SAUDIS TELL U.S. FORCES TO GET OUT

Saudis tell US forces to get out ;Foreign soldiers seen as political liability

Saudi Arabia's rulers are poised to throw US strategy in the Middle East into disarray by asking Washington to pull its forces out of the kingdom because they have become a "political liability". Senior Saudi officials have privately complained that the US has "outstayed its welcome" and that the kingdom may soon request that the American presence - a product of the Gulf war - is brought to an end.

Both the White House and the US state department insisted yesterday that the military arrangement between the two countries was still working. The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said that the president, George Bush, "believes that our presence in the region has a very helpful and stabilising effect in a dangerous region".

Relations between the US and Saudi Arabia, Washington's closest Arab ally, have been severely strained since September 11. Both sides have been desperately denying for months that there is a rift.

The US is reluctant to withdraw its 4,500 troops from the Prince Sultan air base, south of Saudi's capital Riyadh, because it could be perceived as a propaganda victory for Osama bin Laden, who frequently protested at the presence of non-believers so close to the main Muslim holy sites.

But the increasingly brittle and vulnerable ruling House of Saud is nervous about an internal revolt by Bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network and other extremist militants, and has been publicly loosening its links with Washington.

The huge Prince Sultan air base played a crucial logistical role in the bombing of Afghanistan. Withdrawal would upset the military balance in the Middle East by providing a boost to the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. US planes based in Saudi regularly bomb along the Iraqi border as part of its policy of containment of Saddam.

Britain, which jointly patrols the Iraqi no-fly zone with the US, has planes based both in Saudi and Kuwait. A pull-out by Washington would switch the focus to the British air base in Kuwait, whose leaders try to avoid drawing attention to the British presence.

Two senior US state department officials have been in Saudi this week: William Burns, the assistant secretary for the near east, and Lincoln Bloomfield, the assistant secretary for political and military affairs.

The US state department insisted yesterday that at no point during Mr Bloomfield's visit, either formally or informally, had the Saudis said they wanted the US to leave.

But the US ambassador to Saudi, Robert Jordan, was quoted as saying when Mr Bloomfield arrived in the kingdom: "He is here for consultations with the Saudi government to review our presence here and to discuss what we need and what we don't need."

The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, who is in Nepal, denied the Saudis wanted a withdrawal: "There has been no discussion of such an issue."

Many in the US have been upset with Saudi because not only is it Bin Laden's native country but 15 of the 19 terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks were from the kingdom. The Saudi media have reported that about 200 Saudis have been captured in Afghanistan fighting with al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The kingdom is volatile, with a stagnant economy, high unemployment, no democratic outlets and King Fahd unable to crack down on militant clerics.

Hostility to the US is widespread but that is mirrored in the US where there is a huge well of resentment that, having fought to push back Iraq in 1991 and having protected Saudi since, Riyadh refused to provide military help during the Afghan campaign.

Reflecting this, Carl Levin, who heads the US Senate armed services committee, said: "We need a base in that region, but it seems to me we should find a place that is more hospitable."

Bin Laden listed as the main justifications for the attacks on New York and Washington the presence of the US soldiers in the kingdom, US support for Israel in the conflict with the Palestinians, and the US campaign against Iraq. He said six years ago: "There is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land [of Arabia]."

The US could continue its containment of Iraq from aircraft carriers based in the Gulf. But the US air force secretary, James Roche, said a pull-out would make life awkward: "It would be difficult, unless we could replicate the air operations centre somewhere else."

