The murders would carry the shock waves all around the Muslim world. Where Sharon is looked upon as little other than Bush's head hunting bulldog. The notion is reinforced when an Israeli spokesman brazenly boasted that the prime minister had personally supervised the planning of the attack on Yassin. The murder was known to be formally ratified by the Israeli Cabinet that has descended to the level of a Council of Mafia gangsters ordering a knockout. The Hamas leaders are convinced that despite half hearted denials by Washington, the assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and subsequently Abdul Aziz Rantisi were carried out in explicit collaboration with the US administration which is equally responsible for the dastardly crime. The Israeli government which owes its existence to the US and is dependent upon Washington for economic and military aid couldn't have conducted the attack without a green signal from 'White House'.

Nevertheless the Israeli actions -- with or without US blessings -- have been able to scuttle the feeble peace efforts pursued by different quarters, for no dialogue for peace is indeed conceivable in prevailing mood on either side. European Commissioner Chris Patten caught the mood when he suggested that Israel had dealt with a fire by powering gasoline on the flame. Hamas is already threatening to take its war beyond Israel and occupied territories warning that all Zionists (and Americans) will now be targets. The movement's new leader calls for the 'Muslim nations' to wake up from its sleep and take up arms; another faction calls for "War, War, War on the sons of Lion.”

Still worse are the implications of Bush's wholesale endorsement of Ariel Sharon's Gaza plan. By supporting the sinister plan, President Bush not only repudiates several decades of American policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict, he, as a matter of fact, legitimises the usurpation of more Palestinian lands by the Israelis. Following his White House meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister early last month Goerge Bush scuttled previous US Administrations' policy by declaring that Israel might retain "some" Palestinian land. This means that the Bush Administration now supports Sharon's diabolical plan that provides for the pullout of Jewish settlements from Gaza Strip and their rehabilitation in larger West Bank settlements.

The US position on Sharon plan was that it could be treated only as an interim step without contradicting the provision of US backed 'road map'. But in the press conference held on 14 April after meeting Ariel Sharon, the President said that one had to take note of "new realities on the ground". This was ostensibly a reference to the illegal settlements the successive Israeli governments built in the West Bank, especially around Al-Quds so as to surround the holy city with Jewish Population Centres.

In hindsight Israel was already comprised of 78% of Ottoman territory as it existed in 1917 when Britain occupied it as mandatory power. The remaining 22% consisting of Gaza Strip and West Bank was under Israeli occupation since 1967. In the throes of Intifida as this occupied territory was bleeding, a visionary US President, Jimmy Carter and two Arab and Israeli Leaders -- Anwar Sadat and Yizhtak Rabin decided to bury the hatchet. More than a decade later Yasser Arafat, the PLO Chief and Prime Minister Rabin signed what the then US President Bill Clinton called "the peace of the brakes". But following Rabin's murder in the hand of a Zionist fanatic, successive Israeli governments sabotaged the peace initiated under the rubric of Oslo process.

Fresh hopes were aroused when in April 2003 President Bush unveilled the 'road map" -- supported also by the UN, EU and Russia. Although the road map was seen more as an attempt to placate the Arab anger on the eve of Anglo-American Iraq invasion, it held out some promises for the weaker party like the Palestinians vis-a-vis Israel, the mighty regional power with nukes in its arsenal.

The 'road map' visualised a total withdrawal from the occupied territories and halt to Jewish settlement activities and, of course, the emergence of sovereign Palestinian state. It also stipulated the disbanding of those settlements which came up after March 2001. But Ariel Sharon continued to build new settlements and strengthen and expand the existing ones while the Bush Administration looked the other way. Now with the latest initiative of Sharon -- ostensibly with Bush's acquiescence, the US has knocked the bottom out of very 'road map' it itself had presented a year ago. In the 14 July press conference, George Bush unabashedly justified Israel's violations of 'road map' by saying that the final settlement couldn't involve return to 1949 armistice line because of the 'existing major Israeli population." In other words the US has already underwritten Israel's annexation of parts of West Bank.

Even if the role of earlier US administrations were unsavoury for the Palestinians, the Bush administration has outdone all its previous ones in kowtowing to the Zionists. It was at Sharon's behest that the US began undermining President Yasser Arafat's leadership and authority. Egged on by Tel Aviv, Washington began to make extraneous demands like the reforms in the Palestinian Authority -- thus side tracking the real issue -- the need for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territory. The latest shift in US policy is a severe blow to hopes for peace in the Middle East.

It is a cruel Joke that Bush calls the butcher of Sabra and Satila 'the man of peace' and blatantly supports his crude terrorism. It is an irony that the US President exasperated with his war on terror has been chasing the wrong men in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan while the world's biggest-terrorist is very much there in Tel Aviv.

George Bush, afraid more of an Israeli lobby than his electorate, praises Sharon's plan to steal yet more Palestinian lands as a 'historic and courageous act'. The man with such a bias can be anything but an earnest broker for Middle East peace.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.