| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2007 7:55 pm Post subject: The Teflon Alliance with Israel |
| September 28, 2007
See No Evil
The Teflon Alliance with Israel
http://counterpunch.org/christison09272007.html
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Two recent offhand comments, both widely publicized, have seriously undermined whatever progress might have been made in exposing the fact that the Iraq war was initiated at least in large part to guarantee Israel's safety and regional dominance in the Middle East.
In late August, Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was secretary of state, told Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service that, when Israel first got wind of U.S. planning for a war against Iraq, a wide range of Israelis, including political and intelligence officials, began warning against such a war. "Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy -- Iran is the enemy," Wilkerson said. Israeli warnings against an attack on Iraq were "pervasive" in Israeli communications with the administration during early 2002, according to Wilkerson.
This story garnered a fair amount of publicity and in at least one instance was used by a radio talk show host to shut off discussion of the John Mearsheimer-Stephen Walt book on the influence of the Israel lobby, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Just a few days after the Wilkerson story came out and also only days after release of the Mearsheimer-Walt book, a caller to the Thom Hartmann radio program commended the book, urged Hartmann and his guest at the time, Senator Bernie Sanders, to read it, and asked Sanders to address the issue of Israel's and the lobby's support for the Iraq war. Hartmann shut the caller off with a comment that "we don't hype books on this program" (after having just allowed another caller to hype another book). Sanders then proceeded to denounce "conspiracy theories" such as the notion that Israel had anything to do with the war, and Hartmann finished off with a remark that, "besides," a report just came out --obviously meaning the Wilkerson story -- that demonstrates there was no Israeli link to the war.
In fact, the Wilkerson report does not refute the notion of an Israeli link; he addresses only Israeli-U.S. contacts in early 2002, whereas by later in 2002 and 2003 the evidence is overwhelming that Israel and particularly the Israel lobby were pushing hard for the war. But this is the way myths are born: Hartmann and Sanders were able to use perhaps 90 seconds on a nationally broadcast radio program to tout an incomplete report reinforcing their own misconceptions and to dismiss a thoroughly researched book disproving those misconceptions. Never again, mostly likely, will they or any of the choir they were broadcasting to, who do not want to have to deal with Israel anyway, even think about the issue.
The Wilkerson assertions were followed in mid-September by the highly publicized single-sentence statement by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in his just-released memoir, The Age of Turbulence, that "it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." When the media pounced on this statement, which stands virtually alone and unelaborated in a 500-page book, Greenspan gave several interviews supposedly intended to clarify his statement. To AP he said -- in an obvious sop to the administration and the right, which clearly do not want to own up to such a crass motivation for the war as oil -- that he had not intended to imply that oil was "the administration's motive. I'm just saying that if somebody asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was essential" for economic reasons. He had come to fear, he explained, that "Saddam, looking over his 30-year history, very clearly was giving evidence of moving towards controlling the Straits [sic] of Hormuz, where there are 17, 18, 19 million barrels a day" passing through. The war was not an oil grab, Greenspan said, but "taking Saddam out was essential" because it assured the continued smooth operation of the oil market.
A week later, on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!," Greenspan, repeating that he had been watching Saddam Hussein for 30 years, said that he had feared that Saddam would acquire a nuclear weapon, that this would give him control over the Strait of Hormuz, and that he therefore had to be removed. Greenspan said he believed the "size of the threat" that Saddam posed "was scary" because "he could have essentially also shut down a significant part of economic activity throughout the world."
The logic here is really quite strange and indicates at least that whatever economic genius Greenspan possesses does not extend to military strategizing or political analysis. One wonders, for instance, how exactly Saddam could have controlled the Strait of Hormuz with a nuclear or any other type of weapon when Iraq does not border this key waterway at the opening of the Persian Gulf and has no navy of any significance. One also wonders why Saddam's future possession of a nuclear weapon was more worrisome than the likelihood that Iran, which does have a navy and does geographically control the strait, might close it. Greenspan's statements further raise the question of why, given his claimed knowledge of Saddam's "30-year history" and given the interest of earlier administrations in Iraq's nuclear ambitions, he began to feel Saddam's removal was "essential" only when the Bush administration began planning for war. And none of what Greenspan said explained why Iraq would have shut down its economy by blocking its own oil exports.
Greenspan's fumbling explanations seem at a minimum to be in the nature of meandering remarks by a man concentrated on economics with little political acumen, who went along with the war because of its presumed benefits in safeguarding oil markets but with no concern about the broader consequences of the war and little or no interest in its political motivations or its geostrategic implications beyond what he saw as its global economic goal.
It remains open to question whether Greenspan in addition intended to divert attention from the clear evidence that Israel and its U.S. supporters, both among Jewish American organizations and among neocon policymakers inside the administration, pushed hard for the war, among other reasons to guarantee Israel's security in the Middle East and its regional domination. But whatever his intent, this has been the effect of his concentration on oil. It reinforces the assumptions of those, primarily on the left, who have always contended that the war was "all about oil," and only about oil. The left's refusal to acknowledge that a desire to secure Israel in the region had anything to do with the Bush neocons' war planning is difficult to fathom, since many on the left are notable critics of Israeli policy. But, again, whatever their intent in quashing discussion of the Israeli link, the effect has been to contribute to silencing domestic debate on a critical U.S. policy issue.
Neither is it clear in Wilkerson's case whether he intended, by discussing Israeli representations against going after Iraq, to divert attention from Israel's actual interest in Iraq. But once again, diverting and silencing discussion has been the effect of his brief remarks.
Without closer examination, both Greenspan's and Wilkerson's statements seem to let Israel and its U.S. lobbyists off the hook, something that in differing ways serves the interests of Israel and the lobby, of the right in the U.S., and of the left. Israel's U.S. supporters -- fearful that Jews will be blamed for leading the U.S. into the debacle that Iraq has become and fearful of reviving old anti-Semitic canards about Jews exerting undue power -- roundly deny any Israeli connection to the war. Israel itself, although not as fearful as its American acolytes of anti-Semitism, has remained silent, obviously not affirming a role in instigating the war and letting its supporters do the denying. The U.S. political right does not, of course, want to acknowledge that the relationship with Israel has grown so close that the U.S. would actually go to war at the behest of or for the benefit of Israel. Nor does it want to own up to any of the other actual motivations for the war -- neither, as previously noted, to a motivation like oil nor to a baldly imperial motivation promising (and already providing) great profits for the joint U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex.
The left, on the other hand, very much wants to believe that oil, and perhaps secondarily the imperial drive, constituted the only motivations, and that Israel played no role at all. The left is as skittish as anyone, and perhaps more so than anyone else, about being seen to criticize Israel except occasionally regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. It is much more comfortable for the left to believe that the U.S. is evil and Israel is at worst a hapless tool of Washington. The thought that the tail might wag the dog is rarely taken seriously.
So the weight of public discourse since before the Iraq war was launched has been that any Israeli role in inspiring or pushing for it is at best a silly invention and at worst a vile anti-Jewish lie, and both the Wilkerson and the Greenspan statements play into this impression. Until these statements, the knowledge of an Israeli connection had begun to gain some greater currency thanks to a few valiant souls who have dared raise the subject, including people like Chris Hedges, Scott Ritter and, most recently, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. In July, Hedges wrote a hard-hitting article for Truthdig, subsequently widely circulated, saying that the war "was strongly shaped by the notion that what is good for Israel is good for the United States," and Israel and its neocon supporters wanted Iraq neutralized. Hedges also acknowledged a "desire for American control of oil" as a major driver of the war, along with "the belief that Washington could build puppet states in the region."
Scott Ritter, who served as a weapons inspector in Iraq during the 1990s, paints a somewhat more complex picture in his 2006 book Targeting Iran. He makes it clear, supporting Wilkerson's statement, that over the years of weapons inspections, Israel had come to regard Iraq as a diminishing threat (unlike Greenspan, apparently), whereas Iran was increasingly viewed as a new looming danger. By August 2002, according to Ritter, when the Israelis passed intelligence about the threat from Iran to the Bush administration, "there was barely a reaction in Washington" because "all eyes were on Baghdad, not Tehran." But Israel's Ariel Sharon was, in Ritter's words, "quick to catch on," and in those last several months of 2002 -- the critical months of war planning, coming well after the early 2002 period that Wilkerson was discussing -- Israel jumped on the Iraq war bandwagon, publicly and privately, and began to press for and justify a U.S. invasion. Sharon assigned a senior Israeli military intelligence official to give the U.S. Israeli intelligence assessments on Iraqi WMD activity, according to Ritter, and at the same time, with an eye to later broadening the conflict to Iran and beyond, Israeli intelligence "pressed home to [the U.S.] the notion that the upcoming U.S. invasion of Iraq must serve as a springboard for a larger transformation within the Middle East, one that swept away not only Saddam Hussein, but also anti-Israeli elements in Syria, Palestine, and, of course, Iran."
This dovetails precisely with the neocon agenda, which was ultimately the operative ingredient in determining whether there would be war or not. This agenda was laid out publicly in the mid-1990s in the now infamous "Clean Break" paper, written in Israel for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by a group of Israelis and Americans, three of whom later entered the Bush administration and began planning for the attack on Iraq. The principal elements of the paper involved overturning the Palestinian-Israeli peace process to save Israel from having to make any territorial concessions and then sparking massive changes, through force if necessary, in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, leading to an era of peace in which Israel and the U.S. jointly dominated a transformed and intimidated Middle East.
