Sharon Warned Bush
munaeem | 13 January, 2007 14:48
Sharon Warned Bush
The Strategic Interest
Yossi Alpher | Fri. Jan 12, 2007
. . .Publicly, Sharon played the silent ally; he neither criticized nor
supported the Iraq adventure. One reason for his relative silence was
Washington’s explicit request that Israel refrain from openly backing its
invasion of an Arab country or in any way intervening, lest its blessing
damn the United States in Arab eyes.
But sometime prior to March 2003, Sharon told Bush privately in no
uncertain terms what he thought about the Iraq plan. Sharon’s words —
revealed here for the first time — constituted a friendly but pointed
warning to Bush. Sharon acknowledged that Saddam Hussein was an “acute
threat” to the Middle East and that he believed Saddam possessed weapons
of mass destruction.
Yet according to one knowledgeable source, Sharon nevertheless advised
Bush not to occupy Iraq. According to another source — Danny Ayalon, who
was Israel’s ambassador to the United States at the time of the Iraq
invasion, and who sat in on the Bush-Sharon meetings — Sharon told Bush
that Israel would not “push one way or another” regarding the Iraq scheme.
According to both sources, Sharon warned Bush that if he insisted on
occupying Iraq, he should at least abandon his plan to implant democracy
in this part of the world. “In terms of culture and tradition, the Arab
world is not built for democratization,” Ayalon recalls Sharon advising.
Be sure, Sharon added, not to go into Iraq without a viable exit strategy.
And ready a counter-insurgency strategy if you expect to rule Iraq, which
will eventually have to be partitioned into its component parts. Finally,
Sharon told Bush, please remember that you will conquer, occupy and leave,
but we have to remain in this part of the world. Israel, he reminded the
American president, does not wish to see its vital interests hurt by
regional radicalization and the spillover of violence beyond Iraq’s
borders.
Full text available by clicking on the link below.
Comments
C. Lockhart | 22/01/2007, 07:50
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If, as Alpher contends, Sharon didn’t want the Iraq War, then why did the Israeli government wait over four years to correct the misinformation in the following CNN etc. news accounts? The 2002 accounts, not what Alpher says today, are what the U.S. public perceived as Israel’s stance on the war. And that stance hurt the anti-war cause. I’m not impressed by Alpher’s self-serving allegations, appearing for the first time in 2007 and after the Iraq War has proven to be a fiasco. Would Alpher have made these vague contentions if the war had been a success? I don’t think so. Then we would have heard him or another Israeli government mouthpiece trumpet Israel's 2002 pro-war statements.
Here's what Sharon and his cronies led the U.S. public to believe in 2002:
Sharon, 16 August 2002. AFP, citing Haaretz: “Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has urged the United States not to delay its threatened strike on Iraq any further. Postponing a military operation against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime ‘will not create a more convenient environment for action in the future,’ the Israeli daily Haaretz quoted Sharon as saying Friday [16 August 2002] in a message sent to the US administration.” http://www.arabia.com/afp/news/mideast/article/english/0,10846,267538,00.html
Peres, 15 August 2002. CNN: “Attacking Iraq now would be ‘quite dangerous, but postponing it would be more dangerous,’ Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Thursday [15 August 2002]. ‘The problem today is not if but when,’ Peres said, ‘and if they think we wait, [Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] will change, and if he will change, it … will be for the worse; he will have more weapons.” http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/08/15/peres.iraq/
Ranaan Gissin, 16 August 2002. CBS: “Israel is urging U.S. officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Friday. … ‘Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose,’ [Ranaan] Gissin said. ‘It will only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction.’” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/08/18/world/main519037.shtml
According to one author, these war-mongering statements came at the time Bush and his cronies were deciding to strike Iraq. See “The Iraq War of 2003 and the Politics of Denuclearization,” Bruce D. Larkin, The University of California at Santa Cruz http://www.gcdd.net/TX=2003/TX.028=2003.11.11.IraqWar.pdf, p. 21 et seq.