Several Gulf states have quietly urged the United States to launch a war against Iraq before it's too late.
U.S. diplomatic sources said the Bush administration has been told by
representatives of the states that the region could not sustain the rising
tension of a prolonged U.S. military buildup. They said Washington should either launch the war and topple the regime of President Saddam
Hussein or leave the region.
The Gulf Arab appeal is a change from the line by Arab allies in the
Gulf and Middle East earlier this year, Middle East Newsline reported. At the time, the allies urged
Washington to obtain United Nations endorsement and follow with an
initiative on the Palestinian issue.
"In the last month those conversations have changed in a rather dramatic
way," Ken Pollack a former National Security Council member and analyst at
the Brookings Institution. "What they're saying now is, 'Look, we are taking
a lot of heat at home for this. For being willing to support you we are
really getting ourselves into trouble. You had better go this year because
if you don't go this year, if you pull your punch, forget about it. We're
not going through this again.'"
Pollack warned that GCC states would not gear up to support any U.S.-led
war against Iraq for at least the next two years. This includes such
countries as Kuwait, Oman and Qatar, regarded as the most cooperative of the
GCC states.
The diplomatic sources said the United States will not go to war before
mid-February. They said Washington, with an estimated 60,000 U.S. troops in
the Gulf region, has not completed either diplomatic or military
preparations for the war.
The administration is expected to send such units as the 101st Air
Assault Division, the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division, the 1st Cavalry
Division and a Marine Expeditionary Force. This would result in a force of
up to 200,000 soldiers, a mission that could take at least two months.
A major question, the sources said, is how to end the UN weapons
inspections and justify a war. They said one prospect is that the United
States demands that Iraq answer a series of specific questions and that the
UN interview leading scientists in an attempt to foment a crisis.
Pollack said a key concern is that UN weapons inspection chief Hans Blix
will not agree to interview Iraqi scientists abroad. Pollack said Blix has
demonstrated extreme caution in his inspection efforts.
"If the administration does want to go to war there is a real risk in
allowing the inspections to play out for another month or two because each
time they go into a place and find nothing, each time the Iraqis are seen to
be cooperative," Pollack said. "And especially each time the U.S. gives them
intelligence and they go to a site and find nothing, it is going to make it
harder to build that coalition of the willing, not easier."
Brookings Institution analyst Michael O'Hanlon predicted that the United
States has decided to ignore the UN inspections and launch a war in January.
He told a Brookings seminar on Dec. 12 that the decision to go to war
appears to have jelled over the last few weeks.
On Thursday U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Iraq is in
"material breach" of the UN disarmament resolution. "It [Iraq's 12,000-page
arms declaration] totally fails to meet the resolution's requirements,"
Powell said. "These are material omissions that in our view constitute
another material breach."Although Powell did not say that the U.S. had
decided to launch a war in January or early February, he said that "the
world will not wait forever."
Earlier, chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told the Security
Council that there are omissions Iraq's arms declaration.
"There is a good bit of information about non-arms related activities,"
Blix said. "Not much information about the weapons. The absence of
supporting evidence is what we are talking about mainly. That continues."