In their book on the lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt provide overwhelming evidence for an Israeli link to the war that completely undermines the public myths revived by Wilkerson's and Greenspan's statements, and they build a convincing case against the notion that the war was "all about oil." They are the first who have done the extensive research necessary to bring the mountain of evidence together.
The two authors devote more than 30 pages and a remarkable 175 footnotes to constructing an irrefutable case for an Israeli role in helping plan, and a large lobby role in pressing for, the war. Although they do not claim that the effort to guarantee Israeli security was the sole reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they demonstrate clearly -- citing public and privates statements by Israeli military and political officials, informed commentary in both Israel and the U.S., and analysis by foreign policy experts -- that "Israeli leaders, neoconservatives, and the Bush administration all saw war with Iraq as the first step in an ambitious campaign to remake the Middle East" in order to "make it a more friendly environment for America and Israel." Israel and the lobby "played crucial roles in making that war happen." Without the lobby and particularly the core of neocon policymakers inside government and neocon commentators and think-tank analysts on the sidelines, Mearsheimer and Walt conclude bluntly, "the war would almost certainly not have occurred" and "America would probably not be in Iraq today."
On the question of oil as a principal driver in the war, the authors demonstrate that in fact, although the oil industry was clearly happy to obtain lucrative concessions in post-Saddam Iraq, the argument that the industry pushed for the war in order to enhance profits is counter-intuitive. The disadvantages to the industry of turmoil in the region are evident. Energy companies, they make clear, do not like wars in oil-rich areas. Nor do they like such other recent "staples of U.S. Middle East policy" as sanctions and regime change, because each of these actions "threatens access to oil and gas reserves and thus [the oil companies'] ability to make money." Mearsheimer and Walt point out that Vice President Cheney opposed sanctions on Iran while he was president of Halliburton in the mid-1990s and complained about the "sanctions happy" policies of the U.S. Instability is rarely in the interests of the oil companies. In the end, the authors conclude, the "wealthy Arab governments and the oil lobby exert much less influence on U.S. foreign policy than the Israel lobby does, because oil interests have less need to skew foreign policy in the directions they favor and they do not have the same leverage."
It is fair to ask why it matters whether the U.S. went to war solely for oil, or solely for Israel, or out of an imperial drive -- or, as is much more likely the case, for some combination of these motivations. It matters, most fundamentally, because, if there is ever to be a course correction and a return to some kind of policy sanity that will prevent similar future disasters, it is necessary to understand how this disaster arose in the first place. All of these motivations, together and separately, are unacceptable reasons for launching an unprovoked aggression against another sovereign nation, for killing up to a million of its innocent citizens, and for fostering chaos throughout the region. Global sanity and global security demand that the U.S. not invade other countries to obtain control over their natural resources or gain huge corporate profits through oil concessions. Global sanity and security also demand that the U.S. cease trying to expand its imperial reach. And, perhaps most important, it is absolutely vital that the U.S. not so subordinate what should be its true interests to those of another nation that it can be led into wars anywhere, but particularly in the most sensitive area of the world, at the behest or for the benefit of Israel. If going to war to secure huge profits for oil companies is obscene, how much more obscene is going to war for the benefit of a foreign power because we are no longer able to distinguish our interests from theirs?
It has become almost trite to quote George Washington's farewell speech urging moderation in foreign attachments, but his injunctions 200 years ago have an eerie applicability to the U.S. relationship with Israel today. Warning against "a passionate attachment of one nation for another," Washington observed that this creates "a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."
The U.S. alliance with Israel has unquestionably led to a gross distortion of U.S. policy in exactly the way in which Washington predicted, creating the illusion of a common interest where none exists and injecting Israel's enmities into the U.S. with little or no justification. If the U.S. cannot distinguish its own interests from those of Israel and Israel's lobby, then it simply cannot act, as it should, purely in its own interest. Those who minimize the role of the Israel lobby in influencing U.S. policy choices, and who refuse or fail to recognize the part Israel and the lobby have played in leading the U.S. into disastrous foreign adventures, pose an incalculable danger to the U.S., for a failure to recognize the reason for a misguided policy will inevitably doom us to repeat it.
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. She can be reached at kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net.
Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence officer and as director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis.
They can be reached at kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net
http://counterpunch.com/
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Christisons on KPFK last night talking about Mearsheimer and Walt and the above article (their articles regularly appear at www.counterpunch.org)
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2007/10/kathleen-and-bill-christison-on-phone.html
Here is a tiny URL of the above one:
http://www.tinyurl.com/2ec9n5
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2007/10/thom-hartmanns-hypocrisy-for-israel.html
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2007/10/thom-hartmanns-hypocrisy-for-israel_21.html
Re: AIPAC is pushing us to war with Iran for Israel
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2007/10/re-aipac-is-pushing-us-to-war-with-iran.html
The Lobby on Trial:
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11856
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11695
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11846
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com
Last edited by Alpha on Tue Nov 06, 2007 8:42 am; edited 4 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2007 10:53 pm Post subject: |
| Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2007 15:01:15 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Morris"
Subject: Re: See No Evil The Teflon Alliance with Israel
To: "K & B Christison"
CC: mikedirkx@clearchannel.com, thom@thomhartmann.com, louise@thomhartmann.com, david@thomhartmann.com, thomhartmann@clearchannel.com, beckyg@asis.com, counterpunch@counterpunch.org, ed@edschultzshow.com, james@edschultzshow.com, rrhodes@airamericaradio.com, wendyjoschultz@yahoo.com, paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
Dear Kathy and Bill,
Thank you very much for your reply which is very much agreed with. It is also utterly unacceptable how CBS '60 Minutes' won't won't cover the Mearsheimer & Walt book either (see my email exchange with the executive office via the following URL):
CBS '60 Minutes' refusing to cover Mearsheimer/Walt book:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2007/08/24/60-minutes-refusing-to-cover-mearsheimer-walt-book.php
I have been very fortunate to be in touch with American patriots such as yourselves. I have been following your excellent articles going back to the following one as well:
A Rose By Another Other Name
The Bush Administration's Dual Loyalties
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison1213.html
Even Israelis have written similar:
White Man's Burden:
http://tinyurl.com/8uf6
The Night After
The Easier the Victory, the Harder the Peace
By URI AVNERY
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery04102003.html
So What About Iran ?
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1191034415/
Stephen Green (whom I have also been in touch with) was brought in as a consultant for the FBI in the ongoing AIPAC espionage case which Bamford writes about in the additional section of the paperback version of his excellent 'A Pretext for War' book (Stephen is referenced in the index as he has written various books and articles to include the following 'Serving Two Flags' piece which appeared at counterpunch.org as well):
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/nc-green.html
Bamford also included mention of the 'A Clean Break' agenda in his 'A Pretext for War' book (see pages 261-269/318-321 from it which are posted via the following URL as well):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php
Must watch interview with Walt and Mearsheimer (note the mention of 'A Clean Break' at the end):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIPv298fdRY&mode=related&search
Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' turned Republican Congressman Walter 'Freedom Fries' Jones against the Iraq quagmire as the following article conveys:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/01/the_three_conversions_of_walter_b_jones.html
Bamford also wrote the 'Iran: The Next War' piece (http://tinyurl.com/s3tm3 ) for Rolling Stone magazine (the pro-Israel biased US press/media hasn't covered this case much either as I conveyed in the following call for Walter Pincus of the Washington Post):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rf16XjbOUs
Scott Ritter mentioned AIPAC's push for the coming war with Iran, but I haven't seen him interviewed either about AIPAC by Thom Hartmann:
Israel's influence of US policy & the Israeli lobby:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O125hGt9qt4&NR
Look at what Lawrence Wilkerson says about the pro-Israel lobby and the coming war with Iran possibly resulting in WW 3 in the following documentary about AIPAC which the Dutch producer can't even get to air in the US yet (again seeming to validate what Mearsheimer and Walt have conveyed as John Mearsheimer is interviewed in this documentary as well):
Dutch documentary about AIPAC:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17525.htm
BBC: The War Party (if only Americans could see such a program!):
http://tinyurl.com/yw2m8w
Look at what Eric Alterman mentions via the following URL:
"AIPAC is pushing us to war with Iran. AIPAC is the reason that no Democrats are coming out strongly against war with Iran. AIPAC's funding is extremely wealthy American Jews and AIPAC is pushing for war with Iran. So, when people go to Democratic politicians and they say "listen, I don't want you gettin' out in front and opposing war with Iran, particularly since you have national aspirations," they don't say it in the New York Times." - Eric Alterman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nch43wy8Zb8
Take a look at the Arnaud de Borchgrave (Arnaud is mentioned in the Mearsheimer & Walt book as one can look up 'Chris Matthews' in the index to find his mention) piece via the URL below about the Israeli general (General Tira) pushing for US to attack Iran next (such irked General Wesley Clark as the Matthew Yglesias article about such is mentioned in the Mearsheimer and Walt book if you look up Wesley Clark in the index as the Yglesias piece is included via the following URL as well):
D.C. Notes: Wes Clark is Steamed & BORCHGRAVE:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2007/01/09/d-c-notes-wes-clark-is-steamed-borchgrave.php
Jonathan Cook has this excellent piece as well (seems to fit with the 'A Clean Break' agenda to me)
An Opening Shot for War on Iran? Why Did Israel Attack Syria?
