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COMMENTARY
December 24, 2003
Christmas eve
Throughout the world on this Christmas eve there is good news. The American and allied victory in Iraq is suddenly shown to push freedom forward and throw tyrants back on many other fronts. Muammar Gaddafi Libya's unspeakable dictator has himself acknowledged that the fate of Saddam Hussein in Iraq influenced his decision to abandon Libya' s programmes for weapons of mass destruction and throw his country open to international arms inspectors. According to my information he is also impressing the Bush and Blair administrations by turning tables on the intelligence front and shopping some of his links and assets in the terror networks. Indeed I believe the Orange Alert now signalled in the United States owes something to information transferred through British contacts from the Libyan intelligence services. As well as to many other government sources in the Arab and Muslim world not always friendly to the West. Another example is Pakistan where under unpublicised but large U.S. pressure the Musharraf regime has done something it could not previously contemplate for its own domestic political reasons. It is questioning even Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan the father of the Islamic bomb and Pakistan's leading public hero about surreptitious activities of which he must have knowledge. In the last several months an information highway has been opening out of Pakistan (which might suddenly result in running Osama bin Laden to ground); and in the last couple of weeks the U.S. has been given detailed documentation of Pakistani aid in developing Iran's illicit nuclear weapons programme. And Pakistan's role in transferring technology to Iran and exchanging it with North Korea has been publicly if discreetly admitted. The regime of the ayatollahs in Iran itself has meanwhile become sufficiently impressed with U.S. resolution in Iraq and elsewhere to become more forthright about its weapons programmes. It has confessed to a network of reactors whose existence was previously denied and opened the field much wider to inspectors from the United Nations' IAEA. The regime has responded favourably to demands from the provisional Iraqi government to help stop infiltrations across the Iran/Iraq frontier. In Saudi Arabia a significant attitude change is detectable both governmental and public towards Al Qaeda and allied terror organizations. Real efforts are being made to stop the funding even at the risk of provoking retaliations within the country; and for the first time state-controlled media are occasionally actually telling the people that "we and not the Crusaders or the Zionists are responsible for the mess they are in. A major co-operative military operation seems to be happening, under the radar, between Saudi, Yemeni, and U.S. special forces, to locate and pounce upon terror camps in the remote south of the Arabian peninsula, especially in the Hadhramaut. The whole power matrix of the Middle East seems thus to be getting it, from Rabat to Islamabad: rulers understanding that the U.S., Britain, and their allies are no longer the paper tigers" described in Jihadist propaganda. The message of President Bush from his first state of the union speech after 9/11 you're either with us or against us is being driven home by diplomatic means that could only succeed after the Afghan and Iraqi demonstrations of military power. In one country after another tyrants are deciding that they do not wish to share in the fate of Saddam and will even begin to open their societies to avoid or postpone that fate. And even in France and Germany attempts to undercut the U.S. effort are being publicly abandoned. The victory in Iraq is being fully harvested. But as the alert in force across the U.S. shows the war is hardly over. And at the very moment when indisputable progress is being recorded abroad a huge question is raised over the U.S. domestic situation. I believe the terror alert Stateside is very real -- my impression is that senior people in the Bush administration are genuinely spooked by the information before them. At some point over the next fortnight it is entirely possible that a co-ordinated attack will occur possibly involving dirty nuclear devices or chemical or biological agents. The intention will be to kill enough Americans to throw the country and its economy into convulsions and thus bring down the Jihadists' deadliest enemy President Bush. The Jihadists' natural allies in the Bush-hating "liberal" media are already spontaneously preparing the ground for them by asking malice-ridden rhetorical questions such as Why after Saddam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya are we in this state of high alert? While the answer to that is perfectly obvious -- "Because we are at war" -- we cannot know how the U.S. public will answer it under acute stress. That public has until now shown remarkable resolve in supporting policies which required courage. The polls show a consistent movement from liberal towards conservative attitudes in the face of present dangers. But human nature is such that the worst hysteria usually follows the dropping of a "second shoe". If America can keep its nerve and its head the war against Islamic fanaticism can be won patiently over time through the gradual transformation of the Middle East. But if after "another 9/11" America turns in panic against the only competent leadership it has all that has been gained will be lost and no one can know where the carnage will end. That said let us earnestly pray for a blessed and merry Christmas. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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