A Costly Friendship
By
Patrick Seale
The Nation
30 August, 2003
Much
of the talk in Europe these days--in newspaper offices, at dinner parties,
in foreign ministries--is about how the United States and Britain were
conned into going to war against Iraq, or perhaps how they conned the
rest of us into believing that they had good reasons for doing so. It
is now widely suspected that the war was a fraud, but who perpetuated
the fraud and on whom? Were Bush and Blair fed fabricated intelligence,
or did they knowingly massage and doctor the intelligence to exaggerate
the threat from Iraq so as to justify an attack? Everyone agrees that
Saddam Hussein was a monster, but the military invasion to depose him
is seen by many, and certainly on this side of the Atlantic, as illegitimate
and unprovoked, and a blatant violation of the UN Charter, setting an
unfortunate precedent in international relations. Henceforth, in the
jungle, only might is right.
Various intelligence
and foreign affairs committees of the British Parliament and the US
Congress have started inquiries into how the decision to go to war was
taken--when, why and on what basis. But it will require a superhuman
effort to penetrate the murky thicket of competing government bureaucracies,
spooks, exiles, defectors and other self-serving sources, pro-Israeli
lobbyists, magazine editors, think-tank gurus and assorted ideologues
who, in Washington at least, have a massive say in the shaping of foreign
policy.
How did it all begin?
An important part of the story, though not the whole of it, is the special
relationship between the United States and Israel. Warren Bass's important
and timely book Support Any Friend, written with candor and firmly rooted
in primary sources, takes us back to the diplomacy of the 1960s, and
to what he argues were the beginnings of today's extraordinarily intimate
alliance between the two countries. It is in effect the story of how
Israel and its American friends came to exercise a profound influence
on American policy toward the Arab and Muslim world. Bass believes it
all began with JFK. It is an interesting thesis and he argues it well,
although in my view the US-Israeli entente actually began with LBJ,
after Kennedy's assassination.
The neocons--a powerful
group at the heart of the Bush Administration--wanted war against Iraq
and pressed for it with great determination, overriding and intimidating
all those who expressed doubts, advised caution, urged the need for
allies and for UN legitimacy, or recommended sticking with the well-tried
cold war instruments of containment and deterrence. War it had to be,
the neocons said, to deal with the imminent threat from Saddam's fearsome
weapons, which, as Tony Blair was rash enough to claim in his tragicomic
role as Bush's "poodle," could be fired within forty-five
minutes of a launch order. This flight of blood-curdling rhetoric has
now come home to haunt him, earning him a headline (in The Economist,
no less) of "Prime Minister Bliar."
Where did the information
for his remarkable statement come from? How reliable was the prewar
intelligence reaching Bush and Blair? The finger is increasingly being
pointed at a special Pentagon intelligence cell, known as the Office
of Special Plans, headed by Abram Shulsky. The office was created after
9/11 by two of the most fervent and determined neocons, Paul Wolfowitz,
Deputy Defense Secretary, and Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense
for Policy, to probe into Saddam's WMD programs and his links with Al
Qaeda because, it is alleged, they did not trust other intelligence
agencies of the US government to come up with the goods. It has been
suggested that this special Pentagon intelligence cell relied heavily
on the shifty Ahmad Chalabi's network of exiled informants. If evidence
was indeed fabricated, this may well have been where it was done.
One way of looking
at the decision-making process in Washington is to see it as the convergence
of two currents or trends. The first was clearly the child of the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, which both traumatized and enraged America,
shattering its sense of invulnerability but also rousing it to "total
war" against its enemies in the manner of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Perhaps because they had more experience of wars and terrorist violence,
Europeans were slow to comprehend the visceral impact of these events
on the American psyche. Suddenly mighty America was afraid--afraid of
mass-casualty terrorism; afraid of the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction; afraid that "rogue states" might pass on such
weapons to nebulous, elusive, fanatical, transnational terrorist groups
such as Al Qaeda, enabling them perhaps to strike again with even more
devastating effect.