Why Did Israel Attack Syria?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18469.htm
Steve Clemons (of thewashingtonnote.com) has a transcript of how Cheney and Wurmser were conspiring to get Israel to attack Iran in order to draw a retaliatory attack against our forces in Iraq for US to go to war with Iran beyond what we are doing in Iran currently. Incredible.. Why doesn't Thom Hartmann address such? Keep in mind that Wurmser co-wrote the 'A Clean Break' as well.
'Newsweek' piece that mentioned Cheney and Wursmer (Steve Clemons mentioned too):
http://tinyurl.com/yu5frj
Karen Kwiatkowski mentioned how Israeli generals walked to JINSAN Feith's office at the Pentagon like they owned the place:
http://www.amconmag.com/2004_01_19/article1.html
Karen is also mentioned in 'The Lie Factory' piece linked via the following URL about JINSAN Feith:
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0213-20.htm
Sharon had even set up a parallel office to Feith's 'Office of Special Plans' in Israel:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html
More about the Mearsheimer & Walt book at the following URL (be sure to read the UPI article at the beginning there which mentions JINSA as well):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/03/17/u-s-middle-east-policy-motivated-by-pro-israel-lobby.php
Colin Powell even conveyed that the 'JINSA crowd' was in control of the Pentagon for Washington Post correspondent Karen DeYoung's bio book about him (simply look up 'JINSA/Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs' in the index) as Cheney has been associated with JINSA (and PNAC as well) as Fisk conveyed via http://tinyurl.com/2poj3o for the London Independent:
A War for Israel: Colin Powell Seems to Think So:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/10/08/a-war-for-israel-colin-powell-seems-to-think-so.php
Gorilla in the room is US support for Israel (see the 'What Motivated the 9/11 Hijackers?' video linked at the upper left of the following URL):
The Gorilla in the Room is US Support for Israel
http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2005/08/gorilla-in-room-is-us-support-for.html
SCANDAL: 9/11 Commissioners Bowed to Pressure to Suppress Main Motive for the 9/11 Attacks:
http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2006/09/reviews-of-without-precedent-inside.html
With kindest regards,
James
K & B Christison wrote:
Dear James,
Thank you very much for your message, and for taking note of our Counterpunch article. We were outraged when Thom Hartmann charged you with "hyping" the Mearsheimer-Walt book and bruskly cut you off during his August 31 radio show, which we watched as it was simulcast on C-SPAN. Your mere mention of the book hardly constituted "hyping," but it seems clear that Hartmann was terrified of allowing a book that's critical of the Israel lobby even to be mentioned. The book is a superb bit of research on an extremely important topic, and both Hartmann and Sanders demonstrated great irresponsibility in refusing to discuss it seriously. This is exactly the kind of imposed media silence about Israel and the lobby that Mearsheimer and Walt write about.
All the best,
Kathy & Bill Christison
----- Original Message -----
From: James Morris
To: kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net
Cc: mikedirx@clearchannel.com ; thom@thomhartmann.com ; louise@thomhartmann.com ; david@thomhartmann.com ; thomhartmann@clearchannel.com ; beckyg@asis.com ; counterpunch@counterpunch.org ; ed@edschultzshow.com ; james@edschultzshow.com ; rrhodes@airamericaradio.com ; wendyjoschultz@yahoo.com ; paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2007 1:31 PM
Subject: Re: See No Evil The Teflon Alliance with Israel
Dear Bill and Kathleen,
Thank you for addressing (in your article below which appeared at counterpunch.org yesterday) how Thom Hartmann cut off my listener call about the Mearsheimer & Walt book during his segment with Senator Bernie Sanders (which also aired on C-SPAN as a link for the broadcast is also included on the home page for thomhartmann.com) It was actually a follow-up call to when Thom Hartmann had cut me off about a month or so earlier (the following message thread addresses that prior call as I never even received a reply from Mr. Hartmann and Mike Dirx who was the operations manager at KPOJ as I assume that he still is):
http://thomhartmann.org/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/2051097651/m/5511034862
I have a Brit MP (who was a former UK defense minister) ready to address the Mearsheimer and Walt book in the House of Commons after Parliament returns on October 8th as I was trying to see if I could get Senator Sanders to do similar in the US Congress before Thom Hartmann abruptly cut me off yet again.
Thank you for your excellent piece that follows.
With kindest regards,
James Morris
September 28, 2007
See No Evil
The Teflon Alliance with Israel
http://counterpunch.org/christison09272007.html
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Last edited by Alpha on Tue Oct 02, 2007 10:39 am; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 10:35 am Post subject: |
| Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 11:48:50 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Morris"
Subject: Re: Lawrence Wilkerson mentioned (Progressive radio host Thom Hartmann cuts my calls about the pro-Israel lobby - Mearsheimer & Walt book)
To: Lawrence Wilkerson
And they seem to be doing similar to get US to attack Iran next (right in accordance with the 'JINSA crowd' again) - see the video link at the following URL:
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Seymour_Hersh_No_reason_we_might_1002.html
Hersh: Bush, Cheney 'really want' Iran war
10/02/2007 @ 7:49 am
Filed by Mike Aivaz and Nick Juliano
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says that the "only thing" he's hearing from inside sources is how much President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney "really want" to go to war with Iran, and the president's refusal to speak to Iran's leaders shows how little commitment he has to diplomacy.
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"He has no interest in talking to anyone he doesn't like," Hersh said of the president appearing on MSNBC's Countdown Monday. "If he would talk to them, I could say to you that there's some reason we may not go to war, but the only thing you hear from inside is that these guys really want to" attack Iran.
The following video is from MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, broadcast on October 1, 2007. (Story continues below)
In his latest article for the New Yorker, Hersh says the administration's rhetoric towards Iran shifted over the summer, from accusing the rogue regime of harboring nuclear-weapons ambition to blaming it for attacks on US troops in Iraq.
The investigative journalist told host Keith Olbermann that the "new gambit" was deliberate because administration officials believes it can build support among Americans and US allies for a series of surgical strikes aimed at cutting the flow of improvised explosive devices from Iran into Iraq. Blaming Iran for attacks in Iraq has more to do with laying the groundwork for an invasion than reflecting the realities of weapons supplies in Iraq, though, he said.
"You'd really think that every problem we have, every IED ... was given to the Iraqis by the Iranians, when in fact Iraq is a cesspool of weaponry, it has been forever," Hersh said.
Although he's unaware of any specific order to strike Iran, Hersh said he has no doubt that Bush is laying the groundwork to build support for an attack in the country, as he did leading up to the war in Iraq.
"The bottom line is, it's real easy, you hear the White House spokeswoman say, 'We're interested in a diplomatic track,'" Hersh said. "Well all he (Bush) has to do is start talking to them, and then you get diplomacy. He's not talking to them."
As the president's term draws to a close, Hersh said he was told that Bush's and Cheney's drive for war trumps their loyalty to their party and its future.
"Cheney and Bush don't give a rats ass about the future of the Republican Party," Hersh said, "when it comes to this."
Lawrence Wilkerson wrote:
Yes, I saw this -- unfortunately, there was no mention of the other part of my statement which was that, the Israelis not being idiots, once they sensed the way the wind was blowing, became supporters of the war with Iraq. Under the circumstances--a Vice President and President utterly committed to war--they would have been fools to act otherwise. lw
---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2007 16:00:09 -0700 (PDT)
>From: James Morris
>Subject: Lawrence Wilkerson mentioned (Progressive radio host Thom Hartmann cuts my calls about the pro-Israel lobby - Mearsheimer & Walt book)
>To: Steve Clemons , Flynt Leverett
>Cc: Lawrence Wilkerson,
>
> Progressive radio host Thom Hartmann cuts off calls
> about the pro-Israel lobby
> (Mearsheimer & Walt book)
>
> September 28, 2007
> See No Evil
> The Teflon Alliance with Israel
> http://counterpunch.org/christison09272007.html
> By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Last edited by Alpha on Tue Oct 02, 2007 10:48 pm; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 7:16 pm Post subject: |
| From: "Henry Norr"
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 11:17:34 -0700
Subject: Sy Hersh: "Come on, let's not kid about it."
Below is the transcript of the last part of an interview Amy Goodman did this morning on Democracy Now with Seymour Hersh. The whole interview is interesting - see http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/1438251 - but this final segment is extraordinary in its candor. I wonder when Hersh will be able to say stuff like this in the New Yorker!
As a California Jew, I do have one gripe: when he mentions "Jewish money from New York," he's showing his age - nowadays the Dems also collect huge amounts of Jewish money from Hollywood and Silicon Valley, too.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy Hersh, I wanted to switch gears for the last question, and this has to do with it not just being Republicans who are sounding a drumbeat for war. The three leading Democratic presidential candidates -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards -- have all declared no options off the table. This is a clip from last week's Democratic debate. It was the day the Senate approved a controversial resolution calling on the State Department to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. At the debate, Democratic presidential hopeful Mike Gravel bitterly criticized Hillary Clinton for voting in favor.
