The Israelis have just elected a Prime Minister who, brought before the bar of international justice, would surely be judged a war criminal. He would be in the class of, say, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander who was as firmly associated with the Srebenica massacre as Ariel Sharon was with the massacre of Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Mr Sharon calls Yasser Arafat "a murderer and a liar", but, in the run-up to the elections, the liberal Israeli press copiously illustrated the deceit and sanguinary brutality which have been the twin pillars of Mr Sharon's own career. One of his likely coalition partners, Avigdor Liebermann, has spoken of burning Beirut, bombing Tehran and destroying the Aswan Dam. Mr Sharon's ideas on furthering the peace process make a total mockery of it. If any Israeli leader ever had the makings of a Western villain, the destroyer of US interests in the region, it is surely he.
Yet, within a week of this would-be villain emerging as Israel's Prime Minister-elect, whom do the Americans and British go and bomb? That old, familiar, Arab villain, Saddam Hussein. Of course, his crimes and atrocities are of an order that words can barely encompass. Keeping him from committing more of them is one thing - the motives and methods of those who have assigned themselves that task, and the regional context in which they do so, are something else.
Last Friday's raid was the first on such a scale for over two years. The US and Britain say it was necessitated by the upgrading of Mr Saddam's defences and the increased threat that posed to their aircraft's routine forays over the so-called no-fly zones. Even if that argument is true, it has few takers in the Arab world. For the Arabs, the raid is a clear escalation of the Anglo-American campaign against Mr Saddam, with a far greater political import than a strictly military one.
With the rise of Mr Sharon, there could hardly have been a more blatant, a more richly symbolic display of the double standards which, in the Arab view, typify Western, but especially American, treatment of those perennial Middle East crisis zones - the Arab-Israeli conflict and Iraq and the Gulf. It bodes ill for both.
Each crisis has its own origins and dynamics. And they are, and always have been, intrinsically connected. Mr Saddam himself pioneered what came to be known as linkage when, just after he invaded Kuwait in 1990, he offered to withdraw in return for an immediate, unconditional Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. The offer was greeted with cries of outrage in the West.
But in due course linkage surreptitiously asserted itself. George Bush snr promulgated a "new world order", whose cornerstone in the Middle East was to be a just and lasting Arab-Israeli settlement. America's Arab allies understood that to achieve it the US would back away from its historic pro-Israeli bias. "Bush," Egypt's President Mubarak said at the time, "agrees with me that the Israelis must be pushed into a Palestine solution."
Fairness and firmness in one crisis zone were to work wonders in the other, and vice versa.
But it was not to be. Both crises have festered and worsened. Mr Saddam grows stronger and more assertive; as for his weapons of mass destruction, whose destruction is the central aim of US policy, it has become clear that nothing short of his own removal from power can prevent him from developing them. On the Arab-Israeli front, the peace process has all but collapsed; violence and mutual hatred deepen.
PERNICIOUS though these two crises are on their own, through the intrinsic connection between them they achieve an even higher degree of malignancy. And, with Mr Sharon's ascent, both have as key players two individuals who incarnate all that is most extreme, dangerous and destructive in the region.
This, then, is the moment the US, under a new administration, has chosen to embark on a more activist policy in one zone of crisis. Presumably that is what the raid portends. Leading members of the Bush team, notably Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, are known to favour a more forceful interpretation of the Iraqi Liberation Act - under which the US is supposed to help the Iraqi opposition to bring about "representative" government in Iraq - to which Mr Clinton paid mere lip service.
The raid may please the Iraqi opposition, or some of it, as well as Gulf countries, or some of its ruling elites most directly threatened by Mr Saddam, but it is deeply unpopular in the wider Arab arena. The Arabs - people especially but governments too - have been growing steadily more hostile to US-led containment of Iraq; key Arab countries are making ever greater breaches in the UN sanctions. Indeed, supporting Iraq has become a necessary yardstick of patriotism, even for a devoutly pro-Western ruler such as King Abdullah of Jordan, which is second only to supporting the Intifada.
This is not for love of Mr Saddam, or any hostility to Iraqis who seek to overthrow him. It is because of natural solidarity with a fellow Arab country - more than ever now because of linkage - and outrage at how the world's only superpower penalises Arabs for their misdemeanours but never its Israeli ally.
"It is clear what the US is now about," said an Iraqi exile in Beirut, "it wants erring Arab regimes to correct their priorities, to re-establish Saddam, not Sharon, as the real enemy; it may have some success in the Gulf, but in general, and unfortunately for us Iraqis who have most reason to hate him, it is turning him into an Arab champion again."
In truth, no one revels in linkage like Mr Saddam. He outbids Arab leaders in his militancy, castigating those who "don't know how to fight". While others quarrel over the disposal of an official, billion-dollar Intifada fund, he gets money directly to the families of Palestinian martyrs. In the wake of the latest raid, he ordered the formation of 21 divisions of the Jerusalem Liberation Army, an ostensibly volunteer force with the mission of reconquering Palestine "from the river [the Jordan] to the sea".
US Secretary of State Colin Powell begins an inaugural tour of the Middle East soon. The raid will have made his task more difficult than ever. There is no way he can persuade pro-Western Arab regimes, increasingly nervous of the anti-American feelings of their publics, to assist US efforts to manage either zone of crisis, if that means they must line up behind a more aggressive policy against Mr Saddam in the one, while simultaneously adjusting themselves to the outrageous requirements of Mr Sharon in the other.
There could always be a miracle: in resorting to a new activism against Mr Saddam, Bush will do the same against the Saddam-equivalent in Israel. But judging by the lack of any perceptible official alarm with which the new man was greeted, he will have to wreak a great deal of havoc before the miracle occurs, and America begins to think of fairness and true objectivity as a sensible way for saving the Middle East from the twin calamities that surely await it.
