Free Republic

AP) JERUSALEM In a bold gamble, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Monday asked Israel's president to dissolve parliament, pushing for a quick March election just hours after deciding to leave his hardline Likud Party and form a new centrist party . Sharon's decision to leave Likud sent shock waves through Israel, redrawing the political map, finalizing his transformation from hardliner to moderate and boosting prospects of progress in peacemaking with the Palestinians. His confidants say Sharon felt Likud hardliners, who tried to block this summer's Gaza pullout, were imposing too many constraints and would prevent future peace moves. Palestinian officials...

Thursday July 17, 2003 The Guardian As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war. It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses. This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising...

The emerging consensus among observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that any resolution inevitably involves the Palestinians governing themselves under their own flag in their own country. The Bush administration has endorsed an independent Palestinian state and backed UN resolutions to this effect, something that just a few years ago would have seemed improbable even for an administration striving for "even-handedness" toward Yasser Arafat, much less one that is pro-Israel.Even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, hardly famous for his conciliatory attitude toward the Palestinians, has concluded that at some point in the future, there will be a Palestinian state or at...