"The leadership vacuum created by the sad demise of [Palestinian] president [Yasser] Arafat can only be filled by Osama Bin Laden and [Taliban leader] Mullah [Mohammed] Omar, the real leaders that are the only dedicated individuals with the mass support of the Muslim world," said this front-page statement in Pakistan's mass circulation, Urdu-language newspaper Nawa-e-Waqt.
The author was none other than Gen. Hamid Gul, the notorious former head of Pakistan's intelligence service (ISI), the perennial America-hater who is "strategic advisor" to the six-party coalition of politico-religious extremists known as MMA. In a subsequent interview in the same newspaper on November 19, Gul flayed US foreign policy now in the hands of "warrior princess" Condi Rice. "The US," he said, "has created the dilemma of the sociopolitical and economic collapse in Pakistan. Now with Rice's appointment, the US will influence and control Pakistan's nuclear program, which is our only remaining strength, through which the right nuclear balance in the region [with India] is maintained".
An internal CIA assessment describes Gul as Pakistan's "most dangerous man". He doesn't hide his admiration for Osama Bin Laden and is a personal friend of Mullah Omar. Bin Laden and Gul share a geopolitical vision that merges Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and the oil riches of a post-monarchy Saudi Arabia in a revival of the Muslim caliphate.
Earlier this year Gul told a closed meeting of MMA leaders who were attending a wake for the deceased wife of the coalition's vice-president Sami ul-Haq they should begin planning Musharraf's succession. Gul's candidate: Dr. Abdel Qader Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and, according to opinion surveys, the country's most popular man since Ali Jinnah, the founder of the republic.
"Musharraf and the new Prime Minister Aziz are just the informers and not the real leaders of Pakistan as they were not elected by the people," Gul said in a recent interview.
Gul's candidate is the same Dr. Khan who confessed to running the world's first international black market for nuclear materials and bomb-making wherewithal. His clients were Iran, North Korea - two of the three members of President Bush's axis of evil (the 3rd was Iraq) - and Libya (now on probation in reform school).
Dr. Khan first began catering the Iranian ayatollahs' nuclear yearnings in February 1986. This was when the secret program was split up and compartmentalized into raw materials, uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing, technology procurement and weapons design.
Negotiations between Europe's 'big three' and Iran, and the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran, are pure cat-and-mouse charades. Iran is already in the process of trying to fit a WMD warhead to a long-range missile. And IAEA doesn't have the authority to scour the country looking for nuclear weapons.
The fiercely anti-American Dr. Khan also sent two nuclear engineers to Afghanistan before 9/11 to confer with Mullah Omar (on an agricultural project, Pakistan lamely explained when the news leaked). Gen. Gul was also in Afghanistan for two weeks immediately prior to 9/11.
President Musharraf granted Dr. A.Q. Khan a full pardon. He was allowed to keep his lucre stashed in foreign banks. Musharraf realized that bringing such a national icon to trial would have triggered nationwide riots.
Worse than riots, A.Q.K's handiwork may well precipitate a wider conflict in the region. Both Israel and the US have said a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. Iran, on the other hand, sees itself bracketed between two countries now occupied by the US - 20,000 US troops to the east in Afghanistan and 135,000 to the west in Iraq. Again, seen from Tehran, Iran is surrounded by half the world's nuclear powers - Russia, Israel, Pakistan and India.
So Iran does have legitimate security concerns. And the fear of US armed forces on its flanks has strengthened the grip of hardlining ayatollahs.
Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, some prominent neocons spoke out in favor of hitting Iran first, not Iraq. They argued, as the Iraqi hawks did about Baghdad, that countless millions were anxiously waiting to be liberated. For the United States to take on Iran and its 70 million people without a clear casus belli would make Iraq look like a walk in the park.
The inevitable strategic debacle would topple Pakistan's Musharraf and bring about Gen. Gul's vision of a nuclear caliphate.
The US Defense Science Board concluded this week in a 111-page report US credibility among Muslims is down to zero and urged policymakers to spend more time "listening" to their intended audience and use messages that "should seek to reduce, not increase, perceptions of arrogance, opportunism and double standards".
At the same time another US survey showed levels of anti-American prejudice and hostility in Europe far exceeding those experienced during the Vietnam War. Today, every large European country has a Muslim minority of several million people. So a preemptive US attack on Iran would only make matters worse for the Bush administration and for the governments still backing the United States in Iraq. We would likely be at the receiving end of a paroxysm of global rage.
Unencumbered by image problems in Europe and the Muslim world, where it has long been seen as the villain, Israel is ready and able to seriously disrupt Iran's nuclear buildup, much the way it killed Saddam Hussein's reactor at Osirak before it went critical in 1981. Israel won't wait for a wink and a nod from the White House before acting. But the United States will be blamed anyway.
Gulled by Gul
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