June 20,
2002
Dr. Ahmed S. Hashim,
Center for Naval Warfare
Studies–Strategic Research Department, U.S. Naval War
College.
Dr. Ahmed Hashim from the United
States Naval War College briefed the Executive Lecture
Forum members and the invited Mississippi
Anti-Terrorist Task Force group on the threat of
weapons of mass destruction in three distinct areas:
Iraq, the Indian subcontinent, and Al-Qaeda. The
threat in these three areas has a direct impact upon
American national security and on global security. He
analyzed these three issues jointly in great detail.
As far as Iraq is concerned, said our speaker, the
United States did the right thing in lunching Desert
Storm. Had we waited three to four more years,
Saddam Hussein could have developed a nuclear weapon
system, and the United States would have had great
difficulty ejecting the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Iraq
learned from its defeat in 1991 that it has no hope of
meeting the United States conventionally; so Saddam
decided to propel a biological and chemical war
capability to assure his regime’s survival in the face
of American hostility. Professor Hashim maintained
that the best course of action would be to contain
Saddam, as we did in the Cold War with the Soviet
Union. In the end, the Saddam regime will collapse, as
was the case in the Soviet regime.
According to Professor Hashim, the major danger in the
Indian-Pakistani conflict is that the command and
control structure for nuclear weapons in these two
countries are absolutely primitive at the moment.
There is a possibility that local commanders could
trigger a nuclear exchange and threaten not only their
two countries’ populations but the entire world.
The Al-Qaeda organization, pointed out our speaker, is
a much greater danger for the United States and the
free world than previous terrorist groups. Al-Qaeda is
extremely well organized, highly disciplined, and well
financed. Their goal is to remove the U.S. forces from
Arabia, eliminate American presence in the Islamic
world, and destroy Israel. The United States has
eliminated the basic infrastructure of Al-Qaeda, but
the battle is far from over, concluded Professor
Hashim in his very well received lecture.
