Israel not to blame for Iraq
mess By Stephen Zunes
As the official rationales for the US
invasion of Iraq - that Iraq possessed weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) that threatened the
national security of the United States and that
the Iraqi government had operational ties to
al-Qaeda - are now widely acknowledged to have
been fabricated, and the backup rationalization -
of bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq - is
also losing credibility, increasing attention is
being given to why
the
US government, with broad bipartisan support, made
such a fateful decision.
There are a
number of plausible explanations, ranging from
control of the country's oil resources to
strategic interests to ideological motivations.
One explanation that should not be taken
seriously, however, is the assertion that the
right-wing government of Israel and its American
supporters played a major role in leading the US
to invade Iraq.
The government of Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and its supporters in
the United States deserve blame for many tragic
policies in recent years that have led to needless
human suffering, increased extremism in the
Islamic world, decreased security, and rampant
violations of the United Nations Charter,
international humanitarian law, and other
international legal principles. The US invasion of
Iraq, however, is not one of them.
Arguments supporting claims of a major
Israeli role There are four major arguments
made by those who allege a key role by Israel and
its American supporters in leading the United
States to war in Iraq:
1. "Despite
propaganda by the Bush administration and its
bipartisan supporters on Capitol Hill, Iraq was
not a military threat to the US. As a result, the
invasion had to have been done to protect Israel
from an Iraqi attack."
To begin with,
Iraq during the final years of Saddam Hussein's
rule was no more of a threat to Israel than it was
to the US. All Iraqi missiles capable of reaching
Israel had been accounted for and destroyed by
UNSCOM (the UN Special Commission), the
International Atomic Energy Agency had determined
that Iraq no longer had a nuclear program, and
virtually all the country's chemical weapons had
similarly been accounted for and destroyed. All
this was presumably known to the Israelis, who
monitored UN disarmament efforts in Iraq and had
the best military intelligence capabilities in the
region.
Though observers were less
confident regarding the absence of biological
weapons, the Israelis recognized that there was no
realistic threat from that source either.
Respected Israeli military analyst Meir Stieglitz,
writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot,
stated categorically that "there is no such thing
as a long-range Iraqi missile with an effective
biological warhead. No one has found an Iraqi
biological warhead. The chances of Iraq having
succeeded in developing operative warheads without
tests are zero." Similarly, it is highly doubtful
that Iraq would have been able to attack Israel
with biological weapons by other means. For
example, it is hard to imagine that an Iraqi
aircraft carrying biological weapons, presumably
some kind of subsonic drone, could somehow make
the 1,000-kilometer trip to Israel without being
detected and shot down. Israel - as well as Iraq's
immediate neighbors - have sophisticated
anti-aircraft capability.
More
fundamental, if the United States was really
concerned with Israel's safety from Iraqi attack,
why did the US government provide Iraq with key
elements of its WMD capability during the 1980s -
including the seed stock for its anthrax and many
of the components for its chemical-weapons program
- back when Iraq clearly did have the capability
of striking Israel? How could the "pro-Israel
lobby" - which was no more influential in 2002
than it was 15 years earlier - have the power to
push the United States to invade Iraq when Saddam
was no longer a threat to Israel, whereas the
lobby had been unable to stop US technology
transfers to Iraq when those really could have
potentially harmed Israel?
2. "Though
Iraq had no connection with al-Qaeda, it was
supporting other terrorist groups that were
attacking Israel. A US invasion was seen as a way
of stopping the terrorist threat targeted at the
Jewish state."
Saddam Hussein did
support the Abu Nidal group, a radical secular
Palestinian movement, during the mid-1980s, though
that group tended to target moderate leaders of
the Palestine Liberation Organizations as much as
it did Israelis. Ironically, the administration of
US president Ronald Reagan dropped Iraq from its
list of states sponsoring terrorism at that time
in order to be able to transfer arms and
technology to Saddam's regime that would have
otherwise been illegal. Iraq was put back on the
list of state sponsors of terrorism immediately
after its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990,
despite evidence that its support for
international terrorism had actually declined. Abu
Nidal himself became chronically ill not long
afterward and his group had been largely moribund
for more than a decade when Saddam had him killed
in his Baghdad apartment in 2002.