MIKE GRAVEL: This is fantasy land. We're talking about ending the war. My god, we're just starting a war right today. There was a vote in the Senate today. Joe Lieberman, who authored the Iraq resolution, has authored another resolution, and it is essentially a fig leaf to let George Bush go to war with Iran. And I want to congratulate Biden for voting against it, Dodd for voting against it, and I'm ashamed of you, Hillary, for voting for it. You're not going to get another shot at this, because what's happened, if this war ensues, we invade, and they're looking for an excuse to do it. And Obama was not even there to vote.
TIM RUSSERT: Senator Clinton, I want to give you a chance to respond.
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: [laughter]
AMY GOODMAN: That was Hillary Clinton laughing. Fifteen seconds, Seymour Hersh. Your response?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Money. A lot of the Jewish money from New York. Come on, let's not kid about it. A significant percentage of Jewish money, and many leading American Jews support the Israeli position that Iran is an existential threat. And I think it's as simple as that. When you're from New York and from New York City, you take the view of -- right now, when you're running a campaign, you follow that line. And there's no other explanation for it, because she's smart enough to know the downside.
AMY GOODMAN: And Obama and Edwards?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I -- you know, it's shocking. It's really surprising and shocking, but there we are. That's American politics circa 2007.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, thank you very much for being with us, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist. His piece in the New Yorker is called "Shifting Targets: The Administration' s Plan for Iran."
------------ --------- --------- --------- ------
Henry Norr
henry@norr.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 10:49 pm Post subject: |
| Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 20:01:17 +1000
From: "Peter Myers" <myers@cyberone.com.au>
To: "clem clarke" <oscarptyltd@ozemail.com.au>
Subject: Roberts: Bush's wars are about hegemony; oil companies did not write "Project for New American Century"
(1) Roberts: Bush's wars are about hegemony; oil companies did not
write
"Project for New American Century"
(2) Newsweek Senior Editor Says 'Israeli Lobby' Is Shaping U.S. Policy
Toward Iran
(3) Israel “opposed Iraq war”; Greenspan and Wilkerson let Israel
off the hook
(4) Errant Nukes Over America; a Mystery in Syria, by Conn Hallinan
(1) Roberts: Bush's wars are about hegemony; oil companies did not
write
"Project for New American Century"
From: "Kristoffer Larsson" <kristoffer.larsson@sobernet.nu> Date: Sun,
30 Sep 2007 07:21:06 +0200
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09202007.html
September 20, 2007
Greenspan and the Economy of Greed
As the Empire Slips
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's memoir has put him in the news
these last few days. He has upset Republicans with his comments on
various presidents, with George W. Bush getting the brickbats and
Clinton the praise, and by saying that Bush's invasion of Iraq was
about
oil, not weapons of mass destruction.
Opponents of Bush's wars welcomed Greenspan's statement, as it strips
the moral pretext away from Bush's aggression, leaving naked greed
unmasked.
It is certainly the case that Iraq was not invaded because of WMD,
which
the Bush administration knew did not exist. But the oil pretext is also
phony. The US could have purchased a lot of oil for the trillion
dollars
that the Iraq invasion has already cost in out-of-pocket expenses and
already incurred future expenses.
Moreover, Bush's invasion of Iraq, by worsening the US deficit and
causing additional US reliance on foreign loans, has undermined the US
dollar's role as reserve currency, thus threatening America's ability
to
pay for its imports. Greenspan himself said that the US dollar "doesn't
have all that much of an advantage" and could be replaced by the Euro
as
the reserve currency. By the end of last year, Greenspan said, foreign
central banks already held 25 percent of their reserves in Euros and 9
percent in other foreign currencies. The dollar's role has shrunk to 66
percent.
If the dollar loses its reserve currency status, the US would magically
have to move from an $800 billion trade deficit to a trade surplus so
that the US could earn enough Euros to pay for its imports of oil and
manufactured goods.
Bush's wars are about American hegemony, not oil. The oil companies did
not write the neoconservatives' "Project for a New American Century,"
which calls for US/Israeli hegemony over the entire Middle East, a
hegemony that would conveniently remove obstacles to Israeli
territorial
expansion.
The oil industry asserted its influence after the invasion. In his
book,
Armed Madhouse, BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast documents that
the US oil industry's interest in Middle Eastern oil is very different
from grabbing the oil. Palast shows that the American oil companies'
interests coincide with OPEC's. The oil companies want a controlled
flow
of oil that results in steady and high prices. Consequently, the US oil
industry blocked the neoconservative plan, hatched at the Heritage
Foundation and aimed at Saudi Arabia, to use Iraqi oil to bust up OPEC.
Saddam got in trouble because one moment he would cut production to
support the Palestinians and the next moment he would pump the maximum
allowed. Up and down movements in prices are destabilizing events for
the oil industry. Palast reports that a Council on Foreign Relations
report concludes: Saddam is a "destabilizing influence ... to the flow
of oil to international markets from the Middle East."
The most notable aspect of Greenspan's memoir is his unconcern with
America's loss of manufacturing. Instead of a problem, Greenspan simply
sees a beneficial shift in jobs from "old" manufacturing (steel, cars,
and textiles) to "new" manufacturing such as computers and
telecommunications. This shows a remarkable ignorance of statistical
data on the part of a Federal Reserve Chairman renowned for his command
over numbers and a complete lack of grasp of offshoring.
The incentive to offshore US jobs has nothing to do with "old" and
"new"
economy. Corporations offshore their production, because they can more
cheaply produce abroad what they sell to Americans. When corporations
bring their offshored production to the US to sell, the goods count as
imports.
Had Greenspan bothered to look at US balance of trade data, he would
have discovered that in 2006, the last full year of data, the US
exported $47,580,000,000 in computers and imported $101,347,000,000 in
computers for a trade deficit in computers of $53,767,000,000. In
telecommunications equipment the US exported $28,322,000,000 and
imported $40,250,000,000 for a trade deficit in telecommunications
equipment of $11,883,000,000.
Greenspan probably has given offshoring no serious thought, because
like
most economists he mistakenly believes that offshoring is free trade
and
learned in economic courses decades ago before the advent of offshoring
that free trade can do no harm.
For most of the 21st century I have been pointing out that offshoring
is
not trade, free or otherwise. It is labor arbitrage. By replacing US
labor with foreign labor in the production of goods and services for US
markets, US firms are destroying the ladders of upward mobility in the
US. So far economists have preferred their delusions to the facts.
It is becoming more difficult for economists to clutch to their bosoms
the delusion that offshoring is free trade. Ralph Gomory, the
distinguished mathematician and co-author with William Baumol, past
president of the American Economics Association, of Global Trade and
Conflicting National Interests, the most important work in trade theory
in 200 years, has entered the public debate.
In an interview with Manufacturing & Technology News (September 17),
Gomory confirms that there is no basis in economic theory for claiming
that it is good to tear down our own productive capability and to
rebuild it in a foreign country. It is not free trade when a company
relocates its manufacturing abroad.
Gomory says that economists and policymakers "still are treating
companies as if they represent the country, and they do not." Companies
are no longer bound to the interests of their home countries, because
the link has been decoupled between the profit motive and a country's
welfare. Economists, Gomory points out, are not acknowledging the
implications of this decoupling for economic theory.
A country that offshores its own production is unable to balance its
trade. Americans are able to consume more than they produce only
because
the dollar is the world reserve currency. However, the dollar's reserve
currency status is eroded by the debts associated with continual trade
and budget deficits.
The US is on a path to economic Armageddon. Shorn of industry,
dependent
on offshored manufactured goods and services, and deprived of the
dollar
as reserve currency, the US will become a third world country. Gomery
notes that it would be very difficult-perhaps impossible-for the US to
re-acquire the manufacturing capability that it gave away to other
countries.
It is a mystery how a people, whose economic policy is turning them
into
a third world country with its university graduates working as
waitresses, bartenders, and driving cabs, can regard themselves as a
hegemonic power even as they build up war debts that are further
undermining their ability to pay their import bills.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the
Reagan
administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal
editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is
coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at:
PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
(2) Newsweek Senior Editor Says 'Israeli Lobby' Is Shaping U.S. Policy
Toward Iran
From: "justicequest2000" <justicequest2000@yahoo.com> Date: Thu, 27 Sep
2007 14:22:23 -0000
Newsweek Senior Editor Says 'Israeli Lobby' Is Shaping U.S. Policy
Toward Iran:
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2007/09/newsweek-senior.html
Mondoweiss
September 27, 2007
Newsweek Senior Editor Says 'Israeli Lobby' Is Shaping U.S. Policy
Toward Iran
The greatest achievement so far of Walt & Mearsheimer is that they have
knocked down a wall in the American discourse: They have licensed ideas
and statements that would have been impossible to imagine even a month
ago.
On Monday at Hopkins's SAIS in D.C., there was a forum for Trita
Parsi's
fabulous book on the Iran/Israel/U.S. triangle, Treacherous Alliance:
The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States. Newsweek
Senior Editor Michael Hirsh, the magazine's former foreign editor, was
one of the respondents, and in the Q-and-A, a Georgetown grad student
asked why the U.S. was not negotiating with Iran re nukes, and whether
this reflected pressure from the Israelis. Hirsh answered that the
reason was "entirely ideological." The Bush Administration still
adheres
to the "neocon position... essentially, that by talking to a regime you
legitimize it."
