As the United States faces no serious challenger in the immediate future, either from inside or outside the region, could it recover its authority? There is no doubt that the United States is now deeply unpopular in the Arab and Muslim world, even an object of loathing in many quarters. Militant groups would like to strike at it, if they could.

Many Arabs look back with nostalgia to the era of President Eisenhower, who put an end to the Anglo-French-Israeli aggression at Suez in 1956 and, more recently, to the presidency of Jimmy Carter who, although he only managed to do half the job - by forging the Egyptian-Israeli peace -- made a valiant effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict in its entirety.

What then should the US do to regain trust and credibility? It should perhaps begin by recognising its many mistakes.

Perhaps the greatest mistake over the past 25 years was to allow Israel to expand its settlements on occupied Palestinian territories. There is no greater obstacle to a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and to Israel's integration into the region, than the nearly half a million Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The relentless erosion of the rump of Arab Palestine has created the militant movement Hamas and has aroused hostility to the US throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

Another mistake, made under Ronald Reagan's presidency, was to allow Israel to invade Lebanon in 1982, killing over 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians. The US even attempted to reward Israel for its invasion by forcing Lebanon to conclude a separate peace which would have put it in Israel's orbit. When that attempt failed, the US allowed Israel to remain in south Lebanon for the next 18 years until 2000 - an invasion and occupation which created the militant movement Hizbullah.

A third mistake was the failure to re-establish friendly relations with Iran in the 27 years since the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution, and indeed to have backed Iraq in the long and brutal Iraq-Iran war (1980-88.) Instead, outraged at the seizure and incarceration of its diplomats for 444 days at the start of the Iranian revolution, the US allowed itself to be trapped in a posture of unrelenting hostility towards a major regional power - and is now paying for that mistake by Iran's defiance over the nuclear issue.

A fourth mistake which dwarfs the others was America's rash and intemperate reaction to the traumatic terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The war against Iraq, waged on false and fraudulent premises, has proved a catastrophic error. It was driven by a wish, in the heat of the moment, to teach the Arabs a lesson about America's military power; by the ambition to control Iraq's vast oil resources; and also - and perhaps primarily in the minds of pro-Israeli officials in the U.S. administration -- by a bid to improve Israel's strategic environment by smashing a major Arab state.

Not only has the war - and the “Global War on Terror”, of which it is a part - squandered America's human and material resources, it has also done tremendous, perhaps irreversible, damage to America's moral standing.

What should the US now do? It should regain the independence of its foreign policy by freeing itself from the pressures of lobbies and special interest groups. It should punish those responsible for gross human rights abuses, such as torture. It should announce a firm date for its withdrawal from Iraq. And it should bend every effort - and every resource - to solving the Arab-Israeli conflict on a basis of equity and justice.

George W Bush has two more years in office. Can he — will he — act? Or will Haass' prediction of an end to the American era come true?

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Obtained with copyright permission from Al Hayat, November 2006, http://english.daralhayat.com