Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work - the Middle East - and see a landscape which I do no recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in the US, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and bare-faced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat.

Or the Mad Hatter?

I picked up Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine Peace not Apartheid, at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded, subject population, and what he calls "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights".

Carter quotes an Israeli as saying he is "afraid that we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arabs subjects with few rights of citizenship?" A proposed but unacceptable modification of this choice, Carter adds, "is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them".

Needless to say, the American press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently sensible book - until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest-lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour - Egypt - secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords. The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print", ho! ho! ) then felt free to tell its readers that Carter had stirred "furor among Jews" with his use of the word "apartheid". The ex-president replied by mildly (and rightly) pointing out that Israeli lobbyists had produced among US editorial boards a "reluctance to criticise the Israeli government".

Typical of the dirt thrown at Carter was the comment by Michael Kinsley in the New York Times (of course) that Carter "is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa". This was followed by a vicious statement from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said the reason Carter gave for writing this book "is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media".

"What makes this serious is that he's not just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States."

But well, yes, that's the point isn't it.

This is no tract by a Harvard professor on the power of the lobby. It's an honourable, honest account by a friend of Israel as well as the Arabs who just happens to be a fine American ex-statesman. Which is why Carter's book is now a bestseller - and applause here, by the way, for the great American public who bought the book instead of believing Abe Foxman.

But in this context, why, I wonder, didn't the New York Times and the other gutless mainstream newspapers in the United States mention Israel's cosy relationship with that very racist apartheid regime in South Africa which Carter is not supposed to mention in his book? Didn't Israel have a wealthy diamond trade with sanctioned, racist South Africa? Didn't Israel have a fruitful and deep military relationship with that racist regime? Am I dreaming, looking-glass-like, when I recall that in April of 1976, prime minister John Vorster of South Africa - one of the architects of this vile Nazi-like system of apartheid - paid a state visit to Israel and was honoured with an official reception from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, war hero Moshe Dayan and future Nobel prizewinner Yitzhak Rabin? That of course, certainly did not become part of the great American debate on Carter's book!

At Detroit airport, I picked up an even slimmer volume, the BakerHamilton Iraq Study Group Report' - which doesn't really study Iraq at all but offers a few bleak ways in which George W Bush can run away from this bloodbath without too much shit on his shirt. After chatting to the Iraqis in the Green Zone of Baghdad - Dream Zone would be a more accurate title - there are a few worthy suggestions (already predictably rejected by the Israelis): a resumption of serious IsraeliPalestinian peace talks, an Israeli withdrawal from Golan, etc. But it's written in the same tired semantics of right-wing think-tanks - the language, in fact, of the discredited Brookings Institution and of my old mate, the messianic New York Times columnist Tom Friedman - full of "porous" borders and admonitions that "time is running out".

The clue to all this nonsense, I discovered, comes at the back of the report where it lists the "experts" consulted by Messers Baker, Hamilton and the rest.

And sure enough, there we find exIsraeli lobbyist Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution, Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution (he is inexplicably listed twice), Carlos Pascual of the Brookings Institution, Kenneth Pollack - he who wrote the pre-Iraq war The Threatening Storm, listing every weapon of mass destruction Saddam didn't have and using the second world war as his paradigm for invasion - of the Brookings Institution, Strobe Talbot (formerly of Time magazine) of the Brookings Institution and - wait for it - "Thomas Friedman of the New York Times". Save for the Iraqis hiding in the Green Zone of Baghdad, not a single ordinary Iraqi is quoted in the report.

But for sheer folly, it was impossible to beat the post-Baker debate among the great and the good who dragged the United States into this catastrophe.

General Peter Pace, the extremely odd chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the American war in Iraq: "We are not winning, but we are not losing."

Bush's new defence secretary, Robert Gates, announced that he "agreed with General Pace that we are not winning, but we are not losing". Baker himself jumped into the same nonsense pool by asserting, "I don't think you can say we're losing. By the same token [sic], I'm not sure we're winning." At which point, Bush proclaimed this week that - yes - "We're not winning, we're not losing."

Pity about the Iraqis.

I pondered all this bullshit during a bout of severe turbulence at 37,000 feet over Colorado. And that's when it hit me, the final score in this unique round of the Iraq war between the United States of America and the forces of evil. It's a draw!