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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Some Iraq Scenarios By Antonio C. Abaya March 5, 2003 From the American point of view, the best possible scenario in Iraq would be for Saddam Hussein to go into exile and turn the country over to them for them to remake into an American-style �democracy.� Alternately, the Americans would be overjoyed if Saddam were to be overthrown/assassinated by Iraqi oppositionists and his regime dismantled. From the Iraqi point of view, the best possible scenario would likely be for George W. Bush to be assassinated by an American anti-war protester, which could then trigger some soul-searching among the American people, leading to a wind-down of the war-mongering in Washington DC and a scaling down of the troop build-up around Iraq. But neither scenario has a high probability of happening, even if there is a historical oddity in the fact that since 1840, every American president elected in a year ending in 0 has either been assassinated or has otherwise died in office. William Henry Harrison (elected in 1840) died in office. Abraham Lincoln (1860) was assassinated. James Garfield (1880) was assassinated. William McKinley (1900) was assassinated. William Harding (1920) died in office. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (elected to a third term in 1940) died in office. John F. Kennedy (1960) was assassinated. The only exception, so far, is Ronald Reagan (1980), but he was wounded in an assassination attempt in 1981. Will George W. Bush (2000) break the jinx? Abangan�. ***** The most likely scenario is that Bush - who never served in Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Haiti or even Los Angeles� Watts district - will have his splendid little war and tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people � Americans, British and Iraqis � are likely to die in the next few weeks or months. And that will be just in Iraq and possibly Kuwait, the designated springboard for the invasion. No one doubts that an attack on and invasion of Iraq will trigger a backlash in the entire Muslim world, from Morocco to Mindanao. How wide and devastating that backlash will be remains to be seen. Someone who claimed to be Osama bin Laden, in an audio recording broadcast last Feb. 11 on the al-Jazeera cable network, warned that any Muslim regime which supported a US-led attack on Iraq would be an �apostate� and �all those who co-operate with the Americans against Iraq are hostile to Islam�..We stress the importance of martyrdom attacks against the enemy. These attacks inflicted on America and Israel a disaster they have never experienced before�.� As calls-to-arms go, this was rather tame and muted, which suggests that Al-Qaeda may have shot its wad and is no longer capable staging an encore on the scale of 9/11. But we will never know until George W. launches his �pre-emptive strike,� the heart and soul of the Bush Doctrine, whose chief architects are Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, both Jews, and which, not surprisingly, posits the survival of a strong and dominant Israel as the lynchpin of US Middle East policy. Pre-emption has replaced containment as the defining animus behind the US attitude towards its potential enemies. Which can cut both ways. If Bush feels free to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, Saddam Hussein, knowing that his days are numbered anyway, may feel equally free to launch HIS pre-emptive strike against Bush�s pre-emptive strike. Militarily speaking, this would make a lot of sense since never again would so many American and British troops be bunched up together in such a small area as they now are in northern Kuwait while they wait for the word Go! Since Iraq borders Kuwait, the 150 km limit on Iraqi missiles becomes irrelevant; even ordinary artillery shells and mobile tactical missiles, tipped with conventional, bio/chem, or nuclear warheads, can cause considerable casualties. A group of 45 Australian lawyers has recently articulated the opinion that in the current situation, Iraq would be morally justified in launching a pre-emptive strike against the US and the UK since it is Iraq, not the US or the UK, which is under direct and imminent threat of attack and invasion. After all, how many Iraqi divisions are poised in Canada or Mexico to attack and invade the US? Or how many Iraqi carrier battle groups are on standby in the North Sea to bomb London back to the Stone Age? An Iraqi pre-emptive strike against US and British troops massed in northern Kuwait would cause mostly military casualties. A US/British response to that strike against Iraqi troops imbedded in cities waiting for a ground invasion will cause mostly civilian casualties, especially if tactical nuclear weapons are used. A Muslim (not necessarily solely Iraqi) counter-strike in the form of smallpox-ricin-nerve gas attacks in the subways of Manhattan or London, or radiological or �dirty� bombs detonated in the ports of, say, New York or Southampton, would kill relatively few people but the ensuing panic would wreck the US or British economy. . . ***** Another unintended possible convert to the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strike may be Kim Jong Il of North Korea. If Kim concludes that he is next in the hit list of Bush, he may decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against South Korea while the US is pre-occupied with Iraq. Such a pre-emptive strike will not be meant to unify the two Koreas under Kim but only to take down as many Americans as he can with him as he immolates himself in a final blaze of glory. Kim would definitely be exterminated in Bush�s brave new world. A pre-emptive strike on South Korea will almost certainly draw a nuclear response from the US as it tries to save its 37,000 troops from certain defeat. Such a nuclear response will not be a surgical strike, more like a chain-saw massacre against anything that moves because the US does not have full and reliable