Bush Moving Closer To Ariel Sharon

by Jim Lobe

The main obstacles to ending U.S. ties with Yasser Arafat' s Palestine Authority (PA), an indispensable pillar of the entire Oslo edifice, is the lack of anything to replace it with - which appears not to bother Sharon. In addition, there have been fears that such a move could set off a backlash among Washington's Arab allies, especially Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Their influence here, however, appears to have diminished since Bush launched his "war on terrorism."

Nonetheless, Secretary of State Colin Powell had argued for patience at a White House meeting Friday in which Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly pressed forcefully for strong diplomatic sanctions against Arafat, including cutting off all contact with the Palestinian leader, closing the PA's office here, and adding a militia linked to his Fatah faction to Washington's list of terrorist groups.

Instead, Bush opted, for now, only to further delay the trip to the region of special Mideast envoy, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, at least until Arafat, who has been appealing for Zinni's earliest possible return, cracks down much harder against militant groups and accounts for the PA's alleged attempt to ship 50 tonnes of weapons from Iran to Gaza. Israeli forces intercepted the arms last month.

The attitude and rhetoric of the U.S. administration are clearly hardening against Arafat, who has been under virtual house arrest by Israeli tanks in Ramallah for six weeks. Anonymous senior officials have been telling reporters since mid-week that Washington has all but given up on the Palestinian leader.

"I am disappointed in Yasser Arafat," Bush told reporters during a visit to Maine after the meeting. "Ordering up weapons that were intercepted on a boat headed for that part of the world is not part of fighting terror; that's enhancing terror, and obviously we're very disappointed in him."

While the smuggling operation -- and Arafat's failure thus far to adequately account for it or follow through on promises to arrest those responsible -- is now cited as the straw that broke the back of Washington's patience with Arafat, many analysts here believe that its new willingness to let Sharon pound the final nails into Oslo's coffin reflects more the rise in influence of the most hawkish and pro-Zionist sectors within the administration since last September's terrorist attacks in the United States.

Many of Rumsfeld's and Cheney's top aides have long opposed Oslo and several are on record as rejecting the "land for peace" principle on which U.S. policy on the Israeli-Arab conflict has been based since the 1967 war.

"The notion that a country that gives two billion dollars a year in military aid to an occupying power gets freaked out when the occupied get a few hundred thousand dollars worth of arms is ludicrous," said Stephen Zunes, a Middle East specialist at the University of San Francisco.

Indeed, even before the shipment was seized, the administration had begun to echo Sharon in blaming Arafat for each new spiral of violence, seemingly oblivious to what to many analysts appeared to be deliberate Israeli provocations, such as targeted assassinations of the leaders of Palestinian militias or brief, but bloody incursions into PA towns and villages. Moreover, Washington ceased denouncing such tactics or even calling on Israel to exercise restraint.

Thus, in late November and on the eve of Zinni's first mediation mission, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) killed a senior Hamas military commander in a rocket attack on this apartment. When, as predicted by the Israeli press, the group retaliated with suicide bombs in Israel, Washington denounced them in the strongest terms, demanding that Arafat act decisively against both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, then remaining silent when Israel sent tanks into PA-controlled areas and carried out attacks on police stations and other PA targets.

As the bloodshed worsened over the first two weeks of December, Arafat declared a unilateral cease-fire and, despite mounting popular opposition, ordered the arrest of alleged militia members and the closure of some Hamas and Islamic Jihad offices. The resulting lull lasted until early January, a period in which no Israelis, but 30 Palestinians, including at least ten children, were killed. Arafat called on Zinni to return to negotiate a permanent cease-fire and a freeze on Israeli settlements, as set forth in a plan put forward by Powell in November.

But the pattern repeated itself in mid-January, when Israel assassinated Raed Karmi, the leader of a West Bank militia associated with Fatah. The killing set off a new cycle of deadly suicide attacks followed last week by the biggest Israeli military operations in the West Bank and Gaza since the 1967 war, including the re-occupation for the first time of an entire Palestinian town, Tulkarm on the West Bank, as well as the killing -- accounts differ as to whether Palestinians died in a gun battle or were executed -- of a number of suspected militia members, and the rounding up of dozens of others.

Almost every retaliation by Israel includes attacks on Palestinian jails and police stations, actions that actually undermine Arafat's ability to comply with Sharon's and Bush's demands for a crackdown. "How can he control any kind of violence when his hands are tied, he has no freedom of movement, when his police and infrastructure are being destroyed?" a senior Jordanian official told the New York Times last week, adding that such a proposition was "illogical."

But, instead of calling for Israeli restraint, Washington has remained mostly silent, if not explicitly supportive of Israel's actions. "The president understands the reason that Israel has taken the action that it takes," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said this week.

"If you look at this cycle, it is na•ve to think it is accidental," Akiva Eldar, a prominent Israeli columnist, told the Christian Science Monitor. "Whenever Arafat is arresting people and terrorism is reduced, Sharon takes some action. Sharon wants to stave off any attempt to bring him and Arafat to the same table... His goal is not only to keep the settlements in place, but to finish off the Oslo agreement and get rid of the (Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization)."

The administration insists that it is Arafat, and not Sharon, who bears responsibility for Oslo's demise, but even former senior officials of Bill Clinton's administration see Washington's passivity as "playing into Sharon 's hands." In a Times column this week by the same name, Robert Malley, Clinton's top National Security Council aide on Oslo warned that Sharon is trying to "undo the foundations of the Oslo agreement."

Ousting Arafat and killing off Oslo, according to Malley, will "guarantee a succession that is in the interest neither of peace nor of Israel and produce a generation of scarred and vengeful Palestinians."