Inside U.S. War Plans

William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
washingtonpost.com

"Do Pentagon war planners game-play war against Venezuela? Of course they do," says WS, commenting on my blog saying that the Pentagon was newly eyeing Venezuela as a military threat and initiating war planning, "they probably game-play war against the Swiss!"

"I'd guess that there are hundreds of contingency plans in existence," Dave comments, "perhaps … even including some developed to respond to changes in our current allies' positions."

WS and Dave credit the Pentagon with far more prescience and capability then it actually possesses. Though there is an awful lot of contingency planning going on in this military-first, post 9/11 world, there aren't plans for every country or even for every potentially hostile country.

On the other hand, under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the military has made radical changes in both its methods of war planning and the plans themselves, a move that ultimately eases the ability of the government to take military action. Since the act of preparing a war plan for a country like Venezuela has such profound political consequences, it is a system that requires much greater transparency. Here is my small contribution:


According to Pentagon documents, my research and a lot of educated guesswork, the United States military currently has some 70 overall plans. These plans themselves take many forms, some being full-fledged war plans, others short fused "strategic concepts" for plans.



Of the 70 operations plans, only 48 are actual plans contemplating combat with other countries. That is because 10 plans deal with the air defense of the United States, homeland defense and other domestic defense tasks while 11 are generic "functional" plans (FUNCPLANs) dealing with humanitarian assistance, counter-narcotics, peacekeeping, and other military operations in "permissive" environments.

Of the 48, five are what are called "complete" OPLANs, or operations plans. OPLANs are prepared for specific threats (that is, specific countries) of "compelling national interest" where prospective large scale operations demand detailed planning, actual target lists, and the logistics and choreography worked out for a conflict.

Of the five current OPLANs (and that is all that there are), one is the United States nuclear war plan (OPLAN 8044, and sometimes known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan or SIOP). Two are contingencies in Asia, one regarding defense of South Korea against a North Korea invasion (OPLAN 5027) and the other presumably a different Korean peninsula scenario (OPLAN 5077). Two war plans exist for the Middle East: one for Iraq (OPLAN 1003) that has already been implemented and another for an unknown contingency, possibly Iran. A sixth OPLAN (OPLAN 2002) exists, but it deals purely with homeland defense.

Thirty-nine of the remaining 43 plans are what are called CONPLANs, "Operations Plans in Concept Form Only." These are operations plans in an abbreviated format prepared for less compelling contingencies, plausible but not likely in the near term. CONPLANs can be prepared for smaller scale operations as well as for what are called non-specific threats.

In addition to OPLANs and CONPLANs, there are four "strategic concepts" that have been more recently prepared. Though every OPLAN and CONPLAN includes the commander's statement of his strategic concept, stand alone strategic concepts are a post 9/11 invention allowing regional commanders to develop plan concepts, enemy estimates, alternative courses of action, and target lists prior to the completion of a CONPLAN or OPLAN.

By regional command, the OPLANs, CONPLANs, and Strategic Concepts plans are broken down as follows:

Central Command (Middle East): 2 OPLANs, 7 CONPLANs, 2 strategic concepts
European Command: 10 CONPLANs
Pacific Command: 2 OPLANs, 12 CONPLANs, 2 strategic concepts
Southern Command (Latin America): 7 CONPLANs
U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), in addition to preparing the central nuclear war plan (OPLAN 8044), also has responsibility for three global CONPLANs, one for nuclear and conventional "global strike" (CONPLAN 8022), which is the implementation of the Bush administration's policy of preemption, one for ballistic missile defense (CONPLAN 8055), and one of unknown nomenclature (CONPLAN 80??) presumably for "information operations," or cyber warfare, STRATCOM's newly assigned global mission.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff organization is also responsible for two weapons of mass destruction plans, one (CONPLAN 0400) dealing with offensive counter-proliferation and the other (CONPLAN 0300) for special operations support in the event of a WMD incident. A third JCS CONPLAN is for unknown purposes. Finally, it is presumed that the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has a newly produced CONPLAN to fight the global war on terrorism.