It is
also true that Iraq supported a tiny pro-Iraqi
Palestinian group known as the Arab Liberation
Front, which was known to pass on much of these
funds to families of Palestinians who died in the
struggle against Israel. These recipients included
families of Palestine Authority police and
families of non-violent protesters, though some
recipients were families of suicide bombers. Such
Iraqi support was significantly less than the
support many of these same families had received
from Saudi Arabia and other US-backed Arab
monarchies, which - unlike Iraq - also provided
direct funding for Hamas and other radical
Palestinian Islamists. In any case, given that
Israeli occupation forces routinely destroyed the
homes of families of suicide bombers and the Iraqi
money fell far short of making up for their
losses, it was hardly an incentive for someone to
commit an act of terrorism, which tends to be
driven by the anger, hopelessness and desperation
from living under an oppressive military
occupation, not from financial incentives.
3. "Individuals and organizations
sympathetic to Israel strongly supported the
invasion. Sizable numbers of otherwise dovish
Jewish members of Congress voted in support of the
war resolution, and the American-Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), long considered one of
the most powerful lobbying groups on Capitol Hill,
pushed Congress to authorize an invasion on behalf
of Israel."
While AIPAC undeniably has
influenced congressional votes regarding
Israeli-Palestinian concerns and related issues,
it did not play a major role lobbying members of
Congress to vote in favor of the resolution
authorizing a US invasion of Iraq, in large part
because it knew there was such overwhelming
bipartisan support for invading that oil-rich
country that AIPAC support was not needed. More
fundamentally, there are far more powerful
interests that have a stake in what happens in the
Persian Gulf region than does AIPAC, such as the
oil companies, the arms industry, and other
special interests whose lobbying influence and
campaign contributions far surpass that of the
much-vaunted "Zionist lobby" and its allied donors
to congressional races. The American Jewish
community, like most Americans, is turning against
the war. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union
of American Hebrew Congregations, along with its
chairman of the board, Robert Heller, recently
sent a letter to President George W Bush stating,
"We call not only for a clear exit strategy but
also for specific goals for troop withdrawal to
commence after the completion of parliamentary
elections."
It is noteworthy that in the
authorization of force for the 1991 Gulf War, the
majority of Jewish members of Congress voted
against the war resolution, which is more than can
be said for its non-Jewish members. In the more
lopsided vote authorizing the use of force in
October 2002, a majority of Jewish members of
Congress did authorize the use of force, though
proportionately less so than non-Jewish members.
4. "Pro-Israel Jewish neo-conservatives
such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard
Perle and others were among the key architects of
the policy of 'preventive war' and were the
strongest advocates for a US invasion of
Iraq."
While it is true that a
disproportionate number of Jews could be found
among the policymakers in Washington who pushed
for a US invasion of Iraq, it is also true that a
disproportionate number of Jews could be found
among liberal Democrats in Congress and leftist
intellectuals in universities who opposed the
invasion. Furthermore, while a number of prominent
neo-conservative intellectuals are of Jewish
background, they have tended not to be religious
nor have they, despite their support for the
current right-wing Israeli government, been
strongly identified as Zionists.
It should
also be noted that these same neo-conservatives,
while in the Reagan administration during the
1980s, were advocates of a US invasion of
Nicaragua and Cuba as well as a nuclear first
strike - in a so-called "limited nuclear war" -
against the Soviet Union. In short, they are hawks
across the board, not just in regard to the Middle
East. Support for Israel has always been seen as
part of a broader strategic design to advance
perceived US interests in the region.
Furthermore, the most prominent backers of
the US invasion of Iraq - Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney -
are neither Jewish nor prone to put the perceived
interests of Israel ahead of those of the United
States. Indeed, strong US strategic interests in
the Persian Gulf region, home of most of the
world's known oil reserves, have existed for many
decades and even pre-date the establishment of
modern Israel.
Has the US invasion of
Iraq helped Israel? To argue that support
for Israel and/or pressure by supporters of Israel
was a crucial variable in prompting the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq assumes that the
US invasion and occupation of Iraq has been good
for Israel.
Evidence suggests strongly to
the contrary, however. As cited above, in the
years leading up to the March 2003 invasion, Iraq
was no longer a strategic threat to Israel nor was
it actively involved in anti-Israeli terrorism. In
short, Israelis had little to worry about Iraq
during Saddam Hussein's final years in power. They
do now, however.
