Iraq, Israel, Iran

When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's article on the Israel Lobby appeared in the London Review of Books, after having been commissioned and killed by the Atlantic Monthly, neoconservative publicists launched an all-out campaign to slander the authors as anti-Semites. Now that their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy has appeared--a work of considerable scope, carefully documented, and not just an expanded version of the article--the imputation of anti-Semitism will doubtless be repeated more sparingly for readers lower down the educational ladder. Meanwhile, the literate establishment press will (a) ignore it, (b) pretend that it says nothing new or surprising, and (c) rule out the probable inferences from the data, on the ground that the very meaning of the word "lobby" is elusive.

The truth is that many new facts are in this book, and many surprising facts. By reconstructing a trail of meetings and public statements in 2001-2002, for example, the authors show that much of the leadership of Israel was puzzled at first by the boyish enthusiasm for a war on Iraq among their neoconservative allies. Why Iraq? they asked. Why now? They would appear to have obtained assurances, however, that once the "regime change" in Iraq was accomplished, the next war would be against Iran.

A notable pilgrimage followed. One by one they lined up, Netanyahu, Sharon, Peres, and Barak, writing op-eds and issuing flaming warnings to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein was a menace of world-historical magnitude. Suddenly the message was that any delay of the president's plan to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq would be seized on by "the terrorists" as a sign of weakness. Regarding the correct treatment of terrorists, as also regarding the avoidance of weakness, Americans look to Israelis as mentors in a class by themselves.

So a war projected years before by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz--a war secured at last by the fixing of the facts around the policy at the Office of the Vice President--was allowed to borrow some prestige at an intermediate stage by the consent of a few well-regarded Israeli politicians. Yet their target of choice had been Iran. They accepted the change of sequence without outward signs of doubt, possibly owing to their acquaintance with the Middle East doctrine espoused by the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute--a doctrine which held that to create a viable order after the fall of Iraq, regime change in Iran and Syria would have to follow expeditiously.

To sum up this part: the evidence of Mearsheimer and Walt suggests that Israel was never the prime mover of the Iraq war. Rather, once the Cheney-Wolfowitz design was in place, the Israeli ministers who trooped through American opinion pages and news-talk shows did what they could to heat up the war fever. This war was on the cards before they threw in their lot with Cheney and Bush; by their efforts they merely helped to confer on the plan an aura of legitimacy and worldly wisdom.

But now the American war with Iran they originally wanted is coming closer. Last Tuesday, when the mass media were crammed to distraction with the behavior of a senator in an airport washroom, few could be troubled to notice an important speech by President Bush. If Iran is allowed to persist in its present state, the president told the American Legion convention in Reno, it threatens "to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." He said he had no intention of allowing that; and so he has "authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities." Those words come close to saying not that a war is coming but that it is already here. No lawmaker who reads them can affect the slightest shock at any action the president takes against Iran.

Admittedly, it was a showdown speech, reckless and belligerent, to a soldier audience; but then, this has been just the sort of crowd and message that Cheney and Bush favor when they are about to open a new round of killings. And in a sense, the Senate had given the president his cue when it approved, by a vote of 97-0, the July 11 Lieberman Amendment to Confront Iran. It is hardly an accident that the president and his favorite tame senator concurred in their choice of the word "confront." The pretext for the Lieberman amendment, as for the president's order, was the discovery of caches of weapons alleged to belong to Iran, the capture of Iranian advisers said to be operating against American troops, and the assertion that the most deadly IEDs used against Americans are often traceable to Iranian sources--claims that have been widely treated in the press as possible, but suspect and unverified. Still, the vote was 97-0. If few Americans took notice, the government of Iran surely did.

That unanimous vote was the latest in a series of capitulations that has included the apparent end of resistance by Nancy Pelosi to the next war. After the election of 2006, the speaker of the house declared her intention to enact into law a requirement that this president seek separate authorization for a war against Iran. On the point of doing so, she addressed the AIPAC convention, and was booed for criticizing the escalation of the Iraq war. Pelosi took the hint, shelved her authorization plan, and went with AIPAC against the anti-war base of the Democratic party.

