Saddam's boys are staked out at the Straits Of Hormuz looking for the 250,000 man build-up. I expect we'll all be suprised when this thing goes down.
Posted on 07/12/2002 2:46:07 PM PDT by blam
America rattles Saddam's cage hoping he will lash out in anger
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
13 July 2002
The Bush administration is seeking to prove that a war can be won by sabre-rattling alone. Amid an almost deafening public indifference to the prospect, hardly a day goes by without a new report or disclosure suggesting that a US attack, at the end of this year or early next, is a virtual certainty.
The official position was set out by President George Bush at his press conference on Monday. America is committed to "regime change" in Baghdad and will use "all the tools at our disposal" to achieve that end, but he insisted again that he had not made a final decision on any plan.
He dismissed the leak of detailed Pentagon war plans to The New York Times last week as "somebody down there at level five flexing some 'know-how' muscle."
This week the leaks have continued, first in a report claiming that the US would use Jordanian airfields to launch its assault – even though the Jordanians have not been informed of the plan, and every indication is that they would not give permission if asked. Then came another and somewhat contradictory report in USA Today, to the effect that the military planners had "raised the bar" for an invasion. It would now require a major provocation by Saddam, such as invading a neighbour or attacking the Iraqi Kurds or Shi'ites in the south, before the US war machine started to roll. Like the other reports, it was sourced to anonymous "officials" of unknown provenance.
The implication of the Times' revelations is that the "Afghan model" for an invasion of Iraq, involving a combination of bombing, special forces and covert CIA operations, with the help of an internal insurrection (for the opposition Northern Alliance read the Kurds in Iraq), had been dropped.
Instead the blueprint, entitled Cent-Com Course for Action, puts the emphasis on an all-out assault involving 250,000 or 300,000 US troops, and a massive air attack aimed at key infrastructure targets in Iraq as well as suspected sites where weapons of mass destruction are being developed or stored.
Some analysts believe the source of the leak to be senior Pentagon military commanders who believe the politicians are blithely talking up an operation whose scale and potential cost in casualties for US forces they do not fully appreciate. But others take the report as part of a process of softening up Saddam, forcing him into a rash move that would give Washington the pretext it required.
For example, talk of US and British agents stirring up trouble among the Kurds might prod the Iraqi leader into a strike against them – thus offering the US justification to step in. This strategy would also explain why Washington is so averse to protracted negotiations over the return of United Nations weapons inspectors, and was delighted by the failure of the latest round of talks last week in Geneva.
Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary and a leading proponent of action to get rid of Saddam once and for all, has openly derided the inspection process. They would be unable to inspect anything worth inspecting, he insists, while the talks would enable Saddam to play for time, if needs be by throwing open the doors to a team at the 11th hour to stave off an invasion.
Instead, Washington is starting to focus on a possible provocation that would clear any conceivable bar: links between Iraq and al-Qa'ida pointing to Baghdad having had a hand in earlier terrorist attacks, or even in 11 September itself.
In the aftermath of the attacks, the CIA and the Pentagon seemed if anything to play down reports that Mohammed Atta, the hijackers' ringleader, met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague earlier in 2001.
But officials are now looking at that episode again, while an Iraqi defector claimed in a TV documentary this week he had seen Osama bin Laden himself in Baghdad in July 1998, just before al-Qa'ida launched its deadly attacks against two US embassies in East Africa.
Either story, if confirmed, would vindicate Washington's bottom line argument for toppling Saddam – that while he might not use chemical, nuclear or biological weapons himself, he would make them available for terrorists.
If the US could prove a connection between Iraq and al-Qa'ida, doubts over whether an invasion was justified would disappear. In the meantime, the sabre-rattling continues.
Saddam's boys are staked out at the Straits Of Hormuz looking for the 250,000 man build-up. I expect we'll all be suprised when this thing goes down.
1. He is not in the government. He simply leads dissident members of the Likud party.
2. Israel could not invade Iraq.
At any rate, a regime change in Iraq is in the interest of the US and other Arabs states. As with the origional Gulf War, it is Israel which will have to give up something. In the origional Gulf War, the US forced Israel to allow Syria to occupy 4/5 of Lebanon and to not respond after being attacked. This not only destroyed the myth of ISraeli strenth but weakened ISrael's position. Moreover, the Bush I administration then bullied Israel into the Madrid negotiations and all but forced a change of government in Israel. What will Israel have to lose this time for the US to pursue its national interest?
"Rupert Cornwell"?.....BWAHAHAHA!!!
FMCDH
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