The March of War

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Fur­ther evi­dence of impend­ing fire­works in the Gulf, three mas­sive mil­i­tary ships left U.S. ports this week­end.

“It is part of the repo­si­tion­ing of forces and equip­ment in sup­port of the war on ter­ror. They are on route,” [Marge Holtz, direc­tor of the Mil­i­tary Sealift Com­mand (MSC), a branch of the U.S. Navy charged with run­ning the ships on behalf of the U.S. armed forces] told Reuters from Wash­ing­ton.
Two, the USNS Fisher and USNS Bob Hope [Ed. — the Bob Hope?], have seven decks capa­ble of car­ry­ing tanks, heli­copters and other heavy armor MSC says.

News from the region…

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Wow. Lots of stuff today already. In the first instance, Ara​bic​News​.com (and oth­ers) reports that Sad­dam Hus­sein has shown a new will­ing­ness to work with the United Nations and thanked Saudi Ara­bia for its lack of coop­er­a­tion with the Amer­i­cans. The Kuwaitis on the other hand, in a show of Gulf War I grat­i­tude, said it was OK with them for the United States to bivouc on Kuwaiti bases. (This may end up prov­ing more trou­ble than its worth, per­haps, since the Kuwaiti daily al-Rai al Aam is report­ing that a soli­dier for the emi­rate was caught try­ing to sneak into the al-Doha base there for the pur­pose of attack­ing Amer­i­cans. With Kuwaiti army troops and other peo­ple attempt­ing may­hem against the United States on a semi-regular basis, Kuwait may prove a shaky ally.)
At the same time, the Wash­ing­ton Post reports that the United States is pre­pared to ten­der its final Iraq res­o­lu­tion to the Secu­rity Coun­cil, pos­si­bly as soon as tomor­row, and that it wants a vote by the end of the week. It’s the third such res­o­lu­tion and is aimed at allay­ing the con­cerns of Rus­sia and France, since Britain is on board and China has indi­cated it won’t sign on to such a pro­posal, but it won’t veto it either. Mex­ico, which has many of the same con­cerns as France and Rus­sia, said it was “opti­mistic” a solu­tion would be found soon, indi­cat­ing the Amer­i­cans are get­ting closer to a deal.
Also, Sad­dam gives his first inter­view in 12 years, accord­ing to the Egypt­ian oppo­si­tion weekly, Al Usbou’. It’s full of juicy lit­tle tid­bits, includ­ing the novel the­ory that the United States will carve up all Arab lands into coun­tries the size of Yemen (or Israel) so they may be gov­erned bet­ter by an Amer­i­can viceroy­alty. A high­light of the inter­view:

Nas­sar: “Mr. Pres­i­dent, I want to ask you some­thing that I already know, but would like your con­fir­ma­tion. Do you have Kuwaiti pris­on­ers that you did not release as yet, know­ing that Kuwait is demand­ing their release as a con­di­tion for rec­on­cil­i­a­tion?“
Sad­dam: “You know, and every­one else knows, that I issued a deci­sion to release all pris­on­ers, polit­i­cal and crim­i­nal, Arab and Iraqis. Except for the spies who worked for Israel and the U.S. We released even mur­der­ers, on con­di­tion that an agree­ment was reached between the fam­i­lies of the mur­der­ers and the fam­i­lies of the vic­tims, and that the amnesty was the will of both sides. The jails in Iraq became the only jails in the world, and in his­tory, with­out occu­pants.“
Nas­sar: “…And the war­dens have a prob­lem, Mr. Pres­i­dent, they have to look for a job since the jails are empty…“
Sad­dam: “We shall turn the jails into shel­ters for orphans, the vic­tims of Amer­i­can daily mis­sile attacks on the country’s south and north, and on Baghdad’s neigh­bor­hoods, while the world con­science remains indif­fer­ent.” (Ed. — Emphasis added. Orphans!)

Prime min­is­ter Ariel Sharon backed up Saddam’s state­ment that the United States was try­ing to make the Mid­dle East safe for Israel by say­ing in an inter­view with The Times that Britain and Amer­ica should attack Iran after they’ve fin­ished con­quer­ing Iraq. British for­eign min­is­ter Jack Straw soundly rejected that idea, thank good­ness. (You can read the entire inter­view here. Also, Sharon has agreed to Beyamin Netanyahu’s demands for early elec­tions on Feb. 4, 2003, but grum­bled that Israel doesn’t need elec­tions right now. Pales­tin­ian offi­cials urged Israelis to vote for “a lead­er­ship capa­ble of mak­ing peace,” while Islamic Jihad said elec­tions would make no difference.)

In a year, War?

