Iraq: A War For Israel

Iraq: A War For
Israel
By
Mark Weber
The
U.S. invasion of Iraq in March-April 2003, and the occupation of the country
since then, has cost more than four thousand American lives and more than $500
billion, and has brought death to many tens of thousands of Iraqis.
Why
did President Bush decide to go to war? In whose interests was it
launched?
In
the months leading up to the attack, President Bush and other high-ranking US
officials repeatedly warned that the threat posed to the US and world by the
Baghdad regime was so grave and imminent that the United States had to act
quickly to bomb, invade and occupy Iraq.
On
Sept. 28, 2002, for example, he said:
“The danger to our
country is grave and it is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and
chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to
the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as
little as 45 minutes after the order is given... This regime is seeking a
nu­clear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.”
On
March 6, 2003, President Bush declared:
“Saddam Hussein and
his weapons are a direct threat to this country, to our people, and to all free
people... I believe Saddam Hussein is a threat to the American people. I believe
he’s a threat to the neighborhood in which he lives. And I’ve got good evidence
to believe that. He has weapons of mass destruction... The American people know
that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.”
These claims were
untrue. As the world now knows, Iraq had no dangerous “weapons of mass
destruction,” and posed no threat to the US. Moreover, alarmist suggestions that
the Baghdad regime was working with the al-Qaeda terror network likewise proved
to be without foundation.
So
if the official reasons given for the war were untrue, why did the United States
attack Iraq?
Whatever the
secondary reasons for the war, the crucial factor in President Bush’s decision
to attack was to help Israel. With support from Israel and America’s
Jewish-Zionist lobby, and prodded by Jewish “neo-conservatives” holding
high-level positions in his administration, President Bush – who was already
fervently com­mitted to Israel – resolved to invade and subdue one of Israel’s
chief regional enemies.
This is so widely
understood in Washington that US Senator Ernest Hollings was moved in May 2004
to acknowledge that the US invaded Iraq “to secure Israel,” and “everybody”
knows it. He also identified three of the influential pro-Israel Jews in
Washington who played an important role in prodding the US into war: Richard
Perle, chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy
Defense Secretary; and Charles Krauthammer, columnist and author. [1]
Hollings referred
to the cowardly reluctance of his Congressional colleagues to acknowledge this
truth openly, saying that “nobody is willing to stand up and say what is going
on.” Due to "the pressures we get politically," he added, members of Congress
uncritically support Israel and its policies.
Some months before
the invasion, retired four-star US Army General and former NATO Supreme Allied
Commander Wesley Clark acknowledged in an interview: “Those who favor this
attack [by the US against Iraq] now will tell you candidly, and privately, that
it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But
they are afraid at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use
it against Israel." [2]
Six
months before the attack, President Bush met in the White House with eleven
members of the US House of Representatives. While the “war against terrorism is
going okay,” he told the lawmakers, the United States would soon have to deal
with a greater danger: “The biggest threat, however, is Saddam Hussein and his
weapons of mass destruction. He can blow up Israel and that would trigger an
international conflict.” [3]
Bush also spoke
candidly about why the US was going to war during a White House meeting on Feb.
27, 2003, just three weeks before the invasion. In a talk with Elie Wiesel, the
well-known Jewish writer, Bush said: “If we don’t disarm Saddam Hussein, he will
put a weapon of mass destruction on Israel and they will do what they think they
have to do, and we have to avoid that.” [4]
Fervently
Pro-Israel
President Bush’s
fervent support for Israel and its hardline government is well known. He
reaffirmed it, for example, in June 2002 in a major speech on the Middle East.
In the view of “leading Israeli commentators,” the London Times reported,
the address was “so pro-Israel that it might have been written by [Israel prime
minister] Ariel Sharon.” [5] In an address to pro-Israel activists at the 2004
convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Bush said:
“The United States is strongly committed, and I am strongly committed, to the
security of Israel as a vibrant Jewish state.” He also told the gathering: “By
defending the freedom and prosperity and security of Israel, you’re also serving
the cause of America.” [6]
Condoleeza Rice,
who served as President Bush’s National Security Advisor, and later, as his
Secretary of State, echoed the President’s outlook in a May 2003 interview,
saying that the “security of Israel is the key to security of the world.”
[7]
Long Range
Plans
Jewish-Zionist
plans for war against Iraq had been in place for years.
In
mid-1996, a policy paper prepared for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu outlined a grand strategy for Israel in the Middle East. Entitled “A
Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” it was written under the
auspices of an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and
Political Studies. Specifically, it called for an “effort [that] can focus on
removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, an important Israeli strategic
objective in its own right...” [8]
The
authors of “A Clean Break” included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David
Wurmser, three influential Jews who later held high-level positions in the Bush
administration, 2001-2004: Perle as chair of the Defense Policy Board, Feith as
Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser as special assistant to the
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control.
