I have been shocked–“shocked!”– to read in Sy Hersh’s latest piece in the New Yorker that Israelis, including Mossad operatives, have been all over Iraqi Kurdistan in the past 18 months.
Look, it’s always been perfectly clear that this whole administration is completely riddled with Israeli infiltration at every decisionmaking and operational level. I always simply assumed the US occupation forces throughout the whole of Iraq were just a continuation of that picture.
And indeed, when I was in DC last week, an old friend of mine who is retired from but still well connected to high US diplomatic and military circles confirmed to me that, “Yes, the Israelis have been all over Iraq ever since the start of the occupation… And certainly, they’ve been advising the ‘interrogation’ systems inside all the prisons there.”
In Sy’s piece, he tries to portray what he’s writing as something breathlessly new and unknown. (Prime example right there in the first graf: “In July 2003 … Israeli intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the insurgents had the support of Iranian intelligence operatives and other foreign fighters, who were crossing the unprotected border between Iran and Iraq at will. ” Duh. Everyone could see that the border was quite unprotected, and being raversed at will by all sorts of people from Iran. But the Bushites simply didn’t want to send in the manpower–American, or anyone else’s–that it would have taken to seal it.)
In the life of any journalist, you write some good stories, some less good. This ain’t one of Sy Hersh’s better ones.
Actually, one of the things that stands out in Hersh’s article is how many Israeli warnings the Bush administration disregarded – a pattern which is inconsistent with the theory that Israelis control the administration’s decision-making processes. This whole fiasco seems more indicative of the Bushies refusing to listen to anyone but themselves, including their theoretical close allies.
What struck me about Hersh’s article was the denial of Israeli responsibility for the strengthened position of Iran in the region and in Iraq, when it is precisely the policies advocated by the Israeli-bent neocons that led to that very condition.
For example, Jay Garner, who wanted to keep most of the Iraqi Army and security apparatus intact – the only forces which could have “sealed” the Iranian border – was fired because Chalabi and the neocons thought he dressed funny. Under his neocon-approved successor, Bremer, the remaining technical and governmental infrastructure was discarded and replaced by contracts to Bechtel and Haliburton who have hired-out the reanimation of Iraq’s corpse to other foreigners, causing unemployment and tremendous resentment.
Chalabi himself, the pro-Israeli neocon’s hand-picked ‘Alexander Hamilton’ of Democratic Iraq, turns out to have been an Iranian agent (can I hear a “Duh!”, please).Chalabi and the neocons were also the primary advocates of the radical de-ba’thification of Iraq, the result of which is greater resistance as well as the impoverishment and political irrelevancy of the technical and professional classes who may have rebuilt the country and guided it in a secular direction. Here recently they’ve gotten rid of the only person who seemed capable of salvaging the situation, Brahimi, by calling him and “an Arab nationalist”, as if that were a crime.Since his departure the Coalition Air Force has returned to the same murderous policies in Falluja which will probably blow up in their faces again soon.
Sharon, Netanyahu and their American counterparts want Iraq weakened, dismembered and partitioned into two or three parts, and they are – or were, maybe they’re having doubts now about Turkey – willing to run the risks. After all, they sold billions in US weaponry to Khomeini in the 1980s to keep that war going, and got away with no skin off the nose.Why not run a slightly greater risk with a somewhat less odious Iranian government when the prospect of a near certain payoff would be the result?
And remember, Ansar al-Islam was a 90% Kurdish organization.
Actually, one of the things that stands out in Hersh’s article is how many Israeli warnings the Bush administration disregarded
What warnings? Did Israel warn us not to invade Iraq, in light of the fact that what has happened there was entirely predictable? No. Israel was the only country other than the US in which not only the government but the majority of the people supported the invasion.
Clawson told me that Israel
A propos of the first three comments there, it seems to me that a good part of what was going on in Sy’s article was Israelis and pro-Israelis engaging in a bit of old-fashioned blame-shifting and CYA-ing by saying, “Yes it’s a mess in Iraq. But that’s because they didn’t listen to us on sub-items x, y, and z”, while hoping that people conventiently forget that on the big Item A–going to war in Iraq in the first place–it was largely the Sharon government and its acolytes inside the administration who jerked the whole US into doing that.
As I’ve said before, I don’t (totally) blame Sharon for the success of this campaign. He’s a wily old guy who does what he sees as best for his people. Who I DO blame is all the high administration officials and the legions of elected US legislators who put the demands of a small but high-strung foreign government–Sharon’s–above the interests of the US people, over-ruling all the advice they were getting throughout 2002 and into 2003 from people who know the Middle East a lot better than they or the Israelis do, from the professional military, etc etc…
Regarding the advice I was offering in the relevant period, go to this collection of my CSM clumns and read the ones from, e.g., August 2002 and Jan., Feb., and March 2003.
Vote all the bums out!
The last comment was what I was waiting to hear. Hitherto, it sounded as if the problem was alleged to be Israelis somehow controlling US foreign policy, which would have been unduly conspiratorial. The “neo-conservative” venture that we object to (“we”, as in, all present) is really a project of empire. Like something out of Dilbert, it’s an imbecilic project that has sucked up resources from other projects, and the fire eaters of Likud emerged from the political wilderness after the US government revealed that it would bail out their own if they overreached.
