Americans - be aware! The cards in Washington are stacked against Israel these days. An unfortunate combination has emerged of a president who regards the Jewish state as strategically weak and a group of key US advisers on the administration’s new Iraqi policy who are drawn from the most anti-Israeli US administrations of the past. The Olmert government must of necessity brace itself for a period of intensive American pressure to cede ever more assets to curry favor with the Arabs. This is the present situation.

The situation which the Bush Administration is facing in Iraq has created a dilemma which necessitates reversing the US policy of support for Israel in order to gain help from the Arab nations with regard to Iraq. The feared diplomatic nightmare for Israel is now a reality.

Hamas was quick to pick up the new tune emanating from Washington. Its leaders and Mahmoud Abbas declared a hurried ceasefire Sunday to take advantage of the US president’s willingness to broaden his Amman talks from his planned meetings with Iraqi prime minister Nouri Maliki to an effort to convene an international conference on the Palestinian issue. Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert accepted the ceasefire against military advice Jordan's King Abdullah chipped in by saying that Palestine “is the core” of all Middle East violence.

Olmert, loath to relinquish the high diplomatic ground to the Palestinians, promised Monday that after the kidnapped Israeli soldier is released, Israel will free many jailed Palestinians, including long term prisoners, as a confidence-building gesture to prove Israel seeks peace. As soon as a Palestinian unity government is formed, Olmert said, immediate negotiations could start with Mahmoud Abbas on the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. He allowed the evacuation of some West Bank settlements was possible in return for real peace and Palestinian renunciation of the return of 1948 Palestinian refugees. If such talks are successful, Olmert promised to release frozen Palestinian funds.

Since Sunday, every Palestinian and Israeli verbal pronouncement has been tuned to the wavelengths of Bush and his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. She will join him in Amman and lead the effort to bring Israeli and Palestinian leaders together. Her mission will be to extract results from these encounters to be used in turn to persuade Arab rulers to lend the United States a helping hand on the Iraq crisis.

In plain terms, Israel is to be the 'sacrifice' for solving the Iraq dilemma.

The brain behind this new strategy belongs to Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to three Republican presidents, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George Bush Sr. He is emerging as the live wire behind the latest US foreign policy departures and the pivotal figure behind the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group.

Scowcroft was the first American strategic thinker to say out loud what intelligence has been reporting since early August - namely, that George Bush and his key advisers have diagnosed Israel as coming out of the Lebanon War weakened and with its strategic situation impaired.

“I think we need to embed Iraq in a larger regional solution, and that to me goes back to the Palestinian issue. I think this would put us back on the offensive psychologically and even make Iraq easier to manage,” Sowcroft said. Scowcroft then proposed an international conference, saying: “But I don’t think this will start with some kind of a conference because everyone will come with their preset speeches and everything will freeze again. But I think that there will be some quiet consultations in the region. I believe the Arab states in the region are eager for such a conversation. Israel may not be eager, but Israel is in bad shape right now.”

The mismanagement of the Lebanon War this summer and its distasteful results on all fronts are now yielding dangerous consequences for Israel, far beyond the public unhappiness and political implications within Israel itself.