The aggressive National
Security Strategy of September 2002 sprang from these fears. It proclaimed
that containment and deterrence were now stone dead; that the United
States had to achieve and maintain total military supremacy over all
possible challengers; that any "rogue states" that might be
tempted to acquire WMDs would be treated without mercy by means of preventive
or pre-emptive war. Under this "Bush Doctrine," the United
States gave itself the right to project its overwhelming power wherever
and whenever it pleased, to invade countries it disliked, to overthrow
their regimes and to transform hostile "tyrannies" into friendly--read
pro-American--"democracies." It was a program for global dominance,
driven by the perceived threat to America but also by a modern version
of imperial ambition.
The second, overlapping
trend--overlapping because it involved many of the same people--was
more narrowly focused on Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians
and its Arab neighbors. Right-wing Jewish neocons--and most prominent
neocons are right-wing Jews--tend to be pro-Israel zealots who believe
that American and Israeli interests are inseparable (much to the alarm
of liberal, pro-peace Jews, whether in America, Europe or Israel itself).
Friends of Ariel Sharon's Likud, they tend to loathe Arabs and Muslims.
For them, the cause of "liberating" Iraq had little to do
with the well-being of Iraqis, just as the cause of "liberating"
Iran and ending its nuclear program--recently advocated by Shimon Peres
in a Wall Street Journal editorial--has little to do with the well-being
of Iranians. What they wished for was an improvement in Israel's military
and strategic environment.
The Iraq crisis
has made their names and organizations familiar to every newspaper and
magazine reader: Wolfowitz and Feith, numbers 2 and 3 at the Pentagon;
Richard Perle, former chairman and still a member of the influential
Defense Policy Board, sometimes known as the neocons' political godfather
and around whom a cloud of financial impropriety hangs; Elliott Abrams,
senior director of Middle East affairs at the National Security Council,
with a controversial background in Latin America and in the Iran/contra
affair; and their many friends, relations and kindred spirits in the
media, such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan of The Weekly Standard,
and in the numerous pro-Israel think tanks, such as Frank Gaffney's
Center for Security Policy, the American Enterprise Institute, the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs, the Project for the New American
Century, the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute,
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (born out of AIPAC, the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and many others. As has been
observed by several commentators, 9/11 provided the neocons with a unique
chance to harness (some would say hijack) America's Middle East policy--and
America's military power--in Israel's interest by succeeding in getting
the United States to apply the doctrine of pre-emptive war to Israel's
enemies.
This trend rested
on a mistaken, indeed willfully tendentious, analysis of the attacks
that the United States had suffered--not just the body blow of 9/11
but also the numerous earlier wake-up calls such as the bombing of two
US embassies in East Africa and the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor.
The basic neocon argument was that terrorist attacks should not in any
way be read as the response of angry, desperate men to what America
and Israel were doing to the Arab and Muslim world, and especially to
the Palestinians. Quite the contrary; America was attacked because the
terrorists envied the American way of life. America was virtuous, America
was "good." The real problem, the neocons argued, lay not
with American policies but with the "sick" and "failed"
Islamic societies from which the terrorists sprang, with their hate-driven
educational system, with their inherently "violent" and "fanatical"
religion. So, rather than correcting or changing its misguided policies,
the United States was urged to "reform" and "democratize"
Arab and Muslim societies--by force if necessary--so as to insure its
own security and that of its allies. Wars of choice became official
American policy.
Concerned to insure
Israel's continued regional supremacy, and at odds with what they saw
as distasteful opponents, such as Islamic militancy, Arab nationalism
and Palestinian radicalism, the neocons argued that the aim of US policy
in the Middle East should be the thorough political and ideological
"restructuring" of the region. Exporting "democracy"
would serve the interests of defending both the United States and Israel.
A "reformed" Middle East could be made pro-American and pro-Israeli.
All this seems to have amounted to an ambitious--perhaps over-reaching--program
for Israeli regional dominance, driven by Israel's far right and its
way-out American friends.