This much, one might know without the help of Mearsheimer and Walt. But without their record, how many would trace the connection between the removal of Philip Zelikow as policy counselor of the state department, at the end of 2006, and a speech Zelikow had given in September 2006 urging serious negotiation and a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine? The ousting of Zelikow was a blessing to the war party, since it freed them from a skeptical confidant of Secretary of State Rice--perhaps the only person of stature anywhere near the administration whom she treated as an ally and friend. And the meaning of the change was clear when Zelikow's replacement turned out to be Eliot Cohen: a neoconservative war scholar and enthusiast, an early booster of the "surge" on the pundit shows, and incidentally a shameless slanderer of Mearsheimer-Walt ("Yes, It's Anti-Semitic," Washington Post, April 5, 2006).

From Zelikow to Cohen was only a step on the long path of humiliation that now stretched before Condoleeza Rice. When, in March 2007, amid suggestions of a renewal of diplomacy, she intimated that talks might be helpful in dealing with the Hamas-Fatah unity government (whose formation the Arab world had greeted as offering a promise of peace), she was demolished by an AIPAC-backed advisory letter bearing the signatures of 79 senators, which directed her not to speak with a government that had not yet recognized Israel. From that moment Rice was effectively neutralized.

The hottest cries for another war have been coming this summer from Joe Lieberman. He has called for attacks on Iran, and for attacks on Syria. It is as if Lieberman, with his appetite for multiple theaters of conflict, spoke from the congealed memory of all the wars he never fought. But Joe Lieberman is a stalking-horse. He would not say these things without getting permission from Vice President Cheney, a close and admired friend. Nor would Cheney permit a high-profile lawmaker whom he partly controls to set the United States and Israel on so perilous a course unless he had ascertained its acceptability to Ehud Olmert.

Yet the chief orchestrater of the second neoconservative war of aggression is Elliott Abrams. Convicted for deceptions around Iran-Contra, as Lewis Libby was convicted for deceptions stemming from Iraq--and pardoned by the elder Bush just as Libby had his sentence commuted by the younger--Abrams now presides over the Middle East desk at the National Security Council. All of the wildness of this astonishing functionary and all his reckless love of subversion will be required to pump up the "imminent danger" of Iran. For here, as with Iraq, the danger can only be made to look imminent by manipulation and forgery. On all sober estimates, Iran is several months from mastering the nuclear cycle, and several years from producing a weapon. Whereas Israel for decades has been in possession of a substantial nuclear arsenal.

How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage cited by Mearsheimer-Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart--except in Israel--from the rest of the population." When he wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to serve in another American administration. He certainly did not expect to occupy a position that would require him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the country with which he confessed himself uniquely at one, alongside the national interest of a country in which he felt himself to stand "apart...from the rest of the population." Now that he is calling the shots against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection.

Among many possible lines of inquiry, the senators might begin by recognizing that the United States has other allies in Asia besides Israel. One of those allies is India; and there is a further point of resemblance. In a distinct exception to our anti-proliferation policy, we have allowed India to develop nuclear weapons; just as, in an earlier such exception, we allowed Israel to do the same. But suppose we read tomorrow a statement by the director of the South Asia desk of the National Security Council which declared: "There can be no doubt that Hindus are to stand apart from any nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Hindu to be apart--except in India--from the rest of the population." Suppose, further, we knew this man still held these beliefs at a time of maximum tension between India and Pakistan; and that he had recently channeled 86 million dollars to regional gangs and militias bent on increasing the tension. Would we not conclude that something in our counsels of state had gone seriously out of joint?

