What kind of deranged individuals decide that a twelve-year old girl's bat mitzvah (sp?) party makes a good target for a terrorist attack? Many on the news are saying that this may be the event that pushes the Israeli's over the edge into an all out-war with the Palestineans. They say that even those in Israel who had been urging peace and restraint have had enough. The Palestinean Authority meanwhile is literally begging the US to send Gen. Zini back to the region to try to get the two sides talking.
So if this is the case and Israel takes all out military action in the occupied territories and topples Arafat, what will the rest of the Arab world do? Will Lebanon, Syrian, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Iran just sit by, or will that lead to the Third Middle East War (going back to the inception of Israel at least)? And we all know that if any other nation attacks Israel then the US will get involved on Israel's side. Any conflict here has the possibility of drawing Russia, Turkey, and other NATO nations, notably the UK and France, in on the side of Israel.
At the same time it seems that the US military presence in Saudi Arabia will finally be coming to an end. Saudi Arabia most likely provides much of the financing that groups like al-Queda get, as well as many of the Saudi clerics granting legitimacy to the actions carried out by these terrorist organizations. I'm sure the US is growing uncomfortable with the Saudi support of terrorism, and the Saudi's are growing uncomfortable with us opposing Islamic extremism and our stance on Iraq. This will leave us without the most optimum staging area from which to carry out operations against Iraq as well as leave the Saudis vulnerable to not only direct hostilities from Iraq, but also leave the Royal Family more vulnerable to being overthrown due to foreign support of Saudi extremist groups. We still have Kuwait, Turkey, carriers in the Gulf, and Israel (if things got really bad) as bases of operation though. Our withdrawal from SA could prompt Iraq to take actions which would draw us into another shooting war with them.
And during all this we have the Indians and the Pakistanis squaring off, both seemingly willing to use nuclear weapons if they felt it necessary. I suspect the US would try to play the peacemaker, but also if it came down to it we would most likely support India. A conflict here has the possibility of drawing China into it, as well as Russia or some of it's former states. This conflict could also serve to destabilize the already less than stable situation in Afghanistan, regarding their interim government.
So did Nostradamus have anything to say about any of this? I would hope that saner heads would prevail, but there is nothing sane about Islamic extremism, and this is probably just the kind of situation they are hoping for anyway.
