PARIS, 29 September — Gerard Chaliand, a respected specialist on strategy and a consultant to the French government, says he’s convinced that the United States has taken the decision to attack Iraq, that it will stage its attack “much earlier” than the Feb. 15, 2003, date it’s heretofore evoked, and that the US attack will most probably take place following the end of the month Ramadan which this year ends around Dec. 4. “That way,” he says, “the war will probably be over by the end of the year.”
Interviewed in the editorial pages of Le Figaro, the French daily considered as close to President Jacques Chirac and the French military-industrial sector, Chaliand said that according to his intelligence, Washington “still hopes to stage the attack with the support of the Security Council of the United Nations,” but “has decided to undertake it unilaterally if need be.”
He says too that the plan being presently hammered out by the Pentagon is not entirely new: “Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s second-in-command, had already designated Iraq as the principal target for Washington back on Sept. 12, 2001,” the day following the Al-Qaeda attack on the United States, and that Washington’s plan should incorporate a good many of the elements contained in the Wolfowitz plan.
Based on his knowledge of that plan, Chaliand says that the attack will revolve around an air battle “of an incredible intensity, one that the world has never yet known.” The intensity of the US air war, he says, “will undoubtedly surprise (the Iraqis) by the brutal precision” of the US attacks.”
He notes that already US forces have begun regular strikes on Iraqi military targets: “During the past six weeks, the state of belligerency (between the United States and Iraq) that has never really subsided since the Gulf War of 1991 has been accelerated (by the United States) which has weakened (substantially) Iraq’s means of counterattack as well as its communications.”
The military operations, he continues, “will imply the cooperation — official or clandestine — of a number of neighboring countries, among them Turkey, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan. The US will make use of a relatively modest number of special forces — a total of 60,000 men should suffice — who will attempt to take the adversary by surprise, said Chaliand.
The plans being developed by the Pentagon for the attack on Iraq are based on the need for a rapid war — a blitzkrieg, one that will be over as quickly as possible, “one in any case much shorter than the (recent) war in Afghanistan,” opined the analyst.
“And this,” he notes, “to avoid a destabilization of the regimes (in the region) more or less allied with the United States, notably Egypt and Jordan.”
Then too, the Pentagon plan “will have to deal with the eventual street demonstrations, some of great importance, against the attack, notably in Pakistan, but also in Indonesia and Malaysia.”
But, he adds, “the immediate destabilizations will most likely not occur,” and this because “to destabilize (a country), the organizational structure for destabilization has to be present, something which requires patient work that may have been undertaken here and there, notably by the FIS in Algeria, and, in the past, by the Islamic movements in Pakistan. But to reach that point, you need more than a small group of radicals, you have to organize the masses.”
And at the present moment, notes Chaliand — a conclusion apparently shared by his interlocutors at the Pentagon — that situation just doesn’t exist. As for an eventual destabilization of the region, notes Chaliand, that is a strong possibility, “especially if the United States allows the government of Ariel Sharon to continue the implantation of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, or anything that does not contribute to the creation of a Palestinian state, which the United States says it supports.”
In such a situation, says Chaliand, “for Arab and Islamic public opinion, Washington will have become judge and jury, and this factor will in turn contribute to a sense of frustration and humiliation which will lead inevitably to further instability.”
