After almost four weeks of war between Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and Israel, the Bush administration’s ambitions to transform the Arab Middle East into a pro-Western, more democratic region are fading fast.

Not only is Washington’s staunch support for Israel losing Arab “hearts and minds” at an astonishing pace, but the “moderate” governments and non-governmental forces which

the administration had hoped would act as catalysts for reform are increasingly isolated, according to Middle East specialists.

“I have never seen the US being so demonised or savaged by Arab commentators and Arab politicians,” Hisham Melham, Washington correspondent for Lebanon’s An-Nahar newspaper, said last week at the Brookings Institution. “People are clinging to Hezbollah and Hamas because they see them as the remaining voices or forces in the Arab world that are resisting what they see as an hegemonic American-Israeli plan to control the region,” he said.

“What we see in Lebanon is a policy that is not empowering them. It is widening the gap between the moderate elites and the people, and people are moving toward the militants,” Shibley Telhami, an expert on Arab public opinion at the University of Maryland, observed at the same meeting. That point was echoed by none other than Jordan’s King Abdullah who had joined the Egyptian and Saudi governments in denouncing Hezbollah for “adventurism” in attacking across the Lebanese border, thus provoking Israel’s military campaign.

Even before the outbreak of this latest war between Israel and Hezbollah, Washington’s hopes of regional transformation appeared to be dimming fast. Besides Lebanon, whose “Cedar Revolution” last year was cited by the Bush administration as vindication of its domino theory of democratic change, the two other Arab polities in which it has invested most of its hopes for transformation — Iraq and the Palestinian Authority (PA) — were already in deep trouble.

In the PA, not only had Hamas, the Islamist party on the State Department’s terrorism list, won last January’s democratic parliamentary elections, but a subsequent US-led aid and diplomatic embargo against its government only strengthened its popularity at home, partly at the expense of Washington’s preferred interlocutor, the Fatah Party’s Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA. Moreover, Israel’s US-backed military campaign against Hamas does not appear to have reduced its hold on public opinion.

In Iraq, where Washington is spending seven billion dollars a month, a series of US-organised elections appears only to have hastened the country’s descent into a brutal sectarian civil war.

“Sectarian violence probably is as bad as I’ve seen it in Baghdad,” Gen. John Abizaid, the head of US Central Command, told a Senate hearing. “If not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war.” His remarks were echoed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

Gen. Peter Pace, who was reacting to a leaked memo from Britain’s outgoing ambassador to Iraq who warned Tony Blair that “the prospect of a low-intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.” — IPS