From The Washington Research Group:
Bush has avoided the Middle East since it is a no-win situation and he felt Clinton's involvement was a disaster. Nevertheless, he now must get involved and the good news is that there is hope for some successes.
High on the U.S. agenda is keeping suicide bombing from becoming a successful tactic for fear it will spread to the U.S. and to American citizens in foreign countries.
Israel is exacting a heavy toll on the terrorist organizations in the current attack, which has shocked Arafat in its intensity as he expected the U.S. would step in to prevent anything of this scale, and 200 terrorist leaders have been arrested. Also the Israelis appear to have found proof of Arafat's direct involvement in sponsoring terrorism. Early in this campaign, President Bush ordered the Israelis to not kill Arafat and the CIA arranged for a mass surrender of a group of PLO leaders, so that Arafat's organization can be reconstructed to some degree for negotiations, since he remains the only person of suitable stature with whom to hold negotiations. But the current campaign has changed the playing field, making it clear to Arafat that he no longer can play the game of alternating between talking peace publicly for a while, then secretly promoting a new round of terrorism; he knows now that if he does that again, he is likely to be taken out and the U.S. probably won't prevent it.
If new talks are reasonably successful, we are likely to end up with U.N. or NATO peacekeepers (with much of the terrorist infrastructure having been destroyed) and even the Russians probably will want to get involved.
Iraq remains a target of intense preparations, though the plan for unseating Saddam Hussein has not been finalized. There have been a number of military defections in recent weeks (into the Kurdish area in the north of the country) and a tank commander who defected quite recently forecasted that 85% of Iraq's military will defect fairly quickly after the U.S. attacks.
The U.S. commanders for this campaign are all in place in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and they have set up secondary headquarters in Bulgaria and Romania. However an attack is not expected until the fourth quarter; the military is still actively involved in Afghanistan and is having to replenish its stockpile of sophisticated weapons after using much of its supplies in the operation in Afghanistan, while the CIA works to organize the resistance in the north and south and gather intelligence, and temperatures in Iraq from May to Sept. are 120+ degrees which would be very rough on both troops and equipment. Areas in the no-fly zone in northern Iraq also may be used as staging areas and airfields in the campaign in addition to the countries mentioned above.
While France and Germany (who have significant muslim populations) oppose an Iraq attack and Russia is worried about its muslims and its $8+ billion of loans to Iraq, the U.K., Spain and Italy are very supportive secretly, even if speaking somewhat in opposition publicly (the Spanish leader strongly supports Bush in this effort and Berlusconi would like for Italy to become one of the U.S.'s closest friends and allies).
We are learning that Saddam has been more involved in training and financing terrorists than we realized, but Iran remains that worst offender and may well be on the list after Iraq.
Intelligence sources feel that terrorists will not hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction once they obtain them and both Iraq and others are trying very hard to obtain them. Bush has make it clear that this is why we will go into Iraq - no connection with 9/11 is needed. It has been learned that Iraq is actively developing a long-range missile capable of carrying such weapons. On the other hand, it now seems likely that there are no weapons of mass destruction in terrorist hands in the U.S. or they would have used them already to avoid the risk of being captured in the FBI's massive campaign to find sleeper cells in the U.S.
Petro-warfare is a major concern of Bush and the ruler of Saudi Arabia has indicated that he believes bin Laden's endgame has been to sieze control of the Saudi oil supplies. However, the current Iraq embargo is not likely to be a problem and is not getting any traction. The Saudi ruler has secretly promised to make oil available if there is any serious problem. |