"As I said earlier, with North Korea, the only reason they changed
their
tune a little bit--'Kim Jong Il is evil'--is that they simply got too
distracted by [the ongoing problems in] Iraq. And North Korea is not
important enough. On Iran, considerations of the Israeli lobby and
Israel do come into play to some degree, I don't know how much... But
they do. It is seen as a different animal..."
I don't think Hirsh would have used the word "lobby"
pre-Walt/Mearsheimer. Wow. Isn't it about time we talked about this,
when we are threatening to bomb Iran? Will Hirsh put W&M on the cover
of
Newsweek?
Posted at 05:11 AM in Books, Journalism, U.S. Policy in the Mideast |
Permalink
(3) Israel “opposed Iraq war”; Greenspan and Wilkerson let Israel
off
the hook
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2007 16:05:11 -0700 (PDT) From: James Morris
<justicequest2000@yahoo.com>
See No Evil
The Teflon Alliance with Israel
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
September 28, 2007
http://counterpunch.org/christison09272007.html
Two recent offhand comments, both widely publicized, have seriously
undermined whatever progress might have been made in exposing the fact
that the Iraq war was initiated at least in large part to guarantee
Israel's safety and regional dominance in the Middle East.
In late August, Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's chief
of staff when he was secretary of state, told Gareth Porter of Inter
Press Service that, when Israel first got wind of U.S. planning for a
war against Iraq, a wide range of Israelis, including political and
intelligence officials, began warning against such a war. "Israelis
were
telling us Iraq is not the enemy -- Iran is the enemy," Wilkerson said.
Israeli warnings against an attack on Iraq were "pervasive" in Israeli
communications with the administration during early 2002, according to
Wilkerson.
This story garnered a fair amount of publicity and in at least one
instance was used by a radio talk show host to shut off discussion of
the John Mearsheimer-Stephen Walt book on the influence of the Israel
lobby, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Just a few days after
the Wilkerson story came out and also only days after release of the
Mearsheimer-Walt book, a caller to the Thom Hartmann radio program
commended the book, urged Hartmann and his guest at the time, Senator
Bernie Sanders, to read it, and asked Sanders to address the issue of
Israel's and the lobby's support for the Iraq war. Hartmann shut the
caller off with a comment that "we don't hype books on this program"
(after having just allowed another caller to hype another book).
Sanders
then proceeded to denounce "conspiracy theories" such as the notion
that
Israel had anything to do with the war, and Hartmann finished off with
a
remark that, "besides," a report just came out --obviously meaning the
Wilkerson story -- that demonstrates there was no Israeli link to the
war.
In fact, the Wilkerson report does not refute the notion of an Israeli
link; he addresses only Israeli-U.S. contacts in early 2002, whereas by
later in 2002 and 2003 the evidence is overwhelming that Israel and
particularly the Israel lobby were pushing hard for the war. But this
is
the way myths are born: Hartmann and Sanders were able to use perhaps
90
seconds on a nationally broadcast radio program to tout an incomplete
report reinforcing their own misconceptions and to dismiss a thoroughly
researched book disproving those misconceptions. Never again, mostly
likely, will they or any of the choir they were broadcasting to, who do
not want to have to deal with Israel anyway, even think about the
issue.
The Wilkerson assertions were followed in mid-September by the highly
publicized single-sentence statement by former Federal Reserve chairman
Alan Greenspan in his just-released memoir, The Age of Turbulence, that
"it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the
Iraq war is largely about oil." When the media pounced on this
statement, which stands virtually alone and unelaborated in a 500-page
book, Greenspan gave several interviews supposedly intended to clarify
his statement. To AP he said -- in an obvious sop to the administration
and the right, which clearly do not want to own up to such a crass
motivation for the war as oil -- that he had not intended to imply that
oil was "the administration's motive. I'm just saying that if somebody
asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was
essential" for economic reasons. He had come to fear, he explained,
that
"Saddam, looking over his 30-year history, very clearly was giving
evidence of moving towards controlling the Straits [sic] of Hormuz,
where there are 17, 18, 19 million barrels a day" passing through. The
war was not an oil grab, Greenspan said, but "taking Saddam out was
essential" because it assured the continued smooth operation of the oil
market.
A week later, on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!," Greenspan, repeating
that he had been watching Saddam Hussein for 30 years, said that he had
feared that Saddam would acquire a nuclear weapon, that this would give
him control over the Strait of Hormuz, and that he therefore had to be
removed. Greenspan said he believed the "size of the threat" that
Saddam
posed "was scary" because "he could have essentially also shut down a
significant part of economic activity throughout the world."
The logic here is really quite strange and indicates at least that
whatever economic genius Greenspan possesses does not extend to
military
strategizing or political analysis. One wonders, for instance, how
exactly Saddam could have controlled the Strait of Hormuz with a
nuclear
or any other type of weapon when Iraq does not border this key waterway
at the opening of the Persian Gulf and has no navy of any significance.
One also wonders why Saddam's future possession of a nuclear weapon was
more worrisome than the likelihood that Iran, which does have a navy
and
does geographically control the strait, might close it. Greenspan's
statements further raise the question of why, given his claimed
knowledge of Saddam's "30-year history" and given the interest of
earlier administrations in Iraq's nuclear ambitions, he began to feel
Saddam's removal was "essential" only when the Bush administration
began
planning for war. And none of what Greenspan said explained why Iraq
would have shut down its economy by blocking its own oil exports.
Greenspan's fumbling explanations seem at a minimum to be in the nature
of meandering remarks by a man concentrated on economics with little
political acumen, who went along with the war because of its presumed
benefits in safeguarding oil markets but with no concern about the
broader consequences of the war and little or no interest in its
political motivations or its geostrategic implications beyond what he
saw as its global economic goal.
It remains open to question whether Greenspan in addition intended to
divert attention from the clear evidence that Israel and its U.S.
supporters, both among Jewish American organizations and among neocon
policymakers inside the administration, pushed hard for the war, among
other reasons to guarantee Israel's security in the Middle East and its
regional domination. But whatever his intent, this has been the effect
of his concentration on oil. It reinforces the assumptions of those,
primarily on the left, who have always contended that the war was "all
about oil," and only about oil. The left's refusal to acknowledge that
a
desire to secure Israel in the region had anything to do with the Bush
neocons' war planning is difficult to fathom, since many on the left
are
notable critics of Israeli policy. But, again, whatever their intent in
quashing discussion of the Israeli link, the effect has been to
contribute to silencing domestic debate on a critical U.S. policy
issue.
Neither is it clear in Wilkerson's case whether he intended, by
discussing Israeli representations against going after Iraq, to divert
attention from Israel's actual interest in Iraq. But once again,
diverting and silencing discussion has been the effect of his brief
remarks.
Without closer examination, both Greenspan's and Wilkerson's statements
seem to let Israel and its U.S. lobbyists off the hook, something that
in differing ways serves the interests of Israel and the lobby, of the
right in the U.S., and of the left. Israel's U.S. supporters -- fearful
that Jews will be blamed for leading the U.S. into the debacle that
Iraq
has become and fearful of reviving old anti-Semitic canards about Jews
exerting undue power -- roundly deny any Israeli connection to the war.
Israel itself, although not as fearful as its American acolytes of
anti-Semitism, has remained silent, obviously not affirming a role in
instigating the war and letting its supporters do the denying. The U.S.
political right does not, of course, want to acknowledge that the
relationship with Israel has grown so close that the U.S. would
actually
go to war at the behest of or for the benefit of Israel. Nor does it
want to own up to any of the other actual motivations for the war --
neither, as previously noted, to a motivation like oil nor to a baldly
imperial motivation promising (and already providing) great profits for
the joint U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex.
The left, on the other hand, very much wants to believe that oil, and
perhaps secondarily the imperial drive, constituted the only
motivations, and that Israel played no role at all. The left is as
skittish as anyone, and perhaps more so than anyone else, about being
seen to criticize Israel except occasionally regarding the Israeli
occupation of Palestinian territories. It is much more comfortable for
the left to believe that the U.S. is evil and Israel is at worst a
hapless tool of Washington. The thought that the tail might wag the dog
is rarely taken seriously.
So the weight of public discourse since before the Iraq war was
launched
has been that any Israeli role in inspiring or pushing for it is at
best
a silly invention and at worst a vile anti-Jewish lie, and both the
Wilkerson and the Greenspan statements play into this impression. Until
these statements, the knowledge of an Israeli connection had begun to
gain some greater currency thanks to a few valiant souls who have dared
raise the subject, including people like Chris Hedges, Scott Ritter
and,
most recently, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. In July, Hedges wrote
a hard-hitting article for Truthdig, subsequently widely circulated,
saying that the war "was strongly shaped by the notion that what is
good
for Israel is good for the United States," and Israel and its neocon
supporters wanted Iraq neutralized. Hedges also acknowledged a "desire
for American control of oil" as a major driver of the war, along with
"the belief that Washington could build puppet states in the region."
