The United States invasion of Iraq
in March-April 2003, and the occupation of the country since then, has cost more
than three thousand American lives and many tens of billions of dollars, and has
brought death to tens of thousands of Iraqis. Why
did President Bush decide to go to war? In whose interests was it launched? In
the months leading up to the attack, President Bush and other high-ranking US
officials repeatedly warned that the threat posed to the US and world by the Baghdad
regime was so grave and imminent that the United States had to act quickly to
bomb, invade and occupy Iraq. On Sept.
28, 2002, for example, he said:
"The danger to our country is grave and
it is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is
rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government,
could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after
the order is given... This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile
material could build one within a year." On
March 6, 2003, President Bush declared:
"Saddam Hussein and his weapons
are a direct threat to this country, to our people, and to all free people...
I believe Saddam Hussein is a threat to the American people. I believe he's a
threat to the neighborhood in which he lives. And I've got good evidence to believe
that. He has weapons of mass destruction... The American people know that Saddam
Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." These
claims were untrue.
As the world now knows, Iraq had no dangerous "weapons
of mass destruction," and posed no threat to the US . Moreover, alarmist suggestions
that the Baghdad regime was working with the al-Qaeda terror network likewise
proved to be without foundation.
So if the official reasons given for the
war were untrue, why did the United States attack Iraq? Whatever
the secondary reasons for the war, the crucial factor in President Bush's decision
to attack was to help Israel. With support from Israel and America's Jewish-Zionist
lobby, and prodded by Jewish "neo-conservatives" holding high-level positions
in his administration, President Bush -- who was already fervently committed to
Israel -- resolved to invade and subdue one of Israel's chief regional enemies.
This is so widely understood in Washington
that US Senator Ernest Hollings was moved in May 2004 to acknowledge that the
US invaded Iraq "to secure Israel ," and "everybody" knows it.
He also identified
three of the influential pro-Israel Jews in Washington who played an important
role in prodding the US into war: Richard Perle, chair of the Pentagon's Defense
Policy Board; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary; and Charles Krauthammer,
columnist and author./ 1
Hollings referred to
the cowardly reluctance of his Congressional colleagues to acknowledge this truth
openly, saying that "nobody is willing to stand up and say what is going on."
Due to "the pressures we get politically," he added, members of Congress uncritically
support Israel and its policies.
Some months
before the invasion, retired four-star US Army General and former NATO Supreme
Allied Commander Wesley Clark acknowledged in an interview: "Those who favor this
attack [by the US against Iraq] now will tell you candidly, and privately, that
it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But
they are afraid at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use
it against Israel ."/ 2 Six months before
the attack, President Bush met in the White House with eleven members of the US
House of Representatives. While the "war against terrorism is going okay," he
told the lawmakers, the United States would soon have to deal with a greater danger:
"The biggest threat, however, is Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.
He can blow up Israel and that would trigger an international conflict."/ 3 Bush
also spoke candidly about why the US was going to war during a White House meeting
on Feb. 27, 2003, just three weeks before the invasion. In a talk with Elie Wiesel,
the well-known Jewish writer, Bush said:
"If we don't disarm Saddam Hussein,
he will put a weapon of mass destruction on Israel and they will do what they
think they have to do, and we have to avoid that."/ 4
Fervently
Pro-Israel President Bush's fervent support for Israel and its hardline government
is well known. He reaffirmed it, for example, in June 2002 in a major speech on
the Middle East . In the view of "leading Israeli commentators," the London Times
reported, the address was "so pro-Israel that it might have been written by Ariel
Sharon."/ 5 This outlook was echoed by Condoleeza
Rice, who served as President Bush's National Security Advisor, and later, as
Secretary of State.
In a May 2003 interview she said that the "security of
Israel is the key to security of the world."/ 6
In
an address to pro-Israel activists at the 2004 convention of the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Bush said:
"The United States is strongly
committed, and I am strongly committed, to the security of Israel as a vibrant
Jewish state."
He also told the gathering: "By
defending the freedom and prosperity and security of Israel , you're also serving
the cause of America ."/ 7 Long Range Plans
Jewish-Zionist plans for war against Iraq had been in place for years.
In
mid-1996, a policy paper prepared for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
outlined a grand strategy for Israel in the Middle East. Entitled "A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," it was written under the auspices of an
Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.
Specifically, it called for an "effort [that] can focus on removing Saddam
Hussein from power in Iraq , an important Israeli strategic objective in its own
right..."/ 8
The authors of "A Clean Break" included
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, three influential Jews who later
held high-level positions in the Bush administration, 2001-2004: Perle as chair
of the Defense Policy Board, Feith as Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser as
special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control. The
role played by Bush administration officials who are associated with two major
pro-Zionist "neoconservative" research centers has come under scrutiny from
The Nation, the influential public affairs weekly./ 9
The
author, Jason Vest, examined the close links between the Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), detailing
the ties between these groups and various politicians, arms merchants, military
men, wealthy pro-Israel American Jews, and Republican presidential administrations
JINSA and CSP members, notes Vest, "have ascended to powerful government posts,
where... they've managed to weave a number of issues - support for national missile
defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons
systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general - into a hard
line, with support for the Israeli right at its core...
