| Subject: "We must take the offensive to stop the terrorists." |
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George W. Bush
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Date Posted: 18:31:33 06/05/02 Wed
Author Host/IP: 24.125.57.252
In reply to:
will we be able to conduct talks.'' -- Ariel Sharon
's message, ""The aim is to increase the number of losses on the other side. Only after they've been battered" on 09:12:36 06/03/02 Mon
And he's right.
Dumbass.
>Geeze!!!! Even SHRUB Knows THAT Sharon is a Huge Part
>of the problem!!!
>
>
>READ This!!!
>
>GEEZREE!#@##!!!!
>
>March 17, 2002, Sunday
>WEEK IN REVIEW DESK
>
>
>The World: About Face; What Does He Want? The Enigma
>That Is Sharon
>
>By JAMES BENNET (NYT) 1502 words
>JERUSALEM -- THERE are times, as they bestride the
>carnage and chaos here, that Ariel Sharon and Yasir
>Arafat seem a little like Godzilla and Mothra, roused
>from political slumber to fight out their antediluvian
>rivalry over the vulnerable heads of a terrified city.
>Indomitable and rubbery, equipped with mysterious
>powers, the two have laid waste to offices, stores,
>airports and lives -- so far without mortally wounding
>each other.
>The question is whether either can address their
>dispute with anything besides savage blows. After more
>than a year of pressing Mr. Arafat to answer that
>question, the Bush administration has begun putting it
>to Mr. Sharon.
>
>
>Now, Prime Minister Sharon does not seem like a subtle
>man. He is known to Israelis as ''the Bulldozer,'' to
>Palestinians as ''the Butcher.'' But what Arik Sharon
>really wants -- his endgame for the Middle East
>conflict -- is a mystery.
>
>Some people here believe he would sign a far-reaching
>peace agreement, if Mr. Arafat would first put a stop
>to all Palestinian violence. Others insist he is
>executing a dark master plan, provoking Palestinian
>violence to build a pretext for occupying the West
>Bank and the Gaza Strip. And some say he is making it
>up as he goes along, scrambling daily for his
>political footing as he fends off his chief rival,
>former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
>
>Seeking support in the Arab world for a possible war
>on Iraq, the Bush administration recoiled from a
>massive Israeli assault on the West Bank and the Gaza
>Strip and demanded a withdrawal. The administration's
>special envoy, Anthony C. Zinni, is here now, hoping
>to broker a cease-fire.
>
>In that effort, Mr. Sharon could be either ally or
>adversary, and it is a testimony to his wiliness that
>it is impossible to know for sure which he is. It is
>possible, in fact, even he is not sure.
>
>In Israeli politics, nobody is better credentialed to
>make peace than Mr. Sharon, though that is because he
>seems so unlikely to do so. He has repeatedly said he
>would make ''painful concessions'' for peace, provided
>the Palestinians first stopped all violence. They have
>not put him to the test.
>
>''Only the hawks can make peace,'' said Meir Sheetrit,
>the Israeli minister of justice. ''Sharon is the best
>person now to make such a step.''
>
>It seems like a fantasy, in the shadow of the recent
>violence here. But this Nixon-to-China -- or
>Menachem-Begin-to-Camp-David -- scenario has its
>adherents in Israel, who cite Mr. Sharon's stage of
>life and his searing experience fighting Israel's war
>in Lebanon.
>
>In fact, some settlers have long had a fear about Mr.
>Sharon, their ardent supporter: Lebanon might have
>cost him his nerve. ''He feels that he wants to clear
>his name,'' said Shaul Goldstein, a settler leader.
>
>As Israel's defense minister in 1982, Mr. Sharon led
>the invasion into Lebanon. He was forced to resign
>after a commission of inquiry held him indirectly
>responsible for the slaughter, by Christian
>militiamen, of Palestinians in two refugee camps,
>Sabra and Shatila. Israeli protesters called him a
>murderer. In his autobiography, ''Warrior,'' Mr.
>Sharon, who rejects any blame, recalled that residents
>of nearby kibbutzim would not give one of his sons a
>lift to high school.
>
>Mr. Goldstein proposed what he called a ''theory of
>conspiracy'': Mr. Sharon's aides have exaggerated the
>American pressure to give him an excuse to withdraw
>from refugee camps that the army has invaded in the
>West Bank. ''Maybe Sharon does not want to go into the
>camps because of Sabra and Shatila,'' he said.
>
>Mr. Sharon is thinking about his place in history,
>many analysts here believe. He does not trust the
>younger generation to negotiate with the same regard
>for Israel's security needs, they say.
