Kim Ghattas

And there have been, as you said, increasing Palestinian guerrilla attacks against Israel, killing soldiers, but also civilians.

There has been already an Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon in 1978, a first invasion, which creates a bit of a buffer zone and sets up a proxy militia for Israel in southern Lebanon.

Ariel Sharon has this vision.

He wants to get rid of this problem once and for all.

How many times have we heard this since then, including today in this war, finish off the problem?

Never quite works.

But anyway, Ariel Sharon, a big, rotund man, detail-obsessed in many ways, but also unwilling to listen to outsider advice.

decides that he has the plan to invade Lebanon, get rid of the PLO, finish them off politically and militarily, which would also help solve the issue of Palestinian political ambitions in the West Bank, install a friendly pro-Israel Christian president in Lebanon, the only country that has a Christian president, and at the same time,

Niqab Hafez al-Assad, who is now president in Syria and has troops in Lebanon with surface-to-air missiles positioned in the Bekaa Valley that Sharon feels are a danger to Israel.

That is his big ambition to remake

the Middle East.

He does not have cabinet approval, and he hides his intentions from the cabinet so that he can go ahead with his invasion.

He pretends he just wants to go 40 kilometers in, and he insists we're not going to confront Syria, we're not going to get into a war with Syria.

This is just a small cleanup operation.

He describes it to the U.S.

Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, at the

Just something short and quick and will be out in six weeks.

But of course, A, he has much bigger plans to go all the way up to Beirut, which he does not divulge.

And of course, it all goes wrong.

Absolutely.