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Editorial: New Front
21 August 2005
The rocket attack on two US naval vessels docked in the Jordanian port of Aqaba opens a new front in Al-Qaedas campaign against the Americans and their involvement in Iraq. Crude though the three rockets may have been, no one disputes that one of them came within a few feet of hitting the USS Ashland, an amphibious warfare weapons carrier which was tied up alongside its sister ship, the USS Kearsarge. Had one of the rockets struck the ship and exploded, the consequences could have been every bit as deadly as the attack in 2000 on the destroyer USS Cole which killed 17 sailors in the Yemeni port of Aden. As it is, the only casualty was a Jordanian soldier who was guarding a nearby warehouse which the rocket in fact struck. The attack on the USS Cole, however, was made from a small launch that pulled alongside the ship. The incident in Aqaba is the first in which terrorists have fired at a vessel from the shore.
Both US ships immediately put to sea. Within hours, there was a report that Egyptian security forces were carrying out a thorough sweep of both sides of the 118-mile long Suez Canal through which US and other coalition warships as well as heavily-laden oil tankers regularly pass. The Jordanian authorities, for their part, immediately isolated the port and began to search for three or four suspects, variously described as Iraqi, Syrian or Egyptian, who had only recently rented the warehouse from which the rockets were launched. It seems likely, however, that timers or telephonically activated triggers were used to fire the devices and that the terrorists had long vanished from the scene.
The attack was clearly designed to embarrass the Jordanian government. The missiles were probably home-made, similar to the Katyusha rockets developed by the Soviets in World War II. Nonetheless, since they may very well have been smuggled into Jordan from Iraq over the still-porous border, the Jordanian authorities will find themselves under new pressure to stop the flow of terrorists and materiel. If the weapons did originate from Iraqi terrorists, there will clearly also be concerns about what other armaments may already have found their way into Jordan.
For the American military, this latest outrage demonstrates the complexity and ever-changing nature of the task they have set themselves in eradicating terror in Iraq. They must now plan for the possibility that any of their naval ships, tied up in any port in the region, could come under attack from the shore. This could produce a policy of replenishment at sea with US vessels hardly ever docking. If that turns out to be the case, it will be another small but nevertheless telling victory for the terrorists and will once again put the US on the back foot in a fight, the difficulty of which it underestimated from the beginning. Amphibious warfare weapons carriers such as the USS Ashland are designed to project extremely powerful air and land forces into battle. Seeing two such ships hurrying out to sea after three home-made rockets were fired at them was, at the very least, an unfortunate spectacle.
Kathianne said:By product of Iraq or Israel/Palistinian dealings?
http://arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=68765&d=21&m=8&y=2005