Iraq was the first
candidate for a "democratic" cure, but the need for this doubtful
medicine could just as well justify an assault on Iran, Syria, Egypt,
Saudi Arabia or wherever a "threat" is detected or America's
reforming zeal directed. Immediately after 9/11, Wolfowitz clamored
for the destruction of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This was a cause he had
advocated unsuccessfully throughout much of the 1990s. But the accession
of the neocons to positions of power, the fear of more terrorist attacks
and the President's combative instincts now made what had been a Dr.
Strangelove scenario appear quite doable. No scrap of evidence, however,
could be found linking Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden. Nor did Iraq
pose an imminent threat to anyone, least of all to the United States
or Britain. Exhausted by two wars, it had been starved by a dozen years
of the most punitive sanctions in modern history. Hans Blix's UN arms
inspectors had roamed all over the country and acquired a good grasp
of its entire industrial capability. They had found no evidence that
Saddam had rebuilt his WMD programs. They would have certainly liked
more time to look further and make quite sure. This was the view of
most European experts. Meanwhile, Arab leaders had buried the hatchet
with Iraq at the Arab summit in Beirut in March 2002. All Iraq's neighbors
wanted to trade with it, not make war on it. In the atmosphere of reconciliation
that then prevailed, even Kuwait did not think it seemly to admit that
it still longed for revenge for Saddam's 1990 invasion.
There were, however,
plenty of reasons why Israel and its friends in Washington wanted Iraq
"restructured." Saddam had dared fire Scuds at Israel during
the 1991 war and, more recently, he had been bold enough to send money
to the bereaved families of Palestinian suicide bombers, whose homes
had been flattened by Israeli reprisals. These "crimes" had
gone unpunished. Moreover, in spite of its evident weakness, Saddam's
Iraq was the only Arab country that might in the long run pose a strategic
challenge to Israel. Egypt's government had been neutralized and corrupted
by American subsidies and by its peace treaty with Israel, while Syria
was enfeebled by internal security squabbles, a faltering economy and
a fossilized political system. The Iraqi leader had to be brought down.
His fall, the neocons calculated, would change the political dynamics
of the entire region. It would intimidate Teheran and Damascus, even
Riyadh and Cairo, and tilt the balance of power decisively in Israel's
favor, allowing it to impose on the hapless Palestinians the harsh terms
of its choice. Some neocons were already envisioning an Israel-Iraq
peace treaty as a bonus byproduct of the war.
These concerns,
in addition to control of Iraq's oil resources, rather than Saddam's
alleged WMDs, were the real aims of the war against Iraq. They were
embraced by the United States to assuage its own fears and restore its
sense of absolute power. But what made the attack possible--the motor
behind it--was one overriding fact of American political life: the US-Israel
alliance, as close a relationship between two states as any in the world
today. The Iraq war was in fact the high-water mark of that alliance.
Warren Bass seeks
to establish that the foundations of the US-Israel alliance were laid
by the Kennedy Administration. He even gives a precise date--August
19, 1962--for the start of the military relationship as we know it.
On that day in Tel Aviv, Mike Feldman, the deputy White House counsel
and Kennedy's indefatigable contact man with Israel and American Jews,
met secretly with David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir and told them that
"the President had determined that the Hawk missile should be made
available to Israel." The Israelis were ecstatic. The Kennedy decision
destroyed the Eisenhower embargo on the sale of major weapons systems
to Israel. "What began with the Hawk in 1962," Bass writes,
"has become one of the most expensive and extensive military relationships
of the postwar era, with a price tag in the billions of dollars and
diplomatic consequences to match."