For some contingencies, such as North Korea, there are multiple OPLANs and CONPLANs: CONPLAN 5026, 5027, 5029, and 5030 are all known to deal with different Korean peninsula scenarios. There are also specific OPLANs and CONPLANs for Iraq.

You must be thinking if you've kept up with the arithmetic that with some 30 plans left, clearly there is room for Venezuela. Not so quick. Each of the commands has war plans for the "defense" of key allies: CONPLAN 4305 exists for the defense of Israel; CONPLAN 5055 seems to deal with the defense of Japan. Add up U.S. treaty commitments and deployments, and the number now shrinks to about 20.

Then there are the one or two generic CONPLANs each command has to guide unassigned small scale contingencies. European command, in addition, has a new set of "non-specific" CONPLANs dealing with potential regional action in the Transcaucasus, the Baltics, West Africa, Equatorial Africa and Southern Africa. Pacific Command has regional plans for South Asia, the Southeast Asia mainland, and Southeast Asian islands. Central Command has a regional plan for the Horn of Africa; Southern Command has one for the Caribbean.

So there are no more than ten plans that deal with specific "threats" and that has to accommodate one or more plans for Iran and China, possible contingency plans if thing go sour with Russia, additional contingencies dealing with Syria and Cuba, and yes, even Venezuela.

So on the one hand there are generic contingencies for virtually every corner of the planet, as well as war plans supporting transnational global combat -- preemption, cyber warfare, the war on terrorism -- that cross command boundaries and can apply to more than one country.

On the other, there are only a limited number of staff officers and a limited amount of resources. A decision to undertake serious planning for a new contingency -- such as a Venezuela -- is a big one. It is particularly burdensome on the intelligence community, which has to produce "threat" estimates and enemy order of battle and target lists.

As planning software improves and the military moves to integrated network operations, the ease with which a plan can be quickly prepared will also increase. Already the Pentagon has shaved the time it takes in the old process to build a plan from 12-22 months to 4-6 months. With Rumsfeld's new "adaptive planning" initiative -- the draft Adaptive Planning Roadmap was approved on March 11 -- a whole new process of quick reaction plans is in the works.


Today, as far as I can surmise, there isn't a contingency plan for Venezuela. But there can be one real soon.

By William M. Arkin | November 4, 2005

New Syrian leadership probably wouldn't benefit U.S., report says

By Warren P. Strobel
Knight Ridder Newspapers


WASHINGTON - A new U.S. intelligence report concludes that if Syrian President Bashar Assad is overthrown, his successor is unlikely to be more supportive of American policies in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East, according to current and former government officials.

The report surfaces amid growing speculation in Damascus and abroad over the fate of Assad's regime, which faces intense international isolation over its alleged role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri last winter.

It highlights the delicate balancing act that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice confronts as she orchestrates escalating international pressure on Syria.

The United States and France, who are coordinating diplomacy, say their aim is to change Syria's actions, not its regime.

Washington wants Syria to cooperate with a U.N. probe into Hariri's murder, stop insurgents from crossing into neighboring Iraq, cease interfering in Lebanon and crack down on the radical Palestinian groups it hosts.

"The Syrian government needs to make a strategic decision to fundamentally change its behavior," Rice said at the U.N. Security Council late last month.

Within the Bush administration, there's a vigorous debate over how far to go in pushing for regime change in Syria.

Diplomats acknowledge that a risk of the current course is that Assad could be overthrown, especially if he's forced to turn over members of his ruling family for questioning or prosecution.

"Will it lead to a change of behavior of the regime, or a coup? We don't know," said a senior European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.

Some leaders in Europe and the Middle East suspect the United States is attempting to do in Syria what it did in Iraq - overthrow its leader - but without firing a shot.

J.D. Crouch, Bush's deputy national security adviser, met Thursday with a Syrian opposition figure, Kamal al-Labwani, at the White House, a Bush administration official confirmed Friday.