Scott Ritter, who served as a weapons inspector in Iraq during the
1990s, paints a somewhat more complex picture in his 2006 book
Targeting
Iran. He makes it clear, supporting Wilkerson's statement, that over
the
years of weapons inspections, Israel had come to regard Iraq as a
diminishing threat (unlike Greenspan, apparently), whereas Iran was
increasingly viewed as a new looming danger. By August 2002, according
to Ritter, when the Israelis passed intelligence about the threat from
Iran to the Bush administration, "there was barely a reaction in
Washington" because "all eyes were on Baghdad, not Tehran." But
Israel's
Ariel Sharon was, in Ritter's words, "quick to catch on," and in those
last several months of 2002 -- the critical months of war planning,
coming well after the early 2002 period that Wilkerson was discussing
--
Israel jumped on the Iraq war bandwagon, publicly and privately, and
began to press for and justify a U.S. invasion. Sharon assigned a
senior
Israeli military intelligence official to give the U.S. Israeli
intelligence assessments on Iraqi WMD activity, according to Ritter,
and
at the same time, with an eye to later broadening the conflict to Iran
and beyond, Israeli intelligence "pressed home to [the U.S.] the notion
that the upcoming U.S. invasion of Iraq must serve as a springboard for
a larger transformation within the Middle East, one that swept away not
only Saddam Hussein, but also anti-Israeli elements in Syria,
Palestine,
and, of course, Iran."
This dovetails precisely with the neocon agenda, which was ultimately
the operative ingredient in determining whether there would be war or
not. This agenda was laid out publicly in the mid-1990s in the now
infamous "Clean Break" paper, written in Israel for then-Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu by a group of Israelis and Americans, three of whom
later entered the Bush administration and began planning for the attack
on Iraq. The principal elements of the paper involved overturning the
Palestinian-Israeli peace process to save Israel from having to make
any
territorial concessions and then sparking massive changes, through
force
if necessary, in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, leading to an era of peace in
which Israel and the U.S. jointly dominated a transformed and
intimidated Middle East.
In their book on the lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt provide overwhelming
evidence for an Israeli link to the war that completely undermines the
public myths revived by Wilkerson's and Greenspan's statements, and
they
build a convincing case against the notion that the war was "all about
oil." They are the first who have done the extensive research necessary
to bring the mountain of evidence together.
The two authors devote more than 30 pages and a remarkable 175
footnotes
to constructing an irrefutable case for an Israeli role in helping
plan,
and a large lobby role in pressing for, the war. Although they do not
claim that the effort to guarantee Israeli security was the sole reason
for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they demonstrate clearly -- citing
public
and privates statements by Israeli military and political officials,
informed commentary in both Israel and the U.S., and analysis by
foreign
policy experts -- that "Israeli leaders, neoconservatives, and the Bush
administration all saw war with Iraq as the first step in an ambitious
campaign to remake the Middle East" in order to "make it a more
friendly
environment for America and Israel." Israel and the lobby "played
crucial roles in making that war happen." Without the lobby and
particularly the core of neocon policymakers inside government and
neocon commentators and think-tank analysts on the sidelines,
Mearsheimer and Walt conclude bluntly, "the war would almost certainly
not have occurred" and "America would probably not be in Iraq today."
On the question of oil as a principal driver in the war, the authors
demonstrate that in fact, although the oil industry was clearly happy
to
obtain lucrative concessions in post-Saddam Iraq, the argument that the
industry pushed for the war in order to enhance profits is
counter-intuitive. The disadvantages to the industry of turmoil in the
region are evident. Energy companies, they make clear, do not like wars
in oil-rich areas. Nor do they like such other recent "staples of U.S.
Middle East policy" as sanctions and regime change, because each of
these actions "threatens access to oil and gas reserves and thus [the
oil companies'] ability to make money." Mearsheimer and Walt point out
that Vice President Cheney opposed sanctions on Iran while he was
president of Halliburton in the mid-1990s and complained about the
"sanctions happy" policies of the U.S. Instability is rarely in the
interests of the oil companies. In the end, the authors conclude, the
"wealthy Arab governments and the oil lobby exert much less influence
on
U.S. foreign policy than the Israel lobby does, because oil interests
have less need to skew foreign policy in the directions they favor and
they do not have the same leverage."
It is fair to ask why it matters whether the U.S. went to war solely
for
oil, or solely for Israel, or out of an imperial drive -- or, as is
much
more likely the case, for some combination of these motivations. It
matters, most fundamentally, because, if there is ever to be a course
correction and a return to some kind of policy sanity that will prevent
similar future disasters, it is necessary to understand how this
disaster arose in the first place. All of these motivations, together
and separately, are unacceptable reasons for launching an unprovoked
aggression against another sovereign nation, for killing up to a
million
of its innocent citizens, and for fostering chaos throughout the
region.
Global sanity and global security demand that the U.S. not invade other
countries to obtain control over their natural resources or gain huge
corporate profits through oil concessions. Global sanity and security
also demand that the U.S. cease trying to expand its imperial reach.
And, perhaps most important, it is absolutely vital that the U.S. not
so
subordinate what should be its true interests to those of another
nation
that it can be led into wars anywhere, but particularly in the most
sensitive area of the world, at the behest or for the benefit of
Israel.
If going to war to secure huge profits for oil companies is obscene,
how
much more obscene is going to war for the benefit of a foreign power
because we are no longer able to distinguish our interests from theirs?
It has become almost trite to quote George Washington's farewell speech
urging moderation in foreign attachments, but his injunctions 200 years
ago have an eerie applicability to the U.S. relationship with Israel
today. Warning against "a passionate attachment of one nation for
another," Washington observed that this creates "a variety of evils.
Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an
imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest
exists,
and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former
into
a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate
inducement or justification."
The U.S. alliance with Israel has unquestionably led to a gross
distortion of U.S. policy in exactly the way in which Washington
predicted, creating the illusion of a common interest where none exists
and injecting Israel's enmities into the U.S. with little or no
justification. If the U.S. cannot distinguish its own interests from
those of Israel and Israel's lobby, then it simply cannot act, as it
should, purely in its own interest. Those who minimize the role of the
Israel lobby in influencing U.S. policy choices, and who refuse or fail
to recognize the part Israel and the lobby have played in leading the
U.S. into disastrous foreign adventures, pose an incalculable danger to
the U.S., for a failure to recognize the reason for a misguided policy
will inevitably doom us to repeat it.
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on
Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of
Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. She can be reached at
<mailto:kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net>kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net.
Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a
National Intelligence officer and as director of the CIA's Office of
Regional and Political Analysis.
They can be reached at kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net
(4) Errant Nukes Over America; a Mystery in Syria, by Conn Hallinan
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2007 09:00:50 -0400 From: "Sadanand, Nanjundiah
(Physics Earth Sciences)" <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu>
Column: Dispatches from the Edge
Errant Nukes Over America; a Mystery in Syria
By Conn Hallinan
09-28-07
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?storyID=28105
“Loose nukes sink…” well, just about anything.
The official story is that on Aug. 30, the U.S. Air Force (AF)
“mistakenly” loaded six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on a B-52 at
Minot, North Dakota and flew them to Barksdale, Louisiana for
decommissioning. The mistake was discovered and the munitions officer
at
Minot was suspended pending an investigation.
Except the story doesn’t make any sense and it certainly didn’t
happen
the way the AF says it did. At least according to the hundreds of
current and retired military personal and non-commissioned officers
(NCOs) with nuclear experience who are writing letters to the Army
Times
and military websites essentially charging that the AF is lying.
“Ain’t no way in hell that anybody in the U.S. military could do
anything ‘inadvertently’ with a nuke,” writes a retired NCO who
worked
with nuclear weapons.
Another veteran with lots of hands-on experience says, “the
safeguards
involved in nuclear munitions in all the armed forces are incredibly
complex,” and when nuclear weapons are involved, “all kinds of red
lights go off in everyone’s systems.” The military is so up-tight
about
nuclear weapons procedures, the writer says, that in one incident an
NCO
who violated a “no go” area was fatally bayoneted by a guard.
There are any numbers of things that don’t make sense about the
“official” version.
For one thing, when nuclear weapons are moved by air, it is in a
special
C-130s designed to prevent radiation leakage in case of a crash. But in
the Aug. 6 event, the missiles were attached to the wings of the B-52,
which as one wag commented was like “shipping ammunition in a gun.”
Secondly, if the nukes were going to be decommissioned, they would have
been sent to Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. From there the
warheads would have been transferred to the Pantex facility in
Amarillo,
Texas for dismantling. Barksdale, in contrast, is one the main staging
bases for the Middle East.
Some commentators argue that the only way the operation could have
avoided the “red lights” was by leap frogging the normal chain of
command. Only the National Security Agency or Vice-President Dick
Cheney’s office has that kind of juice. In May 2001, Cheney was
placed
in charge of “all federal programs dealing with weapons of mass
destruction.”
One theory is that Cheney was trying to ship nukes to the Middle East
in
preparation for a strike on Iran. But transporting nukes to the Middle
East would be like sending coals to Newcastle: U.S. forces in the
theater are bristling with nuclear weapons.
A former officer writes that it might even have been a
“cost-cutting”
maneuver—albeit a dumb one—to save money by putting the nukes on a
regular flight rather than using the expensive, specially designed
C-130.
Some have even suggested that it was a plot by Christian evangelicals
trying to bring on the apocalypse. As silly as that might sound, a 2006
study for the U.S. War College by Col. William Millonig concluded that
“conservative Christian and Republican values have affected the
military’s decision making and policy recommendations.” and warned
that
“America’s strategic thinkers, both military and civilian, must be
aware
of this and its potential implications on policy formulation.”
