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February 21, 2003/Adar1 19 5763, Vol. 55, No. 26
Consequences of Iraq war debated
LESLIE SUSSER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - Will a post-Saddam Middle East herald a new promise of regional peace or dire consequences for the Jewish state?
As the anticipated Amer-ican showdown with Iraq nears, the Israeli defense establishment is sounding increasingly optimistic about the outcome.
Not only will war on Saddam Hussein remove a potential nuclear, biological and chemical threat to Israel, they say, it will also open up possibilities for peace with the Palestinians, the Leb-anese and possibly even the Syrians.
Skeptics, however, warn that America's grand plans for the Middle East might prove to be overly ambitious, and, if the United States bogs down trying to do too much, the results for Israel could be disastrous.
And even if things don't go badly wrong, the skeptics say, the end result of U.S. military action could be far less dramatic than Israel's leaders hope.
The debate is significant as Israelis grapple not only with the immediate implications of a war against Iraq, including the possibility that such a war could prompt attacks against Israel itself, but the long-term impact as well.
The most upbeat ass-essment of the future so far has come from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy.
In a Feb. 9 address at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, the former Mossad chief spoke of "shock waves" from a post-Saddam Baghdad that would have "wide-ranging effects in Teheran, Damascus and Ramallah."
He also envisaged a post-Yasser Arafat Palestinian leadership negotiating in good faith with Israel, a progressive and prosperous Iraq rejoining the family of nations, and Syria, no longer feeling a need to compete with Iraq, loosening its ties with Iran.
This, in turn, Halevy said, could lead to a weakening of the Iranian hold in southern Lebanon, a Syrian with-drawal from Lebanon, the disarmament of Hezbollah and an eventual peace agreement between Lebanon and Israel.
"The departure of Syrian and Iranian forces from Lebanese soil, accompanied by the disarmament of Hezbollah, could enable Lebanon to make peace with Israel."
Others are optimistic as well.
The Israel Defense Force's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, foresees a "regional earthquake" creating a "new regional order" and predicted the end of the Palestinian intifada.
"Remember," he said in an interview earlier this month with Yediot Achronot, "the last Palestinian intifada ended in 1991, with the last Gulf War."
Amos Gilad, Israel's newly appointed "national comm-entator" on the war with Iraq, called the imminent Am-erican strike a "miracle."
Among the skeptics is Maj. Gen. Ya'akov Amidror, a former head of army in-telligence research, on retirement leave from the IDF, and just back from a stint in the United States as a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank.
Although a hawk, Amidror argues that American plans for remaking the Middle East through a war in Iraq may be too optimistic and fail to achieve the hoped-for results.
In particular, he is skep-tical about American plans to democratize Iraq and through a ripple effect based on a successful Iraqi model, democratize the Middle East as a whole.
The deep, underlying goal of the American move against Iraq, Amidror says, is to neutralize global terror by turning the Middle East, the region where it flourishes, into a conglomeration of more open, Western-oriented societies in which Al-Qaida-style terror would have no breeding ground.
But this grand scheme, Amidror argues, is unlikely to succeed, and its failure could exacerbate tensions between the Arab world and the United States - and by extension, between the Arab world and Israel.
Others go further in their pessimism.
Former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit reportedly warned officials in the United States that a failed attempt to democratize the Middle East could lead to major regional instability.
It could prove to be a recipe for all-out war between the United States and the Muslim world, and a night-mare scenario for Israel, he said.
Even the skeptics don't deny that taking out Saddam and his weapons of mass des-truction would be a major strategic boon for Israel. But they would like to see the United States move out of Iraq as soon as the job is done.
Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Report.
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