|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: joanna bujes
||
||
|| Are you keeping an eye on Palestine, the latest Saudi announcement
|| (recognition of Israel in exchage for just peace), and Sharon's real
|| response (tanks into refugee camps)? What do you make of it?
||
The PLO had recently gotten Hamas to agree that no attacks against Israeli territory would take place unless Israel launched attacks inside the occupied territories. This deprived Sharon of his favorite pretext for escalating the conflict, as he did on the eve of the Powell's initiative to restart the peace process and countless occasions before and since. The new Israeli attack is an escalation designed to provoke Palestinian attacks inside Israel. It shows that Sharon's strategy hasn't changed: He wants to provoke a maximum level of conflict to legitimize the incarceration and/or expulsion of the entire Palestinian population.
Israel's highest-circulating daily Yedioth Ahronoth has called Sharon's latest move "a psychedelic journey", adding: "you have to be either stoned or a gambler to put the army into it at this point of time". The Haaretz and Ma'ariv dailies, as well as Labor's Peres and Ben-Eliezer support Prince Abdullah's proposal. 60% of Israelis oppose it but 50% also disapprove of Sharon's handling of the Palestinian question. So Sharon is now going to try to sink the plan as he's always done, by provoking the Palestinians and telling his AIPAC troops to rev up the anti-Arab lobbying. Getting more Israelis killed and shooting babies isn't going to improve his approval rating at home, but he's probably hoping that if the Palestinians do something really terrible, he can kill Arafat and shut down the PA, which would satisfy a lot of Israelis. It's a gamble all right.
On the US front, as Doug posted, Bush fired the speechwriter who coined "axis of evil", David Frum. Frum works for the Weekly Standard, Wolfowitz's mouthpiece. Firing Frum was a reprimand to Wolfowitz for getting Dubya into hot water with the rest of the world. But the Shrub is not about to forget his campaign promises to AIPAC. Wolfowitz has been out of favor before and he's bounced back. He is extremely persistent as he doesn't have to hustle for backers, having a steady employer in the Israeli govt. His unwavering objective has been to disrupt the US-Saudi arrangement, which is the only check against AIPAC in the US's ME policy. Saddam has supplied the pretext for the US military presence in the Gulf for the last decade, which is why Wolfowitz has campaigned so hard to get rid of him, alienating the rest of the world in the process. Abdullah's move could make the get-Saddam plan irrelevant. Saddam will never undersign such a plan, but Saudi's becoming the ME peace broker would cement the US-SA relationship much more strongly than the precarious "dual containment" strategy. It's a big risk since Abdullah is surrounded by ObL fans (as Michael's MEMRI post underlines) and could end up being another Sadat. The question is, can he can get his act together before Boeing makes enough JDAM's to start blasting Iraq's miserable people to pieces?
Hakki