Phil Zelikow, who had a good view of the Bush decision to attack Iraq from his perch on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, says that an important but downplayed reason for the attack on Iraq was to remove a threat to Israel:
Asia Times - Asia's most trusted news source: ...[Phil] Zelikow's casting of the attack on Iraq as one launched to protect Israel appears at odds with the public position of US President George W Bush and his administration, which has never overtly drawn the link between its war on the regime of Saddam and its concern for Israel's security. The administration has instead insisted it launched the war to liberate the Iraqi people, destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to protect the United States. Zelikow made his statements about "the unstated threat" during his tenure on a highly knowledgeable and well-connected body known as the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which reports directly to the president. He served on the board between 2001 and 2003.
"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990 - it's the threat against Israel," Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of September 11 and the future of the war on al-Qaeda. "And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell," said Zelikow....
Zelikow has long-established ties to the Bush administration. Before his appointment to PFIAB in October 2001, he was part of the current president's transition team in January 2001. In that capacity, Zelikow drafted a memo for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on reorganizing and restructuring the National Security Council (NSC) and prioritizing its work.... Rice herself had served in the NSC during the first Bush administration, and subsequently teamed up with Zelikow on a 1995 book about the unification of Germany....
He also suggested that the danger of biological weapons falling into the hands of the anti-Israeli Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym Hamas, would threaten Israel rather than the US, and that those weapons could have been developed to the point where they could deter Washington from attacking Hamas. "Play out those scenarios," he told his audience, "and I will tell you, people have thought about that, but they are just not talking very much about it. Don't look at the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but then ask yourself the question, 'gee, is Iraq tied to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the people who are carrying out suicide bombings in Israel?' Easy question to answer; the evidence is abundant."...
If this was indeed a powerful reason for Bush administration decisions, I can't help thinking that they should have gotten much, much more in return from Ariel Sharon than they have.
Posted by DeLong at April 7, 2004 07:06 AM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this post"If this was indeed a powerful reason for Bush administration decisions, I can't help thinking that they should have gotten much, much more in return from Ariel Sharon than they have."
That's a bit of an understatement, don't you think?
Posted by: Billmon on April 7, 2004 02:58 PMThere is a very good reason why no U.S. politician from either party ever takes a stand against Israel. You'd think that with $4 billion in annual aid and with the US-Israel relationship complicating the US relationship with so many key trade partners that at least one US Representative or Senator would question whether all that aid is really a good investment. But they don't.
Well, actually in 2002 two representatives did question the unwavering US commitment to Israel. Both were in safe House seats. Both were soundly defeated in the primaries. In both primary races an extremely rare event occurred ... the incumbent was way out spent by a challenger.
Posted by: Z on April 7, 2004 03:07 PM"In both primary races an extremely rare event occurred ... the incumbent was way out spent by a challenger."
Name names?
Posted by: ogmb on April 7, 2004 03:59 PMWhat Billmon said.
Not that the Bush Administration seems to even have the desire to get anything from Sharon; they think whatever he does is fine.
Posted by: RT on April 7, 2004 05:41 PMWhat a disaster! Just to explain it you need a raftful of dependent clauses. I think it’s fair to say that the Arabs in Iraq and beyond do not separate our actions there, from our support for Israel. And since Benny Morris’ revelations about the Israel massacres (can we call it terrorism?) to help along the transfer of Palestinians in ‘48-’49 (“The extent to which Palestinian psychology is marked by the events of this period cannot be overemphasized... Even today, decades later, they remain a principal occupation and are subjects that generate strong and bitter emotions..” --Mark Tessler, A HISTORY OF THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT, pp. 281-282) the complaints from each side have been levelled, morally. A total rethink of Middle East policy would be indicated. But now--today and yesterday--so much blood is being spilled on both sides in Iraq that America may find it difficult to rethread the path. And the Administration’s intention to garrison troops in strongholds there is just going to look to the Arabs like more Israeli Wall. We need clearsighted expositions of the whole disaster from the beginning, or our country is going to lose its moral bearings.
Posted by: Lee A. on April 7, 2004 05:52 PMditto Billmon
I think Sharon did promise the Bushies something (or they told Blair that he had). Remember how one of the wonderful things what would happen if we invade Iraq is unblocking the "peace process". Sounds like a deal with no enforcement clause.
Amazing that Zelikow is chief of staff of the 9/11 committee. I am sure that he will fight as hard for publication of his memo to Rice as he did to get Rice to testify under oath and publically.
I would fax him the obscure Asia Times article and tell him that the point about how he helped Rice "prioritize" will be all over Washington faster than the photo of Roosevelt's chief of staff testifying, if he doesn't quietly decide he needs to spend more time with his children.
Posted by: Robert Waldmann on April 7, 2004 07:27 PM"If this was indeed a powerful reason for Bush administration decisions....."
Duh!?!?!?
How many Jewish neocons with ties to the Isreali defense ministry / industries, pushing for war in Iraq for several years........
Oh forget it.
I'm obviously just an anti semtic, right?.