to sum it all up, WORLD WAR III and the ATTEMPTED destruction of israel loom very, very imminently in the quagmire from hell known as "the middle east." and we'll be fine, as long as the russians either stay out of it, or work on our side. other than that, china can hop into the fray and find itself blown back 5000 years like the rest of them. these arabs are smoking some serious stuff if they think theyre going to survive an overwhelming onslaught from the american, british, and israeli air forces. which makes me wonder.... is bin laden in pakistan with NUKES and musharaff keeps claiming hes sure bin baby is dead to deflect attention? seems to me that the pakis have tried to instigate a party with india with the terrorist attack on 13 december. a "war" with the indians would be a convenient time for bin laden and al qaeda to wrest control of the pakis NUKES and think theyre going to launch a few at israel, or ANYWHERE, including out to sea, that bin baby and friends think they can destroy vast numbers of american troops. the arabs DO NOT have a problem with bin laden, the silence has been deafening. if they wanted him caught, hed have been caught by september 18. this is a huge plot to lure the US and israel into their own destruction.

Terrorism Is Just Means of Fighting

Militant Islamic Fundamentalism Is the Enemy

By Linda Chavez

The Week of October 22, 2001

We are not fighting a war on terrorism. Terrorism is the means by which our enemy chooses to wage war against us, but we should not confuse its tactics with the nature of the enemy itself.

The enemy has an ideology. It has a command structure. It has troops. And it is clear in its aim—nothing short of the destruction of our civilization.

The enemy is militant Islamic fundamentalism. The command structure is made up of hundreds of mullahs around the world, including some living in this country, who preach death to the infidels.

Its troops include not just the thousands of trained terrorists but the millions of others who support the mullahs and finance the terrorists through their donations to radical Islamic groups. To pretend otherwise risks not only our own defeat, but that of the moderate Moslem world as well.

Threat Extends Across the World

In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington presciently described "a quasi war develop[ing] between Islam and the West." Even before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Huntington noted, "many more Westerners have been killed in this quasi war than were killed in the ‘real’ war in the Gulf."

The direction of Islam as a religion has become increasingly threatening to nonbelievers, not just in the West but throughout the world. Its threat extends beyond the Middle East to Asia and Africa, even to the United States, where some fundamentalist imams spread their hateful doctrines protected by our 1st Amendment.

Not all, or even most, Moslems are our enemies, certainly. Indeed, the moderate Islamic nations are on the front lines of this war and have been among its first casualties, starting with the Iranian revolution in 1979. Some of the most brutal tactics of the fundamentalists have been used against fellow Muslims in Egypt, Morocco, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Nonetheless, the response of virtually every moderate Moslem leader to the threat posed by fundamentalists has been to accede to the fundamentalists’ interpretation of Islam, and to further the Islamization of all social, cultural, and political institutions in their countries.

Even Turkey, which since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s policies of secularization in the 1920s and 1930s has been the most pro-Western Moslem nation, has become more Islamist in the last few years. As Huntington observed, every Moslem country in the world is more Islamist today than it was two decades ago, with the exception of Iran—but only because Iran was the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution.

Despite what our leaders keeping telling us, Islam is not inherently a peaceful religion. Unlike Christianity, in whose name wars have been fought but without any Scriptural basis to support those wars to be found in the teachings of Jesus Christ, Islam can find explicit justification for its jihad or "holy war" within its sacred text.

The Koran instructs believers to "slay the idolaters . . . make war on the leaders of unbelief—for no oaths are binding with them—so that they may desist. Will you not fight against those who have broken their oaths and conspired to banish the Apostle? They were the first to attack you. Do you fear them? Surely God is more deserving of your fear, if you are true believers. Make war on them: God will chastise them at your hands and humble them."

The Koran is filled with elaborate instructions on the conduct of war, the methods of executing the infidels, the rewards that will accrue to those martyred in a holy war.

The very nature of fundamentalism is to take these instructions literally. And there is plenty of historical precedent. For nearly 1,000 years, Europe was under nearly constant siege from Islamic invaders, from the first Moors who conquered Spain in 710 to the last Ottoman attack on Vienna in 1683. So long as the trend within the Moslem world today is toward a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, the West will continue to face a new threat to its survival.

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Linda Chavez, a nationally syndicated columnist, is president of the Center for Equal Opportunity .

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