The Hawk sale is
therefore the first pillar of Bass's case for saying that Kennedy was
the father of the US-Israel alliance. The second is what he describes
as Kennedy's "fudge" over America's inspections of Israel's
secret nuclear weapons plant at Dimona in the Negev. Although ingeniously
and entertainingly argued with a wealth of detail, the thesis is not
conclusively proven. As a matter of fact, the Kennedy team, with the
exception of Feldman and his friends, did not want a special military
relationship with Israel, fearing that it would trigger a regional arms
race. Kennedy was not taken in by Ben-Gurion's histrionic description
of Nasser, the Egyptian leader, as a cruel aggressor bent on Hitlerian
genocide. He knew Israel was strong enough to deal with any Arab threat.
He didn't believe it needed the advanced weapons and the formal American
security guarantee Ben-Gurion requested. He told Ben-Gurion firmly that
he did not want to be the US President who brought the Middle East into
the missile age. Kennedy was in fact attempting to reach out to Nasser,
whom he recognized as a nationalist, not a Communist. He feared that
giving Israel preferential treatment might push the Arabs into the arms
of the Soviets. In turn, the State Department's Middle East experts
saw no good reason for the United States to change its arms policy toward
Israel. As an internal memo put it, "To undertake, in effect, a
military alliance with Israel would destroy the delicate balance we
seek to maintain in our Near East relations."
Nevertheless, Kennedy
finally approved the Hawk sale, which Eisenhower had rejected two years
earlier. But he seems to have done so against his better judgment. He
was eventually worn down by Israel's persistent and systematic exaggeration
of the Egyptian menace, and more particularly by Shimon Peres's ability,
based on chillingly detailed knowledge of internal Administration debates,
to play off the Pentagon and the NSC against the State Department.
Bass's case is also
arguable regarding Dimona. Far from turning a blind eye to what was
evidently going on there, JFK was totally opposed to Israel's getting
the bomb and was prepared to disregard the views of the American Jewish
community on the matter. In the spring of 1963 he warned Ben-Gurion
that (in Bass's words) "an Israeli refusal to permit real Dimona
inspections would have the gravest consequences for the budding US-Israel
friendship." He wrote Ben-Gurion two scorching letters, on May
18 and June 15, threatening that "this Government's commitment
to and support of Israel would be seriously jeopardized" if Israel
did not permit thorough inspections to all areas of the Dimona site.
Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi Eshkol, lied through their teeth
to Kennedy about Dimona but, as Bass writes, Kennedy was preparing to
force a showdown. Had he not been assassinated on November 22, 1963,
he was on course for a confrontation with Israel.
The fudge came later,
with Lyndon Johnson, who was far less concerned than Kennedy with nuclear
proliferation. Skirting the issue of Israel's nuclear ambitions, Johnson
approved the sale to Israel of large numbers of American tanks and warplanes
even before the 1967 war, which propelled the Jewish state to stardom,
pumping a large segment of the American Jewish community full of confidence,
ambition and even arrogance. Johnson was the true father of the US-Israel
alliance. It was he, rather than Kennedy, who "set the precedent
that ultimately created the US-Israel strategic relationship: a multimillion-dollar
annual business in cutting-edge weaponry, supplemented by extensive
military-to-military dialogues, security consultations, extensive joint
training exercises, and cooperative research-and-development ventures."
Bass raises the
intriguing possibility that the Hawks were never really intended, as
Ben-Gurion pleaded, to defend Israel's air bases from a knockout blow
by Nasser's MIGs, but rather as a perimeter defense to protect the Dimona
nuclear weapons plant. Some indirect corroboration of this thesis was
later to emerge. In delivering its own knockout blow to Egypt's air
force on the first day of the 1967 war, Israel lost eight jets in the
first wave of attack. One wounded plane came limping back to base in
radio silence. It wandered into Dimona's air space, and was promptly
shot down by an Israeli Hawk missile.
From 1967 onward
there was no stopping the extravagant blossoming of the US-Israel relationship.
If Johnson had been the father of the alliance, Henry Kissinger was
to be its sugar daddy. In 1970, he invited Israel to intervene in Jordan
when a beleaguered King Hussein asked for US protection. Syrian troops
had entered the country in support of militant Palestinians then engaged
in a trial of strength with the little King. Israel was only too happy
to comply with this most irregular request. It made some much-publicized
military deployments in the direction of Jordan. Emboldened by this
support, Hussein's own forces then engaged the Syrians, who quickly
withdrew. Hussein's army was thus left free to slaughter the Palestinians.
