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Politics : Stop the War! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: eims2000 who wrote (8866)	4/6/2003 11:00:45 PM
From: Emile Vidrine	Respond to of 21614

Postcard USA: Bush fighting Sharon’s war?, Daily Times (Pakistan), December 29, 2002 "Israel’s great achievement in the political and diplomatic realm has been to draw American anger from those who carried out the 9/11 attacks to its own enemies, namely Saddam, Hamas and the non-existent Al Qaeda in Palestine. Barring the occasional article in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times which gives a viewpoint other than that favoured by Sharon and his ardent supporters in the United States, among which you can include the president himself, his deputy, his defence secretary and his national security adviser, the rest of the mainstream US publications remain uncritically pro-Israel. As for the networks, in particular cable channels such as Fox News, the less said about their lack of balance on the Middle East the better. Many people in Pakistan can view for themselves today, thanks to the satellite dish, what some of them churn out with such sickening predictability day after day on the issue. It is, therefore, something of a surprise to have one of the leading conservative columnists of the country, Robert D Novak, invite attention a day after Christmas to a speech by Sen. Chuck Hagel that would have gone unreported otherwise. The Republican senator from Nebraska who recently returned from a week-long fact-finding trip to the Middle East told the Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs that the road to Arab-Israeli peace would not go through Baghdad as was being argued by President George Bush and those who support his thinking. The Senator left no one who heard him in any doubt that the war about to be launched against Iraq was not America’s war so much as it was Ariel Sharon’s. According to Novak, 'In private conversation with Hagel and many other members of Congress, the former general leaves no doubt that the greatest US assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam’s Hussein’s Iraqi regime. That view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason why US forces today are assembling for war.' Hegel told his audience that military force alone would neither assure a democratic transition in Iraq, bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians, nor assure stability in the Middle East. He also warned that as America prepared for war, its standing among Muslim countries, even among long-time allies, was low. Novak writes, 'Yet the Bush administration has tied itself firmly to Sharon and his policies. Gen. Amran Mitzna, the new [Israeli] Labour Party leader challenging the heavily favoured Sharon in the January 28 election, is denied access to US officials. In private conversation, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice has insisted that Hezbollah — not Al Qaeda — is the world’s most dangerous terrorist organisation. How could that be, considering Al Qaeda’s global record of mass carnage? Quite correctly, Novak concludes from the national security adviser’s comments that the US war against terrorism, accused of being Iraq-centric, is actually Israel-centric."