Imperialism has been a largely cooperative venture for the nations of Europe (the “fissures” of the two world wars were, from the point of view of the colonies, not extremely important). The Fashoda Incident or the Leap of the Panther. For the most part, all of the imperial powers cooperated. So out of this, the venture capital model of colonialism evolved. The analogy that keeps returning to my mind–since I lived there for so long–is Silicon Valley startups that are nurtured by venture capital. A tiny start up like Israel was desperate for VC from anywhere. You could say it’s a major (captive) contractor in this venture, and its top management has an immense stake in perpetuating its stream of VC. But it isn’t really an instigator, any more than my sister’s late start-up in Palo Alto was the instigator of the computer revolution.
I have to disagree with Mr. McLean’s comments on two grounds.
1. The first world war and the second both were wars between “them that has” (existing colonial powers) and “those that were excluded.” The prize was new colonies, or the transfer of old ones to new ownership. Also both wars had a very large effect on colonies.
2. On the more important point, don’t underestimate the power of the small VC firm to spark conflict or direct policy. In the mid-19th century British Empire, the cabinet and the government saw colonial expansion as unnecessary and a drag on the economy, yet the empire grew at a tremendous rate. Adventurers, whether colonial officials or private investors, dragged the Empire into conflict with foreign populations again and again, and to preserve prestige in the face of European rivals and extra-European powers, the government reluctantly ratified expansions that had not taken place.
By the time official opinion came to approve of colonial expansion, the most important expansions had been accomplished.
Sorry, that should say, “expansions that had not been officially planned or approved (at least at the highest levels).”
So…are we looking at a possible Israeli-Kurdish alliance? The road to Bahgdad runs through Kurdistan?
1. The first world war and the second both were wars between “them that has” (existing colonial powers) and “those that were excluded.” The prize was new colonies, or the transfer of old ones to new ownership. Also both wars had a very large effect on colonies.
That is a plausible explanation for the war, provided one is guided by Lenin’s Imperialism: the Last Stage of Capitalism. But diplomatic histories of the period do not support such a conclusion. On the contrary, immense effort was made on the part of revanchists in France (post-1870) to stimulate such a war and restore the country’s security–and Alsace Lorraine, of course. Austria-Hungary certainly had methods of securing colonies in Africa that stopped far short of invading Serbia, and if the German Empire wished to defeat Britain or France for purposes of acquiring colonies, then it surely could have avoiding taking on both them and Russia.
As for the effects of the war on the colonies:
[a] Cameroun, Tanganyika, Ruanda-Urundi, Papua New Guinea, Togo and SW Africa–these had a total population of about a quarter of Germany’s wartime population. They were transferred to the victors as League of Nation mandates. On a map that is significant.
[b] a large number of people from the colonies, most notably French West Africa, served in the war.
[c] the global economy underwent a colossal inflationary boom, 1915-1918; then a depression lasting 18 months. In countries like Chile, this was an especially extreme event.
[d] as a result of the movements of people, the “Spanish” flu killed some 10-20 million.
These are certainly significant effects, so perhaps I was hasty to say that WW1 had little effect on them. Likewise, mandates in SW Asia, Italian colonies in Africa, FW Africa and Madagascar experienced Vichy, then Allied, then Free French rule–sometimes accompanied by minor combat operations. These should not be trivialized. But, as calamities, I would humbly submit they were exceeded by the mere fact of being colonies.
If we admit Japan as a colonial nation, we notice that cooperation on the part of other imperial powers was far weaker, and that Japanese ambitions in WW2 were explicitly and undeniably imperialist. But if we do not admit Japan as a quasi-European country, then the generalization I made holds up better.
The partition of Africa was, with a few exceptions, settled amicably at the Berlin Conference. The European penetration of China was accompanied by rivalry, but functioned as an allied assault on Chinese sovereignty. The Chinese and other peoples of the region were almost never able to play off one imperial power against another (although Siam might be admitted as a dubious exception). The Boer War was possibly as unpopular in Europe then as the Iraq Invasion was in ’03; but no major power applied pressure on the UK to withdraw or moderate its demands.
No, the three big wars of Europe after 1815 were all revolutions that touched off a panicked defense of national security; the UK and France didn’t declare war on Germany for fear that Hitler would try to take over the Suez Canal; they feared for their national survival. Aside from these episodes, the conduct of European nations towards each other in the colonial mileau was usually marked by comity and open commerce.
on the big Item A–going to war in Iraq in the first place–it was largely the Sharon government and its acolytes inside the administration who jerked the whole US into doing that.
The thing is, I don’t see how this can be taken as read. It’s not as if there weren’t other prominent interests pushing the US toward war – Halliburton, Bush 43’s desire to finish what his father started, the Bushies’ own imperial ambitions, etc., etc. It may well be that the importunings of Israel (or of the American Likudniks who believe that the US and Israel are united in interest) are one of the reasons behind the war, but to reduce the whole invasion to something “Israel jerked the whole US into doing” is simplistic to the point of inaccuracy. If you want to argue that Israel was the sole proximate cause of the war (which may not be what you meant to say, but it’s what the above sentence amounts to), I’ll need to see compelling evidence, and I haven’t seen that even in the European and Israeli media where such matters are discussed frankly.
Interesting perspective here, BTW, from someone who’s no friend of Sharon or the neocons.
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