unfortunately, it's the road map Bush himself is using in Iraq--not the PR gimmick Bush and other Western leaders issued in April for the Middle East. The result is far worse.

The publicized "road map"--the phrase itself is a PR invention, probably invented by some State Department flack because after the failure of the Oslo accords, no Middle East plan dares to actually use the word "peace"--was dead on arrival. Actually, it was dead before arrival, because Bush held up the proposal for over a year so that he could launch his Iraq invasion first.

With Baghdad occupied, the White House claimed, America would turn its full attention to the Palestinian "problem." Both Washington and the Israelis wanted Arafat out for his alleged continuing support of terrorism. Key to their plan was to try to first find a Palestinian--any Palestinian--who could plausibly be presented to the world and to at least some Palestinians as a replacement for legendary leader Yassar Arafat. Sound familiar?

Their answer has been Mahmoud Abbas, who, it turns out, is in an impossible position. Even a pliant politician like Abbas, who owes his present position to support from Bush and Sharon, could not deliver on what the two leaders wanted: to curtsy and say "yes, sir" when Sharon dismantled already-abandoned settlements, and then to look the other way as Israel attempted (and failed) to assassinate the political leadership of Hamas.

Hamas, of course, has far more grassroots support among Palestinians than Abbas does; Abbas cannot possibly look the other way. What Bush and Sharon have wanted was a scene from America's westward expansion: an Indian chief who would, with or without the tribe's authority, knowledge, or permission, sign over the tribe's land and resources. What the two governments have discovered is that no credible Palestinian leader can be found who will do it.

Did anyone seriously expect such a plan to work? If so, it was an exercise in self-delusion; if not, it was a cynical PR ploy. Either way, it was a non- starter, because any Palestinian peace process, by any name, must include safeguards against Israelis obtaining concessions and then backing out of talks as soon as any Palestinian faction--and there are dozens--commits an act of violence to disrupt things. The cycle is as predictable as the tides. The same is true of Palestinian leaders, of course, but the perpetrators of Israeli violence are almost always either the army or vigilante settlers with the army's backing. They, at least, are on the same side as the negotiators, That's not necessarily true at all for the fractious Palestinians, who become united only when Israel unleashes a new round of violence. A leader with a tenuous constituency, like Abbas, will always have factions that will want to undermine whatever he negotiates.

Meanwhile, the non-Abbas component of the Sharon strategy seems to be an assumption that any Palestinian resistance to the deal brokered with the pliant local chief can be crushed militarily--from large international outfits like Hamas to random packs of angry villagers. It seems to be exactly the same strategy that Bush is pursuing in America's new Occupied Territories: install a hand-picked "government" intended to restore "democracy," and then shoot at everyone else. How long before Marines start bulldozing homes?

In Iraq, the new pliant chief, er, "returned exile leader" looks to be Ahmed Chalabi, the ethically-challenged protege of the ethically-challenged Richard Perle. Chalabi is a convicted thief with no Iraqi constituency beyond what he can buy with the Pentagon's money. His domain: a road map that is also unraveling rapidly. The Americans and Brits (a.k.a. "Coalition Provisional Authority") and their hand-picked puppets talk and work only with each other, kept safely separate from ordinary Iraqis while they toil in leftover Saddam palaces and hastily erected military bases. When they emerge from behind their moats, in their black Mercedes stretch limos with the armed escorts, they're met with stones and hatred and, increasing, gunfire. Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank combined are the size of New Jersey; Iraq is the size of Montana, with 24 million people, and Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds are beginning to unite in their determination that the Americans must go. This is what democracy looks like.

The harsh military crackdown on Iraqis, ordered last week by the extraordinarily clueless new American viceroy, Paul Bremer, is bound to only escalate the organized resistance already coalescing in a number of Iraqi cities. Add in the press censorship, the stunningly ham-fisted threat to censor the imams' (frequently politicized) public prayer calls, the repression of new Shiite political parties, and the American theft of Iraqi oil, and it all has the ring to Iraqis of visions they already saw for over three decades with the (American-installed) Baathists of Saddam Hussein.

Iraqis are as determined to nip a new Western-supported dictatorship in the bud as the Americans are to nip Iraqi resistance in the bud; but really, so long as the Americans get their oil, they could not care less what happens to the rest of the country. It all has exactly the same weary, and expensive, inevitability as the Israeli/Palestinian conflict--a conflict born not of religious animosity, but of a struggle for control of land and resources. In Israel, it's water; in Iraq, oil.

In both settings, the "road map" is to maintain an illegal occupation, legitimize it--to the world, not to the indigenous victims--as an exercise in "democracy" and "freedom" that the indigenous victims "don't know how to do for themselves," label any resistance of any sort "terrorism" or "supporting terrorism", and crush it with overwhelming military superiority. Ending violence with far greater violence, of course, never, ever works; instead, it provokes more "terrorism," other forms of asymmetrical warfare, and the endless loss of innocent lives on all sides. The cycle of bloodshed never stops.

This is a formula that's kept Israelis prosperous--if not safe--for decades. Since America is halfway around the world from Iraq, the danger to Americans on US soil from such a road map is somewhat less. But these two occupations are now linked, and as such are no longer a localized conflict.

Bush has seemingly accepted Sharon's role in destroying his Middle East PR road map with equanimity; he called the deaths of two Palestinian bystanders (including a young girl) in the botched attack on Hamas "troubling," and it's easy to imagine the reaction if it had been a young Israeli child who'd died in a failed suicide bomb attack on Israeli ministers.

For a wide swath of the world--including the zealots who launched 9/11--the single most enraging injustice perpetrated by the West has been the 35-year-old, illegal Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank; that occupation has been abetted by the United States. Now, the US itself is launching another Middle East occupation that looks eerily similar. Muslims won't stand for it. Americans, Israelis, and other Westerners--in that order--are going to be targets around the world as a result. And some day, that thirst for revenge will find its way back to US soil.

Some map.