The
role played by Bush administration officials who are associated with two major
pro-Zionist “neoconservative” research centers has come under scrutiny from
The Nation, the influential public affairs weekly. [9]
The
author, Jason Vest, examined the close links between the Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP),
detailing the ties between these groups and various politicians, arms merchants,
military men, wealthy pro-Israel American Jews, and Republican presidential
administrations
JINSA and CSP
members, notes Vest, “have ascended to powerful government posts, where...
they’ve managed to weave a number of issues – support for national missile
defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons
systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general – into a hard
line, with support for the Israeli right at its core... On no issue is the
JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war – not
just with Iraq, but ‘total war,’ as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential
JINSAns in Washington, put it... For this crew, ‘regime change’ by any means
necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an
urgent imperative.”
Samuel Francis,
author, editor and columnist, also looked into the “neo-conservative” role in
fomenting war. [10]
“My
own answer,” he wrote, “is that the lie [that a massively-armed Iraq posed a
grave and imminent threat to the US] was fabricated by neo-conservatives in the
administration whose first loyalty is to Israel and its interests and who wanted
the United States to smash Iraq because it was the biggest potential threat to
Israel in the region. They are known to have been pushing for war with Iraq
since at least 1996, but they could not make an effective case for it until
after Sept. 11, 2001...”
In
the aftermath of the 2001 Nine-Eleven terror attacks, ardently pro-Zionist
“neo-conservatives” in the Bush administration – who for years had sought a
Middle East war to bolster Israel’s security in the region – exploited the
tragedy to press their agenda. In this they were backed by the Israeli
government, which also pressured the White House to strike Iraq.
“The [Israeli]
military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq,” reported a leading
Israeli daily paper, Haaretz, in February 2002. [11]
The
Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian, the respected British daily,
reported in August 2002: “Israel signalled its decision yesterday to put public
pressure on President George Bush to go ahead with a military attack on Iraq,
even though it believes Saddam Hussein may well retaliate by striking Israel.”
[12]
Three months before
the US invasion, the well-informed Washington journalist Robert Novak reported
that Israeli prime minister Sharon was telling American political leaders that
“the greatest US assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s
Iraqi regime.” Moreover, added Novak, “that view is widely shared inside the
Bush administration, and is a major reason why US forces today are assembling
for war.” [13]
Israel’s spy
agencies were a “full partner” with the US and Britain in producing greatly
exaggerated prewar assessments of Iraq’s ability to wage war, a former senior
Israeli military intelligence official has acknowledged. Shlomo Bron, a
brigadier general in the Israel army reserves, and a senior researcher at a
major Israeli think tank, said that intelligence provided by Israel played a
significant role in supporting the US and British case for making war. Israeli
intelligence agencies, he said, “badly overestimated the Iraqi threat to Israel
and reinforced the American and British belief that the weapons [of mass
destruction] existed.” [14]
The
role of the pro-Israel lobby in pressing for war has been carefully examined by
two prominent American scholars, John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political
science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, professor of
international affairs at Harvard University. [15] In an 81-page paper, "The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," they wrote:
“Pressure from
Israel and the [pro-Israel] Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to
attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this
was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this
claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel
more secure… Within the United States, the main driving force behind the Iraq
war was a small band of neoconservatives, many with close ties to Israel’s Likud
Party. In addition, key leaders of the Lobby’s major organizations lent their
voices to the campaign for war.”
Important members
of the pro-Israel lobby carried out what professors Mearshiemer and Walt call
“an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq. A
key part of this campaign was the manipulation of intelligence information, so
as to make Saddam look like an imminent threat.”
For
some Jewish leaders, the Iraq war is part of a long-range effort to install
Israel-friendly regimes across the Middle East. Norman Podhoretz, a prominent
Jewish writer and an ardent supporter of Israel, has been for years editor of
Commentary, the influential Zionist monthly. In the Sept. 2002 issue he
wrote:
“The regimes that
richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced are not confined to the three
singled-out members of the axis of evil [Iraq, Iran, North Korea]. At a minimum,
the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘friends’ of
America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, along with the
Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen.”
Patrick J.
Buchanan, the well-known writer and commentator, and former White House
Communications director, has been blunt in identifying those who pushed for war:
[16]
“We
charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our
country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them
with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We
charge them with deliberately damaging US relations with every state in the Arab
world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a
homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all
over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and
bellicosity...
“Cui Bono? For
whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America
save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war
of civilizations between the West and Islam?
“Answer: one
nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.”