On no issue is the
JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war -- not
just with Iraq , but 'total war,' as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential
JINSAns in Washington , put it... For this crew, 'regime change' by any means
necessary in Iraq , Iran , Syria , Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority
is an urgent imperative." Samuel Francis,
author, editor and columnist, also looked into the "neo-conservative" role in
fomenting war./ 10
"My own answer," he wrote, "is that the lie [that a
massively-armed Iraq posed a grave and imminent threat to the US ] was fabricated
by neo-conservatives in the administration whose first loyalty is to Israel and
its interests and who wanted the United States to smash Iraq because it was the
biggest potential threat to Israel in the region. They are known to have been
pushing for war with Iraq since at least 1996, but they could not make an effective
case for it until after Sept. 11, 2001..." In
the aftermath of the 2001 Nine-Eleven terror attacks, ardently pro-Zionist "neo-conservatives"
in the Bush administration -- who for years had sought a Middle East war to bolster
Israel's security in the region -- exploited the tragedy to press their agenda.
In this they were backed by the Israeli government, which also pressured the White
House to strike Iraq . "The [Israeli] military and political leadership yearns
for war in Iraq," reported a leading Israeli daily paper, Haaretz, in February
2002. / 11 The Jerusalem correspondent
for the Guardian, the respected British daily, reported in August 2002:
"Israel signalled its decision yesterday to put public pressure on President
George Bush to go ahead with a military attack on Iraq , even though it believes
Saddam Hussein may well retaliate by striking Israel ." / 12
Three months
before the US invasion, the well-informed Washington journalist Robert Novak reported
that Israeli prime minister Sharon was telling American political leaders that
"the greatest US assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraqi
regime." Moreover, added Novak, "that view is widely shared inside the Bush administration,
and is a major reason why US forces today are assembling for war." / 13 Israel
's spy agencies were a "full partner" with the US and Britain in producing greatly
exaggerated prewar assessments of Iraq 's ability to wage war, a former senior
Israeli military intelligence official has acknowledged. Shlomo Bron, a brigadier
general in the Israel army reserves, and a senior researcher at a major Israeli
think tank, said that intelligence provided by Israel played a significant role
in supporting the US and British case for making war. Israeli intelligence agencies,
he said, "badly overestimated the Iraqi threat to Israel and reinforced the American
and British belief that the weapons [of mass destruction] existed." / 14 The
role of the pro-Israel lobby in pressing for war is examined in an 81-page research
paper by two prominent American scholars, John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political
science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, professor of international
affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University . / 15
In
the paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," they write:
"Pressure
from Israel and the [pro-Israel] Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision
to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that
this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this
claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel
more secure… Within the United States, the main driving force behind the Iraq
war was a small band of neoconservatives, many with close ties to Israel 's Likud
Party. In addition, key leaders of the Lobby's major organizations lent their
voices to the campaign for war." Important
members of the pro-Israel lobby carried out what professors Mearshiemer and Walt
call "an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq
. A key part of this campaign was the manipulation of intelligence information,
so as to make Saddam look like an imminent threat." For
some Jewish leaders, the Iraq war is part of a long-range effort to install Israel-friendly
regimes across the Middle East. Norman Podhoretz, a prominent Jewish writer and
an ardent supporter of Israel, has been for years editor of Commentary,
the influential Zionist monthly.
In the Sept. 2002 issue he wrote:
"The
regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced are not confined to
the three singled-out members of the axis of evil [ Iraq , Iran , North Korea
]. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well
as 'friends' of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt 's Hosni Mubarak,
along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen."
Patrick J. Buchanan, the well-known writer
and commentator, and former White House Communications director, has been blunt
in identifying those who pushed for war: / 16
"We charge that a cabal of polemicists
and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are
not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite
those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging
US relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports
the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they
have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through
their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity... " Cui
Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital
to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit
from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?
"Answer:
one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud." Uri
Avnery -- an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, and a three-time member
of Israel 's parliament -- sees the Iraq war as an expression of immense Jewish
influence and power. In an essay written some weeks after the US invasion, he
wrote: / 17
"Who are the winners? They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives.
A compact group, almost all of whose members are Jewish. They hold the key positions
in the Bush administration, as well as in the think-tanks that play an important
role in formulating American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential newspapers...
The immense influence of this largely Jewish group stems from its close alliance
with the extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who nowadays control Bush's
Republican party. ...