Key leaders of Iraq's
current government and likely future government
are part of fundamentalist Shi'ite political
movements heavily influenced by Iran. These
movements are strongly anti-Zionist in orientation
and some have maintained close ties to other
radical Arab Shi'ite groups, such as the Lebanese
Hezbollah, whose militia has battled Israel for
more than 20 years. One of the dominant parties of
the US-backed governing coalition has been the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq, whose 15,000-strong paramilitary unit, known
as the Badr Organization, was trained by the
Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who also helped
train Hezbollah.
Meanwhile, the
anti-government and anti-US insurgents in Iraq are
dominated by Sunni Salafists and radical
nationalists, both of whom tend to be anti-Israel
extremists. Thanks to the US invasion and
occupation of Iraq, these insurgents are becoming
stronger and increasingly sophisticated fighters
gaining valuable new experiences in urban
guerrilla warfare as well as terrorist tactics.
These Iraqi insurgents have developed close ties
with radical Jordanian and Palestinian groups with
the means and motivation to harm Israeli
civilians, and Israel will undoubtedly feel their
impact.
University of Michigan historian
Juan Cole, a leading authority on internal Iraqi
politics, has noted that while such radical
currents were kept under control by Saddam, "an
Iraq in which armed fundamentalist and nationalist
militias proliferate is inevitably a security
worry for Israel". General Shlomo Brom, former
chief of the Israeli army's strategic planning
division, has stated, "The US presence there
actually causes harm to some of our interests."
To help the United States deal with the
deteriorating situation in Iraq, Israel has helped
train US Special Forces in aggressive
counter-insurgency operations, sending
urban-warfare specialists to the military base in
Fort Bragg, North Carolina, among other things to
train assassination squads against suspected Iraqi
guerrilla leaders. American officers have also
traveled to Israel and Israeli officers have
traveled to Iraq for additional consulting. In
addition, Israelis have helped arm and train
pro-American Kurdish militias and have assisted US
officials in interrogation centers for suspected
insurgents in detention near Baghdad. Israeli
advisers have provided advice on erecting and
manning roadblocks and checkpoints, mine-clearing
and wall-breaching methods, as well as techniques
for tracking suspected insurgents using drone
aircraft. Israel has also provided
aerial-surveillance equipment, decoy drones, and
armored construction equipment.
It has
long been assumed that working so closely with
Israel would harm US interests in the Middle East,
given the long-standing anti-Israeli sentiment in
the region. However, as a result of the US
invasion of Iraq and the bloody counter-insurgency
war that has followed, popular resentment in the
Middle East against the United States today is
arguably even greater than popular resentment
against Israel. Indeed, the death, destruction and
dislocation resulting from US policies in Iraq
eclipse that from Israeli policies in the West
Bank. Israel's war crimes against civilians living
in Jenin in 2002 were horrendous, but pale in
comparison with US war crimes committed in
Fallujah in 2004. Israel's mistreatment of
Palestinian prisoners is also a serious matter,
but does not come close in scale to America's
torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Israel has
openly violated the UN Charter and other critical
standards of international law, but the US
invasion of Iraq and its aftermath are of even
greater negative consequence to the international
legal order.
As with other powers that
have tried to control the Middle East, the United
States' efforts to impose its hegemony has spawned
its own resistance. With the US itself on the
other side of the globe, Israel may become an
easier target by those resisting this hegemonic US
effort in the heart of the Middle East by going
after its closest regional ally. While in the past
US support for Israel has led to increased
anti-Americanism in the Arab-Islamic world, today
it appears that Israeli support for the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq is exacerbating
anti-Israeli sentiments. By further solidifying
its strategic relationship with the United States
through support of the US invasion and occupation
of Iraq, Israel is finding itself further
isolated, less likely to be able to normalize
relations with Arab states, more likely to be
subjected to terrorist attacks by extremists, and
more vulnerable to the whims of US foreign policy.
As a result, rather than goading the
United States into taking military action against
Syria, the Israeli government has been cautioning
the US to back off from its pressure against the
Assad regime, fearing that if the Ba'athist leader
were overthrown, more radical elements could come
to power or that the country could be thrown into
a destabilizing civil war. Similarly, public
opinion polls show that a sizable majority of
Israelis oppose preemptive military action against
Iran for fear that an attack on that large Islamic
country could have serious negative consequences
to Israeli security interests.
The
US-Israeli alliance Using Israel to advance
perceived US interests in the Middle East and
beyond is nothing new.