Al-Labwani played a role in last month's release of the "Damascus Declaration," which calls for peaceful political change in Syria, by five opposition groups. The meeting was to discuss that development and American support for democratic reform, said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But such is the concern over destabilizing Syria that even Israel - its bitter enemy - has urged the Bush administration to proceed cautiously.

The new intelligence assessment was compiled in late September by the office of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.

The classified document concludes that if Assad is overthrown, he's likely to be replaced by someone from the ruling leadership who'd pursue the same policies or even more confrontational ones, according to officials who've read it or been briefed on its contents.

Syria is an authoritarian nation long ruled by members of the minority Alawite sect. Domestic political opposition, while emboldened by the pressure on Assad, is weak.

One of the most potent groups in society is the Muslim Brotherhood, which espouses an Islamic state. But the report sees little chance of it gaining political power soon, one of the officials said.

The U.N. Security Council voted 15-0 Monday to demand that Syria cooperate fully with German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis' investigation into Hariri's murder.

Mehlis concluded in an interim report that the killing couldn't have happened without Syrian officials' complicity. One version of the report, containing text that wasn't supposed to have been made public, cites a witness claiming that the president's brother, Maher Assad, and brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, the powerful head of Syria's military intelligence, were involved.

With even Syria's traditional Arab allies not rushing to support it, the country is more isolated than at any time in recent memory.

Even among Syrians there are differing views on how much danger Assad is in. He took over when his father died five years ago.

"There is no chaos," Ayman Abdel Nour, a reformer within Syria's ruling Baath party, said in a telephone interview from Damascus. "There is no probability, zero, for a coup."

Because opposition and human rights groups are suppressed under an emergency law, "we cannot expect anything from them," said Abdel Nour, who runs a Web site featuring vigorous political discussion.

Yet Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian author and expert on Middle East minorities, said the regime could be close to collapsing and that opposition groups were gaining confidence.

"There's a general feeling that the country could implode," said Abdulhamid, who's currently at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, a research center.

He praised the Bush administration for maintaining a solid international front on Syria, in sharp contrast to the deep splits that developed over Iraq. "They've played their cards right" and maximized pressure on Assad, he said.

Lying's Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Published on Friday, November 4, 2005 by the Chicago Sun Times

Lying's Just the Tip of the Iceberg
by Andrew Greely

Since it is apparently not a crime to deceive the American people into supporting a foolish and unjust war, one must be content with the indictment of I. Lewis Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. The indictment is an example of a mountain laboring two years to bring forth a molehill. Libby will have the best trial lawyers money can buy and stands a good chance of acquittal. If he is convicted, the president will surely grant him a pardon before he leaves office.

We are unlikely ever to learn who ''outed'' Valerie Plame and thus ruined her career. That the leak came from a cabal inside the White House has been evident for a long time. But if the special prosecutor was unable after two years of effort to find out the who-how-and-why of this gratuitous and vicious mischief, the historians of the future might not be able to tease out the truth. They might observe, however, that the scandal was proof of how far down the path of evil the Bush administration would go to defend their case for a war that has turned out to be foolish and unjust.

Did the president know what was going on? It is hard to believe that he did not -- any more than President Ronald Reagan was unaware of the Iran-contra deal. Libby's clumsy lies -- attributing the ''leak'' about a CIA agent to journalists -- were probably an attempt to protect the vice president, who is far too clever to be caught in any legal trap. Yet we know enough now to understand that the Iraq war is his war. He and the crowd of neo-conservatives around him and the secretary of defense planned the war even before the president defeated Sen. Al Gore (if he really did). They even tried to blame the World Trade Center attack on Iraq. A democratic Iraq, they argued, would transform the balance of power in the Middle East. The way to Jerusalem, they claimed, was through Baghdad.

Cheney proclaimed to the bitter end that weapons of mass destruction would eventually be found in Iraq and has never retracted or apologized for this claim, which was decisive in winning support for the war from the American people. More recently, he has claimed that the Iraqi insurrection (better called, perhaps, the Iraqi resistance) was in its ''last throes,'' despite overwhelming evidence that it grows ever stronger. Is he lying, or is he the kind of true believer who sees the world differently than everyone else?

