IF the world were voting in the US presidential elections next November Barack Obama would be certain to win, such is the longing across the globe – and nowhere more than in Europe and the Arab world – for the United States to recover its sanity, its authority and its reputation. But the world will not be voting. The American electorate – distracted by the current economic downturn, manipulated by special interest groups, and largely ignorant of the outside world – cannot be counted on to put Obama in the White House, although the polls suggest that most Americans have a sense that their country is heading in the wrong direction. There is an historic opportunity for America to turn a page on the follies of the past eight years. But will the opportunity be seized? What seems clear, at least to outsiders, is that a McCain presidency – staffed by neoconservatives as rabid as those that shaped the Middle East policy of George W Bush's administration – is likely to plunge the United States still deeper into a morass of arrogant neo-colonialism and foreign wars. Looking back, several of Bush's catastrophic mistakes stemmed from a faulty reading of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Why did 19 young Arabs –several of them highly educated and 15 of them Saudis -- burn with such a desire to hurt America that they were ready to sacrifice their own lives? Few, if any, American politicians or commentators have been ready to admit that the answer lay in the policies America had pursued in the region. *Once the Soviets had been forced out of Afghanistan in 1988, the US cynically abandoned the tens of thousands of Muslims which (with its ally Pakistan) it had recruited, armed and funded for the task. *Half a million American troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia – greatly offending much of local opinion – in order to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991. * After that first Gulf War, Iraq continued to be punished, isolated and crippled by 13 years of punitive sanctions and repeated air raids. * The United States tolerated, and even funded, Israel's cruel occupation and illegal settlement of Palestinian territory. Instead of rethinking and correcting such policies, the United States swallowed the neo-con argument that 9/11 was not an enraged response to American policies, but was instead the product of a violent and fanatical Arab world. Therefore, the neo-cons said, for the US and Israel to be safe, Arab societies had to be reformed and reshaped, if necessary by force -- beginning with Iraq. A foolhardy Global War on Terror (GWAT) was declared which, far from eliminating terrorism, has bred a new generation of angry militants. Many Arabs and Muslims understood Bush's policy to mean an American war on Islam. Saddam Hussein's Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and possessed no weapons of mass destruction, as has since been conclusively demonstrated. But Israel and its friends in the Bush administration saw it as a potential threat to the Jewish state. A case was therefore made, on the basis of fraudulent intelligence, for Iraq to be demonized, occupied and destroyed in 2003. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and between four and five million displaced from their homes or driven into exile. The Iraq war has also inflicted terrible damage on the US armed forces, bankrupted America's public finances, and destroyed its moral and political authority in much of the world. Obama, at least, understands the need to end this futile colonial war, and bring the troops home. In the meantime, distracted by the Iraq war, the hunt to find and kill Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda band has got nowhere. Instead, it has sucked the US and its NATO allies into a war against the Taleban -- in effect a war against some 30 million Pashtun tribesmen on either side of the Afghan-Pakistani border, who are determined to expel the foreigners and protect their families, way of life and religion. That war, too, is being lost by the United States and NATO. The Afghan capital Kabul is under Taleban siege; Pakistan has been destabilized; and Western, Afghan and Pakistani lives are being uselessly thrown away – like the ten French paratroopers killed in a Taleban ambush last week. Urgently required is not a greater military effort by the West, but a ceasefire with the Taliban, followed by a negotiated settlement involving the US, India, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan to stabilize the whole war-torn region. Iran must be involved as well. Of all the follies of the Bush administration perhaps none has been greater than the failure to forge a new relationship with Tehran thirty years after the overthrow of the Shah and the birth of the Islamic Republic. Instead, the same special interests that pushed America into war against Iraq have, with equal fervor, been pressing for war against Iran, demonizing and threatening it as an ‘existential' danger not only to Israel but to the entire world! Obama has spoken of wanting to engage in a dialogue with Iran although, in his contest with McCain, he has recently toughened up his language. He seems to understand the urgent necessity of rebuilding America's bridges with the third world, and with the world of Islam in particular. He has pledged to give priority to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which Bush has criminally neglected, allowing it to continue to pump its poison into the Muslim world's relationship with the West. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was this week once again in Israel – her seventh wholly ineffectual visit since last November's Annapolis conference. The US has totally failed to check Israel's relentless theft of Palestinian land, or to end its stifling grip on the Palestinian economy, and its cruel siege of Gaza. Palestinian statehood remains as much of a mirage as ever. On the eve of Rice's visit, Israel released 198 Palestinian prisoners: one had served 32 years in an Israeli jail, the other 29 years -- two Palestinian ‘Mandelas', bearing witness to the pitiless brutality of Israel's prison system. Of the 11,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, about 9,000 are political prisoners, including 326 children. In January 2006, a report by a UN Special representative found that ‘Allegations of torture and inhuman treatment continue … such as beatings, shackling in painful positions, kicking, prolonged blindfolding, denial of access to medical care, exposure to extreme temperatures and inadequate provision of food and water.' Amin Abu Sitteh, aged 13, a former prisoner said: ‘I was handcuffed to a chair with my legs tied apart; five soldiers were there to beat me. First they started punching me and broke my teeth. Then Abu Rami (the head of the Shin Beth in the area) ordered them to kill me, so they really started beating me. They hit me so hard that my knee cap came right out and they broke my leg. They went on for about two-and-a
