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Victory in Afghanistan is merely the first step in a long march
 
With the welcome prospect of a victory of sorts in Afghanistan the attention of the West is slowly switching to a number of other states in the Middle East accused of supporting terrorism. The US and British Governments will be giving close consideration to whether the peoples and armed forces of these countries will be prepared to fight to the death for the unpopular leaderships in Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus, Sanaa, Algiers or even Riyadh.
 
These undemocratic and unrepresentative regimes can be toppled by a combination of severe diplomatic and economic pressure, covert intelligence and special forces operations and where necessary by direct military action, of that there can be very little doubt.  Unfortunately in the euphoria of success the seeds of a greater disaster could well be planted.
 
The new governments of these states will be either loose coalitions made up of disparate regional, ethnic, political and religious groups whose only reason to co-operate had been hatred of the previous regime or simply another rotten military dictatorship.

They will not be truly national, representative nor democratic and will in all probability oversee the disintegration of much of the Middle East into a collection of weak, war-torn countries, a fate similar to that of the former Soviet empire and the Balkans.
 
Humiliated Muslim masses may turn to Militant Islam
 
A troubled and violent Middle East would be left with only one realistic uniting force and that would be some version or other   of militant Islam, the one remaining pan-Arab or pan-Muslim movement.  Great care must be taken in both Washington and London to ensure that any eventual victory over the present non-compliant Muslim regimes does not bring about the very nightmare that the West so desperately seeks to avoid, a vast and important region united only by the anti-Western zeal of the Mullahs.
 
It would be a Middle East lacking most of the normal political foundations with which to negotiate and driven by an unquenchable thirst for revenge against the Hindu, Jewish and Christian Democracies that will be widely blamed for humiliating the entire Muslim world.   Military and Covert action to topple these rotten regimes must be matched pound for pound with efforts to bring genuine democracy, long lasting reform and hope to the despairing peoples of the Middle East, otherwise apparent success will prove to be a pyrrhic victory.
 
Richard M. Bennett

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