Former Prime Minister Sharon looms large over Israeli elections

Dion Nissenbaum,… Former Prime Minister Sharon looms large over Israeli elections

Dion Nissenbaum, Knight Ridder Newspapers

KIRYAT GAT, Israel – Gilad Lugassy has looked over the list of candidates in next Tuesday’s Israeli election, and he knows exactly who he wants to vote for: Ariel Sharon, the former prime minister who was silenced in January by a near-fatal stroke.

“Ariel Sharon was the best,” said the 25-year-old pest control manager. He runs through the list of potential successors with a dismissive tone. “Olmert is not like him. Peretz is like a clown. And Bibi we tried once before and was no good.”

With the campaign drawing to a close, there’s a malaise among Israeli voters as they prepare to choose Sharon’s successor. Pollsters predict voter turnout will be 70 percent, a historic low for Israel.

Israel faces major issues. Ehud Olmert, the candidate of Sharon’s new Kadima Party, has pledged to abandon some West Bank settlements. Likud’s Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu warns of the dangers of such a move now that the Islamic militant group Hamas runs the Palestinian parliament.

But in political conversations across Israel, the name you hear most is Sharon, whose life has taken on near-mythic airs since early January when a devastating stroke ended his political career.

Everyone is judged against Sharon. No one – not Olmert, not Netanyahu, not Labor party chief Amir Peretz – measures up.

“I’m going to vote, but it’s very difficult,” truck company owner Avi Zano said between mouthfuls of meat in a near-empty cafeteria. “There aren’t any honest people left. There was Ariel Sharon, but since he’s been gone, no one can replace him.”

U.S. troops to remain in Iraq for years, Bush says

William Douglas, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – President Bush said Tuesday that U.S. troops will be in Iraq until after his presidency ends almost three years from now.

Asked at a White House news conference whether there’ll come a time when no U.S. forces are in Iraq, he said “that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq.” Pressed on that response, the president said that for him to discuss complete withdrawal would mean he was setting a timetable, which he refuses to do.

Bush’s statement flies in the face of U.S. public opinion. A Gallup Poll released Friday found that a clear majority of Americans, 60 percent, think the war isn’t worth the costs, 19 percent called for immediately withdrawing U.S. troops, another 35 percent favored a pullout by March 2007 and only 39 percent said troops should remain in Iraq indefinitely. The issue is expected to dominate congressional elections next November.

In the hastily called, 57-minute news conference, the president said he didn’t believe that Iraq had tumbled into a civil war and suggested that success stories there are overshadowed by news coverage of dramatic insurgent attacks.

Bush said he disagreed with former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Sunday that if the current state of Iraq isn’t civil war “then God knows what civil war is.”

“Listen, we all recognize that there is violence, that there’s sectarian violence,” the president said. “But the way I look at the situation is that the Iraqis took a look and decided not to go to civil war.”

As evidence, Bush said the Iraqi military hadn’t splintered into sectarian factions and that U.S. military and diplomatic officials there didn’t view the situation as civil war.