Egyptian specialists weigh scenarios for war
By Steve Rodan, Middle East Newsline
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Thursday, November 30, 2000
TABA, Egypt — You can get a special deal at the Egyptian hotels in
the Sinai these days. Tension in the Middle East has cut down on tourists —
a key source of revenue during winter — and hotel operators are hoping that
cut-rate prices will make up for the shortfall of visitors.
In Cairo, however, the debate is not about tourists, but whether the
Israeli-Palestinian mini-war will escalate into a regional confrontation. At
that point, the question is whether Egypt will enter the fray.
It's a scenario that is being taken seriously as much in Jerusalem as in
Cairo. Neither country wants war but officials and experts in both capitals
fear that a drawn-out guerrilla war in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well
as in southern Lebanon could contain the spark that leads to a regional
explosion.
For some intelligence analysts in Israel, Egypt might have already taken
the road toward conflict when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak withdrew his
ambassador from Tel Aviv last week. Ambassador Mohammed Bassiouny had been
regarded as the most active foreign envoy — after U.S. ambassador Martin
Indyk — in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
"Egypt is preparing for a conflict with Israel, though not necessarily
an all-out war." Yuval Steinitz, an Israeli strategist and parliamentarian
said.
Steinitz, a key Likud member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee, is also regarded as a leading expert on Egypt and predicted more
than a month ago that Cairo would recall Basssiouny.
As Steinitz sees it, Egypt is looking for an excuse to deter Israel
through military means. Cairo has been building its military for more than
20 years, largely through the $1.3 billion in defense aid from the United
States.
The parliamentarian, whose committee is regularly briefed by Israeli
military intelligence, said Egypt is spending $12 billion a year on
defense -- far more than Israel or Syria. "This money can only be going on
preparation for a conflict with Israel in the long term," Steinitz said.
For his part, Mubarak has ruled out the prospect of Egypt launching a
war. "A war until the last Egyptian soldier is definitely not in the cards,"
Mubarak told the Kuwaiti Al Siyassa daily. "The real war that we should
start is that of [economic] development."
At the same time, Mubarak has drawn a red line for Israel. He has warned
that a massive Israeli attack could topple the Palestinian leadership and
even drive Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat into exile.
"The significance [of a collapse of the Palestinian leadership] is the
end of Palestinian moderation and perhaps also entering the tunnel of the
unknown," Mubarak said.
Mubarak did not elaborate but Egyptian pro-government experts said the
president was not ruling out a military campaign to save Arafat. They
pointed to rising anti-Israel and anti-U.S. sentiment in the country and the
election of a new and apparently more militant parliament, which contains a
sizable Islamic opposition.
Last week, leading Egyptian analysts met at the headquarters at the Arab
League in Cairo and in a closed session discussed scenarios for war in the
region.
At the seminar, Dr. Ahmed Yusef Ahmed, director of the Arab Research
Institute and a lecturer at Cairo University, presented a paper that
envisions an escalation of tension in the Middle East that stems from an
Israeli attack on the Palestinian Authority or on Lebanon. Like other
speakers, Ahmed urged Egypt and other Arab countries to consider seriously
the possibility of war with Israel.
The experts, in a seminar organized Thursday by the Arab Center for
Strategic Studies and the Arab Research Institute, agreed that an Arab war
against Israel would not serve either Arab nor Palestinian interests. At the
same time, several experts warned that Israeli actions could lead to an
undesired escalation in tension that could explode in war.
One debate concerned whether Israel wanted to expel Arafat and his
aides. Some of the experts, as well as the Palestinian envoy to the Arab
League, Said Kamal, raised this prospect as real.
But other analysts said Israel realizes that this could plunge the
region into war. But they acknowledged that such a scenario could not be
ruled out amid the political vacuum in the United States, which does not yet
know who will be its next president, and the uncertainty over Prime Minister
Ehud Barak's political survival.
In Israel, experts said whatever Mubarak's intentions, Egypt wants to be
prepared for anything. They said Egypt has maintained or even increased its
defense budgets despite government's plans to liberalize the economy and
rebound from a fiscal crisis.
The result is that Egypt has about 200 F-16s, more than 550 M1A1 tanks,
a navy that is the largest in the Middle East and an impressive defense
industry. The military has been gaining valuable experience with its U.S.
weapons during exercises with the United States as well as with other NATO
members.
"They are building a monster and it is with U.S. help," a senior Israeli
military source said. "We have raised this with the United States and they
don't want to hear this."
For Israel, a key question of Egypt's intentions regards the future of
Sinai. Here, both military sources and some experts detect two trends that
they find worrisome. The first, they said, is the Egyptian effort to end the
presence of an international force to monitor the demilitarization of most
of the Sinai.
The second is Egypt's continuing policy of leaving the military in full
control of the development of the Sinai peninsula. Hillel Frisch, a
researcher at Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic
Studies, said this
includes the construction of cities in the Sinai for the dispersal of the
population from Cairo and the surrounding Delta.
Frisch said Egypt wants to settle three million people in the
once-desolated Sinai. For the military, Frisch said, this represents a
serious
change from the traditional approach that an empty Sinai would make it easy
to attack Israel.
The doctrine now, Frisch said, is that a populated Sinai would slow down
any Israeli counterattack. "The idea is to have Egyptians in the Sinai to
make it more difficult for the Israeli invasion," he said. "The mandate to
the miliary has been expanded and it now conducts land reclamation and
resettlement projects."
Thursday, November 30, 2000
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