In previous
decades, Israel helped prevent victories by
radical nationalist movements in Lebanon and
Jordan, as well as in Palestine. The Israelis have
kept Syria, with its radical nationalist regime
and its role as a onetime ally of the Soviet
Union, in check. The Israeli air force is
predominant throughout the region. Israel's
frequent wars have provided battlefield testing
for US arms. Israel has missiles with ranges of
thousands of kilometers and has cooperated with
the US military-industrial complex in research and
development for new jet fighters, anti-missile
defense systems, and other sophisticated weapons
systems.
Israel also served as a conduit
for US arms to regimes and movements too unpopular
in the United States for openly granting direct
military assistance, such as apartheid South
Africa, Iran's Islamic republic, Guatemala under
its rightist juntas, and the Nicaraguan contras.
Israeli military advisers have assisted the
contras, the Salvadoran junta, and other movements
and governments backed by the United States. The
Mossad, Israel's spy agency, has cooperated with
the Central Intelligence Agency and other US
intelligence services in intelligence-gathering
and covert operations.
As one Israeli
analyst described it during the Iran-contra
scandal, "It's like Israel has become just another
federal agency, one that's convenient to use when
you want something done quietly."
Rather
than being a liability, the 1991 Gulf War proved
Israel once again to be a strategic asset for the
United States. Israeli developments in
air-to-ground warfare were integrated into allied
bombing against Iraqi missile sites and other
targets; Israeli-designed conformal fuel tanks for
F-15 fighter-bombers greatly enhanced their range;
Israeli-provided mine plows were used during the
final assaults on Iraqi positions; Israeli mobile
bridges were used by US marines; Israeli targeting
systems and low-altitude warning devices were used
by US helicopters; and Israel developed key
components for the widely used Tomahawk missiles.
One of the more unsettling aspects of this
kind of strategic cooperation is how closely it
corresponds with historic anti-Semitism.
Throughout Europe in past centuries, the
ruling class of a given country would, in return
for granting limited religious and cultural
autonomy, set up certain individuals in the Jewish
community to become the visible agents of the
oppressive social order, such as tax collectors
and money lenders. When the population would
threaten to rise up against the ruling class, the
rulers could then blame the Jews, sending the
wrath of an exploited people against convenient
scapegoats, resulting in the pogroms and other
notorious waves of repression that have taken
place throughout the Jewish Diaspora over the
centuries.
The idea behind Zionism was to
break this cycle through the creation of a Jewish
nation-state, where Jews would no longer be
dependent on the ruling class of a given country.
The tragic irony is that this cycle has been
perpetuated through Israel being used by Western
powers to maintain their interests in the Middle
East. Britain and France, in their unsuccessful
military campaign to bring "regime change" to
Egypt in 1956, enlisted Israel in their fight.
Subsequent to 1967, in ways described above, the
US has used Israel to advance its strategic
interests in the region and beyond.
Therefore, one finds autocratic Arab
governments, Islamic extremists and others blaming
Israel, Zionism or the Jews for their problems
rather than the US or the broader exploitative
global economic system and their own elites who
benefit from and help perpetuate such a system.
The late respected Israeli intellectual
Ishawa Leibowitz once observed, "The existence of
the Jewish people of 60 to 80 generations ... was
a heroic situation. We never got from the goyish
world a cent. We supported ourselves. We
maintained our own institutions. Now we have taken
3 million Jews, gathered them here and turned them
over to be parasites of America. And in some sense
we are even the mercenaries of America to fight
the wars of what the ruling persons in America
consider to be American interests."
In the
Israeli press, one can find comments like those in
Yediot Ahronot that describe their country as "the
Godfather's messenger", since Israel undertakes
the "dirty work" of the Godfather, who "always
tries to appear to be the owner of some large
respectable business". Israeli satirist B Michael
describes US aid to Israel as a situation where
"my master gives me food to eat and I bite those
whom he tells me to bite. It's called strategic
cooperation."
This explains why the US has
moved increasingly toward Sharon's position of
refusing to engage in serious peace negotiations
with the Palestinians and continuing to occupy and
colonize large sectors of the West Bank while
rejecting Israeli moderates who are willing to
accept Palestinian offers of enforceable security
guarantees in exchange for a withdrawal from the
occupied territories: an Israel in a continuing
state of violence and insecurity is far more
likely to do the bidding of the United States than
an Israel at peace. As former US secretary of
state Henry Kissinger once noted, "Israel's
obstinacy serves our interests best."
