;)
ASHINGTON:
US President George W Bush was forced to get involved in the
Middle East affairs on Arab insistence as a condition for
support for his plans against Iraq, official sources were on
Sunday quoted as saying.
"The Middle East conflict
threatens to derail the Bush Administration's plans to open
the next pahse in the war on terror, in particular its desire
to take on Iraq," Time magazine reported quoting US official
sources.
"If Bush were to allow the escalating combat
between the Israelis and the Palestinians to explode into a
full-blown war that sucks in neighbouring States and inflames
the Arab world, America's campaign against terror wouldn't get
much further than the caves of Afghanistan."
What has
caught the Bush Administration officials flat-footed, the
magazine said, has been the universal Arab insistence on
"linkage," making support for a US campaign against Iraq
contingent on a re-doubled US effort to secure a comprehensive
Middle East peace deal.
"We have been sending
dispatches for a year telling them that the only thing the
people care about here is the Palestinian question, but they
have ignored it," a US official in Cairo told the
magazine.
"There is not a single Egyptian who would be
willing to say 'O.K' on Iraq unless they see a change in the
way the US deals with the Palestinians," he said.
A US
official in Amman added: "All I know is, if we invade Iraq,
I'll be on the first evacuation lane out of here, because this
place is going to
explode."
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