Breaking up is hard to do....
From the Middle East Times....
metimes.com
Bush-Sharon honeymoon is over
By Martin Sieff WASHINGTON
United Press International
Secretary of State Colin Powell made a call from Shanghai last week to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. One phrase was never used in the conversation but it hung like a looming shadow over everything else they said: "The honeymoon is over."
Powell was urging Sharon not to retaliate with overwhelming force for the assassination in Jerusalem on October 17 of his lifelong friend and combat comrade, General Rehavam Zeevi, 75. Zeevi had recently resigned as tourism minister from Sharon's coalition government charging that the prime minister was soft on responding to Palestinian violence and terror attacks.
The fact that it was Powell and not President George W. Bush himself who made that call from the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in China spoke volumes. It announced to the world that the 'odd couple' romance between Bush and Sharon that started their respective terms in power at the beginning of this year is now over.
It was really over several weeks ago. That was when, as our "UPI Hears" column reported, Bush, with deliberate rudeness, hung up on Sharon in the middle of a phone conversation. He did so because Sharon would not authorize his dovish foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to hold yet another meeting with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
Bush and Powell wanted the meeting held to try and find an end to the violence that has cost nearly 200 Israeli lives and more than four times as many Palestinian lives over the past year.
A shaken Sharon then relented and authorized the meeting to be held. As he had expected, it proved as fruitless as countless others before it, which had had the same noble goal. But worse was in store for the Israeli prime minister.
Sharon was furious a few days later when reports emerged in The New York Times and The Washington Post that Powell had been planning to give a speech at the United Nations General Assembly to be held in New York City last month publicly announcing U.S. support in far stronger terms than ever before for the creation of a Palestinian state. The speech was postponed because of the September 11 attacks, the reports said.
The same day the stories appeared, Bush went out of his way to announce he favored the creation of such a state.
Sharon is on record as agreeing to the creation of an independent Palestinian state himself. He repeated that stand on October 16, enraging, among others, General Zeevi. But Sharon was furious about the U.S. press reports and the president's remarks and hit out bitterly and publicly over them a few days later.
Since then, the breach between the two ranchers – one in Texas and one in Israel's Negev Desert - has publicly been healed. But administration insiders say that in reality it is lasting and permanent. They also say the Israelis do not yet appear to realize how deep the rift is on Bush's side.
Sharon, according to figures in Bush's circle, has now repeatedly breached the president's famous "comfort level." The personal intimacy he worked so hard – and initially so successfully - to achieve with the U.S. leader is now gone.
And Bush, disliking personal clashes and unpleasantness – in striking contrast to the abrasive, hard-driving and confrontational Sharon - has passed over prime responsibility for dealing personally with the Israeli prime minister to his secretary of state.
It is a responsibility Powell is only too eager to accept. After many difficult months, his stature within the administration and the White House has soared since the terrorist attacks of September 11.
The president and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, were both entirely inexperienced in dealing with a national security crisis of such dimensions, and since then they have repeatedly deferred to Powell's arguments on virtually every major point.
Vice President Dick Cheney has not been generating policy. Powell has. There is a muted but very distinct sense across the administration among Defense Department hawks and State Department doves alike that Cheney too, for all his public bluster, is finding himself out of his depth. There are also concerns over how his health – and especially his uncertain heart - will hold up to the stress of what looks certain to be a long-drawn-out conflict and crisis.
Sharon had not anticipated Powell's rise in the wake of September 11. He and his advisers overestimated the clout of their sympathetic allies at the Pentagon: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and their senior lieutenants. So far, the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz team has been sidelined on all major foreign policy and strategy decisions.
Bush's views now are a far cry from his first half-year in office. Then, he lost no opportunity to make clear – publicly - that he believed Arafat was the man most responsible for scuppering the Oslo Peace Process by rejecting the unprecedented concessions Sharon's predecessor, Ehud Barak, offered him at Camp David in July 2000.
Bush also blamed Arafat for launching the second Palestinian intifada. All this was music to Sharon's ears.
But now Bush – again following Powell's analysis - sees Sharon's potential for hitting out unilaterally at the Palestinians as a menace to his own efforts to isolate Osama Bin Laden, his Al Qaeda terrorist organization and the Taliban government.
So, just as Bush's father, President George Herbert Walker Bush, a decade ago, prevailed on then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to refrain from retaliating when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles into Israel's largest city, Tel Aviv, Bush now wants Sharon to exercise similar restraint.
But for all of Bush and Powell's efforts, they are unlikely to keep Sharon reined in for long. Saddam Hussein's Scud attacks were showy but almost harmless. Almost no Israelis were harmed by them. Meanwhile, the death toll from Palestinian violence in Israel grows by the week. And Sharon has now lost one of his oldest army comrades – General Zeevi - to it.
Sharon is not cautious by nature at all. He is bold, daring and sometimes reckless. And Bush and Powell have made clear, to his fury, that they do not intend to give him the same freedom to eliminate Palestinian terrorists that they are taking themselves to eliminate Bin Laden's terrorist associates.
The love affair between Bush and Sharon always had elements of the unreal and the surreal to it. The tall, lanky Texan rancher, the son of privilege with a Harvard and Yale education, an American Baby Boomer with little interest in foreign affairs, had little in common with the cosmopolitan, multi-lingual Israel general and politician old enough to be his father, and who, in fact, drove his own father to fury.
Ironically, on a personal level, the bond between them was real. Sharon, like Bush, is a rancher who loves the semi-desert and the open range. Also, Bush and Sharon are both sophisticated insiders who nevertheless see themselves as outsiders.
Bush and Sharon shared the sense of being embattled champions of their people's most profound, but also unfashionable and widely sneered at, religious and cultural values.
They were already good friends before they became their nation's leaders. When Bush, then governor of Texas, first visited Israel a few years ago, Sharon took him on a helicopter ride around the country and the West Bank, pointing out strategic problems.
The shared sense of being embattled – and even despised - outsiders that both men felt was even evident when Bush telephoned Sharon to congratulate him on his landslide election victory over Barak on February 6, the greatest in Israeli history. The two men mutually joked about how no one would have imagined either of them in their current position when they first met.
But all these common bonds are now just past history. Ironically, Shamir and Bush's father, who made no secret of their mutual loathing for each other, still worked exceptionally well together against Iraq a decade ago.
Their political and personal heirs and successors, for all their belief in their own personal ties a few short months ago, look unlikely to repeat that achievement today. |
