From the perspective of Washington, what is now unfolding in Gaza may well be viewed as a vindication of neoconservatism.

Neoconservatives, after all, have long argued that the root cause of terrorism and autocracy in the Middle East is not American meddling or Israeli error, or even oil. It’s fundamentally about a deep-seated Arab political culture that has never had an experience of democracy or produced a polity not dominated by tribalism, monarchism, autocracy or Islamism.

It’s about an Arab political culture that is the most hostile to western concepts of individual citizenship, liberty or the rule of law of almost any culture on the planet.

Arabs, in the judgment of neoconservatives, are tragically not very interested in self-government as the West understands it, and never have been. They are interested in family, tribe, religion and, when all else fails (and often when it doesn’t), brutal violence. If you haven’t watched Lawrence of Arabia recently it’s ravishingly persuasive on this point.

Whatever one’s view of this analysis, it seems obvious that even the most virulent of Israel’s critics cannot blame the current barbarism in Gaza on the Jews. After all, the Israelis withdrew, didn’t they? The main Arab states and Europe backed the moderate Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, didn’t they? A power-sharing deal was brokered between Fatah and Hamas by the Arab states.

And yet civil war still rages. What you see in Gaza, moreover, is what you see anywhere in the Arab world where order is not imposed by overwhelming force or a police state or a monarchy. You see total anarchy and barbarism. You see Iraq.

The complementary neoconservative view is no rosier. It is that Hamas’s rise in Gaza must be seen in the broader regional context of Iran’s Shi’ite revival and regional and global aspirations.

Here is how Charles Krauthammer, the neoconservative columnist, put it on Fox News last week: “Hamas is supplied and financed by Iran. Iran has now a constellation of allies and clients in that region, the way the Sovi-ets had around the world. It’s got Hamas now in Gaza, it’s got Hezbollah in Lebanon, it’s got Sadr in Iraq. And it has a country, Syria, as its only Arab ally in that region.

“It’s an Iranian client crescent, and it is the beginning of a general Iranian, Islamist revolutionary infiltration of the Arabs. It’s the beginning of a great struggle between Persian, nonArab, Shi’ite and radical Iran with all of these Arabs.”

Cheery, isn’t he. But sadly persuasive. The evidence of rising Islamic fundamentalism among the Palestinians is impossible to ignore. This is not Yasser Arafat’s secular Palestine. It is something even more troubling.

“The era of justice and Islamic rule have arrived,” announced Islam Shahawan, a spokesman for Hamas’s militia, as Islamist thugs walked their opponents out on the street and shot them in the head. Religious violence is much harder to contain or to moderate than violence vested in a desire for mere territory or revenge or worldly power. If God sanctions violence without end, then violence will continue without end.

It’s also clear how many Washington neocons will interpret the Gaza meltdown. They will either use it as grist for the case for launching a military strike on Hamas’s protector and funder Iran. Or they will argue that the dangers of Hamas in Gaza are a harbinger of what would happen if the US were to withdraw from Iraq.

As Ralph Peters, a former military intelligence officer, explained in the New York Post last Thursday: “We’re stuck in Iraq, and it sucks. But were we to leave in haste, far more blood than oil would flow in the Persian Gulf. The disaster in Gaza’s just a rehearsal for the Arab-suicide drama awaiting its opening night in Iraq.”

But here, it seems to me, neoconservatism begins to devour itself. For the sake of argument, assume the premise about the violent dysfunctionality of Arab political culture. (I’d say it’s more complicated than that, and Israel’s and America’s mistakes have compounded the Arab suicide. Nonetheless, suicide is ultimately something you really have to do to yourself, and the Palestinians have long since perfected the art.) Now ask yourself: if that’s correct, how on earth did neoconservatives ever argue that we could produce a functioning democracy by force of arms in Iraq?

This is surely the self-contradiction at the heart of neoconservatism. Even at the maximum surge strength, America is helpless in the face of an Iraqi civil war that has only just begun, can be fuelled indefinitely by corrupt oil money, and is driven by centuries-old sectarian hatred between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims and decades of totalitarian trauma. And yet the neocons insist we should plough on, adding more troops, planning on permanent bases for indefinite occupation.

Well, you can’t have it both ways. Either Arab culture without autocracy really is what we see in Gaza and Iraq or it isn’t. If it is, then trying to build western-style democracy during a brutal civil war in Iraq is a mug’s game.

We have, I think, two options. We can withdraw from Iraq and play the grand regional Shi’ite-Sunni war in the Middle East by proxy. Or we can enmesh ourselves much more deeply and irrevocably in a metastasising conflict. Such a conflict may well breed even more antiwestern terror and run the risk of inserting Americans into an ancient sectarian blood feud.

There are grave dangers in both options and no one should underestimate the risks of withdrawal from a power vacuum we created. But surely the lesson of Gaza and Iraq is that occupation will not transform Arab culture for the better either. It may in fact make things worse.

What I guess I’m saying is that if you take neoconservatism seriously as an analysis of Arab culture and the regional conflict in the Middle East, and you are primarily interested in the defence of the West, the case for cutting our losses in Iraq is a very strong one.

But somehow the neocons are afraid to follow their argument to its logical and inexorable conclusion. We need to leave. Soon. Or reap a gathering whirlwind.

Times Recommends

• Fragility always gets my sympathy vote
• Double it and you get the real jobless total
• Has al-Megrahi paid his council tax?