Posted by: avedis on April 7, 2004 07:42 PMWhen Bush met personally with Sharon I thought -- Oh my God! I felt the same way when he met Putin and Prince Bandar at Crawford. Even if he HAD really "surrounded himself with good people", he's not really up to negotiating with that caliber of leader.
Posted by: Zizka on April 7, 2004 07:45 PMA cousin's son is in the Marines. He's in Recon and went into Iraq BEFORE the war started. People with relatives or friends over there don't talk so much about the strategic benefits or higher meanings of all of this, they talk about their relatives and friends and worry that they'll be OK. Strategery and higher meaning I guess is for the country's leaders - NONE of whom have relatives at risk. I guess that's why they're our leaders? Because they can strategize and move chess pieces around the world without worrying about it hitting home.
I think about all the people in the military who signed up and put their lives on the line to DEFEND AMERICA. I don't know when there has ever been such a betrayal of them as this. It could be reasoned that Vietnam was about defending America, but not this. No way this.
Posted by: Dave Johnson on April 8, 2004 12:48 AMGlad you posted this, Brad. I saw it on Juan Cole's site, but wanted to get some corroboration. So I went to the University of Virginia site, where I found a page on the conference where he made his remarks -- and which corroborates the gist of the Asia Times piece.
(http://www.law.virginia.edu/home2002/html/news/2002_fall/terrorismforum.htm
It's no wonder the US press has ignored this.
Posted by: Bob on April 8, 2004 02:53 PMNOT JUST ISRAEL
Iraq had already invaded Kuwait and Iran, and had launched missiles against Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Saddams willingness to use the chemical WMD's he had against the Kurds and Iranians should have been seen as an indicator of his recklessness before 9/11. And Saddams refusal to pull back from Kuwait in the face of overwhelming force showed clearly that Saddam was not going to respond to "Deterrence" in a predicatble way. Likewise, the obstacles that Saddam placed in front of the UN inspectors was persuasive that he still had his WMD's and that he did not intend Iraq to be a nation like other nations, but to continue the Rogue Nation routine.
It was only after 9/11 and the way it SHOWED U.S. VULNERABILITY to the world that enough people realized how dangerous Saddam was to the US, as well.
We don't know for sure whether Saddam's next target would have been the oil fields of Saudi Arabia (he had already tried for the oil of Kuwait and Iran) or Israel or the US. But it became abundently clear that somebody was going to be next. And another war in the middle east can only mean tragedy and poverty for a very large number of people.
Saudi Arabia was under more direct threat from Saddam than Israel. And the US had gone so far as to move in large numbers of US ground forces into Saudi Arabia to protect it, something the US has never done for Israel. Israel was under an indirect, terrorist threat, and we can only guess whether Saddam would have added chemical or biological weapons to the support it was providing to the Palestinian terrorist groups. Maybe Bush knows, maybe not.
We also don't know whether the terrorists in Saudi Arabia were connected to or supported by Saddam. But we do know that if chaos erupted in Saudi Arabia, and the Royal Family fell, that Saddam would have been delighted to move in to "Stabilize" the situation. Saddam supported Islamic Palestinian terrorists, so why not support Islamic revolutionaries in Saudi Arabia?
Keeping US troops in Saudi Arabia to protect it against Saddam was politically impossible, so something else had to be done.
The Middle East is a target rich environment -- it ain't just Israel.
In any case, the US should have gotten more cooperation from the Saudis than we got.
If Warren's reasoning is correct, then why the hell didn't we publicly announce that as our reason? Even the Europeans would have been queasy about the idea of Saddam controlling the Saudi oil supply.
Alternatively, why didn't we follow William Safire's NY Times suggestion just a few months after 9-11 -- occupy just SHIITE Iraq (or a large part of it)? By an agreeable coincidence, it joins Kurdish Iraq as the parts of the country where most of the oil is located. We would have set up a safe buffer zone between Saddam's shrunken Iraq and any possibility of an attack on Saudi Arabia, had a vastly easier occupation and reconstruction problem, and cut Saddam off from most of the oil money he was (supposedly) using to buy weapons.
No matter how you look at it, the crazy hubris of Bush's Neocons and their belief that Iraq could EASILY be occupied and reconstructed had a major -- and disastrous -- effect on our actions in regard to Iraq.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on April 8, 2004 04:22 PMWarren's reasoning composes just a part of the broad geopolitical argument in Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm, still worth perusing because its larger concerns still stand. (But get a used paperback copy, because that author should not be further rewarded for his errors.) Beyond Bruce Moomaw's standing objection to its current policy implementation however, lies the certainty that we have NOW REVEALED to all of these folks the LIMITATIONS of our military/political approach (not least in regard to its effects on our domestic politics)--this should have been held in far reserve, for when we REALLY needed it. This may prove to be one of Bush's biggest mistakes, hardly touched upon as yet by our lackluster pundits. You can bet our enemies have found many new and good lessons, while we're still sniping at each other, or producing more muffleminded swamp gas (e.g., Robert Kagan's article in the new Foreign Affairs).
Posted by: Lee A. on April 9, 2004 10:28 AM"Name names?"
Earl Hilliard (D-AL) and Cynthia McKinney (D-GA).
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