Fallon to recruit Arab nations for help

HONOLULU — The new commander of U.S. military forces in the Middle East, Adm. William Fallon, says he will set a high priority on enlisting the help of friendly Arab and Asian nations in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and against the al Qaeda terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden.

“There are a lot of people out there just standing around not doing anything to help us,” Adm. Fallon said late Saturday in his first newspaper interview since he was named last month to succeed Army Gen. John Abizaid as commander of the world’s most sensitive region. “We need to turn that around. The neighboring nations there have to play a role.”

The admiral, who will have authority over all U.S. forces in the region, including those led by the new commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, did not name specific Arab nations to which he would look for support.

But Egypt — a leader in the Arab world that gets $2.5 billion a year in military assistance from the United States — and Saudi Arabia, which has long been a target for al Qaeda terrorists, seemed likely candidates.

Adm. Fallon spoke by telephone from his airplane as he returned to his Pacific Command headquarters here from Washington, where he was unanimously confirmed to his new post in a Senate vote on Thursday.

Drawing on his experience over the past two years as head of the Pacific Command, Adm. Fallon said he would also seek support from Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, and Malaysia, in which Islam is the dominant religion. He visited both countries a year ago to meet their senior political and military leaders.

Adm. Fallon also said he might look for help from India, which has a large Muslim minority. Adm. Fallon noted that the United States had been helped in Iraq and Afghanistan by Japan, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand. “I’m interested in seeing how we can leverage this into more support,” he said.

The admiral has spent much of his watch at Pacific Command on political military matters, traveling to about 25 nations to talk with everyone from the heads of government to horse breeders on the Mongolian steppes and sailors in the remote Indonesian port of Manado.

In his new assignment, Adm. Fallon said, “I expect to be doing the same thing and even more because of the urgency of the situation. I expect to be meeting a lot of leaders who could be playing a role in the Middle East.”

As Pacific commander, Adm. Fallon nurtured a gradual expansion of military exchanges with China that were intended to assure the Chinese that the United States is not planning to attack them while warning them not to underestimate U.S. military power.

He is the first naval officer to head Central Command, which has its headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., taking up the post while the command is engaged in major ground combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Adm. Fallon replaces Gen. Abizaid, who in turn took over from Gen. Tommy Franks in July 2003, both career Army officers. The admiral indicated in the interview that he would leave most of the ground warfare task in Iraq to Gen. Petraeus.

Adm. Fallon said Gen. Petraeus, with whom he has not served before, “has a great reputation as a skilled combat commander.”

“I’m going to do whatever I can to support him,” Adm. Fallon said. “I’ll be working the region where there’s plenty of work to do.”

Outside of the ground war, he pointed to similarities in some of the issues facing the Pacific and Central commands. Iran threatens to acquire nuclear weapons much as North Korea has already done. Vital shipping, especially of crude oil, passes through the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, just as it passes through the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea in Southeast Asia.

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