A friend of mine once told a college class that nobody ever woke up in 476 A.D. (the date historians define as the fall of the Roman Empire) and said, "Gosh, I'm in the Dark Ages."

His point is plain enough. Transitions happen gradually, and the people who live through them never realize what is happening. So it is with Americans. We are living in the ruins of a once-great republic. Now an empire utterly devoid of moral authority, the United States has nothing left but its military power and its capacity to consume on credit.

Where the world's great leaders will come from in the future, I don't know, but they will not be Americans. Look at the Republican and Democratic parties and their top leaders. Mediocrity in full bloom. Weak men with ambition but no principles. They are devious men, skilled at concealing their personal ambition in patriotic or compassionate rhetoric, depending on which constituency they are trying to bamboozle at the moment.

I said earlier that Colin Powell's trip to the Middle East would answer the question of who determines American foreign policy: America's elected leaders, or Israel and its powerful American lobby. The answer is Israel.

Powell has disgraced himself. He did the ritual moaning and groaning about six Israelis killed by a suicide bomber but said nothing about the hundreds of innocent Palestinians killed by the Israelis. As of this writing, he has not even bothered to tour the devastated cities. He has not gone to Bethlehem to see the gratuitous and malicious damage to the civilian infrastructure. He has not gone to Jenin to smell the decomposing bodies buried under the rubble. He has not uttered a single word of public criticism of Israel, while Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Commission and even Israeli human-rights groups have leveled blistering criticism at Israel's beastly policy and actions.

Instead, he acted as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's errand boy by hopping over to Lebanon and Syria to ask them to restrain Hezbollah. I wish I could have been Lebanon's president long enough to tell him off.

I would have said to Powell: "Where were you and the United States when for more than 20 years Israel illegally occupied Lebanese territory in open defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions? You never said one word; you never lifted one finger to force the Israelis out. And now, you have the gall to demand of me that I chastise Hezbollah, whose brave young men did what you should have done — drove the Israelis out of Lebanon. If you cannot see the hypocrisy in your visit and in your request, then I truly pity you. Good day, sir."

The Syrian president should have told him the same thing, for the United States has never done one thing to persuade the Israelis to stop their illegal occupation of the Golan Heights.

Robert Fisk, the great correspondent of The Independent in London, wrote recently: "Mr. Powell's weakness, his failure of nerve, his cowardice are now likely to set off an Israeli-Palestinian war even more terrible than what we have witnessed so far. ... Thanks to Mr. Powell, President Bush and Mr. Sharon, America's credibility has been shattered. Israel, it turns out, does indeed run U.S. policy in the region. The Secretary of State sings from the Israeli songbook."

The repercussions of this will be unpleasant for the American people. One day, God willing, the American people will wake up and realize what a painful price has been exacted for allowing their politicians to sell their souls to the Israeli lobby. I have to give the Israeli lobby credit. They recognized the souls weren't worth much and bought them on the cheap.