The parallels between then are now are few. Israel is a tiny nation, albeit heavily armed, in sea of far larger, seething enemies. The United States is by far the strongest nation in the world, with friends on its borders and something close to military hegemony in the world. True, we find ourselves in a frightening, shadowy new “war” against terrorists who aim to strike our homeland. But they are based in distant lands. And Iraq is no immediate threat to attack us here.

And yet I think the president sees in Israel’s military history and unblinking determination to survive an instructive analogy for America: be strong, act first when you see a mortal threat brewing. As he said in his speech in Cincinnati: “We refuse to live in fear.” The line got the only standing ovation of the night.

But I wonder if Bush sees the other side of the coin, which Oren points out. Israel’s spectacular triumph in 1967 didn’t bring peace with the Arabs. Just the opposite: the Six Day War was a humiliation that most of her enemies still can’t abide, and are pledged to undo. Would an American conquest of Iraq, however swiftly and surgically done, eventually bear the same bitter fruit?

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this president has thought as much about Israel–and identifies as much with it–as any other foreign country. The president’s enemies (and Israel’s), ascribe his interest in, and support of, the Jewish State to a desire to avoid his father’s political mistakes. Bush the Elder was distrusted by many American Jews for his Texas-based ties to the oil industry and for his roots in a time and a place (Greenwich, Conn., in the ’30s) when anti-Semitism was a proud cultural commonplace.

THEOLOGICAL VIEWS

The rest of the why-Bush-admires-Israel theory is that he’s responding to the theological views of Christian fundamentalists, who form a key base of the Republican Party, and who see the re-establishment of Biblical Israel as a necessary prelude the Second Coming. It’s true that Bush and his political consiglieri, Karl Rove, sought from the start of his run for Texas governor in 1993 to “get right with the right.” But florid displays of devotion to Israel weren’t part of that early effort. Bush’s main method for currying favor with the Christian Right was to declare his own devotion to born-again theology–hardly the route to the hearts and minds of American Jews. At one point early on, Bush declared that only born-agains could go to heaven–a statement for which he was later (conveniently) rebuked by Billy Graham and his own mother.

Bush’s awakening interest in Israel stems from another source: He went there. You have to keep in mind that Bush was, until he became president, not a well-traveled man for his age and station. He had made a perfunctory trip to Europe while in college, and one to China when his father was ambassador there. There was a business trip to Latin America. As governor, he dealt with Mexico a great deal, and got to know the place well. But that was about it.

Then, shortly after his re-election as governor of Texas in 1998, Bush joined a handful of governors (one of them was Marc Racicot of Montana, now the chairman of the Republican National Committee) on a fact-finding trip to Israel and other countries in the region. It was Bush’s first sustained trip abroad–and the first to take place as he seriously considered for the first time the possibility that he might, someday, become president of the United States.

HUGE IMPRESSION

Racicot told me that he thought the trip had made a huge impression on Bush: Israel’s territorial vulnerability, its steadfast determination in the face of dedicated enemies. Did his hosts show him the worst of Gaza? Or lay out for him the history and recent rapid growth of the controversial Jewish settlements throughout the captured territory of the West Bank? The answer is “no.”

But Bush did examine, up close from a helicopter, the lay of the land and the mentality of the military. His tour guide was Ariel Sharon, then the defense minister in a Labor-led government. Racicot says that the future president was impressed by the hawkish Sharon’s loyalty to a government then focused on achieving peace with Yasir Arafat. In two days of helicopter trips, Sharon explained to Bush the history of Israel’s wars–including the pre-emptive strike in 1967 that destroyed Egypt’s air force before it could get off the ground.

How much of that history is really relevant to the war on terrorism, let alone the decision on Iraq, is questionable. But, as far as I know, the president read two substantive nonfiction books while on vacation last summer, as he began to plan to remove Saddam Hussein from power. One of them was Eliot Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argues that elected leaders can, and sometimes must, ignore the advice of their cautious military hierarchy. The other was Oren’s book on the crucial war in the life of a distant country that Bush–no ardent student of history–has come to know a lot about.