A Formal Defense of the Life of Sharon, for those in Rio Linda. (On the model of Cardinal Newman’s great work Apologia Pro Vita Sua or A Formal Defense of My Life.)
Actually the defense of Israel Prime Minister Sharon’s life is only partial, dealing with his controversial recent actions. And the defense is not quite formal since it includes the claims of the daughter of the author that her father’s mind has been invaded by aliens from outer space.
But Norman Podhoretz, Editor-at-large of Commentary is a man of wisdom with special knowledge of the subject of his article in that magazine entitled, Bush, Sharon, My Daughter, and Me . Excerpts below:
[ … ] Hence it was at this fourth annual Herzliya conference in December 2003 that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon confirmed the rumors about his intention to put a “disengagement plan” into effect.The plan had three components. The first was to accelerate construction of the security fence that had recently begun going up between “Israel proper” and the territories it had captured from Jordan on the West Bank in the Six-Day war of 1967. Already some 800 Israelis had been murdered by Palestinian suicide bombers who had infiltrated into the country from the West Bank, and the main (indeed, Sharon insisted, the only) purpose of the fence was to make it harder for these monstrous human missiles to do their grisly work.
The second component of the plan was to dismantle a number of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. “I know,” Sharon said, “you would like to hear names, but we should leave something for later.” All he would divulge for the moment was that the settlements to be “relocated” would be “those that will not be included in the territory of the state of Israel in any future agreement.” [ … ]
All this had been sweet music to my ears. But a jarringly cacophonous note was sounded when the State Department took over the job of producing a blueprint that was supposed to put Bush’s policy into practice; and to make matters worse, State then proceeded to join with the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia in what came to be designated in diplospeak as the Quartet. Had there, I wondered, ever been a better case of the fox being invited into the henhouse?
In due course the fox emerged from the henhouse with the road map—another diplospeak coinage—clenched between its teeth. [ … ] [That] the Quartet had no compunction about forging ahead even while Arafat remained in power certainly did conflict with Bush’s vision.
Why, then, did Bush endorse the road map? [ … ] [W]as it really necessary for Bush to play along with the fiction that the new leadership he had called for had materialized in the person of a prime minister appointed and controlled by Arafat?
Here, I thought, the answer lay in what I had come to see as Bush’s characteristic modus operandi. Thus, just as he had challenged the UN to enforce its own resolutions on Iraq; just as, far from “rushing into war,” as his opponents charged, he had waited many months before taking action without the blessing of the Security Council; and just as he would later do in backing the negotiations aimed at keeping Iran from developing and North Korea from deploying nuclear weapons—so in this instance he was giving his critics every chance to show that they could attain the goals they claimed to share with him by means other than the use of force, or at least without rocking every boat in sight.
It was because I had come to place so much faith in Bush that I was able to overcome my misgivings about the road map. And it was partly because Sharon was also putting his money on Bush that I was ready to bet on Sharon. Unlike most Israelis, Sharon seemed to understand that the Bush Doctrine was already changing the entire context in which the Arab/Muslim war against the Jewish state had always been waged, and that in this new context, there were things Israel could do that it would have been too risky to do before. [ … ]
