[iwar] [fc:The.Gathering.Storm]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-22 07:50:15
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 07:50:15 -0700 (PDT)
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Weekly Standard
October 29, 2001
The Gathering Storm
By Robert Kagan and William Kristol
Here's A Prediction. When all is said and done, the conflict in Afghanistan
will be to the war on terrorism what the North Africa campaign was to World
War II: an essential beginning on the path to victory. But compared with
what looms over the horizon--a wide-ranging war in locales from Central Asia
to the Middle East and, unfortunately, back again to the United
States--Afghanistan will prove but an opening battle.
We do not for an instant minimize the difficulties and the dangers to our
forces of the current mission in Afghanistan, especially now as the Bush
administration wisely moves closer to the more aggressive use of U.S. ground
forces. We are glad that President Bush is apparently following the
Pentagon's advice to accelerate the military campaign to unseat the Taliban,
without waiting for the State Department to name the cabinet and sub-cabinet
officials in an as-yet imaginary "post-Taliban government." Nor do we doubt
the vital importance of victory in Afghanistan--a victory defined by the
unequivocal destruction of the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden. 
But this war will not end in Afghanistan. It is going to spread and engulf a
number of countries in conflicts of varying intensity. It could well require
the use of American military power in multiple places simultaneously. It is
going to resemble the clash of civilizations that everyone has hoped to
avoid. And it is going to put enormous and perhaps unbearable strain on
parts of an international coalition that today basks in contented consensus.
The signs that we are on the precipice of a much wider conflict are all
around us. Although various parts of the government seem bound and
determined to deny it, the high-grade anthrax popping up around the country
suggests that the same terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center also
acquired a biological weapon too sophisticated to have been concocted in a
Trenton basement or an Afghan cave. Richard Butler, the respected onetime
head of the U.N. inspection team in Iraq, suggests Iraq may well have been
the supplier. If this proves true, the Bush administration will have no
choice but to embark on an effort to remove the man who easily
qualifies--anthrax or no anthrax--as the world's most dangerous dictator.
And with evidence in hand, Bush will be able to persuade Tony Blair and
other European allies to support American action against Saddam. 
But the Arab world will be a different matter. Last week's assassination of
Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi by a branch of the Palestine
Liberation Organization operating within the sphere of Yasser Arafat's
nominal control has (justifiably) turned a vast majority of the Israeli
population against any further cooperation with Arafat and his corrupt,
terrorist-shielding and terrorist-sponsoring Palestinian Authority. At the
State Department they may still have the gall to demand that the Israeli
people turn the other cheek. But we wonder how many Americans these days
would think a major political and military response inappropriate. In any
case, Israelis will no longer be deterred from fighting terrorism against
their citizens any less vigorously than the American government responds to
terrorism against Americans. The Palestinian Authority has no cleaner hands
than the Taliban. Within a week, we may see a partial reoccupation of the
West Bank by Israeli troops. We may also see efforts to depose Arafat and
his government, and perhaps even to drive them out of the territories.
The Arab reaction is not hard to predict. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak,
who was already routinely excoriating the Sharon government, could well
decide to abrogate the peace agreement with Israel and join other Arab
states in declaring a state of war against Israel. This, in turn, might
provide the opportunity Saddam Hussein has been waiting for to "lead" the
Arab world in a new war against Israel. What form this war would take is
hard to predict. Arab states probably lack the means or the will for a
conventional assault. But they do not lack the means, and Saddam in
particular does not lack the means, for unconventional strikes involving
biological or chemical warfare and other forms of terrorism.
With or without a new Arab-Israeli war, it is possible that the demise of
some "moderate" Arab regimes may be just around the corner. Dictatorial
governments in Saudi Arabia and Egypt have long been propped up by American
aid and support, and have long been channeling popular discontent away from
themselves by promoting or tolerating all varieties of anti-Western
radicalism--even to the extent, in the case of the Saudis, of supporting the
Taliban. American policy should long ago have attempted in the Arab world
what it has done successfully elsewhere--to press for democratic change. A
great opportunity was missed this past decade, when the end of the Cold War
lowered the risk of promoting reform.
Now it may be too late. Now we may get political change whether we like it
or not, and it may be change for the worse. Today and in the months to come,
Mubarak, the Saudi royal family, and the king of Jordan will be forced to
choose between supporting the American-led war on terrorism and continuing
to pamper and feed their increasingly radicalized populations, for some of
whom bin Laden is a hero. They will, of course, try not to choose, but the
balancing act will prove difficult, and the possibility that one or more of
these regimes may collapse is not to be dismissed. The stake the United
States has in preventing the rise to power of a radical Islamic regime in
any of these countries--which would produce an Afghanistan with money and
power--is enormous. American intervention in some form would be a near
certainty.
These are just the dangers visible on the horizon today. There will also be
what Secretary Rumsfeld astutely calls the "unknown unknowns," events and
crises yet unimaginable. We live in times of turmoil and uncertainty. We
have been surprised, horribly surprised, once. We will be surprised again.
No one can imagine that the latest anthrax attack is the terrorists' last
move.
All this calls for seriousness on the part of our government, all parts of
our government. More seriousness than we have seen so far. Even if only part
of what we have suggested in fact materializes, we will need to beef up our
military capacities far beyond what is currently planned. What if we really
do have to fight two good-sized wars in two separate theaters? Secretary
Rumsfeld has already acknowledged that we don't have nearly what we need.
Seriousness will also require abandoning the State Department's tiptoe
through the tulips approach to this war. The wider conflict ahead will have
to be fought with or without the approval of every single member state of
the United Nations, or every tribe and clan of every ethnically divided
nation in Central Asia and the Middle East. Colin Powell's grand coalition
will have to give way to a narrower coalition of the willing, the capable,
and the committed--committed, that is, to the security of the West.
And at home, we will need to get serious about domestic security, and
(unfortunately) about public health, in ways the government has barely begun
to do. What we have seen so far on the homefront is moderately incompetent
reactions to the new world we live in by public health and law enforcement
agencies, unreassuring attempts at reassurance by cabinet officers, and very
little recognition of the need to rethink public policies in areas like
immigration and counter-terrorism. And, of course, we have the ludicrous
spectacle of 435 of our elected representatives fleeing anthrax in
Washington, presumably to spend their long weekend at home giving speeches
to their constituents urging them to be calm and courageous. The war at home
is as deserving of serious presidential attention, resolute political
leadership, and rigorous executive competence as the war abroad. For in the
case of both the war at home and the war abroad, the challenges have just
begun. We are not even at the end of the beginning.

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