Mideast Forecast

Iraq and the United States will face off again within two years, while a likely confrontation between Israel and Syria is also on the horizon.

The dour predictions were delivered last week at a small private luncheon by Kenneth R. Timmerman, an investigative reporter who has made the turbulent Middle East his beat for the past two decades.

"There’s no doubt that there will be war between Iraq and the United States, but President George W. Bush will set the timetable and will finish the job," Timmerman said, implying that the president’s father hadn’t completed the task of removing Saddam Hussein as Iraqi president 10 years ago.

In the 20 months since United Nations inspectors were kicked out of Iraq, Hussein has perfected chemical and biological weapons and is on the verge of nuclear weapons capability, Timmerman asserted.

During a later conversation with The Jewish Journal, Timmerman clarified his war prediction by saying that Bush will get at Hussein by rebuilding and strengthening Iraqi movements, inside and outside the country, that oppose the dictator’s rule.

A new broad-based coalition of countries similar to the one that won the Gulf War is not in the cards, Timmerman added.

The 47-year-old Timmerman described himself as a former proto-liberal and Palestinian sympathizer who was "cured" during a month’s imprisonment by Muslim forces during the 1982 fighting in Lebanon and is now a "conservative" reporter.

Among other adventures, he covered the Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s and spent a year tracking Osama bin Laden before the Saudi financier gained a reputation as a terrorist mastermind.

He is the author, most recently, of "Selling Out America," which alleges that a corrupt President Clinton sold sensitive U.S. military technology to Communist China.

A major threat to Israel could be Syrian attempts to win a limited war using chemical and biological weapons, Timmerman believes.

In a doomsday scenario, he said that such an attack, causing massive Israeli civilian casualties, would force Israel to respond with nuclear weapons.

Timmerman’s talk was sponsored by Los Angeles supporters of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). The organization is Washington-based and advocates a strong American military capability and U.S. support for a strong Israel.

As its next local event, JINSA will join Holocaust remembrance events with a talk by Maj. Gen. Sidney Shachnow on April 18.

Shachnow is the only Jewish Holocaust survivor to serve as a general in the U.S. Army and to command the elite Special Forces, according to local JINSA coordinator Mara Kochba.

For information on Shachnow’s address at Beth Jacob Congregation, call (310) 284-8233.