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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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