The Mearsheimer-Walt study of American policy deserves to be widely read and discussed. It could not be more timely. If the speeches and saber-rattling by the president, the ambassador to Iraq, and several army officers mean anything, they mean that Cheney and Abrams are preparing to do to Iran what Cheney and Wolfowitz did to Iraq. They are gunning for an incident. They are working against some resistance from the armed forces but none from the opposition party at home. The president has ordered American troops to confront Iran. Sarkozy has fallen into line, Brown and Merkel are silent, and outside the United States only Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency stands between the war party and a prefabricated justification for a war that would extend across a vast subcontinent. Unless some opposition can rouse itself, we are poised to descend with non-partisan compliance into a moral and political disaster that will dwarf anything America has seen.

Comments

[Toole]

A lot of plotting has been going on for so long. It seems people in power do not learn from mistakes and misguided policies of the past. The present scenario reminds me of the main blunder committed by Adolf Hitler in 1941.
The main regions of Europe, with the exception of Great Britain, was under German sway. Had Hitler crossed the English Channel and occupied Britain it would have been exttremely difficult, if not impossible, to liberate Europe from German grip. But the dictator was rendered stupid (may be temporarily) and he ordered an attack on the Soviet Union, Germany's ally nonetheless; thus opening a new front in the war. The rest is history. What happened recently when Afghanistan was left in limbo to open a new front in Iraq has a resemblemce of deja vu.
Do the neocons believe America can take on the whole world and be unscathed? The American army with their NATO allies and their "coalition of the willing" are stretched thin and many of those countries are mired in debt that will take generations to pay off, if at all. War is not cheap!
This is probably how empires decline and go bust

[JohnCitizen]

ANTI-SEMITISM IS EVIL, just as is anti-any-ethic-group. But what about ANTI-ISRAEL, based on the behavoir of that nation?

We Americans need to stop playing word games. For example, if we apply Webster's definition of "TERRORISM" to the already-forgotten recent Middle East war between Israel and Hezbollah, and use OBJECTIVE MEASUREMENTS, then Israel and not Hezbollah was the biggest terrorist in this tragedy, with 50 to 1 non-combatant deaths for Lebanon vs. Israel (2/3 of Israeli dead were soldiers), and an even greater disparity in terms of infrastructure and the long-term suffering of people. Israel could have fought Hezbollah up close and personal, but instead involved a million innocent Lebanonese in an asymmetrical war using United States-supplied warplanes and smart bombs.

Of course, the word terrorism is reserved for our enemies, and not part of our terms of endearment with Israel. However, before we consign what happened to Lebanon and its people to "collateral damage" and it completely fades from our short attention span, perhaps we can find a more appropriate term to describe ravaged Lebanon, such as "collateral devastation." As the pendulum of action and reaction/cause and effect swings our way, we won't just sit and wonder why these terrible terrorists hate us and want to kill us (they do 9-11, we do Lebanon, and so on).

We human beings think and rationalize in words; for this reason words decide issues. Many people use words imprecisely or for advantage, and not for truth. The prime example here, anti-Semitism and anti-Israel are not the same thing. If they were the same, then the Israeli government would be infallible. Israeli tough-guy terror (seen often, even on American TV) is about half the reason United States is hated in the Middle East. Unfortunately, we have to go along too because no one can speak the truth of words and reality. Our one-sided policy in the Middle East is a disaster.

[Not Blind]

All one has to do is read the PNAC manefesto. From its inception, this organization has been bent upon destabalizing the Middle East, to further Israeli interests, and placate the Religious Conservatives (base of the Republican Party) by any means necessary. The Evangelicals see the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel as a means for the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world. This has been their objective all along, and no secret. Abrams, Lieberman and other Jews would attack anything as anti-Semitic, which does not promote the interests of Israel.
The question isn't that this should alarm us, but that those who have the power to stop this insane roadmap to Armageddon remain mute and do nothing to abate disaster.

