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COMMENTARY
March 26, 2002
Looking into hell
As I reported in this newspaper on Friday the "gaoling" or rather probationing of Yasser Arafat the Palestinian leader has been taken over from Ariel Sharon the Israeli prime minister by Dick Cheney the U.S. vice president. It is an extremely significant step not because it "disempowers" the Israelis but because it puts the United States forward directly in the role of Israel's protector negotiating on Israel's behalf. While lost on the Western media the point has been taken in several capitals of the Arab world: Mr. Arafat and his terrorist groups are no longer simply confronting Israel. They are now confronting a United States that is increasingly aware of their international connexions. Mr. Cheney set the conditions for a meeting between himself and Mr. Arafat in Cairo yesterday which did not take place because Mr. Arafat did not meet them. The essential verifiable condition was that Mr. Arafat would deliver a public address to his people in unambiguous Arabic demanding an immediate end to all terrorist strikes against Israel; and be seen delivering like orders to all the Palestinian militias under his ultimate command. Instead he appeared on Palestinian TV looking as if he were a hostage reading a prepared statement by his kidnapper. He condemned after the fact only one particular suicide bombing in Jerusalem. This was 11 eggs short of a dozen. At the meeting in Cairo Mr. Cheney would have had an opportunity to tell Mr. Arafat face to face that all of his brigades were on the point of being declared "foreign terrorist organizations" by the U.S. state department with consequences he should imagine; and that Mr. Arafat must immediately and dramatically sever his connexions with the "Islamist International" or be considered a part of it. It was Mr. Cheney rather than Mr. Sharon who decided Mr. Arafat could go to Beirut and return to the West Bank afterwards notwithstanding his failure to meet any of the American or Israeli conditions. This to preclude an unnecessary explosion of Arab passions at tomorrow's Beirut summit. Mr. Arafat has nerves of steel. The moment he was certain that Mr. Sharon would be compelled to let him go to Beirut Mr. Arafat instructed his negotiators to walk out of the ceasefire talks with Israel under Anthony Zinni. In his own mind and in Palestinian propaganda he thus successfully spat in America's face. If he goes on to deliver an incendiary address to the Arab League he will have unwittingly advanced a U.S. objective which is to show the world why the Bush administration can no longer deal with him. But why is Mr. Arafat sounding so confident when the Israelis have recently through Operation Root Treatment done tremendous damage to his terrorist infrastructure and through retaliatory mortar and air strikes smashed almost all of the material symbols of his prestige? In the past either operation would have been enough to make him accommodating. The smaller part of the answer is beginning to float through the Western media. Palestinian triumphalism is being fed because Israel has been seriously spooked by the latest round of suicide bombings. It is not only the sense of security shattered for people going about their everyday lives who must flinch constantly in expectation of another nail bomb; but also the compound damage done to an increasingly fragile Israeli economy. Imagine if to put this in proportion to population there were bomb blasts in every major Canadian city almost every day with more than a hundred killed and a thousand maimed in the course of an average week. The larger part of the answer is more frightening. Over the weekend the Bush administration in effect used the liberal New York Times to communicate a message alike to friend and foe. A remarkable article appeared at the top of the Sunday front page detailing relations between Mr. Arafat and his major new sponsor the Iranian ayatollahs. The relationship has come more fully into the light since the Israelis intercepted the Karine A arms shipment in the Red Sea in January. The article was supplied with what can only be read as intentional leaks from both U.S. and Israeli intelligence sources. It omits several important dimensions: that Iran is urgently supplying Syria with the technology to produce Scud missiles on its own and that significant shipments of very lethal weapons including medium-range missiles capable of devastating Israeli cities may now be passing from Iran through Iraq and Syria to the Hezbollah army that is building up in southern Lebanon. The article touched on the increasing Iranian effort to infiltrate and supply arms for attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan; and on strong suspicions that the Iranians are now hosting Al Qaeda operatives who have fled the Afghan theatre. But it did not mention Turkish intelligence reports of the rapid build-up of facilities for a Kurdish Islamist terrorist army across the Turkish frontier in Iran. This appears to be a co-operative project between the Iraqi and Iranian regimes. On U.S. television Sunday Mr. Cheney would not confirm the content of the New York Times story. (Condoleezza Rice the national security advisor questioned a few details.) However he allowed the main thrust of it to carry: that the U.S. is aghast to see this further evidence of what President Bush in his state of the union speech described accurately as an "axis of evil". "Aghast" is the word for what we are witnessing looks like joint preparations by the Palestinian Authority Syria its Lebanese client Iraq and Iran for war on a regional scale against both Israel and U.S. interests. I fear we may face a major sudden external assault on Israel meant to precede U.S. action against the Saddam regime in Iraq and indeed prevent the U.S. from going there by enmiring it in the defence of Israel. This last would be a catastrophic miscalculation; but typical of the Islamist mindset both Arab and Persian. It goes with the usual optimistic expectation that the "Arab street" will rise in the "moderate" Arab states compelling even Egypt and Saudi Arabia to join in the anti-Israeli and anti-American fray. I am aware of the magnitude of this prediction and I am not making it casually. Everything I now know about the deployment of forces in the region points in the same counter-intuitive direction: towards an organized external attack on Israel coinciding with a final escalation of the Palestinian Intifada. Whether or not a surprise attack is already planned the equipment is being put in place to launch one. A pretext for such a strike will never be lacking. Whoever happens to be prime minister of Israel at the moment can be blamed for having brought this Armageddon upon himself by failing to accede to Palestinian demands. Alternatively such an attack could be launched to create a second front the moment the U.S. moves against the Saddam regime and using that for pretext. The problem for the Bush administration is that while it makes contingency plans for an unavoidable regime change in Iraq it becomes increasingly aware that Saddam Hussein is no longer isolated; that there is a real risk the Americans could find themselves fighting alongside Israel and Turkey against all of their common enemies in the region simultaneously. But given the constant development of weapons of mass destruction in each of these enemy states and the constant stoking of Islamist fires such a war might better be fought sooner than later. Mr. Cheney's continuing mission is hardly restricted to trying to broker a quick truce between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. I think he knows that will anyway not be possible given what is now behind Mr. Arafat. Rather he is preparing for the U.S. to take charge of that second front by moving the U.S. from behind to a position in front of Israel. He is raising the stakes for any attack on Israel in the hope this can prevent such a thing from happening. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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