Beirut -- The Israelis have just elected a prime minister who, brought before the bar of international justice, would surely be judged a war criminal in the class of, say, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander who is as firmly associated with the Srebrenica massacre as Gen. Ariel Sharon was with that of Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Sharon calls Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat "a murderer and a liar," but in the runup to the elections, the liberal Israeli press gave full play to the deceit and brutality that have been the twin pillars of his own career. One of his likely coalition partners, Avigdor Liebermann, has spoken of burning Beirut, bombing Tehran and destroying the Aswan Dam. His ideas on the furtherance of the peace process make a total mockery of it. If any Israeli leader ever had the makings of a Western villain, the destroyer of U.S. interests in the region, it is surely Sharon.

Yet, within a week of the emergence of this would-be villain as Israel's premier-elect, whom do the Americans and British go and bomb? That old, familiar, Arab villain, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Of course, his crimes and atrocities are of an order that words can barely describe. Keeping him from committing more of them is one thing, however; the motives and methods of those who, once again, have assigned themselves that task -- and the whole regional context in which they do it -- is something else.

According to the Americans and British, Friday's raid, the first on such a scale for over two years, was necessitated by the upgrading of Hussein's defenses and the increased threat that posed to their aircraft's routine forays over the "no-fly zones." Even if that is true, it has few takers in the Arab world. For the Arabs, the raid is a clear escalation of the Anglo-American campaign against Hussein, with more political import than military. With the rise of Sharon, there could hardly have been a more blatant or more richly symbolic display of the double standards that, in their view, typify Western (especially American) treatment of those two great zones of perennial Middle East crisis, the Arab-Israeli conflict on the one hand and Iraq and the Persian Gulf on the other. It bodes ill for both.