[Gaia's Shadow]

I heard Abraham Foxman of the ADL on NPR last night talking about this book. Needless to say, he is full of the argument that any suggestion of an outsized or negative influence of a hawkish pro-Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy is nothing but anti-Semitism. By refusing to even acknowledge any possibility of any negative influence by AIPAC and to just label it all as anti-Semitism, he weakens his own case. Terry Gross did a horrible job interviewing him and asked no really pointed questions, drew no analogies to other powerful lobbies to ask why it is OK to criticize the influence of the NRA or the petroleum lobbies, but not OK to criticize AIPAC. And she didn't bring up the Elliot Abrahms quote. Interestingly, this notion that Jews are "set apart" somehow from the national interest is one that FOXMAN kept attributing to critics of AIPAC (and not a point that I really would have thought to make; I would think the causes are far less ideological, but maybe I am naive), and there you have Abrahms coming right out and saying precisely what Foxman claims is a big anti-Semitic lie foisted upon the AIPAC lobby by Jew-haters.

[memi69]

III

Think about it WWI; WWII; WWIII?

When I saw those three words combined that's what entered my mind.

[ApolloSpeaks]

The Mask of Saddam is a tragic one, those who wear it are fools. The mullahs resemble Saddam in his confidence, intransigence and defiance of the world; they differ from him in that they have a nuclear weapon's program and are the real deal.

The question is this: is the Bush Doctrine of Preemption dead? Or is it alive and ready to roll? David Bromwich believes it has never been more alive, and he is right. Unfortunately, the mullahs see things differently; they are betting that Bromwich is wrong, that the Bush Doctrine is dead, and that the President despite the surge is morally paralyzed by a war gone badly and will not risk another failure. I believe with Bromwich that they are seriously mistaken; the President is anything but paralyzed, he is filled with moral zeal and is ready to strike evil Iran.

In denying this reality the mullahs resemble the tragic Saddam. Saddam did not believe that his country would be invaded. He did not believe that the son of the man who failed to complete the job in Iraq and left him in power would finish him off. In short, he believed that the son's threats were hollow. When he realized he had been deluding himself it was too late.

Perception is everything in politics and the mullahs have a serious reality problem with the President-a problem complicated by the quagmire in Iraq. The mask they are wearing is blinding them. They do well to read Bromwich's article and Mearsheimer's book. They do well to follow the example of Kaddafi and North Korea and disarm. They do well to be reasonable. The coming confrontation is avoidable, but everything depends on Iran.

[Levittown]

The UN had many opportunities to stop the arming of Hamas and Hezbolla. They could have put a damper on Irans expansion plans with more oversight of the nuclear ambitions of Iran. It is the weakness of the European
members that make things the way they are. The US could have put more pressure on Russia and China. Why Bush does not is open to guess work.

[joja]

Excellent article, Mr. Bromwich. Unfortunately, it will never see the light of day in any of the MSM precisely because it is counterintuitive to the drumbeat of war coming from the VP & WH, and, really, YOU expect the MSM to do anything differently than they did before the invasion of Iraq? How naive of you!

So, in summary, the US has Israel dictating our foreign policy, and Mexico dictating our domestic policy. Nicely done, Dick, George.

[sansmerd]

Given that it is clear our government is gearing for a U.S. attack on Iraq, can I have some advice as to what are the most effective actions a good citizen can take to prevent this from happening?

[Elkanah]

The war will come. It will come as close to the November 2008 election as possible. Americans will elect a Republican President as one doesn't switch parties in time of war. Will it be President McCain? The Republican party will lead the Congress again for the same reason.
Bush and Cheney have nothing to lose by an attack on Iran. Bush is not running for President and Cheney is too sick to run for President. They are extremely low in the polls. Another war can't do them any more harm. They will go out with a fight. I advise everyone to read the book "The Mess They Made" by Gwynne Dyer where all the above is outlined. You will also read about some of the possible consequences of this war like, oil tankers sunk in the Persian Gulf. The price of oil soaring and attacks and/or uprisings by minority Shiites in other Middle Eastern countries upon their governments. Above all the assistance which Iran will give the Shiites of Iraq (weapons and men) will be increased greatly.

