By ALAN W. BOCK
SENIOR EDITORIAL WRITER

A moment of full disclosure: Although I have never met him, over the years I have spent hours talking on the phone with Leon Hadar. I have found the former U.N. bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post and longtime foreign policy analyst for the libertarian-oriented Cato Institute an invaluable source of insights and information on most aspects of Middle East policy.

His 1992 book, "Quagmire," predicted a radical Arab and Islamic fundamentalist backlash against U.S. foreign policy. Now that 9/11 has fulfilled that prediction and the illogical response of invading Iraq has created even more of a quagmire, a more thoroughgoing critique of U.S. policy in the region seems timely. Not that it's likely to do much good.

Hadar argues that U.S. policymakers from almost every point on the ideological spectrum have come to accept what he calls a Middle East paradigm that took shape in the wake of World War II. Briefly, it holds that the United States must seek to dominate, or at least be the balancer of last resort, in the region for three reasons.

First, the Soviet Union sought dominance in the region and had to be contained. Second, the U.S. had to be involved in the region to protect access to Middle Eastern oil as the engine of U.S. and Western economic development. Third, once Israel was established, protecting it became a moral imperative that sometimes morphed rhetorically into a geostrategic necessity - the only democracy and only reliable U.S. ally in the region was crucial to our plans.

"Sandstorm" demonstrates rather persuasively that none of these pillars of the paradigm stands up to scrutiny.

The Soviet Union, of course, is long gone.

The United States gets more oil from Latin America than the Middle East, and Middle Eastern regimes need to sell oil more than the U.S. needs to buy it; furthermore spending billions of dollars and thousands of American lives in the region does not make Middle Eastern oil cheap.

And with the demise of the Soviet Union, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has become a regional conflict with very limited larger geostrategic implications.

"Sandstorm" argues that it's time for a new paradigm, one of "constructive disengagement" with the Middle East. There's no need for the United States to be the dominant player in the region, and as the Iraq war is showing (and more Americans, if recent polls are reliable, are coming to believe), trying to fill that role is increasingly costly and frustrating - in fact, downright counterproductive. Since Europe and Japan are more heavily dependent on Middle Eastern oil than the United States is - and European countries have a more direct and long-standing interest let them try to balance the politics of the region if outside intervention is deemed desirable.

The book also fosters an appreciation that the Middle East is not simply a piece on a global chess board, but a distinct region with its own history, culture and power relationships. The capacity of outside forces to mold it - the Europeans have tried, as did imperialist Russia, not to mention the Greeks, Romans and Crusaders - is more limited than is generally acknowledged.

Hadar invokes historian Carl Brown's Middle East kaleidoscope metaphor to argue that "the outside actor can rarely control the politics of such a system and frequently becomes involved in issues that have nothing to do with its original interests in the region."

Hadar doesn't expect his book to persuade those who control American foreign policy, so he suggests the outcome is more likely to be destructivedisengagement - pulling back in response to catastrophes or the perception of costs rising well beyond any imagined benefits - rather than a hard-nosed reassessment of core U.S. interests in the Middle East.

But he has provided rich material for fruitful debate on Middle Eastern policy, should the American public be interested and ready to pressure its leaders to pull back from muscular interventionism.