Shaphan

Sharon and On

Some months ago, when I thought Ariel Sharon was close to death, I wrote in praise of him.  It's typical of the man that he still stubbornly clings to life.  Now, his thoughts on the Iraq invasion have been revealed in the liberal American-Jewish magazine "Forward".

... Olmert’s predecessor, by contrast, was anything but an amateur in Israeli-American relations, and more broadly in dealing with America’s policies in the region.  When it came to Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq and to democratize the Arab Middle East from within, Ariel Sharon took a far more sophisticated position.

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... [Forward]

Given that, in Bushworld, you're either with them or against them, Arik Sharon was clearly an evil-doer.  Luckily for the Americans, in December '95 Sharon suffered a minor stroke and, unluckily for the then most important man in Israel, he was prescribed the wrong drugs, which caused him to have a massive brain haemorrhage in January '06, which put the more US-pliant Olmert in the PM's chair.  Poor Arik - he had been able to diagnose the weaknesses of US 'plans' for Iraq, but his own doctors were unable to diagnose that he, like many people of his age, suffered from cerebral amyloid angiopathy.  Some irony there, I think.

"Things that have to be destroyed through violence"

If we are to believe him, George W Bush spends some minutes every morning reading words of inspiration and communing prayerfully with his god.  In odd-numbered years, the words he reads are from the Bible.  (I wish we knew which passages or books - probably Matthew 24 and the Book of Revelation, but who knows?)  In even-numbered years, he reads from Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest.  So, this year, as I've done previously, I regularly check the online version of My Utmost.. to find out what ideas might be influencing the president that day.  I'm often not at all reassured by what I have read.  Today's is typically worrying.

Do It Yourself (1)

. . . casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God . . . —2 Corinthians 10:5

Determinedly Demolish Some Things.  Deliverance from sin is not the same as deliverance from human nature.  There are things in human nature, such as prejudices, that the saint can only destroy through sheer neglect.  But there are other things that have to be destroyed through violence, that is, through God’s divine strength imparted by His Spirit.  There are some things over which we are not to fight, but only to "stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord . . ." (see Exodus 14:13).  But every theory or thought that raises itself up as a fortified barrier "against the knowledge of God" is to be determinedly demolished by drawing on God’s power, not through human effort or by compromise (see 2 Corinthians 10:4).

It is only when God has transformed our nature and we have entered into the experience of sanctification that the fight begins.  The warfare is not against sin; we can never fight against sin— Jesus Christ conquered that in His redemption of us.  The conflict is waged over turning our natural life into a spiritual life.  This is never done easily, nor does God intend that it be so.  It is accomplished only through a series of moral choices.  God does not make us holy in the sense that He makes our character holy.  He makes us holy in the sense that He has made us innocent before Him.  And then we have to turn that innocence into holy character through the moral choices we make.  These choices are continually opposed and hostile to the things of our natural life which have become so deeply entrenched —  the very things that raise themselves up as fortified barriers "against the knowledge of God."  We can either turn back, making ourselves of no value to the kingdom of God, or we can determinedly demolish these things, allowing Jesus to bring another son to glory (see Hebrews 2:10).

Each person who reads Chambers' words will interpret them in their own way.  It is possible to read the above passage as an exhortation to destroy the barriers within ourselves which keep us stuck in our 'natural life'.  But I can also imagine that someone like George W Bush could interpret those words as justifying violence to advance God's cause.  I do wish Laura would find something less psychosis-inducing for him to read in even-numbered years than My Utmost for His Highest.

The two Bush/Blair transcripts

Steve Clemons (Washington Note) wrote an intruiging piece on December 22nd about the alleged Bush/Blair transcript in which Bush was said to have suggested they bomb Aljazeera.  Clemons said he'd write more in January, but also promised to write more on the following day, December 23rd, about the relevant ten lines of the transcript, but nothing has yet been forthcoming.

It appears there are two sets of leaked Bush/Blair transcripts in existence, and possibly still in circulation, both of which the government has sought to suppress. There's the Aljazeera transcript from 2004, and there are notes of telephone calls between Bush and Blair from 2002, which turned up in the Stormontgate affair.  I've tried to reconcile these two transcripts but, if what little we know about the Aljazeera memo is roughly right, they are undoubtedly two separate documents.

To let leak one transcript of a Bush/Blair conversation is careless and would not have pleased the White House - as the Telegraph wrote at the time:  "The disclosure that terrorists [ie the IRA] gained access to confidential White House information is likely to provoke a furious reaction in America.".  To let leak a second transcript, especially one so potentially embarrassing, would have sent White House-No.10 relations into a tailspin.  Is it any wonder Blair hasn't received his presidential medal of honour yet?

Both transcripts are cloaked in mystery.  Stormontgate became public on October 4, 2002 when the PSNI raided Sinn Fein's offices at Stormont, seized documents and arrested three people, including Denis Donaldson, who later outed himself as a former British agent.  Amongst the documents were, allegedly, notes of telephone conversations between Bush and Blair.  Presumably the subject of the conversations was Northern Ireland - Bush later visited Northern Ireland with Blair in April 2003.  If so, it's unlikely the transcript is revelatory.  But it's possible that the recorded conversation(s) were post-9/11 related, when other, more sensitive, topics might have been discussed. 

According to Denis Donaldson, he informed on Sinn Fein/IRA to both "British intelligence and RUC/PSNI Special Branch".  So the story that PSNI, when it raided Sinn Fein's offices, didn't know Donaldson was a double agent is likely bogus.  To complete the speculation, could the existence of the Bush/Blair transcript have been the actual trigger for the PSNI raid, and that recovering those notes overrode the desire to maintain Donaldson's cover?  Whatever, the PSNI raid seems to have taken that document out of circulation.

As for the Aljazeera transcript, its status is equally murky.  As Blairwatch has pointed out, (at least) two documents are involved in this leak - one, an FCO memo, called 'Iraq in the Medium Term', on military and political strategy in Iraq;  the other, a transcript of a White House meeting between Bush and Blair on April 16, 2004.  Five days before the Daily Mirror broke the Aljazeera story, the BBC had reported that:

Two men have been charged under the Official Secrets Act following the leak of a secret government memo.  The document involved - the Foreign Office's Iraq in the Medium Term - referred to "heavy-handed" US tactics, a government source told the BBC.  Its contents were reported in the Sunday Times in May last year.  Ex-civil servant David Keogh and former MP's researcher Leo O'Connor, both from Northampton, will appear before Bow Street magistrates on 29 November.

Yet when Tony Blair was asked about the Aljazeera allegation, he replied:

"Look, there's a limit to what I can say - it's all sub judice," he said. "But honestly, I mean, conspiracy theories."

But if Keogh and O'Connor have been charged under the OSA with leaking only the FCO memo, then they haven't been charged over leaking the Bush/Blair transcript, and thus the affair isn't sub judice.  It's all highly confusing.

One more thing - IF the Daily Mirror/Aljazeera story is roughly true, it does seem odd, extraordinary even, for Bush to suggest doing something that Blair would never agree to.  Unless, that is, it was a mad scheme, cooked up by the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, that Bush went along with, and that either Rice or Powell (or both) got wind of it and insisted they would only support it if Blair did too, which they knew he never would.