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Triple Threat To Peace -- Arafat, Sharon And Bush
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, April 8, 2002
It's a depressing world these days.
Overseas, we have Americans fighting wars in so many places our government doesn't even tell us about them all. In the Middle East, we have the well-equipped and well-trained Israeli army smashing the ragtag Palestinians, who retaliate with suicide bombers who destroy the lives of innocent people going about their daily business. And in the Bay Area, we have a rash of suicide fathers and mothers, who obliterate their families before killing themselves.
In Washington, we have a somnolent president who still can't believe how easily he went from barroom drunk to Leader of the Free World. It occurred to him Thursday that perhaps he ought to take the Israeli-Palestinian crisis seriously, so he's finally (and far too late) dispatching the one reasonable man he knows to try to get people to talk to one another.
Colin Powell will not succeed. It's far too late for that. If there was any hope for a peaceful resolution to the Middle East crisis, it rested on the shoulders of an ex-president, one William Jefferson Clinton, but George W. Bush has too stingy an outlook on life to even consider using Clinton's skills as negotiator.
(An Israeli once told me: "In the Middle East, Clinton walks on water.")
Mr. Bush's petty mind is now setting us up for a war with Iraq, a war that will cost thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of lives. And what will be the purpose of that war? To kill Saddam Hussein, not because Saddam is a bad man (which he is), but to impress his father, the bumbling president who bungled us into our first Gulf War.
Of course, you and I will be told that our sons and daughters will be fighting in Iraq because Saddam has suddenly unlocked the secrets of weapons of mass destruction and is about to blackmail the world.
It is totally depressing to me to look at some of the main characters in the Israeli-Palestinian disaster. Look at Yassar Arafat, a snake if ever there was one, an aging thug who rose to power without a scrap of concern for the people he supposedly represents.
And, on the other side, Ariel Sharon, a sadistic man skilled only at killing and destroying, a man who believes the road to peace is to kill everyone who stands in his way.
Why oh why did the Israelis elect such a man as their prime minister?
Sharon started the current escalated round of violence way back in September 2000, when he made his deliberately provocative appearance in Jerusalem's Temple Mount, as the Jews call it, or Haram al Sharif, to the Palestinians.
At the time, Sharon was merely aspiring to political office, but he wanted to impress his followers by thumbing his nose at the Palestinians, which he did. That gave him new prominence, and the resultant violence perhaps frightened the Israelis into electing him last year, because he promised peace and stability through power and force.
If you turn on your television or pick up any newspaper or news magazine, you can see what kind of peace Sharon brought to Israel.
The man's character, hardly in doubt, was made clear again recently, on March 4. On that day, after Israeli security forces killed 17 Palestinians (including five children), Sharon urged his troops to "increase the number of Palestinian casualties" to "teach them a lesson."
The quotes are from an article in the currrent edition of In These Times, written by Neve Gordon, who teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University. The quote in the March 5 New York Times is slightly different: "If the Palestinians are not being beaten, there will be no negotiations. 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."
Sharon's penchant for violence has never been a secret. His history is laid out in great detail in the "Biography of Ariel Sharon" on the Web.
Uriya Shavit, writing three weeks before Sharon's election as prime minister, predicts tragedy.
"If the polls prove accurate," Uriya wrote, "Ariel Sharon will be elected prime minister of Israel in three weeks. Twenty years ago, as defense minister to a weakened government, he also promised peace, but embarked on what proved to be a long and costly war. History, they say, repeats itself: once as tragedy and once as farce."
So now we enduring the farce in the Middle East.
And soon, in Iraq, we'll be repeating history again, when the Bush "This is for you, Papa" farce kicks in.
With people like Bush, Arafat and Sharon running the show, I despair of any peaceful resolutions. I fear escalations. The world is in trouble, big trouble.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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