You don’t have to know Italian or French or that smug version of English heard on the BBC to understand that most of Europe is gloating over indications that the Bush administration’s foreign policy is in shambles.

Israel’s leaders aren’t joining the celebrations, but they may be pleased with one result. With the mess in Iraq and the president’s increasingly difficult reelection effort, the Bush administration may be less likely than ever to pressure the Sharon government on issues such as Jewish settlements and Israel’s controversial security fence.

But other results should be deeply worrisome to Israel’s leaders — starting with faltering U.S. leadership in the wars against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

Here in Europe (I am writing from Rome), the “I told you so” chorus is apparent on every news broadcast. The U.S.-led war in Iraq, the TV anchors exult, has become a Vietnam-like quagmire.

Last week, Bush, in a news conference given huge coverage in Europe, claimed that it was the very success of the U.S. effort that was producing the new terrorism. European commentators responded with joyful derision.

Europeans, already turned off by what they consider Bush’s cowboy unilateralism, were never keen on his war on terrorism. They were too eager to keep doing business with terror-sponsoring countries, and they rejected anything demanded by an administration that kept calling for coalitions but acting unilaterally.

The administration’s “our way or the highway” approach was widely resented across what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld derisively termed “the old Europe.”

Crass motives

The war on terror always seemed to the Europeans like the Bush administration’s excuse for toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, not the reason, and everything that’s happened since the “end” of the war seems to confirm that view.

The administration’s claim that Iraq was an imminent threat because of its weapons of mass destruction has been mostly discredited, to the delight of European leaders who don’t much care about WMDs, especially if they’re aimed at someone else and if there’s a Euro to be made by selling the raw materials for making them.

Their motives may be crass, but their critiques have gained credibility in light of mounting reports the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to support a war it had already decided to wage.

All of this represents a diplomatic crisis for the Bush administration, which badly needs massive international help in Iraq and Afghanistan, but which is apparently getting bupkes.

It represents a much more substantial problem for Israel, where terror is an everyday reality and weapons of mass destruction an imminent threat.

Israel wasn’t a part of the administration’s decision to go to war. But it has a big stake in whether the Bush administration is able to convince a doubting world that working in concert against the broad network of terror groups is a matter of vital national security for every democracy.

And that means mostly the Europeans, who continue to serve as both apologists and suppliers for terror-supporting countries.

Across the continent, politicians, opinion makers and voters seem to believe that the war on terrorism is mostly another play for U.S. dominance of the world, or an excuse for a Bush family vendetta against Saddam. The administration’s bobbling of the Iraq war and its aftermath have reinforced that view.

That makes it even easier for Europeans to hold on to a parallel bit of nonsense — that Israel’s fight against Hamas and Islamic Jihad is just an effort to put down the inevitable rebellion against a harsh occupation.

Bush’s miscalculations and exaggerations do not change the fact that Israel faces terrorism based not on its policies but its existence; but they provide convenient excuses for those who want to look through that lens.

Israel stood to benefit from a genuine international effort against terrorism. It stands to lose big time if Bush administration policies devalue the idea that terror is a threat to all civilized nations, requiring cooperation and coordination and sacrifice.

The same calculus holds true for the fight against WMDs. The threat is real, even if not in Iraq. But the Bush administration is increasingly powerless to fight it because of the credibility it lost in Iraq and because of the self-serving European leaders who have exaggerated those failures.

Israel is the nation with the most to fear from the race to acquire non-conventional weapons, and the most to lose if the administration sacrifices that fight because of its obsession with Iraq and its inability to recruit foreign partners in what must inevitably be a genuinely international effort.

And Israel has the most to fear if the administration, faced with a growing body count in Iraq and diminishing support for its war policies at home, decides to cut its losses and leave Iraq in anarchy.

Former Madisonian James Besser has been Washington correspondent for the New York Jewish Week, the Baltimore Jewish Times and other leading Anglo-Jewish newspapers for 15 years.