So the explanations for the errant nukes range from “Grand
Conspiracy,”
penny pinching, to new Testament crazies. Major incompetence is a
strong
candidate as well.
And who blew the whistle? One military source says that if the Army
Times ran the story, it was because someone very high up the command
chain told them to do it. According to the source, the only way the
story could have come out is if “the dime dropper wore at least three
stars, if not four.”
What gets lost in all this is that the Advanced Cruise Missile packs a
W-80 warhead with an explosive power of from five to 150 kilotons. The
atomic bomb that flattened Hiroshima and killed 220,000 people
—100,000
of them in a millisecond — was 13 kilotons. Schelpping these things
around by “mistake” is something that Congress, not the Air Force,
needs
to investigate. Identifying who authorized the operation would go a
long
way toward finding out how six nuclear weapons went AWOL. .
Maybe the media should drop OJ and start asking some questions?
“Loose warplanes…” well, it is not clear exactly what those
Israeli jets
that violated Syrian airspace Sept. 6 were up to, except that they
weren’t there for the reasons the U.S. State Department is claiming.
The aircraft, according to Syrian Foreign Minister, Walid Muallem,
dropped “bombs” in Syria’s arid northern plains and “fuel
tanks” in
Turkey. The Turks called the incident “unacceptable.”
The Israelis are mum.
On Sept. 11, unnamed “officials” in the Bush Administration told
the New
York Times that the Israelis bombed a “weapons cache” that Syria
was
sending to Hezbollah in Lebanon. But that story had no legs. The
bombing—if there was one—took place on the Turkish-Syrian boundary,
a
long way from Lebanon’s northern border. On top of which, Hezbollah
is
in south Lebanon.
Three days later, Andrew Semmel, the acting deputy secretary of state
for nuclear nonproliferation policy, trotted out another explanation:
Israel bombed a covert nuclear program set up by the North Koreans.
According to Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and a
senior
fellow at the New American Foundation, neoconservatives in the Bush
Administration are trying to sabotage talks with North Korea and any
detente with Syria. “They [neocons] want to torpedo the North Korea
deal” and “make sure there is no cooperation in Syria.”
And right on cue, former UN Ambassador and neocon stalwart John Bolton
was writing in the Wall Street Journal that “Iran, Syria, and others
might be ‘safe havens’ for North Korea’s nuclear-weapons
development, or
may already have benefited from it.” He then told the New York Times
that continued talks with North Korea over ending its nuclear weapons
program “would be a big mistake.”
Chiming in was U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, ranking Republican on the
House Foreign Affairs Committee, who wrote in the New York Sun,
“Damascus has been developing its nuclear facilities,” and warning,
“Syria poses a growing threat that the U.S. must confront.”
But when the international Atomic Energy Agency investigated Syria in
2004, it found no evidence of a nuclear program.
Joseph Cirincione, director for nuclear policy at the Center for
American Progress, says “The story nonsense.” He says the 40-year
old
Syrian nuclear program “is too basic to support any weapons
capability.
Universities have larger programs than Syria.”
Another possibility is that the Israelis are preparing to whack Iran.
Northern Syria is one of Israel’s corridors into Iran (the other is
through Jordan and Saudi Arabia). According to Time, the Israeli
incursion was designed to test Syria’s Russian made Pantsyr air
defense
system, a mixture of missiles and 30 mm cannons that is supposedly
immune to jamming. According to Time, Iran is also deploying the
Pantsyr
around its nuclear facilities.
The corridor explanation makes some sense, probing the Pantsyr does
not.
The latter is a short-range tactical system and any bombing of Iranian
targets will be from high altitude using satellite-guided munitions.
Even Syria’s new SA-24 missile system can only reach 22,000 feet, not
high enough to seriously bother U.S. or Israeli planes.
So, what were those warplanes up to? Mapping radar sites? Spoiling for
a
fight? Humiliating the Syrians?
Dark armies are moving by night, with potential catastrophe at every
turn. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2007 12:53 pm Post subject: |
| Another interesting aspect to Virginia Raines' truth distortion for Israel's benefit.. I had been in touch with Wilkerson as he mentioned that Gareth Porter didn't convey the entire story in that Israel was indeed pushing for war with Iran (which is why we will be going to war with Iran for Israel as well) but that they then pushed hard for Iraq when they realized that the (Israel first) JINSA/PNAC/AEI Neocons were pushing so hard for it. Such is why Sharon set up a parallel Office of Special Plans as the following article conveys (Virginia is full blown truth distorting propagandist for Israel):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html
Now the not so covert Zionist operative really shows her spots using that Gareth Porter piece. Here is the truth behind it (can listen to my call for the Christisons as they wrote the piece for Counterpunch.org linked in the comment section there about how progressive talk radio host Thom Hartmann cut off my call about the Mearsheimer/Walt book as he used the same truth distortion that Virginia uses below):
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2007/10/kathleen-and-bill-christison-on-phone.html
Here is the article by the Christisons which addresses the article which Virginia uses to truth distort yet again for Israel below:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2007/09/30/the-teflon-alliance-with-israel.php
-- Original Message -----
From: VCole Svq
To: rainesco@earthlink.net ; James Morris ; German Vilella Coll ; Nick Philippov ; Foppe Dykstra ; Donald Jones ; francisco.soto@altgbs.com ; 'Anthony Tersch' ; ARMONIAARTES@aol.com ; '&Gilbert Wells,Esq' ; 'Dr. José G. Quiñones' ; 'Nick Philippov' ; 'PR-Juan Ramon Fernandez' ; 'Victor Abraham Jr' ; 'Victoria Kirk' ; 'Vile - J.Enrique Vilella Canino'
Cc: Roberta Holler ; Lori Tropiano ; T. David Warren ; Richard Carlson ; Alan Blau ; Alonzo Bain Shattuck ; Amy and Walter Scheyett ; HNaranjo@aol.com ; paul Kendall ; Pedro M. Roman ; Dr.Jose Quinones Segarra ; Steve Roy Silva ; Dennis Nicholas ; Donald Holmes ; Robert L.Gore ; LTFIRE3@aol.com ; Patrick Reddy ; Sandy Cuza
Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2007 12:31 PM
Subject: Re: Ron Paul and his lying supporters
BThat´s not the way I remember it. Israel was insisting that their intelligence knew there were WMD in Iraq and that we, the US, should indeed attack. AIPAC said the very same thing.
Both are insisting that Iran too has WMD and that we should attack.
I do hope that you are right and that there is no attack on Iran - that would be bad for everyone.
Your pal,
Val
----- Original Message -----
From: Virginia Raines
To: VCole Svq ;
Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2007 2:59 AM
Subject: Ron Paul and his lying supporters
A. There will be no war against Iran.
B. ISRAEL WARNED BUSH NOT TO ENGAGE A WAR AGAINST IRAQ, AND IF THE US WENT AHEAD, CERTAINLY NOT TO OCCUPY IRAQ.
THE WAR AGAINST IRAQ WAS AGAINST ISRAEL'S POSITION ON THE REGION. THE IRAQ WAR WAS AND IS NOT "WAR FOR ISRAEL'>
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IH30Ak04.html
Aug 30, 2007
Israel urged US to attack Iran - not Iraq
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Israeli officials warned the George W Bush administration that an invasion of Iraq would be destabilizing to the region and urged the United States instead to target Iran as the primary enemy, according to former Bush administration official Lawrence Wilkerson.
Wilkerson, then a member of the US State Department's policy planning staff and later chief of staff for secretary of state Colin Powell, recalled in an interview that the Israelis reacted immediately to indications that the Bush administration was thinking of war against Iraq. After the Israeli government picked up the first signs of that intention, said Wilkerson, "The Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy - Iran is the enemy."
Wilkerson describes the Israeli message to the Bush administration in early 2002 as being, "If you are going to destabilize the balance of power, do it against the main enemy."
The warning against an invasion of Iraq was "pervasive" in Israeli communications with the US administration, Wilkerson recalled. It was conveyed to the administration by a wide range of Israeli sources, including political figures, intelligence, and private citizens.
Wilkerson noted that the main point of their communications was not that the US should immediately attack Iran, but that "it should not be distracted by Iraq and Saddam Hussein" from a focus on the threat from Iran.
The Israeli advice against using military force against Iraq was apparently triggered by reports reaching Israeli officials in December 2001 that the Bush administration was beginning serious planning for an attack on Iraq. Journalist Bob Woodward revealed in Plan of Attack that on December 1, 2001, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld had ordered the Central Command chief, General Tommy Franks, to come up with the first formal briefing on a new war plan for Iraq on December 4. That started a period of intense discussions of war planning between Rumsfeld and Franks.
Soon after Israeli officials got wind of that planning, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon asked for a meeting with Bush primarily to discuss US intentions to invade Iraq. In the weeks preceding Sharon's meeting with Bush on February 7, 2002, a procession of Israeli officials conveyed the message to the US administration that Iran represented a greater threat, according to a Washington Post report on the eve of the meeting.
Israeli defense minister Fouad Ben-Eliezer, who was visiting Washington with Sharon, revealed the essence of the strategic differences between Jerusalem and Washington over military force. He was quoted by the Post as saying, "Today, everybody is busy with Iraq. Iraq is a problem ... But you should understand, if you ask me, today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq."
