Yesterday, Natan Sharansky resigned as a cabinet minister in Ariel Sharon's government in protest of plans for unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories.  

        http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/571302.html

If you've know anything at all about Sharansky, you probably know he's a hero of the right wing, and you can find him praised as such in publications like the National Review:

        http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/rosenberg200411190851.asp

The gulf between Sharansky's lofty rhetoric (about promoting "democracy" around the globe) and his own lack of respect for human rights in his adopted country (Israel) was the subject of a cover article in a recent issue of The American Conservative.  That article concluded that "This divergence--between Sharansky's rhetoric and real-world political behavior--suggests that he is not the reliable beacon for American foreign policy that the Bush administration so desperately seeks."

        http://www.amconmag.com/2005_03_28/cover.html

President Bush himself once said this: "If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy read Natan Sharansky's book, `The Case for Democracy.' It's a great book''

In other words, Sharansky has enjoyed a great deal of influence over our own government, which has chosen to use violence and brute force to accomplish things without even a decent pretence of using diplomacy to find peaceful solutions.  

That choice is proving to be a failure.