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To: Bobby Yellin who wrote (7599)	2/16/1998 10:01:00 AM
From: Alex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 117011

newsday.com

To: Bobby Yellin who wrote (7599)	2/16/1998 11:16:00 AM
From: Richnorth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 117011

ÿFebruary 16, 1998 6:49 AM EST MidEast Issues Complicate Iraq Decision By Patrick Worsnip WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A tangle of Middle East problems, all affecting each other, is complicating a U.S. decision on whether and when to launch airstrikes on Iraq in the dispute over U.N. weapons inspections. Countries from Israel to Iran are watching anxiously to see how any attack might affect them, as policy-makers in Washington ponder the possible fallout for their interests in the vital oil-producing region. Key among these is the U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace process, already at a virtual standstill because of a collapse of confidence between the Palestinians and the right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Already, Palestinians have demonstrated in the streets of West Bank towns in support of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, urging him to rain missiles and chemical weapons on Tel Aviv. Although the self-rule Palestinian Authority has banned the demonstrations, Israel has been quick to portray them as evidence that the Palestinians are not committed to peace. The United States argues that an attack on Iraq would be justified by U.N. resolutions dating from the 1991 Gulf War requiring Iraq to permit a U.N. commission to scrap its weapons of mass destruction. Baghdad's closure of certain sites to the commission sparked the present crisis. But Palestinians and other Arabs say that while Washington is ready to use deadly force in support of those resolutions, it has done little to make Israel comply with other U.N. resolutions requiring it to withdraw from occupied Arab land. ''It is understandable that someone in the region, looking at the U.N. and its resolutions, might see differences in the way they are enforced,'' says Steven Riskin of the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. ''It's hard to see in the short term how (an attack on Iraq) will be helpful to the peace process,'' Riskin said. ''The fact that the peace process has reached an unhappy and painful impasse does not strengthen the U.S. hand in the region.'' Conscious of that fact, the United States has mounted a major diplomatic offensive in the Arab world to try to convince countries that have grown chary of force against Iraq since 1991 that strikes are the only way if diplomacy fails. The most these countries have been willing to say publicly is that if the United States takes military action against Iraq it will be Saddam's own fault. The situation would be greatly complicated if Iraq responded to a U.S. attack by firing Scud missiles at Israel and the Jewish state retaliated, something Israeli leaders have refused to rule out. Iraq has said it would not attack Israel and Israeli leaders say they do not expect it. But thousands of Israelis have flocked to buy gas masks. ''If the Scuds land on Israel that will really put an end to the peace process, if it hasn't ended already,'' says Gaddis Smith, a history professor at Yale University. At the other end of the Middle East, the Clinton administration needs to consider Iran, a historic rival of Iraq with which it fought a bloody war from 1980-88. U.S. analysts say Washington has long followed a balance of power approach to Iran and Iraq, known in recent years as ''dual containment'' of two governments that the United States finds equally objectionable, though for different reasons. If airstrikes on Iraq are to be as devastating as U.S. leaders have threatened, they will need to avoid upsetting that balance, analysts said. Already, the Iraq crisis has interfered with a ruling the State Department was preparing to make on whether a gas deal that French, Russian and Malaysian companies have made with Iran violates a U.S. sanctions law targeted at Tehran. A decision had been expected last week but, with French and Russian voting critical in U.N. Security Council deliberations on Iraq, has been put off for now, U.S. officials said. With Washington committed to force unless Iraq capitulates completely over the arms inspections, Middle East experts said there were no good options in view for the administration and that this explained the lengthy delay in taking action. ''I think they have a realistic and almost fatalistic sense that if they use strikes on Iraq the situation will get worse,'' Smith said. ''If they don't use strikes on Iraq, the situation will still get worse. It's a lose-lose situation.''