[goodsnservices]

I sent letters to every Senator demanding that they stop this madness. Most won't even be read because I'm not their constituent. Talk about disconnect! Senate won't hear us, Bush won't hear us or the Senate or anyone else.

What's left, taking to the streets? That would just give Bush the leverage he needs to declare an emergency, pull Habeas Corpus for real, and shut down the next election. Never would I have dreamed in a thousand years that America would be in this sorry shape!

[AbstractImp]

Thank you very much, David. It takes courage to speak out against this admiinistration, and it is enlightening to see who is working behind the scenes to misdirect American foreign policy.

Almost one million dead in Iraq - of no consequence to these monsters, and now more to come in Iran. The blindness to Iranian society - which is predominantly young and wants to change from within - is just more evidence of how sick our leaders are, how sick is their agenda.

Yosama must be smiling - no, he is certainly laughing. He murdered 3,000 Americans six years go, and ever since, America has been sending its children off to kill HIS enemies. We cleaned Iraq of all opposition to al-Qaeda, and now al-Qarda operates there freely, according to our own military's estimation. Next will be Iran, arch-enemy of Sunni's everywhere, as Saudi Arabia well knows.

Curious that Americans are so willing to send their children off to die for the Saudi's (oil) and Israel ("holy land"). Lose a leg for lunatics and come home to Walter Reed cokcroaches. Oh, yeah, support those troops!

It's not just Cheney, and it's not just Lieberman. 97-0 for a new war of aggression, another illegal invasion and mass slaughter, a third front at a time when we can't fight the two we have? It's the whole society....

I GIVE UP!

[Macready]

Thank you for posting . . . this is the best article I have read on the subject . . .will definitely buy the book . . .

Impeachment is the only way to stop these madmen . .. but as you point out we no longer have an opposition party . . . the Dems are just too complacent and enabling to both this regime and most seem to have sold their souls to the AIPAC . . . we do have to demonstrate, write to our Congressmen . .. even if they don't listen and most done . . . the only real hope is that the UN and a united Europe will end this madness . . .

[Chook]

The fact that this has appeared at HuffPo - just one of many liberal sites which last year tried strenuously to ignore Israel's crimes in Lebanon and often displays a reticence to criticise Israel which is analogous to that shown by Democrat politicians - is an encouraging bellwether of change. More please.

[ZenJu]

I wish for a day when all people everywhere will embrace rationality and compassion and live in peace and security. This is not that day. Until then, some of the posters here remind me why Israel and the Jewish people must remain on their guard and ready to defend themselves. Some of you who post your "anti-Israel" stances betray your deeper feelings, antipathies and mental aberrations which predate the existence of the modern Jewish state. It is one thing to critique the policies of Israel as a sovereign state among the nations; the bile that some of you spew and the tenacity with which you embrace the Walt & Mearsheimer paper as justification for your fevered Jewish conspiracy theories is rather telling. Amazing, too, is how you single out one tiny sliver of a country in all the world, a democracy with peccadillos common to democracies, with such focused ferocity, yet you blindly ignore the blatant and horrifying abuses of human rights and dignity that happen on a far wider scale elsewhere.

[straightshooter]

What drivel

Get used to it. Criticism of Israel is only going to increase. The truth, now a river, will become a flood. Like it or not, the great majority of people in this country and around the world detest racism, fascism, ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion through force of arms. Only fools and the grossly un/misinformed fail to comprehend that Israel is the epitome of these evils.

[CATO90025]

Yes all those UN sanctions and cristicism within Israel only show how right Israel is--let me guess Project Megaphone.

There is a consequence to AIPAC/Israel's action and clearly the general antipathy for AIPAC--notwithstanding its spies does not bode well.

Save every Presid. candiate has to bow at the AIPAC altar and be vetted by the "CHOSEN LOBBY"