Israel's Eastern Front after the US Withdraws from Iraq

Dore Gold
doregold.com
22 August '10

The hardest challenge for any Israeli leader proposing what political initiatives his government should undertake is anticipating what the Middle East region will look like in the years ahead. In the Middle East, the range of uncertainty about the future is far greater than any other part of the globe. No one can be certain who will rule Egypt five years after Mubarak is no longer president. Will it be the Muslim Brotherhood? Who will lead Jordan in ten years? Because it is so difficult to answer these questions, Israel must preserve for itself security margins that are sufficient in order to protect it in a variety of future scenarios.

Right now, one of the key questions that Israel needs to answer for itself is what happens to the Middle East as the US withdraws its forces from Iraq. Useful insights into how the region may change can be obtained by looking at how other Middle Eastern states are making plans for the period after the US Army is no longer patrolling Iraqi territory. For example, at the end of July, the London-based Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat described how Saudi Arabia has started building a 812 kilometer fence along the Saudi-Iraqi border. The purpose of the fence will be to prevent terrorists from infiltrating into Saudi Arabia from Iraq. While right after the start of the 2003 Iraq War, the flow of terrorists was in the reverse direction, as Saudi mujahideen sought to enter Iraq and join al-Qaeda to fight the US and its allies, now Saudi Arabia sees itself as a future target.

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