Since that time, the US has effected a regime change in Afghanistan, where the al-Qaeda terrorist network is based. The Taliban regime, which supported and gave refuge to al-Qaeda, has been taken apart and replaced with the government of President Abdul Hamid Karzai, a democrat charged with instituting electoral and government reforms. Karzai has since survived two assassination attempts, but with US help, the reforms are being slowly implemented.
Still, US success in Afghanistan is neither complete nor assured. Al-Qaeda still exists, and is still largely based in the caves of Afghanistan. There is no evidence that Osama bin Laden is dead. While the battle for Afghanistan may have been won, or at least championed, the war against terrorism has not yet benefited from any clear victory after more than a year.
Yet, the world, led by the US, sees fit to turn its attention to the next target - Iraq. Every media outlet is predicting that a US attack on Iraq is imminent. But despite overwhelming evidence of Iraq's aggressive aims and non-conventional weapons program, President Bush is having tremendous difficulty building a consensus against Iraq. This is true at home, where Iraq has not directly attacked US interests, and where Americans appear all too willing to wait for another September 11 before renewing the war against terrorism. Just like in Israel, it appears that Americans have a very short memory for these things.
But, and perhaps more ominously, Bush's difficulties also are evident in the international arena. The five super-powers are split on the need to attack Iraq and destroy its non-conventional weapons. And it is very interesting to see how these nations are aligning themselves.
The US, as the champion of freedom, leads the belligerence. I remain far from certain that a campaign against Iraq will be any more successful now than it was in 1991, and I give short shrift to those who automatically assume that Saddam will be toppled as a result, with the domino effect also hitting Arafat and leading to a new middle east. What I do see is a lot of sabre-rattling backed up by nothing. Britain, long the American scabbard-holder continues to toe the US line on Iraq.
The other side of the split features Russia, China and France, each with their own interests in the region, and each acting more self-righteous than the next. Russia has long ignored entreaties from the US, Israel and other western countries to curtail its arms sales to Iran, where advanced missile and nuclear technology will serve only to further destabilize the region. In the 1980s, the US and Israel provided arms to both Iran and Iraq in their decade-long war, and there is no reason to believe that Russia is not doing likewise now. It is not a huge leap to assume that Iraq's weapons development program is a main beneficiary of Russian technology sales, and that any move to curtail that program will result in billions of dollars that Russia doesn't get.
China and its North Korean patron have long been providers of missile and nuclear technology to the most irredentist of Arab states, including Syria, Libya, and Iraq, and would be in the same boat as Russia should a US attack succeed.
None of this is new. What is perhaps most worrisome, though, is France's position. Few analysts will be able to disengage the US-Iraq brinksmanship from the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is safe to assume that Iraq will attack Israel if the US carries out its threat, just as it did in 1991. Further, just about the whole world assumes that if Saddam is toppled, Arafat will follow immediately thereafter.
But perhaps the chain of events should work in the opposite direction. Saddam hasn't attacked anyone in a decade. In that same time frame, Arafat has been at the helm of a terrorist regime that is responsible for close to 1000 deaths and over 7000 injured. If Arafat is removed before an attack on Iraq, it might be much easier to obtain unanimous support for the attack on Iraq. It is here that the French position becomes a little clearer.
In the past year, France has seen a re-awakening of anti-Semitism on par with Germany in the 1930s. President Chirac has barely given lip-service support to the Jewish community, and his re-election bid earlier this year was almost stymied by known anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen. Prior to the election, and certainly since then, Chirac has moved considerably to shore up his support among French anti-Semites.
The latest move in this trend was at last week's Francophone summit in Beirut, where he welcomed Hizbullah leader Nasrallah and allowed him to attend on the level of a statesman. During Chirac's speech, he paid lip service to the war on terrorism, but said that the war must be fought keeping human rights in mind above all other aims. This now de rigueur rhetorical twist emphasizes the mistaken equation between the lives of terrorists and those who they kill - an equation that lies at the heart of the world's reluctance to attack Arafat.
If human rights is really the highest concern of the western world, leaders like Chirac would pay more attention to the plight of terrorist victims and annihilate the terrorists themselves. Rather, I believe that it is anti-Semitism - the direct opposite of human rights - that drives such leaders as Chirac and makes Bush's job that much harder. Thus, leaders like Chirac are joined by Russia and China in blocking any attempt to rid the world of such terrorists and their weapons of mass destruction.
The time has come for Bush to declare his total allegiance to his own doctrine. "Either you're with us or you're against us." There are no middle roads in the war on terror. Terrorism is the newest tool of anti-Semites in their war against the Jews. It is a war in which terrorists believe that Americans and other westerners are behind the Jewish presence they so abhor, and in which terrorism is directed against all these enemies in a concerted effort.
The US must attack Iraq and not cease until Saddam is toppled. It will be much easier to accomplish this if the war were defined properly as a war against racism and anti-Semitism in which terrorism is the chief weapon of the enemy. France's objection, and likely Russia's and China's as well, is based on anti-Semitism and the support of anti-Israel terrorist regimes. If those objections continue, they must be dealt with in line with Bush's own policy.
Copyright 2002. All rights reserved. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission of the author only.
