This is a story everyone in the US– but especially all those members of Congress who line up behind AIPAC’s warmongering– needs to read. Israeli president Shimon Peres tells the London Sunday Times that, regarding Iran, “The military way will not solve the problem… Such an attack can trigger a bigger war.”
How’s that again?? In all the anti-Iran propaganda with which AIPAC lards its public communications, it forcefully makes the argument that the US and Israel should be prepared to use military attacks against Iran to prevent it ever getting a nuclear weapon… because such a capability could be fatal for Israel.
And now Peres, who was the father of Israel’s own nuclear weapons program back in the 1950s and 1960s, tells us that an attack might actually be harmful, not helpful?
We might remember, too, that during the few months in 1995-96 when Peres was Israel’s prime minister, he launched his own fateful war of choice against Lebanon. That was April 1996, and it did not turn out well for Israel, at all. Peres had launched it partly as an election ploy. It didn’t work out well for him, either. He lost that election– due in good part to the fact that his war in Lebanon persuaded large numbers of Palestinian-Israelis not to vote for him…
And now, the Sunday Times’s Uzi Mahnaimi is writing this:
- Peres also criticised American foreign policy in highly unusual terms for an Israeli leader, saying it relied too much on military force in attempts to impose democracy on the Middle East.
…“In my opinion, the Americans are making a mistake in their foreign policy.
“When they intervene abroad, they’d do better using the economy, which doesn’t provoke such antagonism.”
Words of wisdom, spoken very late in the guy’s life, indeed. (When I interviewed him in Tel Aviv back in 1998, he still forcefully defended his decision to launch the 1996 war.)
So, late in the day, yes. But still, words that people in the US policy elite definitely need to hear.