Uri
Avnery – an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, and a three-time member
of Israel’s parliament – sees the Iraq war as an expression of immense Jewish
influence and power. In an essay written some weeks after the US invasion, he
wrote: [17]
"Who are the
winners? They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives. A compact group,
almost all of whose members are Jewish. They hold the key positions in the Bush
administration, as well as in the think-tanks that play an important role in
formulating American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential
news­papers... The immense influence of this largely Jewish group stems from its
close alliance with the extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who
nowadays control Bush's Republican party. ... Seemingly, all this is good for
Israel. America controls the world, we control America. Never before have Jews
exerted such an immense influence on the center of world power.”
In
Britain, a veteran member of Britain’s House of Commons bluntly declared in May
2003 that Jews had taken control of America’s foreign policy, and had succeeded
in pushing the US into war. “A Jewish cabal have taken over the government in
the United States and formed an unholy alliance with fundamentalist Christians,”
said Tam Dalyell, a Labour party deputy and the longest-serving House member.
“There is far too much Jewish influence in the United States,” he added.
[18]
Summary
For
many years now, American presidents of both parties have been staunchly
committed to Israel and its security. This entrenched policy is an expression of
the Jewish-Zionist grip on America’s political and cultural life. It was fervent
support for Israel – shared by President Bush, high-ranking administration
officials and nearly the entire US Congress – that proved crucial in the
decision to invade and subdue one of Israel’s greatest regional
enemies.
While the
unprovoked US invasion of Iraq may have helped Israel, just as those who wanted
and planned for the war had hoped, it has been a calamity for America and the
world. It has cost many tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of
dollars. Around the world, it has generated unmatched distrust and hostility
toward the US. In Arab and Muslim countries, it has fueled intense hatred of the
United States, and has brought many new recruits to the ranks of anti-American
terrorists.
Americans have
already paid a high price for their nation’s commitment to Israel. We will pay
an ever higher price – not just in dollars or international prestige, but in the
lives of young men squandered for the interests of a foreign state – until the
Jewish-Zionist hold on US political life is finally broken.
Notes
1.
Remarks by Ernest F. Hollings, May 20, 2004. Congressional Record –
Senate, May 20, 2004, pages S5921-S5925. See also: M. Weber, "”Iraq Was Invaded
to Secure Israel,” Says Senator Hollings..."(http://www.ihr.org/news/040716_hollings.shtml)
2. The
Guardian (London), August 20, 2002.
3.
Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 186. See
also p. 188
4.
Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 320.
5.
R. Dunn, "Sharon Could Have Written Speech," The Times (London), June 26,
2002.
6.
Bush address to AIPAC convention, Washington, DC, May 18, 2004.
7.
A. S. Lewin, "Israel’s Security is Key to Security of Rest of World," Jewish
Press (Brooklyn, NY), May 14, 2003. Rice's interview with the Israeli daily
Yediot Aharnonot is quoted.
8.
Text posted at http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm
See also: J. Bamford, A Pretext for War (Doubleday, 2004), pages 261-269;
B. Whitaker, “Playing Skittles with Saddam,” The Guardian (Britain),
Sept. 3, 2002.
9.
J. Vest, “The Men From JINSA and CSP,” The Nation, Sept. 2, 2002 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020902/vest).
10.
S. Francis, “Weapons of Mass Deception: Somebody Lied,” column of Feb. 6, 2004
(http://www.vdare.com/francis/wmd.htm).
11.
A. Benn, “Background: Enthusiastic IDF Awaits War in Iraq,” Haaretz, Feb.
17, 2002. Quoted in J. J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, “The Israel Lobby and
U.S. Foreign Policy,” March 2006, p. 30, and p. 68, fn. 146.
12.
Jonathan Steele, “Israel Puts Pressure on US to Strike Iraq,” The
Guardian (London), August 17, 2002.
13.
Robert Novak, “Sharon’s War?,” column of Dec. 26, 2002. (http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/12/26/column.novak.opinion.sharon/).
14.
L. King, “Ex-General Says Israel Inflated Iraqi Threat,” Los Angeles
Times, Dec. 5, 2003.; See also: J. J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, “The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” March 2006, p. 29, and p. 67, fn. 142.
15.
John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy,” March 2006, pages 29, 30, 32.(http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf).
A shorter version appeared in the London Review of Books, March 23, 2006.
(http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html).
The two authors followed up their paper with a detailed book, The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux:
2007).
16.
P. J. Buchanan, “Whose War?,” The American Conservative, March 24, 2003.
(http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html).
17.
Uri Avnery, "The Night After,” CounterPunch, April 10, 2003 (http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery04102003.html).
18.
F. Nelson, “Anger Over Dalyell’s ‘Jewish Cabal’ Slur,” The Scotsman
(Edinburgh), May 5, 2003; M. White, “Dalyell Steps Up Attack On Levy,” The
Guardian (London), May 6, 2003.
#2018 03/2008
(revised)
About the
author
Mark Weber is
director of the Institute for Historical Review. He studied history at the
University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State
University and Indiana University (M.A., 1977).
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