As
Iraq spirals deeper into chaos and perhaps civil
war in the wake of the attack on the Golden
Mosque, critics of the US-led invasion and
occupation will no doubt refocus attention on the
role of Israel in the march to war and the conduct
of the occupation.
The Israeli role in
Iraq has in fact been one of the open secrets of
the US presence in Iraq, but the anger that
details surrounding it
would generate has made it
very hard to determine its scope and extent.
This has led many Iraqis to imagine Israel
as an omnipotent force pulling the strings of the
United States to ensure that Iraq, previously one
of Israel's most dangerous enemies, can never
regain its former military and economic power.
Even some experienced journalists have taken to
blaming Israel for much that goes wrong in the
country.
For example, a senior German
reporter pulled this correspondent aside at
Baghdad airport and confided that a new and
top-secret Israeli "nuclear or radiation weapon"
was responsible for reports of melted or liquefied
Iraqi bodies. The actual culprit turned out to be
white phosphorus, a weapon similar in effect to
napalm, that US commanders recently admitted
having deployed.
Some things are not in
dispute, however. It is clear that US Special
Forces trained in Israel to prepare for the kind
of "Arab urban warfare" that Israel has extensive
experience waging in the Occupied Territories. And
evidence from Abu Ghraib and other detention
centers reveals that the US has used many of the
same coercive interrogation techniques deployed by
Israel on Palestinian prisoners, much to the
dismay of Israeli, Palestinian and international
human-rights organizations.
More
controversial than evidence of shared military and
interrogation tactics has been the argument,
widespread among critics of the invasion, that a
coterie of neo-conservatives at the heart of the
US administration planned the invasion in
consultation with the Israeli government, and with
the express goal of strengthening the position of
the Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians and its
remaining Arab antagonists.
Dubbed the
"Likudization" of US foreign policy by several
commentators, this line of argument claims that
the power of the White House has, in essence, been
hijacked by the Israeli government to further its
parochial ends in the region.
Such an
argument, however, betrays a serious
misunderstanding of the US-Israeli relationship
and, more important, of US goals in Iraq and the
Middle East more broadly. It assumes that Israel
and its supporters in the United States actually
have the power to shape US policies in ways that
are not in the interests of the US policymaking
establishment. But this is nonsense.
The
United States supports Israel not because of
"shared values" and "democracy", but rather
because for four decades Israel's actions -
particularly those that ostensibly harm the
chances for peace - have served US goals in the
Middle East.
Specifically, the Israeli
occupation of Palestinian lands and the larger
regional tensions it helps perpetuate are the
linchpin of a regional system characterized by
continual but manageable levels of conflict, the
moderately high oil prices and disproportionate
levels of defense spending such hostilities
generate (and the unprecedented profits to US oil
and defense companies these involve), and a host
of authoritarian and corrupt regimes whose grip on
power depends on the very system President George
W Bush has pledged, but for good reason done
little, to transform.
Understanding this
dynamic is vital to appreciating the rationales
behind a set of US policies in Iraq that at almost
every turn have seemed to be characterized by
strategic shortsightedness and sometimes outright
incompetence. Such criticisms make sense only if
we assume that the US has actually sought to
create a vibrant, democratic Iraq. If we assume
that its true goals have been less philanthropic -
for example, securing a long-term if reduced
military presence in the country and a strong
degree of influence in the disposition of its oil
resources - then the chaos, corruption and
violence that have plagued the country for the
past three years make more sense.
As a
senior intelligence aid to former Coalition
Provisional Authority administrator L Paul Bremer
explained to a colleague of mine when asked about
why US forces failed to rebuild in years what it
took Saddam Hussein to do in months after the
first Gulf War in 1981, "There's an old Arab
proverb: If you starve a dog he'll follow you
anywhere."
In other words, why bother
fixing a country when your strategy is to break
the will of its people so they accept a
post-occupation system, tailored to US interests,
that they would otherwise not tolerate? Indeed,
with Bush on record saying that the United States
would leave Iraq if asked to do so, a primary
consideration of US strategy has had to be making
sure that the Shi'ites and Kurds never felt
comfortable enough to pop the question.
And it is here that the close relationship
between the US and Israel comes back into play.
The US is not doing Israel's bidding in Iraq, but
it has clearly followed Israel's strategy for
quelling the latest Palestinian uprising in
managing its occupation. And so when my colleague
responded to the intelligence official's proverb
by suggesting that the policy he described
mirrored Israeli policies toward the Palestinians,
he answered, "Of course," as if the Israeli
paradigm of rule in the Occupied Territories was a
natural model for the US occupation of Iraq.
What is this paradigm exactly? As Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon explained in a recent New
Yorker interview with Haaretz columnist Ari
Shavit, it involves bringing the Palestinians to
the point of political chaos and then luring them
into a deal that would "give them only the minimum
necessary", while ensuring continued Israeli
military and economic control over the West Bank.
For almost three years, the
Israeli-inspired US strategy for managing its
occupation of Iraq has, albeit at a high price,
allowed the Bush administration to imagine that
Iraqis would gradually be worn down from the
violence, corruption and lack of development and
accept a long-term US presence in their country.
Indeed, in late February a military intelligence
analyst about to return to the country confidently
assured this correspondent that Sunni leaders were
no longer demanding a complete US withdrawal as a
precondition for ending the insurgency.
But Hamas' landslide electoral victory in
January should have warned him of the power of the
"law of unintended consequences" when it comes to
Middle Eastern politics. This law has now come
home to roost in Iraq, in spades. If the US
thought that by generating enough chaos in Iraq it
could dig itself in so deeply that Iraqis would
eventually stop trying to push it out, the attack
on the Golden Mosque reminds us that the wages of
chaos are steep indeed. The Bush administration's
Israeli-inspired application of chaos theory in
Iraq could well wind up spelling the end not just
of a united Iraq, but of the Bush administration's
imperial ambitions as well.
Unless, of
course, splitting up Iraq has been the long-range
goal all along, as some administration critics
have argued since the buildup to the invasion.
Perhaps the most frightening idea is that
Iraq is going exactly as Vice President Dick
Cheney, former deputy defense secretary Paul
Wolfowitz and the rest of the hardcore
neo-realpoliticians hoped it would. While such a
scenario is indeed hard to imagine, one thing is
for sure: the worse things get, the more money the
oil, defense and heavy-industry companies, whose
profits have soared thanks to the violence, will
grow.
Iraq might take down Bush, but in
the process it will make ExxonMobil, Halliburton
and others richer than ever.
Mark
LeVine is professor of modern Middle Eastern
history, culture and Islamic studies, University
of California-Irvine, and author of Why They
Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of
Evil (Oneworld, 2005).
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