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.
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