Who knows what the answer is to that question? In truth, it does not matter. The Bush administration, led by the vice president, systematically deceived the American people about the war and continues to do so. There were never any nuclear weapons, never any raw uranium, never any Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Center attack. The Iraq war was never part of a ''war on terrorism.''

The vice president is also supporting legislation that would provide the basis for the CIA to do what it is already doing -- torture people who are held outside this country. Granted Cheney's serious fear that jihadism has created another cold war situation, such legislation would still reduce the United States to a country that willingly supports savagery -- an ineffective strategy at that. The war is Cheney's war, and the 2,000 American dead and the 32,000 Iraqi dead are Cheney's victims. The torture is Cheney's torture.

With this background, the indictment of Libby looks kind of silly. One relatively minor player in Cheney's war will have to suffer through a trial and perhaps some time in prison. The conspiracy to go to war pushed forward by the White House Iraq Group will continue even if it has lost one of its more dedicated members.

There is nothing in the American legal system that permits the indictment of public officials for war crimes. Thus, perjury and obstruction of justice must suffice as a substitute. Yet it seems evident that both Cheney and Libby are war criminals. They fed the country false information to seduce it into a war that was both unnecessary and incompetent. And there is very little the American people can do to end the war for several more years.

Former Powell aide links Cheney's office to abuse directives

Agence France-Presse
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2005

WASHINGTON Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff.

"The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president's office," Wilkerson said, "regardless of the president having put out this memo" - "they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen."

He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.

"There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said.

The directives were "in carefully couched terms," Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on U.S. troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.

"If you are a military man, you know that you just don't do these sorts of things," Wilkerson said, because troops will take advantage, or feel so pressured to obtain information that "they have to do what they have to do to get it."

He said that Powell had assigned him to investigate the matter after reports emerged in the media about U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both men had formerly served in the U.S. military.

Wilkerson also called David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions."

On Monday, Cheney promoted Addington to his chief of staff to replace I. Lewis Libby, who has been indicted over the unmasking of a CIA agent.

Wilkerson also told National Public Radio that Cheney's office ran an "alternate national security staff" that spied on and undermined the president's formal National Security Council.

He said National Security Council staff stopped sending e-mails when they found out Cheney's staff members were reading their messages.

He said he believed that Cheney's staff prevented Bush from seeing a National Security Council memo arguing strongly that the United States needed many more troops for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Wilkerson also said that the former CIA chief George Tenet did not inform Cheney's office of key weaknesses in the government's argument that Saddam Hussein had or was seeking weapons of mass destruction.

That argument was central to the Bush administration's justifications for the Iraq war.

Wilkerson has also said recently that Cheney and Rumsfeld operated a "cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign and military policy.

Los Angeles Times: Bush's dishonest mistakes

Los Angeles Times: Bush's dishonest mistakes: "Bush's dishonest mistakes"

Jonathan Chait

November 4, 2005

DID THE Bush administration mislead the country in the run-up to the Iraq war? Yes, it did. Did the administration "mislead us into war?" No, not exactly. The CIA leak scandal has again placed those questions at the center of the national agenda. Unfortunately, almost nobody seems to be getting them right.

It is true that, leading up to the war, the White House exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq. Spencer Ackerman and John Judis showed this in exhaustive detail in a cover story in the New Republic in 2003. (In fact, Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby reveals that this article set Libby off to try to discredit former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who he suspected, correctly, was one of the article's sources.)

Bush and his minions made implausible charges about Iraq possessing unmanned aerial drones that could threaten the United States, that it had obtained aluminum tubes for use in processing uranium for nuclear bombs, and other wild charges. The administration either ignored intelligence analysts who discredited this evidence or intimidated them into silence.

