GOOD NEWS:

Christmas eve (David Warren, 12/24/03, Ottawa Citizen)

Throughout the world, on this Christmas eve, there is good news. The American and allied victory in Iraq is suddenly shown to push freedom forward, and throw tyrants back, on many other fronts.

Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's unspeakable dictator, has himself acknowledged that the fate of Saddam Hussein in Iraq influenced his decision to abandon Libya' s programmes for weapons of mass destruction, and throw his country open to international arms inspectors. According to my information, he is also impressing the Bush and Blair administrations by turning tables on the intelligence front, and shopping some of his links and assets in the terror networks. Indeed, I believe the Orange Alert now signalled in the United States owes something to information transferred through British contacts from the Libyan intelligence services.

As well as to many other government sources in the Arab and Muslim world, not always friendly to the West. [...]

The whole power matrix of the Middle East seems thus to be getting it, from Rabat to Islamabad: rulers understanding that the U.S., Britain, and their allies are no longer the "paper tigers" described in Jihadist propaganda. The message of President Bush from his first state of the union speech after 9/11, "you're either with us or against us", is being driven home by diplomatic means that could only succeed after the Afghan and Iraqi demonstrations of military power. In one country after another, tyrants are deciding that they do not wish to share in the fate of Saddam, and will even begin to open their societies to avoid or postpone that fate. And even in France and Germany, attempts to undercut the U.S. effort are being publicly abandoned.

Definitely a glass half-full assessment, but one that drives home why the Islamicists would be feeling some urgency to pull off a strike ASAP.

MORE:
Al Qaida debates its targets (Martin Walker, 12/23/2003, UPI)

A fierce debate is raging within the ranks of al-Qaida whether to attack the Saudi Arabian regime directly, or to concentrate their attacks on Americans. One result of the argument is that a new organization, the Al-Haramayn (Two Holy Places) Brigades, has spun off from al-Qaida to attack Saudi targets.

The debate, which is conducted semi-openly by al-Qaida theorists and Islamic intellectuals on the website "The Voice of Jihad," has now drawn in a senior al-Qaida member Abd Al-Aziz bin Issa bin Abd Al-Mohsen, also known as Abu Hajer, who is on Saudi Arabia's most-wanted list. He argues that Saudi Arabia should be handled with kid gloves, as the major source of al-Qaida funding.

HERE'S THE HALF-EMPTY VIEW:
Bush has thrown open Pandora's box in a paradise for international terrorists: 2003 has been a crucial year for the Middle East, with war in Iraq and the continuing intifada in Israel. The Guardian's acclaimed commentator on the region assesses what happened, what it
means, and where it might lead next year (David Hirst, December 23, 2003, The Guardian)

This new Iraqi order would be sovereign and democratic, but the first thing it would do would be to ask American troops to stay on to preserve that sovereignty and democracy.

With this subterfuge, Mr Bush might just, as he apparently plans, manage to declare "mission accomplished" on the eve of the presidential election. But it would be remarkable if such an essentially US-installed government, presiding over a hastily reconstructed army and police, was able for long to master the maelstrom of colliding passions and political interests which the removal of the tyranny has unleashed.

An Iraq at loggerheads with itself, and a paradise for international terrorists, would spare none of the principal actors in this geopolitical drama. Not the US, confronted as it then would be with the classical colonial dilemma of whether to pull back or plunge yet further in. Not the Arab world, whose regimes in their people's eyes only differ from Saddam's in the degree of their degeneracy, nor Israel.

The danger is what Arab commentators habitually call "Lebanonisation" - first of Iraq and then, by an inevitable contagion, the rest of the eastern Arab world. Hizbullah, that most successful of anti-Israeli insurgencies, grew out of a single failed and fratricidal state. What might an entire failed region throw up?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 23, 2003 11:59 PM