Iraq Future Depends on What Bush Does on Road Map

Running Out of Time

From Volume 2, Issue Number 37 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Sept. 16, 2003

Iraq Future Depends on What Bush Does on Road Map

by Michele Steinberg

On Sept. 8, a senior United States Senator from the Republican Party, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a retired Major General, William Nash, and the former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War, Chas. Freeman, delivered the same message to the Bush Administration about the Iraq war quagmire, and the collapse of the Middle East peace process: You broke it—now fix it.

The message was delivered at the 12th annual conference of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations (NCUSAR) in Washington, D.C., where these and other speakers insisted that the U.S. return to the UN and to international law.

But, as welcome as this sober assessment from top American leaders was, what was disturbing was what was omitted from discussions: the deterioration in Palestine, and the plans by the Israeli war cabinet to launch actions that will lead to a regional war. So serious is the crisis in the Palestinian area, that one of the lead speakers, Diana Buttu, legal affairs adviser to the Palestinian Authority, was unable to attend.

The Israeli plans include: the intention voiced by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and top officials of the Cabinet of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to escalate targetted assassinations in the Palestinian territories; to "remove" Palestinian President Yasser Arafat from the territories by the end of September ("remove" is openly known as a code word for assassination); to carry out a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear reactor, as the Israeli Air Force did against Iraq in 1981; and to attack Syria in the "hunt" for terrorists. And the most recent Israeli threat was against the longstanding U.S. ally in the Gulf region, Saudi Arabia.

The statement against the Saudis was made Sept. 8 by Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon at a conference at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center in Israel. He said that al-Qaeda had planned to recruit a Saudi military pilot to conduct a suicide attack on Israel, and that the attack would come from the Saudi Tabuk air force base. Ya'alon said that the information has been passed along to U.S. intelligence agencies. There is good reason to be highly skeptical of Ya'alon's assertion, on the eve of the Sept. 11 attacks—the Israelis were so desperate to show a link between the Palestinians and al-Qaeda, that they engaged in a project for more than one year to create an al-Qaeda cell in the Gaza Strip. The plans, transfers of money, equipment, and weapons, were traced by the Palestinian Authority police—to the Israeli intelligence agencies, including the Mossad!

But, like their neo-conservative allies in the Cheney/Wolfowitz cabal in the Bush Administration, who were never able to find a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq because none existed, the Sharon government will use false intelligence to justify preemptive attacks. Are they mad enough to direct that action against Saudi Arabia? And is the neo-con crowd in Washington mad enough to give them a "green light"?

Running Out of Time

Senator Chuck Hagel delivered the luncheon keynote address to the 400 policymakers at the NCUSAR conference, saying, "The U.S. will never win in Iraq alone," it must be an international effort, where the U.S. asks the European allies and other to help in all areas, "not just the military." He said that the Middle East peace process is "absolutely critical" in the war against terrorism, and that as long as there is conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, "there will be no progress" against terrorism, nor in stabilizing Iraq.

Condemning the White House treatment of the Road Map, Hagel said that the United States "did not do a very good job with [Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud] Abbas," meaning that inadequate support from the U.S. had lead to Abbas' resignation on Sept. 6. Hagel said he had been in Aqaba, Jordan, when Bush was there on June 4 at the meeting between Abbas and Sharon, and now, he said, "the Israelis are going to have to live up to the commitments they made in Aqaba." Expressing disappointment that Abbas had resigned, Hagel urged that the peace process be pushed forward because "This may be our last time...." Therefore, the U.S. must "in some tangible way" show that it will support Ahmed Qorei, who had been named by Arafat as the new Prime Minister that day.

Qorei, also known as Abu Ala, is the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (Parliament). He replaced Prime Minister Abbas (Abu Mazen) after the latter's resignation amidst continuing Israeli bombings and attacks on the Gaza Strip, including the failed assassination attempt on Hamas political leader Sheikh Yassin.

(On Sept. 9, the day after Hagel spoke, two Hamas bombings killed 15 Israelis, including eight soldiers, the first outside an army base near Tel Aviv, and the second in a cafe in Jerusalem. These came two days after the botched assassination attempt against Sheikh Yassin, and on the same day that the Israel Defense Force killed a 12-year-old Palestinian boy when the IDF tanks fired at an apartment house in Hebron, going after Hamas militants. As in the case of the attempt on Yassin, the new Israeli policy appears to be to bring down apartment buildings, or city blocks, in the "targetted assassination" of a single Palestinian.)

The new Palestinian Prime Minister Qorei, an architect of the 1993 Oslo agreements and participant in the early-1990s peace negotiations, as was Abbas, had made attempts to break the roadblock Sharon had imposed in 2001 against any peace talks. Qorei invited Israeli President Moshe Katzev to address the PLC, and Katzev agreed, but Sharon refused to allow the speech.

Even blunter than Hagel was retired Maj. Gen. William Nash, who had been a top Gulf war commander in 1991, and who had actually led the occupation of parts of southern Iraq at the end of Operation Desert Storm. Describing the Bremer occupation as a "total screwup," Nash warned that the window of opportunity for the U.S. to clean up the Iraq mess is rapidly ended, and that the situation could be out of control "by Ramadan." He called for the immediate launching of a "Baghdad Airlift," to assure that every day a C-17 carries vital equipment and parts to Iraq from the United States. He said that during his postwar occupation of southern Iraq in 1991, the first priority was providing essentials, especially, clean, safe, and unlimited supply of water. Nash said, "We [the U.S. occupation] screwed it up, now we have to fix it."

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