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Sharon missed huge diplomatic chance, charges Richard Perle
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| By Aluf Benn and Shmuel Rosner |
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Prime Minister Ariel Sharon missed a major diplomatic opportunity following U.S. President George Bush's June 24, 2002, speech, according to Richard Perle, a leading Jewish-American neo-conservative.
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Bush called for two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side, but also stressed the need for a different Palestinian leadership.
"This speech was very important, and Israel's leadership should have grabbed it with both hands," Perle said in an interview with Haaretz yesterday. "Israel's position should have been that this is the first conceptual breakthrough in thinking about a solution, and it should have said: `We are behind it 100 percent, and we will do everything in our power to realize it.' But this didn't happen, and then the road map appeared."
Perle, who is visiting Jerusalem this week, added that Israel should have accepted Bush's speech in a manner that would have transferred all the pressure onto the Palestinians. Because this did not happen, diplomats began working on the road map, and Sharon accepted it, even though in many respects, "it does not accord with the Bush speech."
Perle is one of the most important spokesmen for the neo-conservative approach in the U.S. Though he currently holds no official position in the administration - he was forced to resign a few months ago from the Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon's advisory panel, due to a conflict of interests - he continues to have considerable influence over American foreign policy.
Perle opposes the road map, which, in his view, repeats the mistakes of previous failed efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "When the map appeared, and before the president became involved in the matter, Sharon should have said that it doesn't reflect [Bush's] speech," Perle said. "Is Sharon's position better today for having refrained from doing this in the past?"
But Perle has no magic solutions to the conflict. He sees no point in an agreement with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, "who is incapable of peace and whose signature has no value." He was also disappointed by the failure of the last Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas. "I don't know, I don't have an easy solution," he said.
But he stressed that no diplomatic maneuvering would achieve results if it ignored the prevalent attitude toward terrorism in Palestinian society. When six-year-old children are taught to kill Israelis, there can be no peace, Perle said. "It was a terrible mistake to continue with Oslo once it became clear that the attitude toward Israel remained what it was before Oslo," he added.
Perle is here to participate in the Jerusalem Summit, a conference of rightists from Israel and the U.S. Tomorrow, he will receive a prize named after his former boss, the late Democrat senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a leading fighter for Israel and for Jewish immigration from the former Soviet Union. Perle visited Israel for the first time with Jackson in 1970, and said that Jackson "kept reminding me until his dying day that he led me to discover my roots." He retains fond memories of prime minister Golda Meir from that visit, describing her as "a great prime minister whose career was destroyed by one terrible mistake."
Perle was a leading advocate of the war with Iraq and of the ambitious goal of changing the face of the Middle East through this war. The failure thus far to discover any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has not changed his opinion. "The war was appropriate, even if no weapons are found, and even if there were no weapons - because we liberated 23 million people and opened the door to a tremendously important change in the region. The policy of containment had failed. Saddam was a brutal dictator who used weapons of mass destruction [in the past], and leaving him in place would have been dangerous."
Perle believes that the emphasis placed by both Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the war stemmed from legal considerations: Attorneys had told them that Saddam was in violation of UN resolutions on weapons of mass destruction, and that there would therefore be a firm legal basis for attacking Iraq on these grounds - whereas there was no legal basis for regime change.
But Perle believes that what this primarily indicates is a severe flaw in the structure of the UN, an organization established at the end of World War II that has not adapted to the changes that have taken place in the world since then. "The UN knows how to deal with armies that cross national borders, but not how to deal with people who make anthrax on their own territory," he said. He therefore thinks that the U.S. should not have bothered trying to obtain UN backing for the war.
Perle is optimistic about the war's results. He charges that the media has been playing up the terror attacks and the American casualties while ignoring achievements in rebuilding the educational, health and electricity systems and the emerging sparks of democracy. He believes that it is possible to establish a democracy in Iraq. "We will not get an American, British or Israeli democracy any time soon," he said. "But will we get a representative government that reflects the will of the people? That is realistic. And what is the alternative? To say that every Arab state is doomed for eternity to a brutal, tyrannical regime?"
The principal error in the conduct of the war, he said, was the failure to mobilize a large Iraqi opposition force to fight alongside the American forces. Now, he said, it is important to transfer governing authority to the Iraqis as quickly as possible. "If we have to remain for five years, we've failed."
With regard to Iran, Perle recommends trying to encourage an internal change that would bring down the current regime. He proposes helping with communications, such as underground newspapers and broadcasts, and "adopting" a government-in-exile, "if we find a credible group of Iranians... We should have begun this long since, but unfortunately, that is not the approach of this administration, which has been handling Iran with exaggerated caution." Perle believes that Iran will succeed in obtaining nuclear weapons. "I wouldn't rule out the military option [for dealing with this]," he said, "but I would begin by strengthening the opposition - something that is likely to succeed more quickly than people think."
Perle strongly supports Israel's recent attack on a terrorist training base in Syria. "If Israel were to respond regularly to attacks from Lebanese soil in and around Damascus, they would stop," he said. "I can't prove this, but it is worth trying. Syria is weak, and Bashar Assad understands that war with Israel would be his downfall. Neither we nor you have done enough to pressure Syria. We asked them nicely not to support terror, and it didn't persuade them."
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