1. There is always a reason for US Presidents to promise the transfer of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem - getting Jewish votes and money for elections. And there is always a reason for reneging on this promise - trying to avoid Arab hostility at what are seen as crucial junctions. This undignified behavior is slowly becoming untenable. It encourages Arab terrorism against Israel and does not gain its ostensible objective. Today, there is no way that the US can attack Iraq without incurring lasting Moslem hatred and hostility. The best it can achieve is a Moslem pretense of accepting defeat in the face of superior force. Trying to "compensate" the Arabs by creating a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders of Judea-Samaria and the Gaza strip is a show of weakness that will be treated with contempt. Since it demonstrates that the West rewards Moslem aggression against Israel by giving the Jewish state indefensible borders, this aggression will continue until its final aim - the destruction of Israel - is attained. The turn of Western Europe will come next, but European reactions to the Islamic threat are necessarily futile as they are motivated chiefly by fear of the Moslems and trying to score off the United States.

2. The sending of US Special Forces to Djibouti, where they are conveniently placed for action in both Yemen and Somalia - two likely hideouts of Al-Qaeda - indicates that Al-Qaeda may be attacked simultaneously or nearly simultaneously with Iraq. Commando units of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) have already been used against Moslem terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere.

3. The Western world may have already missed the opportunity of removing the Christian part of Indonesia's Moluccan islands from Jakarta's rule. By now, most of the Christian population there has been expropriated and expelled. But West Papua can still be saved by the insistence of the so-called "international community" that it be granted independence. The murderous jihad in Indonesia was temporarily checked in East Timor, but is now again in full swing. For its own murky reasons, the West always has "more important" things to do than to check Moslem aggression and territorial expansion.