If President George Bush had asked, Coeur d’Alene native David Dolan would have advised him not to send ground troops into Iraq. Instead, he would have recommended pinpoint air strikes and/or covert ground operations to kill Saddam Hussein or keep him on the run. If those tactics failed, he would have suggested that the United States move on, leaving the dictator in a weakened condition.

Anything but a large-scale military operation into the holiest areas of the Arab-Muslim world.

In a quarter of a century of covering the Middle East for radio and television, Dolan has learned how deeply the Arab-Muslim world hates Jews and Western infidels. And how deeply the average Arab-Muslim feels the humiliation of being dominated by them. Even the Iraqis’ deliverance by “infidels” from monstrous Saddam Hussein is a source of humiliation for Islamic fundamentalists.

“We’re in a mess,” Dolan said Wednesday from his parents’ cabin on Spirit Lake. “I don’t see our welcome growing. All of America’s enemies – and there are far more of them than just a few insurgents – see an opportunity to engage us. We will sustain continuous attacks. We will see a growing division in this country about the war, possibly to the point where the Vietnam debate went.”

Dolan isn’t an anti-war hand-wringer.

A 1973 graduate of Coeur d’Alene High, he’s an author and a journalist who has spent about half of his life in the Middle East, reporting on events of world consequence for CBS, Christian radio and various other outlets, including the 1991 Gulf War. Often, he broadcasts his reports from the roof of his Jerusalem apartment, where the viewer is treated to a panorama of the world’s holiest city, including both the old and new sections, Temple Mount and Mount of Olives. Dolan, if anything, considers himself a former small-town kid with a front-row seat on the final turbulent days of world history before the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Since April 2, Dolan has conducted his annual speaking tour of the United States, speaking in recent weeks at churches in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene. Also, he has paused to renew his Kootenai County driver’s license, narrowly escaped jury duty, and renewed family ties. Dolan’s father, Phil, now in his 80s, still practices law and lives in Coeur d’Alene.

David Dolan, a soft-spoken man with an easy manner, didn’t start out to become an expert on Middle East culture and Bible prophecy. He simply wanted to travel. It’s hard to believe now, he says, but he’d never been anywhere but the Northwest, Canada and California prior to hopping a plane for Israel a quarter of a century ago. However, the trip was a natural. After converting to Christianity shortly after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he was drawn to Israel as the fountainhead of his faith and two of the world’s other great religions.

His sojourn in Israel has produced three books: “Holy War for the Promised Land” (1991), “Israel in Crisis: What Lies Ahead?” (2000) and “The End of Days” (1995), a novel. “Holy War” begins by describing the shelling of his Voice of Hope radio studio in southern Lebanon and later introduces Hamas, a little-known Palestinian militant organization that, he predicted accurately, would become a major player in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Dolan is under contract to produce a fourth book, explaining Islam and why the U.S. is in quite a fix now.

Dolan provides these insights:

• Average Arab-Muslim fundamentalists believe in proselytizing with the sword, if necessary, and view Osama bin Laden as a role model and saint. Bin Laden is revered because he, like Mohammed, opted for “saintism” over worldly wealth.

“We don’t understand how beloved he is for his lifestyle,” Dolan said.

• Whether we want to admit it or not, we are fighting a religious war, launched by Islamic fundamentalists, with more than 1 billion adherents. The best we can do is follow Israel’s policy and punish them to a point that they won’t be inclined to attack us again on our soil.

“If their leaders are dead or scrambling for their lives, they have less time to attack,” Dolan said. “It’s damage control. Taking the war to their turf (in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world) was the right thing to do.”

• Iran will have a tremendous influence over whatever government emerges in Iraq.

What will be the outcome of the Iraqi war?

“We will end up one day quickly retreating in apparent defeat, as Israeli soldiers did from southern Lebanon,” Dolan told a First Ladies Prayer Brunch in Tampa during one of his first stops on his speaking tour. “That would not be good news for anyone but Islamic extremists, who are a more formidable enemy than most Westerners have so far understood.”

Dolan believes he’s seeing biblical prophecy fulfilled as he reports on the Middle East news and predicts that the next major event on the end-times calendar will be a horrific attack by Israel against Damascus, possibly with nuclear weapons. And if that happens? Dolan’ll be in the right spot to tell his listeners around the world about it.