BEIRUT -- Since the Taliban's defeat in Afghanistan, the United States has been focusing on that long-standing "rogue state" and newly anointed member of the "axis of evil," President Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as the next target of its "war on terror."

The trouble is that it has encountered a second "rogue state" that is all but ruining its prospects of dealing with the first. Of course, the U.S. never calls or perhaps even thinks of it as such, because the state in question is Israel, than which it has no closer ally or more indulged of proteges. But such, in effect, it is.

There has never been a precise definition of what has been variously termed the "rogue," "backlash," "outlaw" or "crazy" state. In practice, it is likely to be an oppressive dictatorship, but that alone has not been sufficient qualification. It must also pose a constant, exceptional threat to the existing order, allying an aggressive nature with the acquisition of disproportionate military power and the development of weapons of mass destruction. And it must be an adversary of the U.S., since it was the U.S. that developed the concept and determined those to whom it applies.

Israel does not possess this last qualification, but its pride of place in American affections enables it to possess the others in greater abundance.

As the Jewish state, it may not oppress its Jewish citizens, but as a colonial settler-state, it is a direct or indirect oppressor of the indigenous Arabs it rules over or has displaced. To cope with that, it has become a vastly disproportionate military power, both conventional and unconventional, a permanent source of regional disorder, the object of ever-growing international opprobrium -- and poses a far more enduring threat to U.S. interests, and potentially no less calamitous, than any posed by Hussein or the other officially designated "rogue states" of the region, Syria, Libya and Iran.

That threat, implicitly at least, was the reason why U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell just spent 10 days in the region. His immediate purpose was to secure a ceasefire in the Israel-Palestinian fighting and a restoration of the peace process. But it was more than just the fighting that drove the Bush administration to re-engage in a conflict from which it had deliberately disengaged; it was the impact the conflict was having on the Arab world and U.S. standing. That is what Powell was getting at when, with infinite tact, he told Israel, "as a friend," that "we have to take note of the long-term strategic consequences" of its action.

The consequences are indeed becoming ominous: anti-Americanism at fever pitch from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf; a renewed, dramatic stirring of the Arab "street," which American policymakers had tended to dismiss as a paper tiger; distress signals from key American allies, Jordan and Egypt, whose leaders fear that if Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and all he stands for, goes unchecked, their regimes risk collapse, along with the whole structure of peace with Israel; threats by Hezbollah, with its cross-border assaults, to ignite a regional war; Iraq's stoppage of exports, raising the price of oil by a dollar in a political and economic climate where further turbulence could send it soaring; manifest impatience of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah.

On the one hand Israel, the Jewish state, always successfully presented itself as both an embodiment of American ideals -- "bastion of democracy in the Middle East" -- and as a strategic asset and defender of American interests in the region. The success grew mainly out of the extraordinary influence that, via its friends and auxiliaries in key American institutions, the administration, Congress and the media, Israel exerted on U.S. policy. Before Israel came into being, U.S. President Harry Truman famously told assembled Arab ambassadors: "I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents." Ever since, American politicians have indefatigably vied for Israel's favor.

On the other hand Israel, the colonial enterprise, was bound to be a strategic liability -- not an asset -- for any outside power perceived by the Arabs to be aiding and abetting it. The U.S., or at least its specialized agencies like the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon with their professional grasp of realities on the ground, has always known this.

As Truman was pinning his colors to the Zionist mast, the CIA was reporting that the Zionist leadership was "pursuing its objectives without regard for the consequences," thereby "endangering not only the Jews in Palestine but also the strategic interests of the Western powers." This was America's "rogue state" in embryo.

Still, in those early days, the politicians, for all their pro-Israeli partisanship, could more readily share, and more forcefully act upon, the professionals' view of U.S. interests in the region. The most famous occasion -- an adumbration of the present crisis -- was when U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower enforced Israel's unconditional withdrawal from the Sinai, which it had invaded in the 1956 Suez war. Says Stephen Green in his book "Taking Sides," "a strong case can be made that Eisenhower was the last American president actually to make Middle East policy" rather than "Israel and the friends of Israel in America."

To be sure, the endemic conflict of interests has produced quarrels and tensions ever since, but somehow these were almost always resolved, or held in abeyance, and almost always to Israel's advantage. To be sure, Israel often put its own interest above America's, but America would unfailingly supply it with the means to go on doing so. It showered it with a continuous cornucopia of money, weapons and technology. This was supposed (1) to encourage it to be more flexible in American-sponsored peacemaking, yet only made it more intransigent, and (2) to bolster its role as an ally and defender of American interests, even though Israel itself was the main cause of any threat to them in the first place.

All the while, in that other center of Israeli power, Washington, successive administrations -- with the recent, ironic exception of Bush's father -- became ever more pro-Israeli, a process that reached its apogee with this one, replete as it is with rightwing ideologues who favor the Israel of Sharon.

The outcome of the Powell mission provides a startling illustration of the protege turning the tables on the patron, of the ability of America's very own "rogue state," now grown to full stature, to disrupt America's purposes through the exercise of military power and political power in Washington.

Powell had a mandate to ensure Israel's "immediate' withdrawal from Palestinian territories. That was what the higher U.S. interest required, and what his boss, President Bush, demanded. He went home without one -- indeed, without any discernible achievement whatever. In effect, the president had betrayed his own secretary of state. With the America's pro-Israeli forces in full cry -- with Sharon's envoy, his even more extreme political rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, invited by congressmen to attack American foreign policy from Capitol Hill itself -- his resolve evidently crumbled. A far cry from Eisenhower.

Few Arabs would disagree with Edward Abington, former U.S. consul general in Jerusalem and now a consultant to the Palestine Authority, who says Powell had been playing for "tremendously high stakes" and that the consequences of his failure will "be extremely bad for the U.S."

The least that can be said is that, for the U.S., the question is no longer whether it can rein in Sharon so that it can strike Hussein. The game has moved on. It is more likely a question of whether -- as a columnist in Beirut's leading newspaper al-Nahar put it -- the U.S. can "protect its interests from the volcano of public anger in the region that which could erupt and sweep away regimes, rulers, clients, interests, investments, oil, values and policies."