Posted on 09/18/2001 5:29:07 PM PDT by Rome2000
BY WARREN P. STROBEL
Herald Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- As he weighs retaliation for last week's terrorist attacks, President Bush is receiving conflicting advice from his top aides, some of whom want to go beyond a military strike on terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden's bases in Afghanistan and topple states that have long threatened the United States, particularly Iraq.
The split between civilian officials at the Pentagon and Secretary of State Colin Powell, confirmed Monday by current and former U.S. officials, goes to the heart of Bush's proposed new war on international terrorism.
Powell, seeking to build and hold an international coalition against terrorism that includes many Muslim nations, is urging caution, said the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman wants to limit military strikes to bin Laden's Afghan redoubts and to use other means -- diplomacy, law enforcement and financial pressure -- to shut down terrorist networks elsewhere.
That view is not shared by the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and others have argued strenuously in inter-agency meetings for a far more sweeping U.S. response, including a strategic bombing campaign and aid for Iraqi opposition groups to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the officials said.
The retaliatory campaign should include ``ending states who sponsor terrorism,'' Wolfowitz said at a news conference last week.
Wolfowitz's rhetoric -- which has not been repeated by other members of Bush's foreign policy team -- appeared to be a reference to Iraq.
The deputy defense secretary and other aides to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have been calling for an aggressive U.S. effort to oust Hussein since before they took office.
There is no evidence that Iraq helped plan or execute last Tuesday's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to U.S. intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. But proponents of ousting Hussein cite his longtime support of terrorist movements and the hotly debated theory that Iraq played a role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
``This is just an added reason for making life as difficult as we can for Saddam,'' said Richard Perle, an advisor to the Pentagon and leading proponent of increased aid to the opposition Iraqi National Congress.
``If all we do is go after bin Laden, it'll make a mockery of all the president had to say about waging a war on terrorism,'' Perle said.
But a response that goes beyond bin Laden and Afghanistan's Taliban leaders, who host the terrorist mastermind, poses potentially grave problems for Bush and his diplomacy.
During the Persian Gulf War, Bush's father held together a fractious international coalition that included many Arab states by sticking to the narrow goal of ousting Hussein's troops from Kuwait rather than occupying Iraq and removing its leader.
Bush and Powell have rallied many world leaders to their side over the last week. But there is virtually no support in this new international coalition, particularly among its Muslim members, for attacks on Iraq or other Middle Eastern nations that give succor to terrorists.
``We're trying to build a coalition and people are lining up to join us, and they [Pentagon officials] want to blow it all to hell by bombing Iraq tomorrow,'' said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Pentagon proposals are ``exactly the kind of thing that would just alienate a lot of people,'' said Kenneth Pollack, a Persian Gulf specialist at the White House National Security Council until earlier this year.
Also in the back of officials' minds is then-President Bill Clinton's response to the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, also traced to bin Laden's network.
Many people worldwide did not begrudge the United States the right to retaliate for the bombings.
But Washington was widely seen to lose the moral high ground when, in addition to sending cruise missiles to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, it targeted a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan whose links to bin Laden remain in dispute to this day.
If Bush's retaliation goes beyond bin Laden, ``there's a real possibility that we're going to start losing support left and right,'' said Pollack, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Now, how much can we really expect from any Muslim nation?
"Starting" my eye. The guy has been a cautious RAMF for way too long. He was bleating for a continuation of sanctions in 91 rather than advocating throwing Saddam out of Kuwait by force. He was the one who recommended pulling the plug after 100 hours of ground war because of some TV pics about the "Road of Death" (vastly exaggerated, as it turned out), thereby letting substantial number of Rep Gds to escape their well-deserved destruction. He is also evidently captured by the State Dept. mindset. If Bush chooses to follow Powell's advice over that of Rumsfeld (and presumably Cheney) whatever we do will be worse than doing nothing. We will give legitimacy to terrorist states--governments that the State Dept. itself deems to be terrorist supporters--that will be included in a phony "coalition" in a phony "war" against terrorism.
We need a small, hard coalition, not a broad coalition encompassing those nations that want to protect their option to support terrorism in the future.
Fred: I agree. If I weren’t so old, I’d be downright worried. I’ve been practicing my “duck and cover” exercises that I was taught in school in the early ‘50s. It’s easy for me to get down on the floor really fast, but it’s darned difficult to get back up again.
Nice to see you posting here again!
Nice to see you Fred.
A couple of non-radical Arabs told me back in the ‘80s that in their Koranic version, God will help them defeat the “wayward” Jews. Interestingly, the non-radical interpretation of the Koran version has many of the Gentiles uniting with the Arabs, and during the battle of Armageddon (which is a desert area of Israel), Jesus will return to earth to help the Arabs and the Gentiles defeat the wayward Jews. Of course we are all faced with the “self-fulfilling prophesy” situation, in which some Jews, Arabs, and Christians will try to force those old “prophecies” to come true, because they believe the prophecies are supposed to come true.
What many Christians believe is that all the world will be involved with the last battles, and Jesus will finally return and straighten everything out. But in the meantime, all three religions predict some bad times for the whole world during the various clashes, which might last for years.
I don’t mention these things to suggest that “supernatural” events might take place. I mention them only to provide some background information about what many of the combatants believe.
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