FRIEDMAN'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS

The really bothersome thing about reading Tom Friedman columns like this one is that virtually every post-invasion problem in Iraq he's complained about was easily predictable before Bush's war, yet he supported it anyway.

The Bush administration has done more to polarize the American electorate than any other administration in the last several decades (even Clinton), and Friedman trusted them to help foster a "moderate center" in a recent post-dictatorship?

At least Tom is still telling the hard truths on Israel:

Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, dropped a bombshell this week when he said he was laying plans to withdraw most Israeli settlements in Gaza and to move others in the West Bank. It's not surprising that this potential breakthrough move came from Mr. Sharon, since he has the two other main players in the Arab-Israeli drama under house arrest.

That is, Mr. Sharon has the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat under house arrest in his office in Ramallah, and he's had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office. Mr. Sharon has Mr. Arafat surrounded by tanks, and Mr. Bush surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who's ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates, and by political handlers telling the president not to put any pressure on Israel in an election year — all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing.

Since Mr. Sharon is the only moving object, and because he has suddenly found himself under pressure to move — both to change the subject from the corruption scandal closing in on him and his family and to satisfy an Israeli electorate fed up with the bloody status quo — we may have a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. This is apparently part of a broader Sharon plan to unilaterally create an interim Palestinian state in about 50 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, and leave Israel with the rest.

While Mr. Sharon's decision is in the right direction, it's not all so simple. Why? Because in the past two years, Mr. Sharon has crushed Mr. Arafat's corrupt Palestinian Authority, but failed to lift a finger to empower more responsible Palestinians — like Mahmoud Abbas and Muhammad Dahlan. This has created a power vacuum in Gaza and the West Bank, filled by Hamas, the Islamist militant group. And last week, Mr. Sharon turned over 400 Palestinian prisoners to the Islamist Lebanese militia Hezbollah in a prisoner swap, something he was never ready to do with moderate Palestinian leaders.

The message he sent is: use violence, as Hamas and Hezbollah do, and you get results from Israel. Adopt moderation, and you get nothing. If Mr. Sharon just pulls out of Gaza and half of the West Bank soon, he and the Bush team that's in his pocket will reap what he's sown: a Hamas takeover in these areas or civil war.

Friedman dances around a very central point that he implies, but doesn't state in plain English, though I will: Ariel Sharon has no interest in a strong moderate Palestinian leadership. If he actually did anything to foster such trends after locking Arafat in his compound, then Israel would have to withdraw from virtually all of the 1967 West Bank territories (as mandated by UN 242, by the way) rather than merely half of them. With a Hamas-filled power vacuum or open civil war among the Palestinians, Sharon believes he would have a greater ability to deligitimize their claims in the occupied territories. And surrounded by chaos and violence on both sides, Israel would be viewed even more sympathetically.

The interesting thing about Palestine and Iraq is that among the Bushies, the neocons and the Likudniks, the goals in each of those places diverge. It is in all three parties' interest that moderation (or in Bush's case, the appearance of moderation) rises in Iraq. Yet it is in the interests (short-term or not) of all three parties that a moderate center doesn't develop among the Palestinians.