Action - According to the

Action - According to the Boston Globe, US intelligence agents, and Special forces from the US, UK, Jordan and Australia, are already active in Iraq.

The operations, which also have included small numbers of Jordanian, British, and Australian commandos, are considered by many analysts to be part of the opening phase of a war against Iraq, even though the Bush administration has agreed to a schedule of UN weapons inspections.

Reactions to the news are, of course, mixed:

Naseer H. Aruri, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said the Bush administration was being duplicitous in conducting undercover operations while agreeing to the UN weapons inspections.

''Certainly, the Arab world and the Islamic world would see it as being inconsistent with the weapons inspections, as well as an infringement on Iraq's sovereignty,'' Aruri said. ''It makes clear that the public acceptance of the UN mission and inspection process was more of a tactic than anything else.''

James M. Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a member of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, said that few countries outside the Middle East would object.

A while ago, I ran the same story, from Debka. And I took a lot of heat from local liberal observers of the scene for doing it.

Hey, I can't be wrong all the time, right?

Posted by Mitch at January 5, 2003 06:30 PM