>
>Moving toward peace would cost Mr. Sharon his
>right-wing support, but he is already less popular
>than Mr. Netanyahu within his own party, the Likud. To
>be re-elected next year he must have his party's
>backing.
>
>A move toward peace could permit Mr. Sharon to lock
>down the political center, and the idea has been
>floated here of his running, with the dovish foreign
>minister, Shimon Peres, at the head of a new fusion
>party. Last week, he accepted without blinking the
>resignations of two far-right ministers, over what
>they saw as a softening toward the Palestinians.
>
>''In terms of his willingness to do something bold and
>sweeping, he's capable of doing that,'' said Amotz
>Asa-El, the editor in chief of the international
>Jerusalem Post. ''That's how he earned his fame as a
>general.'' Those who envision this, and those, like
>Mr. Goldstein, who fear it, like to point out that Mr.
>Sharon evacuated the settlements in Sinai after peace
>with Egypt.
>
>What is missing from this scenario, they argue, is not
>Nixon but China. A peace agreement is something Mr.
>Sharon would ''dream about,'' said Limor Livnat,
>another minister in his government. But, she said,
>''the issue is whether the Palestinians are willing.''
>
>The Ariel Sharon in this scenario is the one who
>declared early this year, in reflecting on the fact
>that he was almost 74: ''There was one thing I wanted
>to accomplish: to reach a political settlement which
>will lead to peace with the Palestinians and the rest
>of the Arab world. That, I thought, would be the last
>thing I would do in a political life. Then I would
>have been glad to go back to the farm.''
>
>However, there is another, different Ariel Sharon. He
>is the man who declared earlier this month: ''The aim
>is to increase the number of losses on the other side.
>Only after they've been battered will we be able to
>conduct talks.'' This is the Ariel Sharon who carried
>a club as a boy to defend the family farm against Arab
>attacks and, according to his critics, never put it
>down.
>
>IN this darker scenario, Lebanon is not a lesson
>learned but a template. While talking about
>concessions for peace to con the Americans and his
>centrist allies, Mr. Sharon is carefully executing a
>long-term plan to topple Mr. Arafat and destroy the
>Palestinian Authority, according to those who hold to
>this view.
>
>Here is how this plan was supposedly executed: First,
>Mr. Sharon provoked the Palestinian uprising in
>September 2000 by visiting a site holy to both Muslims
>and Jews in the company of hundreds of police
>officers. That enabled him to scuttle peace
>negotiations and be elected on a promise of peace and
>security.
>
>Then, by blockading Palestinian areas, selectively
>killing suspected militants and attacking Palestinian
>security forces, he guaranteed that chaos and
>terrorism would rise, providing pretexts for ever more
>aggressive assaults. An inexperienced American
>president, impressed by an older general and intent on
>a war against terrorism, played into his hands, this
>scenario goes.
>
>Along the way, Mr. Sharon persuaded Israelis that they
>had been dangerously naïve. Almost half of them,
>according to a recent poll, now support the
>''transfer'' of Arabs out of the West Bank and Gaza,
>and three-quarters support exiling Mr. Arafat. So, by
>constantly getting tougher on the Palestinians, Mr.
>Sharon could please his right-wing base and push the
>political center to the right at the same time.
>
>In this scenario, Mr. Sharon saw to it that China
>would never want to receive him.
>
>The echoes of Lebanon in the oratory and violence of
>today are eerie. Then as now, Mr. Sharon complained
>that Mr. Arafat had built a ''kingdom of terror.''
>Then as now, he rejected public criticism as naïve at
>best and politically motivated at worst, and a comfort
>to the enemy either way. Then as now, Mr. Sharon
>chafed at American intervention for a cease-fire,
>which he believed Mr. Arafat manipulated to stall for
>time. He demanded that Mr. Arafat and his henchmen
>leave Lebanon, and he achieved that, though Israel
>became mired in an 18-year war of attrition.
>
>The Ariel Sharon of the first scenario is the one who
>declared recently that he envisioned the eventual
>creation of a Palestinian state. That of the second
>scenario wrote, in ''Warrior,'' that Palestinians
>should find a political home in ''the Palestinian
>state of Jordan.'' As he wrote, ''We must say very
>clearly that our concern for our own survival does not
>permit the establishment of a second Palestinian state
>on the West Bank.''
>
>Mr. Arafat's record, of course, has supplied enough
>clues to various, conflicting identities for a seminar
>on scenarios, from terrorist to daring peace partner.
>Whether any scenario is accurate, Mr. Sharon's stated
>conditions for a possible agreement fall far short of
>offers Mr. Arafat has already spurned.
>
>Perhaps both men have changed, or can change. Or
>perhaps one or both must fall before this brutal
>impasse will break.
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