Fatal vision: how Bush has given up on peace: A vacillating President and lack of a credible plan is fuelling hatred in the Middle East

George Bush Junior gave up last week. After all the blustering and grovelling and the disobeyed instructions to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and all the hectoring of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and all the "visions" of a Palestinian state, the President threw in his hand. There will be no Middle East peace conference in the near future, no serious attempt to halt the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, not a whimper of resolution on the region's tragedy from the man who started the "war for civilisation'', the "war on terror'', the "endless war'' and, most recently, the "titanic war on terror''. Mr Bush, his ever more incomprehensible spokesman Ari Fleischer vouchsafed to us last week, "has come to some conclusions". And – this really took the biscuit – "when the President determines the time is right, he will share it".

I love the idea of this increasingly incompetent strategist on Middle East affairs quietly weighing, like Frederick the Great, the odds on the rights of three million Palestinian refugees to return, the future of Jerusalem, and the continued growth of settlements for Jews on occupied land – only to decide that these weighty matters of state must be withheld from his loyal people. After lecturing the pompous and pathetic Arafat on his duties to protect Israel it only took an Israeli shell fired into a crowded Palestinian market – another of those famous Israeli "errors" – to shut Bush up again. Just a week ago, as we all know, Mr Bush had another of his famous "visions". They started in the autumn of last year when he had a vision of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel. This particular vision coincided quite by chance, of course, with his efforts to keep the Arab states quiescent while America bombed the poorest and most ruined Muslim country in the world. Then this dream was forgotten for a few months until, earlier this year, Vice President Dick Cheney toured the Middle East to drum up Arab support for another war on Iraq. The Arabs tried to tell Cheney that there was already a rather dramatic little war going on in the region. And what happened? George Bush suddenly had his vision thing again.

Now, however, after six visits to the United States by Ariel Sharon – and after Bush was totally ignored by the Israelis when he demanded an immediate end to the West Bank invasion and an end to the siege of Palestinian towns – the President has had yet another vision, a rather scaled-down version of the earlier one. Now he dreams of an interim Palestinian state. It is a sign of how obedient American journalists have become that not one US newspaper has seen this for the preposterous notion it really is. The great American newspapers – I'm talking about their physical bulk not their contents – tiresomely pontificate on the divisions within the American administration on the Middle East. Or they ask whether there's a Middle East policy at all: there is not, of course. But the ideas of this US administration, however vacuous or simply laughable, continue to be treated with an almost sacred quality in the American press and on television.

What on earth, for example, does interim mean? I noticed that in the past four days, interim has turned into provisional, an even more miserable version of the original vision. It reminds me of Madeleine Albright's truly wonderful proposal that the Palestinians should be happy because they might get "a sort of sovereignty" over some areas of Arab east Jerusalem.