Seemingly, all this is good for Israel. America controls
the world, we control America. Never before have Jews exerted such an immense
influence on the center of world power." In
Britain, a veteran member of Britain's House of Commons bluntly declared in May
2003 that Jews had taken control of America 's foreign policy, and had succeeded
in pushing the US into war.
"A Jewish cabal have taken over the government
in the United States and formed an unholy alliance with fundamentalist Christians,"
said Tam Dalyell, a Labour party deputy and the longest-serving House member.
"There is far too much Jewish influence in the United States," he added./ 18 Summary
For many years now, American presidents of both parties have been staunchly
committed to Israel and its security. This entrenched policy is an expression
of the Jewish-Zionist grip on America's political and cultural life. It was fervent
support for Israel -- shared by President Bush, high-ranking administration officials
and nearly the entire US Congress -- that proved crucial in the decision to invade
and subdue one of Israel 's greatest regional enemies.
While the unprovoked
US invasion of Iraq may have helped Israel, just as those who wanted and planned
for the war had hoped, it has been a calamity for America and the world. It has
cost tens of thousands of lives and many tens of billions of dollars. Around the
world, it has generated unmatched distrust and hostility toward the US.
In
Arab and Muslim countries, it has fueled intense hatred of the United States,
and has brought many new recruits to the ranks of anti-American terrorists. Americans
have already paid a high price for their nation's commitment to Israel . We will
pay an ever higher price -- not just in dollars or international prestige, but
in the lives of young men squandered for the interests of a foreign state -- until
the Jewish-Zionist hold on US political life is finally broken. -
Notes 1. Remarks by Ernest F. Hollings, May
20, 2004. Congressional Record - Senate, May 20, 2004, pages S5921-S5925.
2.
The Guardian (London), August 20, 2002.
3. Bob Woodward, "Plan
of Attack," (Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 186. See also p. 188
4. Bob
Woodward, "Plan of Attack," (Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 320.
5.
R. Dunn, "Sharon Could Have Written Speech," The Times (London), June 26,
2002. A. S. Lewin, "Israel's Security is Key to Security of Rest of World," Jewish
Press (Brooklyn, NY), May 14, 2003. Rice's interview with the Israeli daily Yediot
Aharnonot is quoted.
6. Bush address to AIPAC convention, Washington, DC,
May 18, 2004.
7. Text posted at http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm See
also: J. Bamford, "A Pretext for War," (Doubleday, 2004), pages 261-269;
B. Whitaker, "Playing Skittles with Saddam," The Guardian ( Britain ),
Sept. 3, 2002.
8. J. Vest, "The Men From JINSA and CSP," The Nation,
Sept. 2, 2002 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020902/vest).
9. S. Francis,
"Weapons of Mass Deception: Somebody Lied," column of Feb. 6, 2004 (http://www.vdare.com/francis/wmd.htm).
A. Benn, "Background: Enthusiastic IDF Awaits War in Iraq ," Haaretz, Feb.
17, 2002. Quoted in J. J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, "The Israel Lobby and
U.S. Foreign Policy," March 2006, p. 30, and p. 68, fn. 146. .
10. Jonathan
Steele, "Israel Puts Pressure on US to Strike Iraq," The Guardian ( London
), August 17, 2002.
11. Robert Novak, "Sharon 's War?," column of Dec. 26,
2002. (http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20021226.shtml).
12.
L. King, "Ex-General Says Israel Inflated Iraqi Threat," Los Angeles Times,
Dec. 5, 2003.; See also: J. J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, "The Israel Lobby
and U.S. Foreign Policy," March 2006, p. 29, and p. 67, fn. 142.
13. John
J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," March
2006, pages 29, 30, 32.(http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf).
A shorter version appeared in the London Review of Books, March 23, 2006. (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html).
14. P. J. Buchanan, "Whose War?," The American Conservative, March
24, 2003. (http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html).
15. Uri Avnery, "The
Night After," CounterPunch, April 10, 2003 (http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery04102003.html).
16. F. Nelson, "Anger Over Dalyell's 'Jewish Cabal' Slur," The Scotsman
(Edinburgh), May 5, 2003; M. White, "Dalyell Steps Up Attack On Levy," The
Guardian (London), May 6, 2003.
About
the author Mark Weber is director of the Institute for Historical Review. He studied
history at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland
State University and Indiana University (M.A., 1977). This
essay, and others in this series, are available in handy leaflet format, ideal
for wide distribution. They can be ordered, postpaid, at these prices: 20 copies,
$2.00 :: 50 copies, $4.00 :: 100 copies or more, 5 cents each. Institute for Historical
Review, P.O. Box 2739 - Newport Beach, CA 92659 - USA www.ihr.org ihr@ihr.org
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