Rather than seeing
Black September as the local tiff that it actually was, Kissinger blew
it up into an "East-West" contest in which Israel had successfully
faced down not just the Syrians but the Russians as well. This was the
real launch of the US-Israel "strategic relationship," in
which Israel was entrusted with "keeping the peace" in the
Middle East on America's behalf--and was lavishly rewarded with arms,
aid and a cupboard-full of secret commitments directed against Arab
interests.
Kissinger adopted
as America's own the main theses of Israeli policy: that Israel had
to be stronger than any possible combination of Arab states; that the
Arabs' aspiration to recover territories lost in 1967 was "unrealistic";
that the PLO should never be considered a peace partner. His step-by-step
machinations after the October war of 1973 were directed at removing
Egypt from the Arab lineup, exposing Palestinians and other Arabs to
the full brunt of Israeli military power. Ariel Sharon's invasion of
Lebanon in 1982--in which some 17,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were
killed, triggering the birth of the Hezbollah resistance movement--was
a direct consequence of Kissinger's scheming. In 1970 Israel received
$30 million in US aid; in 1971, after the Jordan crisis, the aid rose
to $545 million. During the October war Kissinger called for a $3 billion
aid bill, and it has remained in the several billions ever since.
In due course Congress
was captured by AIPAC--in Bass's phrase, "the purring, powerful
lobbying machine of the 1980s and 1990s"--while the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, founded in 1985 by Martin Indyk, an
Australian-born lobbyist for Israel, set about carefully shaping opinion
and placing its men inside the Administration. Dennis Ross, Indyk's
colleague at WINEP and a high-level negotiator for Bush I, became Clinton's
long-serving coordinator of the Arab-Israeli peace process; he rarely
failed to defer to Israel's interests, which is one reason the peace
process got nowhere. He has now returned to WINEP as its director and
continued advocate.
But nothing in the
history of the US-Israel alliance has equaled the accession by "friends
of Israel" to key posts in the current Bush Administration, and
their determined and successful struggle to shape America's foreign
policy, especially in the Middle East--including the destruction of
Iraq.
The nagging question
remains as to what the special friendship has achieved. Have the wars,
security intrigues and political showdowns of the past decades really
served Israel's interest? A student of the region cannot but ponder
these questions: What if the dovish Moshe Sharett had prevailed over
the hawkish Ben-Gurion in the 1950s? Sharett sought coexistence with
the Arabs, whereas Ben-Gurion's policy was to dominate them by naked
military force, with the aid of a great-power patron--ideas that have
shaped Israeli thinking ever since. What if the occupied territories
had truly been traded for peace after 1967 (as Ben-Gurion himself advised,
with rare prescience), or after 1973, or after the Madrid conference
of 1991, or even after the Oslo Accords of 1993? Would it not have spared
Israelis and Palestinians the pain of the intifada, with its miserable
legacy of hatred and broken lives? Has the triumphalist dream of a "Greater
Israel" (which James Baker, for one, warned Israel against) proved
anything other than a hideous nightmare, infecting Israeli society with
a poisonous dose of fascism? The US-Israel alliance is officially and
routinely celebrated in both countries, but its legacy is troubling.
Without it, Israel might not have succumbed to the madness of invading
Lebanon and staying there twenty-two years; or to the senseless brutality
of its treatment of the Palestinians; or to the shortsighted folly of
settling 400,000 Jews in Jerusalem and the West Bank, who are now able
to hold successive Israeli governments to ransom.
An inescapable conclusion
is that the intimate alliance, and the policies that flowed from it,
have caused America and Israel to be reviled and detested in a large
part of the world--and to be exposed as never before to terrorist attack.
Copyright ©
2003 The Nation