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The Return of the Eastern Front

[Jerusalem Post] Anshel Pfeffer - Four years ago, when the U.S. and Great Britain brought Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq to an end, there was a collective sigh of relief within the Israeli defense establishment. The "Eastern Front" had ceased to exist. The nightmare scenario of the Republican Guards' armored brigades sweeping across the lightly defended Hashemite Kingdom to attack Israel on its long and unfortified Jordan Valley border could be taken off the list of threats. Nor would Hussein's Scud missiles be once more pointed at Tel Aviv. For more than three decades, ever since the Yom Kippur War, the Arab states haven't tried to use their conventional forces against Israel. Two facts, though, seem unavoidable. Any prospective president planning to win the November 2008 U.S. election will have to promise a clear time frame for extricating American troops. And whenever that evacuation is over, there will still be sizable groups of terrorists of various stripes and colors holding out who will celebrate the U.S. departure as their victory. At that moment, the Eastern Front will once again become a threat for Israel. Thousands of Islamist fighters, both Sunni and Shi'ite, will be anxious to take on "Little Satan." Flushed with what they will obviously see as their success at having evicted Big Satan from the land of Islam, they will believe that the same thing can be done to the Zionist entity. Their arrival will boost the capabilities of Hizbullah, Hamas and the other Palestinian terror groups and further encourage them to seek violent confrontations with Israel.
2007-03-16 01:00:00
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