Insider notes from United Press International for Nov. 2...
After his less than triumphant Middle East tour, British Prime Minister Tony Blair learned of new pressures warning him the Brits are becoming less welcome in the region. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are putting pressure on Oman to ensure that all 24,000 of the British troops based there during the recent Operation Swift Sword exercise leave the Persian Gulf state by Nov. 15, the eve of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Britain is trying to keep the 4,200 troops readied for Afghan operations in Oman, along with naval and air basing facilities.
The Saudi pressure is thought to reflect a decision in Riyadh to take a far more assertive military role in the Gulf, pressing its five partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council to establish a NATO-style unified military command with the Saudis in charge. As well as giving the Saudis formal responsibility for regional defense, Riyadh wants to expand the current GCC force from 5,000 to 16,000 troops. The Saudis call it the Al-Jazeera shield, not in honor of the Al-Jazeera TV network, but from the Arabic term meaning island, citadel or The Mount. Based on the Saudi early warning and air defense system, the Al-Jazeera shield now includes hardened communications systems, run from the Saudio command center at Khafer Baaten, south of Riyadh. "Further enhancing cooperation among the GCC member states is important and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is to present military proposals for the improvement and development of the Al-Jazeera shield," Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz told Kuwait-based A-Siyassa daily. The Saudis, startled by the scale of the British Sharp Sword exercise, now insists that the GCC start fulfilling pledges to hold annual exercises among themselves.
The Knight Crusaders are back in the Islamic world, just as Osama bin Laden warned. The shock troops of the medieval Crusades, the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, known these days as the Knights of Malta and refocused on charitable work, have raised more than $1.5 millions for medicines and food supplies for Afghanistan. One of their members, former CIA chief William Casey, helped start the Afghan imbroglio with his clandestine program to arm the anti-Soviet Mujahedin through Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence in the 1980s. And don't even mention the current front-line roles of those more conventional British knights Sir Colin Powell and Sir Rudi Giuliani.
The taste for metaphor of Dick Armitage, deputy secretary of State, has Japan baffled. When he suggested to Japanese Ambassador Shunji Yanai that it was important that Tokyo "show the flag" in support of the war on terrorism, did he mean "sugata o misero" (to show one's hand) or "kishi o senmei ni seyo" (to make one's position clear)? Apparently the secret cables back to Tokyo used both terms -- and sparked a furious debate about what exactly the Americans wanted Japan to do. Some Japanese media reports claimed it was "gaiatsu" (foreign pressure) demanding that Japanese naval ships top sent to the Indian Ocean -- forcing U.S. Ambassador Howard Baker to issue a public denial from his Tokyo Embassy. Although no formal note of the conversation was taken, Armitage and Shunji have agreed that what he meant to say was that "Japan should come up with measures to cooperate with the United States in a way in which the Japanese flag and faces of the Japanese people will be visible."
The $200 billion Lockheed-Martin contract to produce the Joint Strike Fighter might not herald the last manned fighter, nor even necessarily a new period of American air superiority. Russia's President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday signed a decree creating the aviation holding company Sukhoi, to include the famed Moscow design bureau and the four factories (in Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Taganrog) that produce Sukhoi airplanes. It will produce a JSF equivalent, the S-37 Berkut (Golden Eagle), a fifth-generation "stealth" fighter with forward swept wings, at around the same $38 million unit cost of the JSF. The distinctive wing shape is designed for violent high-speed maneuvers, to give the Berkut superiority in dogfights. The American doctrine, by contrast, relies more on killing targets at long range. Sukhoi's former general designer Mikhail Simonov argued that a stealthy and nimble warplane could survive a missile attack, and close in to win a dogfight.
A Muslim religious leader in Burma, Haji Yusuf, has become the first person to be arrested for wearing an Osama bin Laden T-shirt, which are being mass-produced in Thailand and are selling well in Malaysia and Indonesia. Burma's Mae Sot-Myawadi and Ranong-Kawthaung border check points have now formally barred any more imports.
