The outbreak of hostilities between Israel and its Arab neighbors is always a cause for worry, if not nail-biting fear. You never know how it will end or what it could lead to. Newt Gingrich’s call for President Bush and Congress to declare “World War III” strikes some as coldly logical and others like crying “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. But having seen this picture before, it’s not hard to catch his drift.

As threatening as this tinderbox appears to world peace, it’s safe to say there is no significant political downside for Bush in this latest eruption on Israel’s borders. The painfully long and famous history of this struggle suggests that few voters will hold the president personally responsible for what goes right or what goes wrong. For decades we have watched presidents flail away at this mess, and the result, as The Gallup Poll recently found, is that by a 2-to-1 ratio most Americans see no chance of peace there — ever.

Indeed, Bush could have been speaking for all of his recent predecessors, and possibly most Americans, when he used a barnyard epithet last week in summing up his view of the situation. Even if he could miraculously lead the way to peace, there is little to suggest it would help him or his party politically. Jimmy Carter is the only president to achieve anything of lasting significance in the region — the accord between Egypt and Israel — but it did him little good in his 1980 re-election bid.

Then again, Bush and his Republican allies in Congress do have something to gain by the sudden shift of world media attention to Israel and Lebanon. There is nothing like a new war in the Middle East to take our minds off the old one and create a climate of crisis, which tends to argue against change in the midterm election. Wars during elections call for a political accounting, and the math on Iraq was not looking favorable for the president and his party. The opening of a new hot zone west of U.S.-occupied Iraq scrambles the electoral calculus, potentially re-setting the numbers to GOP advantage — especially since leading Democrats are tripping over themselves to agree with Bush’s support for Israel in this fight.

If nothing else, it helps Bush and those GOP lawmakers facing the voters in November to have something else to talk about. Every day that Americans see images and news reports detailing the carnage caused by Israel and its terrorist enemies is a day they are not primarily focused on combat and casualties in Iraq.

The diversion is welcome relief for a White House just beginning to take more shots from Republicans growing fearful of losing Congress over the president’s war policy. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, though not facing re-election himself, recently told reporters that he is urging GOP candidates to tell voters about their differences with Bush’s prosecution of the Iraq War and “acknowledge that there have been mistakes made.”

Now, terrorist missiles slamming a democratic U.S. ally, even hitting the religiously sensitive Jerusalem, underscores the Bush administration’s case for “staying the course” in Iraq. The president can argue that when you pull out, as Israel did years ago from southern Lebanon, the “evil ones” will just get stronger, gather more weapons and ultimately pose a danger that is even harder to defeat.

Such an argument might not fly in the salons of sophisticated thinkers on the nuances of international affairs, but it can be quite workable as campaign rhetoric. And having Israel on the move militarily at least demonstrates that the United States is not totally alone in the region, which has been a major concern to American voters who are losing faith in the Iraqi cause.

And I don’t buy the argument that voters will blame Bush for taking a pass early in his presidency on leading Arabs and Israelis to the bargaining table. Given that presidents had tried everything imaginable up to then, why not take a chance at doing nothing and see if all the children of Abraham could finally get together and sort out their own problems? So now we know that doesn’t work, either, but Bush won’t get blamed for it at home.

Plainly siding with Israel in this conflict might not help Bush play peacemaker down the road, but the domestic political imperative demands it. Given Israel’s strength among American voters, both Jewish and evangelical Christian, the timing of this conflict is well placed for pressuring U.S. politicians to its side. Most Americans have remained sympathetic to Israel in its half-century of struggles against Arab neighbors. And since Sept. 11, 2001, Israel has seen its approval ratings reach record levels. The latest Gallup survey on this topic, in February, produced one of the most lopsided margins favoring Israel over its Palestinian enemies, 59 percent to 15 percent.

With Israel’s polling numbers higher than Bush’s among voters, why not hitch his cart to this wagon? Maybe Gingrich was on to something. Such apocalyptic talk might get us all killed, but until then Bush might just keep his Republican Congress.

Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for MSNBC, CNBC and “The Early Show” on CBS. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.