From: John McAuliff <jmcauliff@ffrd.org>
Subject: Dan Ellsberg's predictions/fears


Hope you had a good Thanksgiving.  

The inspections go forward with the clock ticking toward December 8th when it is "truth or consequences" for Iraq according to some media spin reflecting the hard liners in the Administration.   Others say that the lack of a full and complete report is not seen as justification for war by enough of the world to enable the US to move ahead.

The following is from a Reuters story about Dan Ellsberg.  Not uncharacteristically, his predictions are among the grimmest I've seen.  For the whole story go to http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1125-01.htm

John

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If Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network launches a "spectacular" terrorist attack on the United States as the FBI has warned, it will trigger a U.S. invasion of Iraq even if Baghdad is not involved, he [Daniel Ellsberg] predicts.

If there is no attack soon, the United States will provoke Iraq into shooting down one of its aircraft in the "no-fly" zones in southern and northern Iraq, he said.

"If Saddam doesn't manage to shoot down one of our planes, our planes will fly lower and lower," Ellsberg said. "We're going to be at war with Iraq well before Christmas."

Saddam would then use poison gas against U.S. troops, triggering a retaliatory U.S. attack on his bunkers with earth-penetrating nuclear weapons that would inadvertently cause mass civilian deaths and "create hundreds of thousands of new recruits for suicide training," he said.

"I believe they (the U.S. government) are very smart. They would have to be very stupid to believe that this would reduce the chances of terrorism. It will increase it sharply."

Saddam would make his weapons of mass destruction available to al Qaeda, allowing them to stage attacks that will wipe out Israel and many of its neighbors and prompt armies sympathetic to Islamist causes to take over Pakistan and Indonesia and set off a grab for Pakistan's nuclear weapons.

"It will make it impossible for these countries whose cooperation in hunting for al Qaeda cells is absolutely essential," Ellsberg said. "We will no longer be able to reduce al Qaeda's strength. ... Osama will be a hero for the Muslim world for the next thousand years."

End result: A new age of barbarism, he said. "The world is going to look eventually like Afghanistan outside of Kabul."