From the Vol.1 No.18 issue of Electronic Intelligence Weekly

Bush Speech Sets Off New Sharon War Drive

by Jeffrey Steinberg

July 5 (EIRNS)—President George W. Bush's long-awaited June 24 speech in the Rose Garden, in which he spelled out his so-called "vision" for Mideast peace, has in fact set the region on a war path, in which Israel's "New Hitler," Ariel Sharon, is now even threatening to use nuclear weapons against the Arab world and, possibly, against other targets as well.

While President Bush peppered his speech with talk of a "two-state solution" to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and lamented the suffering of the Palestinian people, under the boot of the Israeli occupation, all of those nice words were trumped by his virulent personal attack against Yasser Arafat. His "off with his head" attack on the duly elected President of the Palestinian Authority, was universally read by Arab and Israeli leaders alike as a death warrant against Arafat, and a "green light" for Sharon to continue his butchery until the Palestinians had "reformed."

Sharon signalled that he perfectly understood the true meaning of the Bush speech, through a series of military and diplomatic actions:

* On June 26, Sharon ordered the Israel Defense Force to blow up the historic Hebron headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, with at least 15 people holed up inside. The building had previously housed the British Mandate. When the building was levelled with explosives, killing all the people trapped inside, the U.S. Administration did not so much as issue a statement of protest—as had been done after April's Israeli invasion of the West Bank cities of Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin.

* The attack on Hebron was part of an overall Israeli military reoccupation of the entire West Bank, including all but one city (Jericho) in "Area A," the portion given over to full Palestinian Authority sovereignty under the Oslo Accords.

* Several days after the Hebron bombing, Sharon ordered the IDF to expel the Palestinian officials from the joint monitoring office, the Oslo-created joint-security center which had been operating since 1993.

In effect, following the Bush Rose Garden signal, Sharon has totally ripped up Oslo, and is now moving to implement his longstanding policy—the "mass transfer" of the 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza across the river into Jordan, and the permanent annexation of the territories seized in 1967. - Nuclear Blackmail -

The day after the disastrous Bush Rose Garden speech, Israel took another dramatic step, moving the Mideast closer to catastrophe. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper of record, Ha'aretz, two top Israeli scientists boasted that Israel now possessed an intercontinental ballistic missile capability, that could deliver bombs anywhere on the planet.

The next day, Ha'aretz revealed that the chief of the Mossad, Ephraim Halevy, had just given a closed-door briefing to top officials of NATO in Brussels, warning that Israel was prepared to launch preemptive strikes against Iraq, Iran, Libya, or Syria—to prevent any of those countries from achieving regional missile and weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities. Halevy refused to share with the NATO audience, Israel's so-called "proof" that these four states are weeks or months away from such capabilities. But the message was clear: Israel would use all the weapons in its arsenal in preemptive attacks against these Arab states on the basis of "secret evidence" that WMD and missile capabilities were about to be fielded.

Lyndon LaRouche responded instantly to these nuclear war threats coming out of Israel—particularly the threat to use ICBMs to strike at targets outside the Mideast. LaRouche declared that this was a major provocation by Sharon, and that the world had to respond by immediately declaring the Mideast a nuclear-weapons-free zone, and dismantling the Israeli nuclear capability at once. - Iraq War -

On April 28, Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld had written an article in the Sunday Telegraph titled "Sharon's Plan Is To Drive Palestinians Across the Jordan." Not only did the article detail Israel's military order-of-battle for the mass expulsion of the Palestinians. Van Creveld emphasized the crucial role to be played by Israel's submarine-based nuclear weapons capability. "Should Saddam be mad enough to resort to weapons of mass destruction, then Israel's reponse would be so 'awesome and terrible' (as Yitzhak Shamir, former Prime Minister, once said) as to defy the imagination."

Van Creveld linked the timing of the "mass transfer" scheme to one of two possible events: a massive terrorist attack inside Israel, in which hundreds of people were killed, or a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Lyndon LaRouche, among others, has warned that Sharon is perfectly capable of staging such a "Palestinian" terror attack inside Israel to provide the pretext for the mass expulsion.

As for the prospects of a U.S. military operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein, this remains a topic of fierce behind-the-scenes debate in and around the Bush Administration.

The resignation, last week, of White House counter-terrorism czar Gen. Wayne Downing, was certainly related to the Iraq war issue. After retiring as chief of the Joint Special Operations Command, the Army four-star had been the "private" military adviser to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, one of the "contra" groups most strongly backed by the neo-conservatives and Zionist Lobbyists in Washington, but opposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department.

Just before his abrupt resignation, Gen. Downing had submitted a war-plan for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to the JCS, and they had rejected his plan as folly. Downing had argued for an immediate military operation, involving Special Forces troops, use of Kurdish and other rebels inside Iraq, and massive U.S. air power. The JCS oppose an invasion, but particularly insist that if any military operation to unseat Saddam is ordered, it must involve, at minimum, 200,000 American troops, prepared for a long-term occupation of the country.

The New York Times today ran a front-page story, detailing precisely such a large-scale military invasion plan. On June 30, Jim Hoagland had written an op ed in the Washington Post, proposing a massive U.S. military invasion and occupation of Iraq, until a "democratic" regime were installed in Baghdad.

Were the United States to engage in any of these military options, the entire Arab and Muslim world would revolt against Washington—particularly since Bush's horrible Rose Garden embrace of Sharon.

All these events put the entire Mideast on a collision course to war, unless there is an immediate shift in U.S. policy, and Sharon is given a very swift kick, to stop his war plans now.

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