Sharon Suckers Bush
The essence of President George W. Bush's April 4 Rose Garden performance, is that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was given a one-week deadline to complete the Hitlerian invasion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population, and whatever may still remain of the structure of the Palestinian Authority. If Sharon has his way, the next week will also see the extermination of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
Israel will now be driven to use that window of opportunity Sharon has been given, to provoke a general war in the Middle East, most likely through a provocation in Lebanon aimed at drawing Syria into the war trap. The basic facts on the ground are: Sharon cannot sustain the present genocidal operations against the Palestinians, either militarily or politically. Sharon's ethnic cleansing campaign, and his tenure in power, are rapidly reaching a break point, as evidenced by the international outcry against the Israeli Defense Forces' Nazi-like operations throughout the Palestinian territories. Sharon desperately needs a broader war to survive politically.
Sharon will, thus, be driven to keep the war against the Palestinians going, by changing the theater of operations. The past days have seen the Israeli government focusing attention on purported Hezbollah operations against Israel, and against international relief agencies operating in southern Lebanon.
Although it cannot be forecast with absolute certainty, it is highly likely, however unpleasant, that Sharon will use the brief window of time, before the arrival of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in Israel, to provoke the broader war, initially targeted at Syria. This defines the immediate days ahead as a flashpoint for a major destabilization of the already-smoldering Middle East and Persian Gulf region.
Sharon's larger goal is to provoke a war against Iraq, preferably a United States-led war. However, if the United States administration balks at an attack on Iraq to commence during the immediate weeks ahead, Sharon will likely launch such an attack on his own. Again, this is not a certainty, but it is an immediate danger that cannot be ignored, except at great peril. It defines the direction in which Sharon, his war cabinet, and his IDF co-conspirators are driving the situation.
The President of the United States and his leading advisors must recognize, that if Sharon goes ahead with his immediate war plan, this will mean the political doom of George W. Bush. In the hours after the President's Rose Garden speech, the entire neo-Conservative crowd of Sharon boosters in the American media, issued celebratory endorsements, characterizing Bush's blame-game rhetoric against Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian Authority Chairman's "epitaph." A spokesman for President Arafat declared that Bush's remarks were tantamount to a green light for Sharon to kill Arafat.
Bush apologists argue, that were the President to have sent Colin Powell immediately to the Middle East, or had Bush taken an appropriately harsh stance against Sharon's Nazi-like conduct of the invasions of the Palestinian territories, "Joe Lieberman would be the next President." These Bush defenders whimper that only 11 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives are not under the grip of the Israel Lobby, and that "political expediencies" argue against a head-on confrontation with Sharon.
This is a cheap excuse. If the President does not act immediately, the Middle East will almost certainly explode, oil prices will skyrocket overnight, the fragile global financial superstructure will crash, and his Presidency will be politically finished, faster than you can say "Read my lips."
But, then again, George W. Bush was not selected as the Republican Party Presidential nominee because of his genius.