The
United States and Israel under their right-wing
governments do share a number of common perceived
strategic interests. However, rather than being a
tail-wagging-the-dog situation, as apologists for
US policy contend, Israel still is very much the
junior partner in the relationship and is playing
that role to its own detriment.
Blaming
the Jews As part of its desperate strategy
to defend its disastrous policies in Iraq, the
Bush administration and its supporters are now
using the defense of Israel as an excuse. While
such claims have no more validity than claims that
Saddam Hussein had operational ties to al-Qaeda or
still possessed WMD, it carries the additional
danger that Israel and its American Jewish
supporters will end up getting blamed for the
whole Iraqi debacle.
The American Jewish
newspaper The Forward noted how a number of
pro-Israel American activists and prominent
Israelis had criticized recent comments by Bush
and other prominent Republicans who have recently
played the Israel card to justify the increasingly
unpopular war. For example, Dani Rothschild, a
retired Israeli major-general who had served as
the Israeli army's top administrator in the
occupied West Bank, noted how "it could put Israel
in a very awkward situation with the American
public, if Israel would be the excuse for losing
more American soldiers every day".
Using
Israel as an excuse for unpopular US policies in
the Middle East is nothing new, either. Over the
past decade, I have had the opportunity to meet
with a half-dozen Arab foreign ministers and
deputy foreign ministers and have asked each of
them why their government was still so friendly
with the United States, given US policy toward the
Palestinians, the Iraqis, and other Arabs. Every
one has answered to the effect that US officials
had explained to them that the anti-Arab bias in
US foreign policy was not the fault of the US
government itself, but was the result of wealthy
Jews who in essence ran US foreign policy.
In short, American officials are using
classic anti-Semitic scapegoating by blaming an
alleged cabal of rich Jews behind the scenes for
being responsible for a widely perceived injustice
as a means of deflecting attention away from those
who actually are responsible.
Similarly,
some defenders of members of Congress who voted to
authorize the invasion of Iraq and falsely claimed
that Iraq still had "weapons of mass destruction"
are now trying to deflect criticism directed at
these powerful senators and representatives by
claiming they were somehow forced into voting for
the war by powerful Jewish interests. In reality,
however, the only people responsible for
authorizing the illegal and tragic US invasion of
Iraq are those individuals who cast their votes in
favor of the resolution and should therefore be
held personally responsible.
This does not
mean the growing awareness of the tragedy of the
Iraq war cannot be used to raise consciousness
regarding certain institutional factors that
helped make the invasion possible. Indeed, this
could be a great opportunity for American
progressives to demonstrate that this tragedy was
a result of not only the warmongering of the
individual members of Congress and the
administration who made it possible, but that it
was also a reflection of the power of the oil
companies, military contractors, right-wing
ideologues, the corporate-owned media, and overall
excessive corporate influence over the US
government's foreign and domestic policy. This, in
turn, could spur demands for badly needed radical
reforms in the US political and economic systems.
It would be tragic if this opportunity to
press for such badly needed social change becomes
sidetracked by the time-honored tactic of
diverting attention from the real issues and
instead "blaming the Jews".
This does not
mean those who exaggerate the role of Israel in
propelling the US to war with Iraq are necessarily
guilty of anti-Semitism. There are any number of
theories as to why the US government decided to
invade that oil-rich country. This one just
happens to be wrong. Because this particular
theory parallels dangerous anti-Semitic
stereotypes that exaggerate Jewish power and
influence, however, it is a particularly grievous
misinterpretation, not just because it reinforces
long-standing oppressive attitudes against a
minority group, but because it diverts attention
away from those who really are responsible for the
unfolding tragedy in Iraq.
Indeed, that
has largely been the functional purpose of
anti-Semitism throughout Western history: to
misdirect popular opposition to economic
injustice, disastrous military campaigns, or other
failures by political and economic elites on to a
convenient and expendable target. It is critical,
therefore, for people to resist - particularly
those who identify with the peace movement -
buying into this myth that it was Israel and its
supporters who were responsible for the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Stephen Zunes is Middle East
editor for the Foreign Policy In Focus Project. He
serves as a professor of politics at the
University of San Francisco and is the author of
Tinderbox: US Middle East Policy and the Roots
of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003.