information on possible targets in that secretive and hermetically sealed communist kingdom. I recall a small, one-table dinner with Zbignieuw Brzezinski (I�m sure I misspelled that), national security adviser of President Jimmy Carter, to which I was invited in 1996 in the residence of Bill Ferguson, then country officer of Citibank, sponsors of Mr. Zbig�s visit to Manila. The other guests were then Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile, then FVR national security adviser Jose Almonte, UP�s Carolina Hernandez and Banker Ramon del Rosario Jr. The dinner conversation ranged over a wide spectrum of geopolitical issues and Mr. Zbig�s sharp intellect was, as expected, stimulating. But on the subject of North Korea, he was uncharacteristically crude. He said that the US has long wanted to bomb North Korea but that they didn�t know where to drop their bombs. As simple as that. And there is no reason to believe that the US has widened its knowledge of North Korea since. ***** The most likely scenario would be a global jihad against the US and the UK, with or without the participation of the remnants of Al-Qaeda. The capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, its operations chief, was undoubtedly a major blow to Al-Qaeda, but it can be expected that its remnants would react to a US invasion of Iraq, not because they are in anyway allied to each other (Al-Qaeda fundamentalists despise the secularist Iraqis), but because, in the spirit of an oft-quoted Arabic saying, �the enemy of my enemy is my friend.� Arrests made in December-January in various cities of Italy, Spain and the UK of persons suspected of planning a bio-chem attack on London�s Underground netted some 20 Algerians, Moroccans and Pakistanis. The point is that there are enough Muslim militants around the world to keep a global jihad against the US running for years or decades even without any linkage to Iraq or Al-Qaeda: the Front Islamique de Sauvation in Algeria (which has been fighting the secular government since 1991), the Islamic Jihad in Egypt (which assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1982 for making peace with Israel), the Jemaat Islamiyah in Indonesia, the MILF in the Philippines, the Hizbollah in Lebanon (funded by the ayatollahs of Iran), an alliance of various fundamentalist groups in Pakistan which won 20% of parliamentary seats in last year�s elections, etc. A US invasion of Iraq, wrote a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer in the Los Angeles Times (reprinted in the March 8 issue of Today), �will lead only to one thing: the breeding of tens of thousands of baby Osamas who will be ever more desperate to tear you down�� , Bush�s policy of pre-emption can backfire with devastating consequences. ***** Part of this article appears in the March 15, 2003 issue of the Philippines Free Press magazine. |
| OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to �Some Iraq Scenarios� WHEW! I hardly know where to begin. (I can say the same about your consistently supercilious tone. It must be part of your personality. ACA) I guess one should start with justification. I find it amusing that the very same people who claim the USA would be acting illegally by attacking Iraq in the absence of a UN resolution to that effect completely ignore the fact that it is Iraq's defiance of an earlier UN resolution that is the reason for all this agitation in the first place. (Why are you upset about Iraq�s 14 or so violations of UN resolutions? Israel has violated 64 UN resolutions, and not a pip out of you. ACA.) Saddam was let off lightly at the end of the '91 war because he agreed to UN terms that required him to disarm. He obviously has not done so and only somebody who believes in the Tooth Fairy can believe that he ever will do so voluntarily. But never mind - the Right Thinking People will never mention any of that. It's the Big Bad Bush vs. Iraqi starvelings. Sigh. (The Right Thinking People of Bush�s Christian fundamentalist sect believe that the state of Israel is a creation of God and must be defended at all cost, and that Iraq�s 150-km-range missiles are a threat to the USA which is 12,000 kms from Baghdad. Sigh! ACA) I doubt that the US government wants any part of administering Iraq. Nation-building has not been particularly successful elsewhere. I for one am convinced that one of the factors delaying US action at present is that we might get stuck in a garrison/occupation role which nobody wants. (You�re behind the times. The US is contemplating a retired Army general as the US first pro-consul in Baghdad to make sure the filthy Iraqis learn to assimilate American democracy. ACA) As for the notion that Bush's assassination by an anti-war protester (isn't that kind of a contradiction - I mean, how could a pacifist be an assassin?) would trigger a US withdrawal, that represents a serious misreading of the American ethos. The result would certainly be the opposite. (You are starting on the wrong assumption that all anti-war protesters are pacifists. Not true. Many protest this war because it is morally and politically unjustified and it is being waged principally for Oil and Israel and not much else. I certainly am no pacifist: I supported the First Gulf War and the war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. THIS war sucks. ACA.) An invasion of Iraq triggering a backlash in the Muslim world? Possible, I suppose. Perhaps most Muslims are as poorly informed as most journalists, and don't know or have forgotten what Saddam is - a Socialist who has systematically persecuted Muslims in his own country. It would be one of the grosser ironies of history for Muslims to rise in solidarity with one who holds them in utter contempt. (I have no love for Saddam, but his demise or removal from power should be the business of the Iraqi people themselves. At the very most, Ariel Sharon should do the dirty work since it is only Israel that is directly threatened by Iraq. Not the US. But, of course, the influence on Bush of a) his Christian