Just like when France last declared war on Germany, we're in for a phoney one, or sitzkrieg. Those rattling sabres won't be cutting anything but hot air for a long time.
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www.latimes.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=la%2D031002usiraq An Iraqi Campaign Faces Many Hurdles
Mideast: If the U.S. opts for military action against Hussein, the battle could prove to be America's toughest in decades. By ROBIN WRIGHT Times Staff Writer (...) The deeper the Bush administration gets into sorting through the options, the more daunting the obstacles appear, U.S. officials concede. A conventional military campaign, if that is the route adopted, could be far more difficult than any U.S. operation in recent decades, including the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The growing belief among experts is that any serious military campaign would be difficult to launch before this fall, and perhaps not until much later (...) --------------------------------------
Even if the war finally gets going, the winner is likely to be Iran, as the the only real Iraqi opposition are the majority Shiites.
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www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V13/6/smyth-f.html Saddam's Real Opponents What you don't know about the Iraqi opposition. { Frank Smyth}
(...)Shiite Muslims make up at least 60 percent of Iraq's population, while Sunni Muslims (including Sunni Kurds and Sunni Arabs) are no more than 37 percent. (...)
Yet here was Henry Kissinger popping up on the op-ed page of The Washington Post in January referring to "the Sunni majority, which now dominates Iraq" and, for good measure, adding an observation about "the Shiite minority in the south."(...)
(...)If Saddam were removed from power, would the United States feel compelled to prevent the majority Shiites from forming a new Islamic state? What kind of "axis of evil" would the Bush administration face if both Iran and Iraq were controlled by Shiite clerics? What are the alternatives?
The same U.S. newspapers that are misguided about Iraq's demographics have been calling the Iraqi National Congress "the Iraqi opposition." But the INC is the active opposition's least-significant part: It has not mounted any military efforts in Iraq since September 1996. The group is based in London and is made up mostly of families who fled Iraq after the fall of the British-imposed monarchy in 1958. They are mainly Sunni Arabs -- just like much of Saddam's regime -- and thus are not representative of the Iraqi majority.
Meanwhile, it's been Shiite rebel groups in southern Iraq that have attempted to attack the "pillars" of Saddam's regime. In December 1996, a group calling itself al-Nahda (Renaissance) wounded Saddam's eldest son and security chief, Uday, a notorious enforcer who is credibly accused of using torture against suspected dissidents. In 1998, Shiite rebels farther south threw hand grenades at Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam's second-in-command in the Baath Party's ruling Revolutionary Command Council. (The grenades missed their target.)
In fact, a quiet war has been under way between Saddam's security forces and Shiite clerics in southern Iraq. In a bloody crackdown from April 1998 to February 1999, three grand ayatollahs were killed in gangland-style assassinations. In each case, the cleric had been handpicked by Saddam to lead Iraq's Shiites. But each one had defied Saddam by encouraging Shiite Muslims to return to their local mosques to receive prayers instead of receiving them through Iraqi state television. The clerics had also asked Saddam to release other religious leaders from imprisonment. (...)
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The get-Saddam war isn't going to happen, period. The most the US can do is bomb Iraq more than usual. The point of all the sabre-rattling is to make the Arabs madder than hell. Israel wants to be the only power in the ME. It wants to sever US-Arab ties. Scratch the get-Saddam campaign and you'll see AIPAC, in the persons of Wolfowitz, Perle, et al. Scratch S11 and you'll find 200 Mossad agents tailing (just tailing?) the Arabs.
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www.reuters.com/printerfriendly.jhtml?type=topnews&StoryID=664967 French Reports: U.S. Busts Big Israeli Spy Ring Last Updated: March 05, 2002 01:30 PM ET
PARIS (Reuters) - The French daily Le Monde reported on Tuesday that the United States had broken up a huge Israeli spy ring that may have trailed suspected al Qaeda members in the United States without informing federal authorities. (...) AL QAEDA LINK?
Le Monde said more than one third of the suspected Israeli spies had lived in Florida, where at least 10 of the 19 Arabs involved in the Sept. 11 airplane attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon also lived.
At least five of the spies resided in Hollywood, Florida, where alleged hijacker Mohammad Atta and four accomplices in the attacks also lived, the paper said.
The United States holds Saudi-born Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network responsible for the September attacks.
Two Israelis lived in Fort Lauderdale, near Delray Beach, where hijackers in the planes that crashed into the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania resided temporarily, the report added.
"This concordance could be the source of the American view that one of the missions of the Israeli 'students' could have been to track al Qaeda terrorists on (U.S) territory without informing federal authorities," Le Monde said. (...)
Hakki