STORY

The Times, London
Bush hands tied as Sharon joins war on terror
  From Roland Watson in Washington
December 4, 2001
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2001561635,00.html


COMMENT

Ariel Sharon has got to be one of the craftiest politicians on the scene 
today. It was he who sparked the current unrest on the West Bank when,  as a
Cabinet minister, he invaded the Temple Mount mosques during prayers with a
small army (1,000 men) of security goons. There was no justifiable reason for
the act: Sharon said that since the Mount belonged to Jerusalem he had the
right to do it.

The resulting unrest was played so skillfully by Sharon against an 
ineffectual Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that he was able to
overthrow the unpopular Netanyahu and become prime minister himself.
Since then, he has gone out of his way to provoke further violence on
the part of the Palestinians, while using that violence as an excuse to
provoke more violence, et cetera. The rage of the Palestinians is also a 
great excuse for not carrying out any of Israel's promised pullbacks from the
occupied territories, for blockading and starving Palestinian population
centers, and for cutting off negotiations with Yasser Arafat. Not that
the negotiations were getting anywhere; the Israelis had already been
changing the rules and reneging on agreements, with the support of the
United States.

Sharon demands that Arafat control the Palestinians, and then shoots
Palestinian policemen and bombs police stations. He bloviates that he
won't restart negotiations until everything is quiet for a week. Then he
sends helicopters to rocket civilian targets, and commits other atrocities 
calculated to enrage the Palestinians into desperate acts such as the 
suicide attacks that killed 25 Israelis last weekend. Those bombings were, 
in turn, used as a pretext to rocket the compound housing Arafat's office 
-- also, incidently, damaging a school full of young, terrified girls.

Sharon is in the driver's seat, and he's playing Bush just as skilfully
as he has played the Israelis and Palestinians:

> The killing of more than 25 Israelis this week, when taken in proportion to 
> the US population, was similar to some 2,000 Americans losing their lives, 
> said his travelling entourage.
>
> Mr Bush hardly needed to have the implication spelt out. Mr Sharon was 
> placing the weekend's suicide bombings on the same scale as the September 11 
> attacks and  would respond accordingly. There was nothing that Mr Bush could 
> do to prevent him.
>
> Mr Sharon has used the wide-ranging terms in which Mr Bush cast his war on
> terrorism to leave the President powerless to restrain Israel.

What chutzpah! This is political operating rivaling that of Bill Clinton. 
Along with the ill-advised U.S. war on Afghanistan, his actions will further 
isolate America from the Muslim world and provoke further attacks against U.S. 
citizens. It is a classic example of the tail wagging the dog:

> Mr Sharon's declaration of a war on terror yesterday was a deliberate aping 
> of Mr Bush's own language and was designed to give the Israeli Prime Minister 
> maximum room for manoeuvre. The implication was that, while Washington was 
> justified in > unleashing its military might over Afghanistan, the Israeli 
> Government was similarly justified in launching its helicopter gunships on 
> Gaza against the Palestinian leadership.
>
> To tie Mr Bush's hands further, Mr Sharon went out of his way to praise his 
> war leadership as brave and promised to match it.

The result was that Bush yesterday, in response to the latest outrage, didn't 
criticize Israel even mildly as he had done in the past. Instead, he 
supported Israel's actions unconditionally, as a "sovereign nation." Funny; 
being a sovereign nation hasn't cut much ice with him for Serbia, Macedonia, 
and Afghanistan.

Bush started out portraying himself as a skeptic regarding an interventionist 
foreign policy. But whether or not that was a lie, it is now clear that he is 
far out of his depth. His foreign policy has been hijacked by Zionists inside 
and outside his own administration, and there isn't a thing he can do about it 
-- even when it is in conflict with his own interests. It would be fascinating 
to be a fly on the wall during his most private moments with his friends. I 
wonder if his venom equals, or possibly surpasses, that of Nixon when he 
railed about "the Jews."