Iraq, Israel, Iran by David Bromwich

September 5, 2007 by Huffington Post

Iraq, Israel, Iran

by David Bromwich

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