fundamentalist sect; b) the Jewish Lobby, and c) the doctrine of pre-emptive strike articulated by Wolfowitz and Perle, all converged to create the war party in Washington. ACA.) I'll skip over the nonsense about Bush's advisors being Jewish and therefore ipso facto Israeli sympathisers or agents. Obviously, blood will tell. I'm obviously a French agent, and if your name is Mueller or Nimitz you could not have been trusted to be loyal to the USA during either World War, could you? QED. (Their being Jewish did not and do not make Wolfowitz and Perle IPSO FACTO Israeli sympathizers and agents. Those are your words, not mine. Many American Jews, including two family and personal friends, are vehemently against this war. But W&P�s doctrine of pre-emptive strike DOES specifically posit a dominant and domineering Israel as the lynchpin of US Middle East policy, and any threat to Israel, as Iraq is, must be neutralized with, yes, a pre-emptive strike. Wolfowitz and Perle are, ergo, �Israeli sympathizers and agents� IPSA SCRITA, by their writings, not IPSO FACTO, by the fact that they are Jews. (Being Jewish in Europe is a badge of victimization as a result of centuries of persecution by the Christian European majorities. Being Jewish in America is not the same as being French or German in America. Being Jewish in America carries with it a special invisible protective cocoon, perhaps in reaction to victimization in Europe, in that any criticism of Jews or Israel is automatically classified as anti-Semitism, which is a cultural taboo. India has its sacred cows. America has its sacred Jews. ACA.) Pre-emptive strikes? Snort. If Saddam moves first, the result will be exactly the same as if he waits. You may be quite certain that US and allied troops and their depots are properly dispersed ("small area" indeed!) - plans for that have been a routine part of US training since the early 60's. And as for the USA having to resort to nukes against North Korea to prevent "certain" defeat - HAR!. The biggest difficulty faced by US foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula since the 70's, and the principal reason for a continued US presence there, has been preventing the South from attacking the North. The North has long been a paper tiger, an exporter of arms who dare not use them themselves, and the Chinese have higher priorities at the moment than propping up the North. (Before you start snorting in earnest, be informed that, coincidence of coincidences, shortly after my article was posted, the Pentagon admitted through CNN that the war planners were aware of �three windows of vulnerability� even before Day One, and one of these windows was the possibility of Saddam Hussein ordering a pre-emptive strike at US and British forces massing in northern Kuwait. (Similarly, coincidence of coincidences, shortly after my article was posted, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced a plan to move the 37,000 US troops in South Korea to camps away from Seoul (which is only 30 miles from the DMZ) or out of the country altogether. Why would the US do that if their problem is really to restrain the South from invading the North, as you claim. HAR! HAR! HAR! ACA.) As for a terrorist "Jihad" - sooner started, sooner finished. (I agree with you on this. Let the jihad begin. ACA.) Marc de Piolenc. [email protected] Iligan City March 09 2003 ���������������������������� TONY, I believe you should be one of the political advisers to the next president of the Philippines. Honest! And bravo !once again. Tony Joaquin. [email protected] an avid fan Daly City, California March 09, 2003 MY REPLY: Thank you for the kind words. Mr. Piolenc above would have a fit if he read you. ������������������������� WHAT COULD BE the best way to fight terrorists like Osama Bin Laden? Would organizing one's own terrorists to wreck havoc on one's enemies do? I guess whatever means is used would not make a difference. The world will be as unsafe as it is. People with power will use all the power they have to try to stop those they perceive to be dangerous threats. When you know somebody is hostile to you, hates your way of life, and is arming to the teeth, what will you do? Wait until he plunges a knife when your back is turned? Okay, talk to him nicely and say, "Please, disarm." He sneers at you and says you're a s.o.b. and goes on sharpening his bolo. What will you do? ----- Gras Reyes. [email protected] March 10, 2003 MY REPLY. The best way to fight terrorists like Osama Bin Laden would be to remove the reasons for his hostility, and OBL has stated these two reasons categorically and repeatedly: a) American support for Israel in its persecution and humiliation of the Palestinians; and b) the posting of thousands of US troops in Saudi Arabia, land which OBL and his followers consider sacred to Islam. If the US does not remove these reasons, Arab and Muslim hostility to the US will remain even after Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are dead and buried. If the second reason is a puzzle to you, just keep in mind that from the 11th to the 13th centuries, hundreds of thousands of European Christian kings, dukes, princes and knights and their footmen descended on what is now known as the Middle East in an effort (unsuccessful, it turned out) to drive the Muslims away from land which the Christians considered sacred to Christianity. Historically, the shoe is just on the other foot. Your analogy assumes that Iraq is arming itself to attack the US and the rest of the world, as the ignorant George W. Bush keeps on repeating for reasons stated in my response above to Mr. Piolenc.. But the empirical evidence is that Iraq has been arming itself to attack Israel and no one else. Certainly, Iraq�s 150-km-range missiles cannot reach New York (12,000 kms away) or London (5,000 kms away). Strictly speaking, this is an Israeli problem, not an American or global problem, and Ariel Sharon, not George Bush and Tony Blair, should solve it. 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