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So I was chat­ting with a reporter down in Wash­ing­ton today and we were swap­ping the RUM-INT (Rumors-Intelligence) we’ve heard. He’s of the the­ory that we won’t see war in early 2003, but late 2003 instead. The rhetoric after tomor­row (don’t for­get to vote!) will be racheted down to “let the U.N. do its job” and some time next year either some inci­dent will be man­u­fac­tured or Sad­dam will do some­thing stu­pid. After that, war.
It makes a cer­tain amount of sense, I have to admit. My buddy said there is some thought that more time would increase the chances of a palace coup thanks to the extra months of Amer­i­can sabre rat­tling. And fight­ing a war in Novem­ber 2003 would be bet­ter for pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics since any vic­tory would be fresh in vot­ers’ minds come Nov. 2004. (This is the the­ory that Bush I fought the first Gulf War too soon, that if he had fought and won it in late 1991 or early 1992, he would have defeated Bill Clin­ton eas­ily.)
Still, there are car­rier groups en route to the Gulf, and the Navy was look­ing for trans­port ships not long ago. Jalal Tal­a­bani, leader of the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan, expects war after Ramadan, which ends Dec. 5. Also, I won­der about the patience of the Neo-Cons and the hawks sur­round­ing Bush. Wol­fowitz, Haas, Perl and Cheney are true believ­ers and Bush has made a big deal in the United Nations that nownowNOW is the time to move since Iraq is a clear and present dan­ger to the sta­bil­ity of the world. It wouldn’t do for Amer­ica to squan­der its pres­tige by bark­ing for war madly only to shrug come Nov. 6 and say, “We’ll chill.” (This is the “We have to go to war because if we don’t we’ll look fool­ish since we said we’re going to war” the­ory of inter­na­tional pol­i­tics.)
War now or war later? Answer hazy, ask again later.

Saddam gets busy, orders murders of dissidents

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OK. Let’s take a break from Turk­ish elec­tions. In other news, Sad­dam has bus­ied him­self recently with order­ing the assas­si­na­tion of Iraqi dis­si­dents abroad, par­tic­u­larly in Lon­don where the Iraqi National Con­gress is based. The goal is to pre­vent them from mak­ing plans to form a gov­ern­ment after the removal of Sad­dam.
The Iraqi strong­man has report­edly con­tacted Libyan leader Col. Muam­mar Gaddafi for help in get­ting this work done, since the Libyans have a net­work of sleeper cells based in Britain in Europe.

In the past few months, senior mem­bers of his Ba’athist regime have vis­ited a num­ber of Arab coun­tries to lobby for sup­port. Intel­li­gence offi­cials were par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in a recent visit to Libya by Saddam’s cousin, Ali Has­san al-Majid, who is wanted for war crimes over his role in using chem­i­cal weapons against the Kurds at Hal­abja in 1988. “Chem­i­cal Ali”, as he is known in Bagh­dad, spent sev­eral hours with Col Gaddafi.
Apart from ask­ing for assis­tance with killing oppo­si­tion fig­ures, al-Majid is also believed to have asked for Libyan help in car­ry­ing out ter­ror­ist attacks against British and US tar­gets in Europe and the Mid­dle East. Sad­dam is also keen to tar­get the Gulf states of Bahrain and Qatar, which are the main bases for US forces in the region. The Libyan leader’s response to the requests is not known.

If this is true, Sad­dam is feel­ing the heat (and Libya is back up to its old tricks.) My worry is that a des­per­ate Sad­dam could strike out with more ter­ror­ist cells or with what­ever weapons of mass destruc­tion he may already pos­sess in a “use ‘em or lose ‘em” tac­tic brought on by Amer­i­can rhetor­i­cal bludgeoning.

Turks say out with the old, in with the Allah

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As it looked ear­lier, Turk­ish vot­ers have given the Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Party (AKP) a resound­ing vic­tory with 34.2 per­cent of the vote out of 99 per­cent of the votes counted. The Repub­li­can People’s Party (CHP) had 19.2 per­cent of the vote. None of the other polit­i­cal par­ties appeared to have crossed the 10 per­cent thresh­old for gain­ing seats in Par­lia­ment. This means AKP can prob­a­bly form a gov­ern­ment with­out a coali­tion part­ner within two weeks.
All three par­ties in the cur­rent coali­tion were defeated, and ail­ing Prime Min­is­ter Bulent Ecevit’s party reg­is­tered barely 1 per­cent. This was a resound­ing rejec­tion of the politi­cians and prac­tices that have gov­erned Turkey for gen­er­a­tions.
This is likely a good thing in that sense, but as I men­tioned ear­lier, it remains to be seen if Erdogan’s AKP has truly mod­er­ated its Islamic roots and can truly be a “Mus­lim Demo­c­ra­tic” party in the mold of Europe’s Chris­t­ian Democrats.