I'm Currently working in an Arab country so I'm watching all this with some concern.

All we seem to hear from the whitehouse is that Saddam is evil and would like to own weapons of mass destruction, thats hardly news to anyone. There may of course be new intelligence that the CIA et al have passed to the shrub, but lets face it they managed to completely miss such things as the invasion of Kuwait until it appeared on CNN. So my confidence in their ability to garner new information from a country as closed as Iraq, is not too great.

It is also worth bearing in mind the current opinion held by the Arabs should Iraq be attacked, if there are no bases in the area open to the US then it will be a lot harder than Desert storm was, and it may even provoke some of them to join Saddam. This may not seem to be a big problem for the US military, remember however that the US is a long way from the middle east.

Without local support US casualties will surely mount, Terrorists will gain recruits, and the US may then be more of a target than it was.

Sledge