This, to put it mildly, is bad. But some liberals and Democrats don't want to leave bad enough alone. They want to make the Bush administration's dishonesty the central explanation for what went wrong in Iraq.

Take, for instance, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's comments on CNN the other day. When asked if she was "duped," Feinstein replied: "Yes. And had I known then what I know now, I never would have cast that vote, not in 1,000 years. I read, re-read the intelligence, read the classified versions, tried to get briefings, read open source, listened to the speeches, did everything I could to inform myself, and when I cast that vote, I was convinced that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to this nation, with respect to biological weapons, with respect to an unmanned aerial vehicle that was capable of being launched with chemical or biological weapons aboard.

"None of that turned out to be true. And that's what bothers many of us, because we now believe that the impetus for the American use of force essentially was regime change, pure and simple. Not the cause that was sold to us, which was weapons of mass destruction and their immediate threat to our country."

If you are a liberal, you were probably nodding your head when you read that passage. Yet it is highly misleading. It turns out that nearly everything the administration said about the Iraqi threat was wrong. The vast majority of that wrongness, though, was attributable to honest mistakes.

How do we know that? Because almost everybody was wrong about the basic outlines of Iraq's weapons capability. Foreign intelligence agencies believed that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton administration had issued dire warnings. United Nations weapons inspectors reported that Iraq had not accounted for missing weapons it had previously declared.

On top of that widely shared consensus, Bush piled on some lies. But the notion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was not, in and of itself, a case of Bush duping Congress or the public. It was a case of Bush being duped along with the rest of the world.

The Senate has already investigated how U.S. intelligence got it wrong (i.e., the honest mistakes). Now, Democrats are pushing for another investigation into how the administration manipulated intelligence (the dishonest mistakes). And, of course, Bush's allies are seizing upon the confusion between the two in order to absolve him.

Conservative columnist David Brooks wrote sneeringly Thursday of Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid's attempt to investigate "the Republican plot to manipulate intelligence to trick the American people into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction." Brooks pointed out that the Clinton administration also believed that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Therefore, Reid must believe that Democrats were part of the conspiracy to fool the public. Therefore, Reid is crazy. Other conservatives have made the same point as Brooks.

Are they really so dense? It isn't that complicated. The Bush administration, like almost everybody else, made some honest mistakes. Unlike everybody else, it also made some dishonest mistakes. The Clintonites warned against Hussein's weapons, but they didn't bully intelligence analysts into suppressing contrary information, and they didn't pass on information they knew was false. That's what the investigation is about. Everybody got it?

The body of a child is buried after being found dead in the rubble of collapsed homes, in Ramadi, Iraq, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005. According to local residents the homes collapsed on Wednesday after a U.S. fighter jet dropped two 500-pound bombs on what the U.S. military described as an 'insurgent command center' about 400 yards from where a U.S. helicopter went down, near Ramadi.(AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

What's on during Ramadan? Antiterror TV on Yahoo! News

By Charles Levinson, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
Thu Nov 3, 3:00 AM ET



In addition to the fasting, feasting, and prayers, in most Egyptian households the Muslim holy month revolves around TV.

Once the sun sets in the Arab world, the 30 days of Ramadan are like November television-sweeps month in the US - and then some.

This year there are dozens of mini-series and specials ranging from the story of an Arab living in post-9/11 America to a Kuwaiti drama featuring a character who is a lesbian.

But every night at 10, the Refaat family gathers in their living room to watch the most talked about show in the Middle East, "Al Hoor al Ain" (The Beautiful Virgins). It's loosely based on the November 2003 bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 18 people, all of them Arab. And it's one of a handful of shows aired here this month that are challenging the view that Islam justifies terrorism.

"This show is very important because it is treating a very delicate and crucial subject," says Rafiq al Sabban, an Egyptian film critic. "It's not solving the problem, but that's not the job of art. It is forcing viewers to confront the problem and think about it."

