Iraq next?
By Marc Erikson
Asked by reporters on Wednesday if the US was running out of targets in its bombing campaign in Afghanistan, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quipped that it was Afghanistan that was running out, not the US. It was a clever riposte and earned Rumsfeld some appreciative laughter. But the fact is that nearly a week into the bombings, most Afghan airfields have been destroyed, air defenses have been taken down, Taleban government installations have been turned into rubble (deserted), Al-Qaeda training camps have been obliterated - but Osama bin Laden and most of his followers appear to be alive and well and the Taleban government of Mullah Omar seems largely unshaken.
There is now talk of the impending insertion of US and allied ground troops into Taleban-held Afghan territory, presumably with the objective of tracking down Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda operatives. But that, admits a US official, is "like chasing one particular rabbit in the entire state of West Virginia".
So what next in the war on terrorism if the Afghan rabbit chase yields nothing in coming days and weeks? High-ranking US security and intelligence officials have let it be known without publicly saying so that they believe Saddam Hussein's Iraq should and will be the next target for US military action. The closest anyone has come to threatening Iraq was a statement by US President George W Bush in a Thursday press conference that "There's no question that the leader of Iraq is an evil man" and that "we're watching him very carefully". But behind the scenes, notably Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, are pushing hard for getting Saddam into the US vise.
Increasing pressure on Saddam is a long-held Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz aim. In January 1998 - joined by Richard Armitage (now Deputy Secretary of State), John Bolton and Paula Dobriansky (now Under Secretaries of State), Peter Rodman (now Assistant Secretary of Defense), Elliott Abrams and Zalmay Khalilzad (now senior National Security Council officials), Robert Zoellick (now US Trade Representative), and Richard Perle (now a senior Bush adviser) - they wrote an open letter to then president Bill Clinton, stating:
"We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. We urge you to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the US and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power ...
"The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."
The emphasis in the letter is on Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. So was Bush's in his press conference statement on Saddam: "We know he's been developing weapons of mass destruction. And I think it's in his advantage to allow inspectors back in his country to make sure that he's conforming to the agreement he made after ... the Gulf War." Absent any tangible proof that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the September 11 attacks on the US (US officials have said as much), will Messrs Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz attempt to justify an assault on Iraq as a pre-emptive measure to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into terrorists' hands?
That would be quite a stretch. It wouldn't sit well with US Secretary of State Colin Powell and his coalition-building efforts, and - at this point at least - wouldn't find takers in Britain either. "We have seen no evidence which links Iraq to the atrocities of September 11. If circumstances change, then we change, but so far they haven't ... No action [outside Afghanistan] is in contemplation by the UK government at present," Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said on Thursday.
To date, aside from reports from the Czech Republic that terrorist pilot suspect Mohammed Atta met Iraqi diplomat Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani in Prague on several occasions, the only allegations of an Iraqi connection to the September 11 attacks have come from Israel's military intelligence service, Aman. According to Jane's Foreign Report, Aman officers believe that two of the world's foremost terrorist masterminds, the Lebanese Imad Mughniyeh, head of the special overseas operations for Hezbollah, and the Egyptian Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, senior member of Al-Qaeda, directed the September 11 mission. They claim that for the past two years Iraqi intelligence officers were shuttling between Baghdad and Afghanistan, meeting with Al Zawahiri, and that one of the Iraqi intelligence officers, Salah Suleiman, was captured last October by the Pakistanis near the border with Afghanistan. The Iraqis are also reported to have established strong ties with Mughniyeh.
Foreign Report quotes its Israeli sources saying, "We've only got scraps of information, not the full picture, but it was good enough for us to send a warning [in August] to our allies that an unprecedented massive terror attack was expected. One of our indications suggested that Imad Mughniyeh met with some of his dormant agents on secret trips to Germany. We believe that the operational brains behind the New York attack were Mughniyeh and Zawahiri, who were probably financed and got some logistical support from the Iraqi Intelligence Service (SSO)."
US intelligence officials acknowledge that a general Israeli warning was received prior to September 11, but have not so far confirmed verification of the Aman allegations. But evidence or no against Iraqi involvement in the recent terrorist acts, a representative cross-section of conservative American foreign and security policy experts and public opinion demand a strike against Iraq as an indispensible aspect of the war on terrorism.
A September 20 letter to The Honorable George W Bush, President of the United States, Washington, DC, published in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard and signed by 37 well-known policy experts and columnists, makes the point in the clearest of terms:
Dear Mr President,
We write to endorse your admirable commitment to "lead the world to victory" in the war against terrorism ...
In order to carry out this "first war of the 21st century" successfully, and in order, as you have said, to do future "generations a favor by coming together and whipping terrorism", we believe the following steps are necessary parts of a comprehensive strategy ...
IRAQ
We agree with Secretary of State Powell's recent statement that Saddam Hussein "is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth ..." It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. The United States must therefore provide full military and financial support to the Iraqi opposition. American military force should be used to provide a "safe zone" in Iraq from which the opposition can operate. And American forces must be prepared to back up our commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means.
* Among the better-known signatories of the letter are: William Kristol, Jeffrey Bell, William J. Bennett, Eliot Cohen, Midge Decter, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, William Schneider, Jr, and Stephen J Solarz.
So, will Iraq be the next target? Saddam Hussein would be foolish to bet against it. |
