PARIS, Sept 29: Gerard Chaliand, a respected specialist on strategy and consultant to the French government, says he is convinced that the United States has taken the decision to attack Iraq, that it will stage its attack “much earlier” than the Feb 15 date it has been talking about, and that the invasion will most probably take place after the end of Ramazan.

The holy month this year ends around Dec 5. “That way the war will probably be over by the end of the year,” Chaliand said in an interview with Le Figaro.

Interviewed in the editorial pages of a newspaper considered close to President Jacques Chirac and the French military-industrial sector, Mr Chaliand says that according to his intelligence, Washington “still hopes to stage the attack with the support of the Security Council of the United Nations”, but “has decided to undertake it unilaterally if need be”.

He says too that the plan being presently hammered out by the Pentagon is not entirely new. “Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s second-in-command, had already designated Iraq as the principal target for Washington back on Sept 12, 2001,” the day after the attacks in the United States.

Based on his knowledge of that plan, also on intelligence that he has developed in France, Europe and North America, Chaliand says that the high point of the attack will be an air battle “of an incredible intensity, one that the world has never yet known”.

The intensity of the US air war, he says, “will undoubtedly surprise (the Iraqis) by the(ir) brutal precision”.

He noted that already US forces had begun regular strikes on Iraqi military targets. “During the past six weeks, the state of belligerency (between the United States and Iraq) that has never really subsided since the Gulf war of 1991 has been accelerated (by the United States). This has weakened (substantially) Iraq’s means of counterattack as well as its communications.”

The military operations, he continues, “will imply the cooperation — official or clandestine — of a number of neighbouring countries, among them Turkey, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrein, Jordan, and perhaps Saudi Arabia, whose own attacks will make use of relatively modest special forces — a total of 60,000 men should suffice — who will attempt to take the adversary by surprise, that way to reduce his capacity to react.”

And if it essential that the Iraqis be subject to a surprise attack, he adds, “it’s because when your adversary has his back against the wall, when a regime and the man who heads it have nothing to lose, they can in such a situation be surprisingly very dangerous.”

Then, he notes, the plans being developed by the Pentagon for the attack on Iraq are based on the need for a rapid war: a blitzkrieg, one that will be over as quickly as possible. “It would in any case be much shorter than the war in Afghanistan.”

“And this,” he notes, “to avoid a destabilization of the regimes (in the region) more or less allied with the United States, notably Egypt and Jordan.”

Then too, he notes, the Pentagon plan “will have to deal with the eventual street demonstrations — some of great importance — against the attack, notably in Pakistan, but also in Indonesia and Malaysia”.

But, he adds, “the immediate destabilizations will most likely not occur,” and this because “to destabilize (a country), the organizational structure for destabilization has to be present, something which requires a work of patience that may have been undertaken here and there, notably by the FIS in Algeria, and, in the past, by the Islamic movements in Pakistan. But to reach that point, you need more than a small group of radicals, you have to organize the masses.”

And at the present moment, notes Chaliand — a conclusion apparently shared by his interlocutors at the Pentagon — that situation just does not exist. As for an eventual destabilization of the Middle East, Chaliand said it was a strong possibility, “especially if the United States allows the government of Ariel Sharon to continue the implantation of colonies on the West Bank, or anything that does not contribute to the creation of a Palestinian State, which the United States says it supports”.

In such a situation, says Chaliand, “for Arab and Islamic public opinion, Washington will have become judge and jury, and this factor will in turn contribute to a sense of frustration and humility (sic) which will lead inevitably to further instability and inexorably to future tensions (in the Middle East and South Asia, indeed as far away as the South Pacific).”