Al Hoor al Ain, which concludes Wednesday night, was written by a confessed former member of Al Qaeda. It tells the story of a young Saudi male torn between two sheikhs with competing versions of Islam - one militant and the other moderate. The story is narrated by a Syrian girl burned in the bombing, and stresses that the attacks were Arab-on-Arab.

Militant Islamist websites have savaged the show, and some imams in Saudi Arabia have warned worshippers not to watch it. They have singled out the show's title as particularly offensive. Al Hoor al Ain refers to the virgins the Koran says await good Muslim men in paradise. While the Koran makes no mention of "martyrdom" as a qualification, militant groups have used the passage to attract young suicide bombers to their cause.

Despite the objections of conservatives, it is the No. 1 show in Saudi Arabia this Ramadan, according to the Saudi newspaper Al Okaz. And many have hailed the program as a powerful attack on extremism.

"This is an integral part of the battle against terrorism," says Abe al Masry, production manager for the Saudi-owned and Dubai-based Middle East Broadcasting Corporation, which is broadcasting the show. "It shows how bad people intentionally misread religion, and exploit religion to recruit terrorists."

In the Refaat household in Cairo, the show is a source of contention. Ahmed, a 23-year-old who's studying business at Cairo University, says the show ignores the root causes of terrorism.

"In the show the Saudi government is made to look like the good guys," he says. "But it is their corruption and their oppression which is driving kids to blow themselves up."

His sister, Amira, a 25-year-old who works at a health club, says the show teaches "that true Islam is not about killing people."

Beyond terrorismAl Hoor al Ain does not confine itself to tackling terrorism. The cast of characters living in the compound, the ultimate victims of the bombing, hail from Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Palestine, and are trying, often in vain, to get along. They suffer the range of ills that plague their respective societies. There are abusive husbands, sterile wives, rebellious daughters, and sons who turn to drugs.

"All these families want to be united, but they don't ever reach that understanding," says Mr. Sabban the Egyptian film critic. "It's a metaphor for the Arab world. They are quarreling and they are loving each other, and they are quarreling again."

Another annual Ramadan show, "Tash Ma Tasha" (Whatever Comes Comes), has provoked an even fiercer response from Islamists, who have sent death threats to the Saudi show's producers.

The show portrays Islamic extremists as incompetent and unthinking half-wits. In Wednesday night's episode a small Saudi village is divided when some villagers want to install electricity and paved roads. The conservative village sheikhs warn that such modernization will destroy their way of life. The paved road will be like a huge black snake coming from hell, one religious leader warns.

A third show this year, "The Rocky Road," exposes the hypocrisy and corruption among the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

In recent years, Ramadan miniseries have triggered controversy, frequently angering the US, Israeli, and various Arab governments, or as in the case this year, Islamic fundamentalists. Last Ramadan, a series called "The Road to Kabul," about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was cancelled after just eight episodes. The show's creators had received death threats for portraying the Taliban in a negative light. Industry insiders, however, say the reason for the show's cancellation was US pressure on the Qatari government, which produced the show. The US reportedly feared that scenes of CIA agents selling heroin to fund the mujahideen would fire anti-American sentiment in the region.

In 2001, after the second intifada broke out in Israel-Palestine, a pair of Arab TV serials recounted the exploits of Salah Eddin, who drove the crusaders from Jerusalem in 1187. "After the last intifada, that's when these serials start getting more tense and more political," says Marlin Dick, an American researcher in Beirut.

Saudi Arabia softeningRamadan serials have long been a tool exploited by Arab governments to sway public opinion. But the Saudi support for and willingness to air such programs represents a total volte-face for the government, says Egyptian screenwriter Wahed Hamid. Mr. Hamid wrote the first-ever Ramadan serial to tackle the issue of terrorism. It aired in 1993, with the blessing of the Egyptian government, which was at the time battling its own terrorism problem.

"For years the Saudis have refused to show my series because they were sympathetic with terrorists, and they were the ones encouraging these extremists," Hamid says. "Now that the terror groups have started to attack them, the Saudis are rebroadcasting it once every two months."



Copyright © 2005 The Christian Science Monitor