Sharon, who was incapacitated by a stroke last year, never revealed publicly what he said to Bush in the February 7 meeting. But Yossi Alpher, a former adviser to prime minister Ehud Barak, wrote in an article in The Forward last January that Sharon advised Bush not to occupy Iraq, according to a knowledgeable source. Alpher wrote that Sharon also assured Bush that Israel would not "push one way or another" regarding his plan to take down Saddam.
Alpher noted that Washington did not want public support by Israel and in fact requested that Israel refrain from openly supporting the invasion in order to avoid an automatic negative reaction from Iraq's Arab neighbors.
After that meeting, the Sharon government generally remained silent on the issue of an invasion of Iraq. A notable exception, however, was a statement on August 16, 2002, by Ranaan Gissin, an aide to Sharon. Ranaan declared, "Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose. It will only give [Saddam] more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction."
As late as October 2002, however, there were still signs of continuing Israeli grumbling about the Bush administration's obsession with taking over Iraq. Both the Israel Defense Forces' chief of staff and its chief of military intelligence made public statements that month implicitly dismissing the Bush administration's position that Saddam's alleged quest for nuclear weapons made him the main threat. Both officials suggested that Israel's military advantage over Iraq had continued to increase over the decade since the Gulf War as Iraq had grown weaker.
The Israeli chief of military intelligence, Major-General Aharon Farkash, said Iraq had not deployed any missiles that could strike Israel directly and challenged the Bush administration's argument that Iraq could obtain nuclear weapons within a relatively short time. He gave an interview to Israeli television in which he said army intelligence had concluded that Iraq could not have nuclear weapons in less than four years. He insisted that Iran was as much of a nuclear threat as Iraq.
Israeli strategists generally believed that taking down the Saddam Hussein regime could further upset an Iran-Iraq power balance that had already tilted in favor of Iran after the US defeat of Saddam's army in the 1991 Gulf War. By 1996, however, neo-conservatives with ties to the Likud Party in Israel were beginning to argue for a more aggressive joint US-Israeli strategy aimed at a "rollback" of all of Israel's enemies in the region, including Iran, but beginning by taking down Saddam and putting a pro-Israeli regime in power there.
That was the thrust of the 1996 report of a task force led by Richard Perle for the right-wing Israeli think-tank the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, and aimed at the Likud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But most strategists in the Israeli government and the Likud Party - including Sharon himself - did not share that viewpoint. Despite agreement between neo-conservatives and Israeli officials on many issues, the dominant Israeli strategic judgment on the issue of invading Iraq diverged from that of US neo-conservatives because of differing political-military interests.
Israel was more concerned with the relative military threat posed by Iran and Iraq, whereas neo-conservatives in the Bush administration were focused on regime change in Iraq as a low-cost way of leveraging more ambitious changes in the region. From the neo-conservative perspective, the very military weakness of Saddam's Iraq made it the logical target for the use of US military power.
Gareth Porter is a historian and national-security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sharon Warned Bush
The Strategic Interest
Yossi Alpher | Fri. Jan 12, 2007
Israel and the United States have a close and vital strategic relationship that constitutes a pillar of Israel's security. Israeli leaders are aware that any major new regional policy departure not closely coordinated with Washington is liable to be a nonstarter and to cloud American-Israeli relations. Any smart Israeli aspirant to a political leadership post knows that the Israeli public wants to be reassured that he or she is persona grata in the White House, Congress and among the American Jewish community.
Yet there was a time when Israeli leaders were not afraid to disagree publicly with American leaders and even act against an American policy line if they judged that Israel's vital interests warranted such a step. Yitzhak Rabin did so in his first term when he took issue with Henry Kissinger's "reassessment." So, too, did Menachem Begin, declaring that "we're not a banana republic." Yitzhak Shamir and Benjamin Netanyahu also clashed publicly with American presidents over settlements and the Palestinian issue.
Dissenting from American policy priorities for the Middle East has not always been politically sound for Israeli leaders. Sometimes, however, it has been, and instructively so. Begin and Moshe Dayan's secret initiative to bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem, and Rabin and Shimon Peres's clandestine talks in Oslo with the Palestine Liberation Organization, were embraced by Washington once it became aware that Israel had successfully implemented a radically different strategy.
But rightly or wrongly, when Israel takes its distance from American policies, this at least reflects a capacity on the part of the Israeli national security leadership to independently assess and act upon the country's vital strategic interests. This capacity seems to be dangerously absent of late.
An obvious case in point is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's recent assertion that Israel can't talk to Syria because doing so would betray President Bush's policy line. It doesn't matter that the Democratic majority in Congress might lean toward a dialogue with Syria, or that the Iraq Study Group report recommended such a step, or that the beleaguered Bush is a lame duck with whom Israel can risk disagreeing.
Nor does Olmert appear to be influenced by the advocacy of negotiations with Syria by many in the Israeli security establishment. That he actually invoked Bush as his rationale for ignoring Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's offer to reopen peace negotiations portrays the Israeli prime minister as an amateur on strategic issues.
Olmert's predecessor, by contrast, was anything but an amateur in Israeli-American relations, and more broadly in dealing with America's policies in the region. When it came to Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq and to democratize the Arab Middle East from within, Ariel Sharon took a far more sophisticated position.
Publicly, Sharon played the silent ally; he neither criticized nor supported the Iraq adventure. One reason for his relative silence was Washington's explicit request that Israel refrain from openly backing its invasion of an Arab country or in any way intervening, lest its blessing damn the United States in Arab eyes.
But sometime prior to March 2003, Sharon told Bush privately in no uncertain terms what he thought about the Iraq plan. Sharon's words — revealed here for the first time — constituted a friendly but pointed warning to Bush. Sharon acknowledged that Saddam Hussein was an "acute threat" to the Middle East and that he believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Yet according to one knowledgeable source, Sharon nevertheless advised Bush not to occupy Iraq. According to another source — Danny Ayalon, who was Israel's ambassador to the United States at the time of the Iraq invasion, and who sat in on the Bush-Sharon meetings — Sharon told Bush that Israel would not "push one way or another" regarding the Iraq scheme.
According to both sources, Sharon warned Bush that if he insisted on occupying Iraq, he should at least abandon his plan to implant democracy in this part of the world. "In terms of culture and tradition, the Arab world is not built for democratization," Ayalon recalls Sharon advising.
Be sure, Sharon added, not to go into Iraq without a viable exit strategy. And ready a counter-insurgency strategy if you expect to rule Iraq, which will eventually have to be partitioned into its component parts. Finally, Sharon told Bush, please remember that you will conquer, occupy and leave, but we have to remain in this part of the world. Israel, he reminded the American president, does not wish to see its vital interests hurt by regional radicalization and the spillover of violence beyond Iraq's borders.
Sharon's advice — reflecting a wealth of experience with Middle East issues that Bush lacked — was prescient. The American occupation of Iraq has ended up strengthening Iran, Israel's number-one enemy, and enfranchising militant Shi'ite Islamists. A large part of Iraq is slipping into the Iranian orbit. Iraq's western Anbar Province is increasingly dominated by militant jihadi Sunnis who could eventually threaten Syria and Jordan, the latter a strategic partner and geographic buffer for Israel.
All these developments harm vital Israeli interests. This past summer, Israel fought a war against two militant Islamist movements supported by Iran — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza — that were enfranchised and legitimized in their anarchic countries thanks to Bush's insistence on hasty and ill-advised democratic elections "in this part of the world."
Had Sharon made his criticism public, citing the dangers posed to vital Israeli interests, might he have made a difference in the prewar debate in the United States and the world? Certainly he would have poured cold water on the postwar assertions of critics, like professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who have fingered Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and pro-Israelis in the administration for instigating the war. Ayalon, incidentally, was directed by Sharon to warn all Israelis visiting Washington not to encourage the American scheme for war in Iraq, lest Israel be blamed for its failure.
There were, of course, neoconservative types in Israel who did encourage the United States to occupy Iraq and advocated democratic elections wherever possible in the Middle East. But there were also many Israelis, this writer included, who spoke out openly and publicly against the American scheme.
Even Aipac officials in Washington told visiting Arab intellectuals they would rather the United States deal militarily with Iran than with Iraq. And pro-Western Arab leaders like Egypt's Husni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdallah were outspoken in their criticism of Bush's war plans, even though they could fall back on far less credit and lobbying support in Washington than in Israel.
As a faithful ally of the United States, Israel is morally obligated to tell Washington when its policies are not only mistaken but also harmful. Many American Middle East policy initiatives since 2003 have indeed been detrimental to Israeli interests. When Bush ignored his advice about Iraq, Sharon should have found a respectful and friendly way to make his reservations public.
It's not too late for Olmert to put Israel's case to Bush — first discreetly, then, if necessary, publicly. He should start with the issue of negotiating with Syria and the harm that Israel will suffer from the emergence of militant Sunni and Shi'ite Islamist states in Iraq following an American withdrawal , unless Washington takes urgent and radical steps to install a tough and friendly regime in Baghdad.
Yossi Alpher, a former senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, is co-editor of the bitterlemons family of online publications.
Fri. Jan 12, 2007
http://www.forward.com/articles/sharon-warned-bush/ | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
